(The New Middle Ages) Matthew X. Vernon - The Black Middle Ages-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S
The Black
Middle Ages
RACE and the
CONSTRUCTION
of the MIDDLE AGES
Matthew X. Ver non

The New Middle Ages
Series Editor
Bonnie Wheeler
English & Medieval Studies
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX, USA
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of
medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s his-
tory and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series
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Matthew X. Vernon
The Black Middle

Ages
Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages
Matthew X. Vernon
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA, USA
The New Middle Ages

ISBN 978-3-319-91088-8 ISBN 978-3-319-91089-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5
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To my family who lives the vernacular.
And to my family who gave me a light in the dark places, when all other
lights went out.
Preface
About the Nature and Structure of This Study

Even at the level of lexicon there are clear difficulties with this project.
This subject is literally hard to talk about. To paraphrase Twain, medieval
and African-American studies can seem like two fields separated by a com-
mon language. What do we mean when we say “vernacular”? Are we dis-
cussing the vernaculars of thirteenth-century England or the multiplicity
of registers in American English, including dialect and regional vocabular-
ies? When we say “feudalism,” do we mean the baggy category meant to
capture the economic and social relations of medieval peoples or is it
meant as the equally fraught category for slave labor in a capitalist American
context? Is “Anglo-Saxon” a cultural designation for a person who has not
existed for nearly a thousand years or shorthand for a white American?
Even deceptively straightforward terms like the lyric, race, and the literary
tradition are revealed to be peculiar within each field and incommensurate
with itself when scaffolded by a different scholarly apparatus. In construct-
ing this book across two fields, I attempt to respect the intellectual context
that allows each of these terms to be legible to scholars in their respective
fields. While I do mean the unusual intersection of discourses in this book
to provoke a broader conversation between the medieval and African-
American studies, the reason for this intervention is practical. Many of the
people under consideration in this book were trained before these disci-
plinary boundaries had solidified. As will be discussed in Chap. 2, several
significant African-American writers read medieval texts or Sir Walter Scott
and a few studied medieval languages. When they deployed terms like
vii
viii PREFACE
“feudalism” or “romance” they did so with a deep understanding of the

implications for putting African-American experiences into paradigms that
were constructed to describe a wholly different historical period. Writers
who did not have this training found explanatory power in the space cre-
ated by the distance in-between applications of these terms in different
contexts. For example, Gloria Naylor invites a discussion of the relation-
ship between Chaucer’s “greet multitude of folk” and the boisterous lan-
guage of the neighborhoods she imagines. Part of this book’s project is to
begin to supplement the ways in which scholars of the Middle Ages and of
African-American literature permit themselves to deploy terms that are
fundamental to their fields so that they can imagine different boundaries
for their inquiries. To bridge these fields, I will occasionally have to tread
territory that is familiar to specialists in either medieval or nineteenth-
century studies.
The breakdown between fields and time periods has prompted me to
construct this book in a way that is different from most of contemporary
scholarship. Although a significant amount of this book examines the ori-
gins of medieval studies within African-American scholarship and litera-
ture, it also looks outside of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Chapter 5 and the Coda look at the afterlife of African-American
perspectives on the Middle Ages. Although it is unusual to find work on
the Middle Ages alongside that of far-flung periods, it is necessary to
include it within the pages of this book. Part of the reason for this is the
performative function these chapters serve. This book insists that what
early African-American scholars and writers undertook when studying the
Middle Ages or making use of medievalisms was not a mere curiosity to be
studied at a remove. The invocation of the medieval or the desire to do
philological work often had a component that transcended the object of
study. As I argue throughout Chap. 2, the relevance of the Middle Ages
redounded to fundamental questions about the construction of race, the
production of social space within the nation, and the possibilities of a
humanistic education.
I hope to use the shape of the book itself to advance a different set of
logics than those of periodization and specialization. The danger inherent
within studying the origin of medieval studies is to reify the social distinc-
tions that African-American scholars sought to complicate by entering
into areas of study that were simultaneously socially constructed as alien to
them and essential to narratives of the nation. Much of the book will
examine hybridity in the sense that Homi Bhabha uses the term to discuss
PREFACE
ix
race, that is, as “cultures caught in the transitional and disjunctive tempo-
ralities of modernity.”1 However, I will expand the assumed dynamics
Bhabha proposes between modern and pre-modern temporalities by add-
ing a temporal site that is negotiated by these African-American scholars as
a means of claiming agency within temporal frames, rather than being
“caught” within them.
Davis, CA Matthew X. Vernon
1
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 360.
Acknowledgements
First, I must thank Bonnie Wheeler, who has overseen a series rich with
ambitious scholarship on medieval subjects. I am honored to have the
opportunity to be included among the roster of scholars whose work has
inspired me throughout my academic career. Without her, this book
would surely be adrift.
Over the course of constructing this book I feared sharing the fate of
Nick Carraway, that is, being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.
Although I have made many missteps along the way, I have been fortunate
enough to have many patient teachers who have tried to usher me ever
upwards. Any mistakes in this book are my own.
I have the privilege of being a member of a department that is both
intellectually stimulating and generous in its support. There is no depart-
ment I would rather be part of. I would like to particularly thank John
Marx, Desirée Martin, Scott Simmon, and Seeta Chaganti for their critical
roles in welcoming me into the department and keeping me afloat. Above
all, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Claire Waters whose bril-
liance and grace suffused the million acts of kindness she showed me while
I was figuring out my place in academia. To properly thank her would take
longer than the whole book. It suffices to say that I wish to one day be half
the superhero she is.
I would like to single out Mark Jerng, Katherine Steele Brokaw, and
Justin LeRoy for reading my manuscript at a critical point in its develop-
ment and for encouraging me subsequently. Kristen Aldebol-Hazle and
Margaret Miller were also instrumental in helping me edit my
manuscript.
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Alastair Minnis, Stephen Yale-Loehr, Susanne Wofford, Robert Stepto,

and Robert Frank were pivotal in my intellectual development. They heard
me out even though I had not yet figured out a vocabulary. Thank you for
taking a chance on me.
Tom Hill deserves special thanks. Without him, none of this would
have ever gotten started.
I would like to thank Grace Lo, Dan Gustafson, and Serena Klempin
for reminding me where my treasure is. Thanks also to Quinn Javers,
Matthew Stratton, Asa Mittman, Ann Zatsman, Britney Dann, Sophia
Ioannou, Katie Peterson, Francis Vernon, Laura D’Amato-Contreras,
Rosslyn D’Amato-Contreras, Lucia D’Amato-Contreras, and Cristina
Biasetto. The next one is on me. And also Teddy.
Contents
1 Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy,

African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages 1
2 Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-

American Scholarship and Curricula 45
3 Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain

and Charles Chesnutt’s Black Romance 103
4 History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval

Theories of Ethnicity and Their Afterlives 159
5 Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality

in Dante, Chaucer, and Naylor 203
6 Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained 247
Index 263
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Reading Out of

Time—Genealogy, African-American
Literature, and the Middle Ages
Anglo-Saxon Freedoms
This book, which is about narratives that have been subsumed under
dominant discourses, will fittingly begin with a historical footnote. In the
midst of the 2012 campaign for president of the United States, when each
side was vying for the slightest advantage in the battle for headlines, the
British paper, The Daily Telegraph, claimed that one of the advisors for the
Republican candidate Mitt Romney made an unusual statement. He
argued, according to the report, that Romney had a unique connection
with the British prime minister because of the “Anglo-Saxon heritage”
that the two countries shared in common, an inheritance that Obama
“didn’t fully appreciate.”1 The comments occasioned a minor tempest
and the Romney campaign vehemently denied them. Journalists debated
just what to make of this statement. Stephen Colbert, host of the satirical
television show, The Colbert Report, even suggested that Romney was
evoking Germanic tribal connections and that he would soon be quoting
Beowulf in his stump speeches. While this gaffe was a small wrinkle in a
much larger political contest, the sentiment evoked a long tradition within
American society. A year earlier, Forbes Magazine had published an article
calling for the return to Anglo-Saxon principles, the ones upon which the
1
Jon Swain, “Mitt Romney Would Restore ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Relations between Britain and
America.” The Daily Telegraph, July 24, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world-
news/mitt-romney/9424524/Mitt-Romney-would-restore-Anglo-Saxon-relations-
between-Britain-and-America.html (Accessed July 7, 2015).
© The Author(s) 2018 1

M. X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_1
2 M. X. VERNON
founding fathers sought to base the laws of the country.2 A few years
before that in a dissenting opinion, the Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia expressed concern that America was in danger of undoing its
“Anglo-Saxon system” of separated powers.3 At the start of the twenty-
first century, the influential conservative political historian Samuel
Huntington lamented the diminishing force of “Anglo-Saxonism” in
American politics within a larger argument about the disintegration of a
coherent American identity.4
The resurgence of these conservative ideas—in the political and ideo-
logical senses of the phrase—that tried to resist the demographic future of
a diversifying country by reasserting America’s connection to the founda-
tion of English political structures seemed to be upended by subsequent
turns in American politics. Donald Trump was elected president. Political
analysts began to reassess America’s historical trajectory to account for his
unexpected victory. Moreover, the president himself was disinterested in
history; a discussion of his connection to a pre-modern society would
seem absurd.5 The terms of the debate about the future of the nation
shifted away from its roots in the hoary past to the presidency’s modern
antecedents. And yet, even in this campaign that seemed to defy all expec-
tations, the dynamics that underpinned the Romney aide’s comments
were replayed in one of the strangest but most telling scenes of the 2016
campaign. Trump enlisted the support of Nigel Farage, a British Member
of Parliament who had championed the British exit from the European
Union, to argue that America could regain its sovereignty and voters who
2
Bill Flax, “Forget Multiculturalism: Restore the Anglo-Saxon Philosophy Of Liberty.”
Forbes Magazine, 9 September 2011, Online.
3
Here Scalia is ultimately borrowing from famed jurist Sir William Blackstone’s theories
about the derivation of eighteenth-century British law from Anglo-Saxon law, particularly
the law of King Alfred. Scalia reads Blackstone through Alexander Hamilton’s writings on
the structure of American law. This is, of course, apocryphal, but is a telling misreading of
history given Scalia’s position and legal expertise. See: Hamdi V. Rumsfeld (03-6696) 542
U.S. 507 (2004); Eric Gerald Stanley, Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2000).
4
Samuel Huntington, Who We Are: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 55, 131.
5
James Hohmann, “Trump Doesn’t Know Much about History. It’s Making His On-The-
Job Training Harder,” The Washington Post, April 14, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/04/14/daily-202-trump-doesn-t-know-
much-about-history-it-s-making-his-on-the-job-training-harder/58f06ba2e9b69b3a72331
e84/?utm_term=.605c91f3b64d.
INTRODUCTION: READING OUT OF TIME—GENEALOGY… 3
were victims of “modern global corporatism” could regain their “self-

respect.”6 This choice of political surrogate perplexed commentators who
underestimated the pull of the latent urge to roll back the years and seek
solidarities that presumed the clarity of racial origins and borders; that is,
to inhabit the fantasy of a pre-modern past. Although the subject of this
book will be about what is marginal and easy to overlook, the issue under
investigation—the desire for and use of origins that are pre-modern, spe-
cifically medieval origins—is an abiding and powerful undercurrent in
American political, educational, and cultural discourses.
The claims of an American “medieval heritage” have a curious geneal-
ogy. Each instance connects the United States and medieval Europe in
ways that center on how American identity was conceived at the nation’s
founding, particularly by Thomas Jefferson. There are many well-worn
anecdotes about Jefferson’s antiquarian zeal for the Anglo-Saxon period
and how he mobilized the history and language of the Anglo-Saxon
period for contemporary purposes. Jefferson advocated that law students
at the University of Virginia study Old English as a means to understand
“our ancient common law, on which, as a stock, our whole system of law
is engrafted.”7 Through this linguistic training students would have a
closer understanding of the philosophy that he believed so deeply informed
the framing of the nation’s laws. Jefferson was enthusiastic enough to
muse about enshrining an image of Anglo-Saxons in one of the most sig-
nificant American symbols; he proposed a plan for the Great Seal of the
United States that would depict Hengest and Horsa, the mythical first
Saxon settlers on Britain, taking their first steps ashore. Jefferson was
deeply and personally invested in the Anglo-Saxon period; he describes his
preoccupation as a “hobby which too often runs away with me where I
meant not to give up the rein.”8
The focus on Thomas Jefferson allows scholars and public figures alike
to locate the Middle Ages within a critical point of American history and
suggests the continued significance of medieval texts, language, and
6
John Cassidy, “Trump Embraces Nigel Farage, His British Alter Ego” The New Yorker,
August 25, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/trump-embraces-nigel-
farage-his-british-alter-ego.
7
Thomas Jefferson, The Essential Jefferson, edited by Jean Yarbrough (Cambridge:
Hackett, 2006), 72.
8
Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson Concerning Philology and the Classics,
ed.Thomas Fitzhugh (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1919), 7.
4 M. X. VERNON
hilosophy in the modern period.9 Dangers lurk in the desire for origins,
p
this mapping between the foundational moment of the nation and the
medieval period. Implicated within Jefferson’s discussions of medieval lit-
erature is his ability to disarticulate the language of liberty he found to be
so attractive within Anglo-Saxon literature from the realities of slave own-
ership. Jefferson looked to the Anglo-Saxon period as the historical and
hereditary basis for a theory of liberty that could then be conferred upon
future generations of Americans. In making an argument about the
American right to rebel against the king, he refers to the allodial title of
the Anglo-Saxons which was conveyed to American settlers.10 This histori-
cal argument reads America as never having been defeated by William the
Conqueror, thus subject only to Anglo-Saxon law, not the king’s law. In a
letter to a friend and Justice for the Virginia Supreme Court, Edmund
Pendleton, Jefferson would further clarify this position:
Has it not been the practice of all other nations to hold their lands as their
personal estate in absolute dominion? Are we not the better for what we have
hitherto abolished of the feudal system? Has not every restitution of the anti-
ent [sic] Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at
once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest & most perfect ever
yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century.11
He concludes the letter by noting that it was “the season for driving” the
Cherokee native Americans off their lands. Jefferson, of course, leaves
unwritten that the laws of the nation derived from England would only
convey to those “of Anglo-Saxon descent.” By locating the source of this
human potential within a mythical Anglo-Saxon people who “had always
been freedom-loving, and who had always exhibited an outstanding
capacity for good government,” Jefferson circumscribed the space within
which “the rights of man” might be understood.12 The freedoms Jefferson
9
For example, Nicholas Howe’s extraordinary study Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-
Saxon England uses the story about the Great Seal as an introduction to the persistence of
certain migration narratives, but the text quickly moves on to lengthy considerations of
medieval texts. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (South Bend: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
10
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg:
Clementina Rind, 1774), 17.
11
Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Edmund Pendleton” Philadelphia, August 13, 1776.
12
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 14.
theorized would bear a racial charge that has not yet been fully expended.
The perhaps more pernicious bequeathal of Jefferson, which becomes
amplified throughout the nineteenth century and can be dimly viewed
from the examples that begin this chapter, is that he evokes a Middle Ages
that never existed. His strategic reading makes the past conform to the
exigencies of political circumstances in his present. The Anglo-Saxons,
who factor prominently in his accounting of British history, always rule in
the name of “moral rights.” Of the Normans, he merely condemns them
for their regime “built on conquest and physical force.”13 And about
medieval moments of cultural encounter or synthesis, he is largely silent.
The mythologizing of Anglo-Saxons certainly did not begin with
Jefferson. The poetry, collections of folklore, and antiquarian research that
kindled the fires of the Romantic movement in the eighteenth century
often looked to the Anglo-Saxon period as the source of pure cultural
identity, “of unmixt blood.”14 Those flames would continue to burn in
nineteenth-century literature seeking to celebrate American expansionist
policies by linking them to British imperialist history. Jack London, in a
1901 essay contemplating Rudyard Kipling’s legacy, imagines an Anglo-
Saxon spirit that unifies the United States and Great Britain:
What the Anglo-Saxon has done, [Kipling] has memorialized. And by

Anglo-Saxon is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the
edge of the Western Ocean. Anglo-Saxon stands for the English- speaking
people of all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions, are
more peculiarly and definitely English than anything else. This people
Kipling has sung. Their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives of
his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive of
motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with what
underlies all the Anglo-Saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the genius
of the race. […]
The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber. Underneath
his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan’s time, in Drake’s
time, in William’s time, in Alfred’s time. The blood and the tradition of
Hengist and Horsa are in his veins. In battle he is subject to the blood lusts
of the Berserkers of old. Plunder and booty fascinate him immeasurably.15
13
Thomas Jefferson “Letter to George W. Lewis,” Monticello, October 25, 1825.
14
Horsman, 31.
15
Jack London, Jack London on Writers and Writing, Dale L. Walker and Heanne Campbell
Reesman, eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 68.
6 M. X. VERNON
London nimbly skips through timeframes and across continents to advance

his argument about the role of “the Anglo-Saxon” in shaping the nine-
teenth century. London’s reading of history is determinative of cultural
products that he believed “Anglo-Saxons” created. This perspective
astounds in its ability to reconcile apparent contradictions in historical fact
and sentiment for the goal of constructing the past in the vision of himself.
How else could “the Anglo-Saxon” both be the Viking berserker and the
British king repelling those same Viking attacks; how else could he cele-
brate “the Anglo-Saxon” who “loves freedom, but is dictatorial to
others”?16 London reveals the critical duality of Anglo-Saxon identity. It is
capacious—the word he uses is “cosmic” in the sense that it endures
unchanged over time—yet it is narrowly confined to “the race.” Anglo-
Saxon identity depends on the politics of exclusion and the claim of a con-
nection to a past unique unto itself.
Tracing the thread of Anglo-Saxonism from its origins may be useful
insofar as it identifies a fault within the American conception of civil liber-
ties and rights that would persist into the twenty-first century. Arguments
about Anglo-Saxon heritage allow Jefferson to neglect the voice of those
outside of the historical lineage he charts. Significantly, this meant African-
Americans. Romney’s campaign and the Forbes article react along similar
lines to the presence of an African-American who successfully articulated
his quintessentially American life. President Barack Obama achieved this
with such felicity and at such long odds that his opponents, including his
successor, tried to undermine this strength by repeatedly suggesting that
the president harbored “foreign” ideas. Embedded within this strategy of
alienation and the call for a return to “Anglo-Saxon” values is this old idea
that has its base in Jefferson’s thinking: Americans were enacting the
“adventus Saxonum” in the United States; the path of conquest and subju-
gation of others was justified by historical precedent.17 Not coincidentally,
the purpose of Romney’s trip to England was to demonstrate his aggressive
foreign policy stance in contradistinction to that of Obama. Romney used
this rhetoric of “foreignness” as a means of creating a competing vision of
national identity, one that would simultaneously undermine Obama’s
narrative as “weak” and assert his own version of American identity.
Ibid.
16
María José Mora and María José Gómez-Calderón, “The Study of Old English in
17
America (1776–1850): National Uses of the Saxon Past,” The Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 97.3 (July 1998), 322–336.
The quest to conserve “Anglo-Saxon” virtues on the part of political

actors, from Jefferson to the Romney aide, requires a seemingly contradic-
tory set of perspectives on how one reads the development of American
history in relationship to theories about race. That politicians and writers
would look backwards to the Middle Ages to frame their vision of the
nation’s future seems counter-intuitive, but that distance from their con-
temporary context makes the Middle Ages, particularly medieval England,
available for being imaginatively constructed as an era of racial purity and
military subjugation of “foreign” peoples. This fantasy could then be
mapped onto projects of “development”—construed as widely as the
growth of factories in the northeast to westward expansion. The geneal-
ogy of medievalism runs through the Civil War, the critical point for the
construction of race and, just as importantly, the genesis for the techno-
logical, economic, and cultural networks that continue to inform the
shape of the nation.18 The archive under investigation radiates outwards
from this point, composing one possible configuration of the long nine-
teenth century: a period that encompasses the critical precedents and
legacies of the war.
The conversation between the Middle Ages and the long nineteenth
century was structured around the politics of recovery: finding in the past
meaning that was prophetic for established structures of power. This
strategy ignored the recent history of England, rather it shaped medieval
history to the American concept of exceptionalism. While the medieval
past was constructed as the source of unity and celebrated for its spirit of
innovation, “blackness” of necessity was read as an impediment to that
progress, or at least antithetical to the positive valence of “whiteness.”
John H. Van Evrie, whose writing popularized “scientific” approaches to
understanding white superiority over African-Americans, employs the
curious logic this brand of medievalism followed to distinguish those with
“Anglo-Saxon” heritage from those with African ancestry in his 1868
study, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination. He reads the conserva-
tion of culture as a primary virtue for white Americans, and one that
African-Americans lack:
18
It is important to emphasize that race and innovation—technical and economic—are not
at all exclusive. Indeed, they are interdependent categories that developed in response to one
another. See the discussion of slavery and capitalism in Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (New
York: Vintage, 2014), 83–136.
8 M. X. VERNON
All the other races have a character to overcome first or to be understood

and properly harmonized, but the negro is a blank, a wilderness, a barren
waste, waiting for the husbandman or the Caucasian teacher to develop his
real worth, and gifted with his wonderful imitative powers, he not only
never resists, but reaching forth his hands for guidance and protection, at
once accepts his teacher, and submits himself to his control. Of the now four
millions in our midst, a considerable proportion are the children of native
Africans, indeed, there are not a few natives still among us and yet every-
thing connected with Africa—their traditions, language, religion even their
names have wholly disappeared. The Normans conquered the Saxons eight
centuries ago, but the Saxon names and even their language, are now as
entirely Saxon as if a Norman had never landed on the shores of England.19
Van Evrie’s reasoning demonstrates the topsy-turvy reasoning that was

employed to distinguish “Anglo-Saxon” heritage from that of African-
Americans. Most notable from this extract is the way he relates heritage to
landscape, that of the Africans is mutable and evanescent as opposed to
that of the Anglo-Saxon, which is ever-present and indomitable. This met-
aphor, like Jefferson’s vision of “the march of civilization from the sea
coast” to the Rocky Mountains, sees people of Anglo-Saxon heritage as
shapers of the landscape, seemingly because they were able to resist geo-
political change in the eleventh century.20 Ironies and inaccuracies abound
in such a reading of history, but the underlying argument must be taken
seriously. Such extrapolations of the Middle Ages racialized bodies and
then fixed a horizon of expectations for what a race could achieve. As
elaborate fantasies of a “pure” medieval history were popularized, they
served as foundational arguments about real political action.
For example, Walt Whitman, whose celebrated voice sought to encom-
pass the nation, had a vexed relationship to the altered political realities
created by the Civil War.21 His understanding of the Middle Ages’ legacy
was central to his critique of post-War America. The poet preferred to call
the Civil War a “secessionist war,” reasoning that the real problem to be
solved was not slavery, but the South’s decision to destroy the unity of the
19
John H. Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, or Negroes: A Subordinate
Race (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1868), 219.
20
Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Ludlow” September 6, 1824 in Jefferson: Political
Writings, eds. Joyce Appleby and Terrence Ball (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1999), 590.
21
This argument borrows from David Blight, Race and Reconciliation (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 22.
nation. In fact, he seemed to believe abolitionist projects were overzealous

and could potentially unbalance the country after the war:
[…] the black domination, but little above the beasts—viewed as a tempo-
rary, deserv’d punishment for Southern whites’ slavery and secession sins,
may perhaps be admissible; but as a permanency of course is not to be con-
sidered for a moment.22
Whitman subverts the expected formulation of “Saxon domination” with

“black domination” and, in this way, he plays with the incompatibility of
these ideas. Any amount of African-American enfranchisement here is read
as a subversion of “Anglo-Saxon dominance” and is thus unsupportable.
Frederick Douglass, writing to Robert Adams in 1888, described this “cry
about negro supremacy” as “humbug,” akin to widespread fears of slave
insurrections before the Civil War.23 Douglass’ dismissal of the idea, coming
decades after the Civil War, both underscores the folly of “black domina-
tion” as a bogeyman and indicates how widely disseminated such fears were.
Scholars interested in Whitman’s views on race often quote this pas-
sage from his wartime memoranda, but it is rarely accompanied by his
further musings about the potential for some good to come out of the
war’s destructiveness. To extract the quotation this way decontextual-
izes the meaning Whitman’s language about “domination” evoked for a
nineteenth-century reader. In the subsequent lines of his memorandum,
Whitman likens the Civil War to “the conquest of England eight centu-
ries ago, by the Franco-Normans” and he directly links the results of that
political change to the creation of the United States:
[…] Time has proved plain enough that, bitter as they were, all these
[Norman acts of war] were the most salutary series of revolutions that could
possibly have happen’d. Out of them, and by them mainly, have come, out
of Albic, Roman and Saxon England—and without them could not have
come—not only the England of the 500 years down to the present, and of
the present—but These States. Nor, except for the terrible dislocation and
overturn, would these States, as they are, exist to-day.24
22
Walt Whitman, “Results South—Now And Hence” (1875) Memoranda During the
War, ed. Peter Coviello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 126.
23
Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, December 4, 1888. (Gilder Lehrman Collection,
GLC04997).
24
Ibid., 127.
10 M. X. VERNON
The reference to the Middle Ages does more than simply create an anal-
ogy between that period and the post-Civil War era; Whitman forges an
imaginative genealogy for the nation that presents the historical alliances
undergirding the nation’s identity to be far deeper than the divisions
exposed by the war. He imagines the Norman Conquest in a way that
echoes previous arguments about the adventus Saxonum, that is, he turns
to the Norman Conquest to discover a unitary, proto-national identity.
Whitman’s “salutary series of revolutions” among the “Albic, Roman and
Saxon England” proleptically composes an ethnic heritage of whiteness
that would offer none of the challenges of race and political enfranchise-
ment that were at the root of the Civil War. This construction of the
Middle Ages allows Whitman to elide those questions and instead imagine
the possibility of recapturing a pure ethnic identity.
“Song of the Exposition” (1871), Whitman’s most exuberant celebra-
tion of technological progress, evokes the Middle Ages as a crucial subtext
for the possibility of the nation attaining “rehabilitated prosperity” that
would restore its imagined coherence.25 Here the period is used as a met-
onym for the ancient, what has been largely left behind, which he treats
elegiacally:
The Crusaders’ streams of shadowy, midnight troops, sped with the

sunrise;
Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone—Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone,
Palmerin, ogre, departed—vanish’d the turrets that Usk reflected,
Arthur vanish’d with all his knights—Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad—all
gone—
dissolv’d utterly, like an exhalation;
Pass’d! pass’d! for us, for ever pass’d! that once so mighty World—now void,
inanimate, phantom World!26
“Song of the Exposition” puts several timeframes in parallel: the mythical

past of romance and chivalric action, the proximal history of war, and a
vision of the country’s future devoid of intestine rancor. These temporal
frames are overlaid and inform one another. The poem expresses the wish
to move beyond the war and “in its stead speed Industry’s campaigns,”
the yields of which would be marvels worthy of the great mythical
Ibid., 127.
25
Walt Whitman, “Song of the Exposition,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library,
26
1950), 160.
undertakings that have preceded them. While much of the poem’s argu-
ment about progress is forward looking, the subtext of the poem is indeed
about the memory of the Civil War, of “blacken’d mutilated corpses.”27
The Middle Ages in the poem are a placeholder for a shifting idea of the
past that was noble and unrecoverable. A few lines later, the poem pro-
claims, “Away with themes of war! Away with war itself…Away with old
romance.”28 This declaration seems to sweep away both chivalric fiction
and the intrusion of the subject of the Civil War in favor of Whitman’s
gleaming vision of “the Union,” a nation joined in productive enterprises
from California to Boston. Despite its elegiac farewell to the Middle Ages,
the turn to industrial progress does not signify a complete departure from
the set of quests he associates with the Middle Ages. Rather, the same
spirit that animated medieval conquests and shaped the “mighty World,”
Whitman suggests, energized post-war technical innovation.
Whitman’s “Song of the Exposition” demonstrates a strategy of recali-
brating the terms by which the Civil War and the ensuing Reconstruction
might be understood. In his efforts to narrate reconciliation within the
country, Whitman evades the root question of race. Herein is the clear
hazard in Whitman’s approach and the problem that runs through each
of the preceding examples of medievalism mobilized to argue for “Anglo-
Saxon domination.” The medieval past creates a map for contemporary
society that simply leaves the challenges of conflict or the complexity of
medieval intercultural contact uncharted. Whitman’s poem disarticulates
the “spirit” of divisive events, such as the Crusades, from the meaning
that constitutes these events. Whitman laments the end of the crusad-
ing spirit without evoking the difficult questions about why these cam-
paigns were prosecuted. He then proceeds to make a historical analogy
to the Civil War while again avoiding any mention of what the bloodshed
was meant to adjudicate. This allows the writer to silence the “embar-
rassments and darkness” of the war while trumpeting the steady march
towards the future.
This lacuna is present in a significant amount of popular nineteenth-
century writing that discusses the Civil War in conjunction with the Middle
Ages. Harvard educated professor and Civil War veteran James K. Hosmer
read the future successes of the nation as not just inspired by a medieval
past, but as a future foretold without the provocations of slavery:
27
Ibid., 163.
28
Ibid., 163–164.
12 M. X. VERNON
As Sir Francis Palgrave says: ‘The new building has been raised upon the old
groundwork; the institutions of one age have always been modeled and
formed from those of the preceding and the lineal descent has never been
interrupted or disturbed.’ Anglo-Saxon freedom is most simply and com-
prehensively stated in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, ‘government of the
people by the people and for the people.’ In its long history there have been
periods of temporary submergence, adaptation to the needs of ever vaster
multitudes and higher civilizations, manifold development and elaboration:
one spirit however has survived through all apparent in the deliberations of
a modern Congress or Parliament as also it was apparent in the ancient folk
moots where the free ceorls chose their army leaders and regulated the life
in their marks.29
His willingness to read the structures of the United States government

and even the political argumentation of Abraham Lincoln as incrustations
of Anglo-Saxon practices demonstrates a desire to excise the Civil War as
a meaningful moment of political change. For Hosmer, slavery was an
echo of feudal serfdom and its abolition subsumed under the eventual
progress of “Anglo-Saxon freedom.”30 The irony of referring to emanci-
pation with a phrase that so clearly evokes Thomas Jefferson’s own reasons
for maintaining his hold on slaves reveals the flaws inherent in reading
history under the cloak of desire for medieval origins.
The New York Times enthusiastically praised Hosmer’s work and reiter-
ated the writer’s basic thesis about the resilience of Anglo-Saxon works
and traditions to change.31 More careful scholars than Hosmer conceded
that while this historical framework was wholly erroneous, it possessed
allure for a wide audience desirous of a coherent theory of nation:
This book sets forth in somewhat pretentious form a theory of English and
American history now very much in vogue. The theory is popular because it
is democratic, not necessarily because it is based on facts. It gratifies the
pride of the masses to be told that the current dogmas about popular sover-
eignty are primordial truths, to which we have returned after a deflection of
the path of history from its natural course. This may be called the democratic
29
James K. Hosmer, A Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom: The Polity Of The English-
Speaking Race Outlined In Its Inception, Development, Diffusion, And Present Condition
(New-York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), v.
30
Hosmer, 123; 296.
31
[Review] The New York Times (New York, NY) 22 February 1891: 19.
philosophy of history. Among English writers it may be traced at least as far

back as the seventeenth century.32
H.L. Osgood, an American historian and contemporary of Hosmer, makes

this withering critique of the notion that the war could be read as simply
a digression from a narrative of progress. His reference to “popular sover-
eignty” cuts straight to arguments about rights for African-Americans
decided by states, and the sense that to enfranchise African-Americans
would mean a further deflection from the “natural course” of history.
Moreover, Osgood’s reading exposes the intersection between history and
fiction that is evident in Whitman’s references to King Arthur, but is
cloaked under the guise of factual inquiry in Hosmer’s research. The
imbrication of these separate historical frames and evidentiary modes—the
mythical golden age of “Anglo-Saxon freedom” and a future of ever-
advancing American progress, filtered through the language of desire—
creates narratives premised on the possibility of returning to a state of
ideological and cultural purity: before the sin of slave-holding.
The fantasy of a reunion with the past that might disarticulate the his-
tories of white Americans from those of African-Americans puts into con-
test some of the fundamental principles of the nation, which continue to
be adjudicated. Historian Greg Grandin argues in his 2014 study of
Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, that the nineteenth century provided
contradictory but mutually constitutive philosophical frameworks for
understanding the nation’s development after the revolution: the “Age of
Liberty” and the “Age of Slavery.”33 The novella, as Grandin presents it, is
a reading of those seemingly opposing significations of the era; it depicts
Benito Cereno, a weakened Spanish captain of a slave ship, who seems
entirely dependent upon one of the slaves, Babo, to assist him with every
task. An American sea captain, Delano, boards the ship and spends a day
observing this. He naively believes that what is apparent is actually what is
occurring, only to be horrified upon discovering that the whole scenario
was a ruse concocted by the slaves to fool him. In fact, there had been a
mutiny onboard the ship before he arrived and the subservience of the
former slaves was an act to conceal their liberation. He realizes that what
he had read as the “natural” black subservience to whites was, in fact, a
32
H.L. Osgood “Review: A Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom, by James K. Hosmer”
Political Science Quarterly, 6.1 (March 1891), 162–164.
33
Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 8.
14 M. X. VERNON
sophisticated interrelation of black and white characters that confuses the

master-servant relationship, showing each of those positions to be depen-
dent upon and distorted by the other. Cereno is undone as much by the
mutiny as by how slavery economically and morally compromises him.
Grandin chose Benito Cereno in part because the reciprocal relationship
between Babo and Cereno so well demonstrates the evident problem with
thinking in terms of racial purity or liberty as separate from the institution
of slavery: to do so misses the deep interconnections between races and
the interpenetration of depictions of whiteness and blackness in American
literature. Grandin argues that the present world remains deeply informed
by the conflicts initiated by the slave trade and incompletely resolved by
the Civil War. In response to Grandin’s argument, Toni Morrison goes
further in judging the reach of “The Age of Liberty” and its dependence
on a construction of African-Americans as outside of time:
From illogical claims that the Negro is both a “natural valet” and an untamed
animal, the language of denial has now moved to the assumption of endemic
unworthiness of the poor (generally assumed to be black in spite of census
data saying otherwise), the always and already criminalized who receive food
stamps, unemployment checks, Medicaid, etc., and who seem outrageously
and fraudulently eager to vote. [Grandin makes] this clear in The Empire of
Necessity, exposing the self-satisfaction, the willed deception in the construc-
tion of racism to sustain slavery in a nation committed to the freedom of its
people.34
Morrison, a writer deeply invested in critiquing literary origins, is acutely

aware that it is dangerous to think that the divisions caused by the Civil
War and the underlying arguments about slavery have been erased. To do
so ignores the heritage of slavery: how the “peculiar institution” has
informed and shaped other types of institutions and, more importantly,
ways of making meaning within the nation. The underlying concerns
about race have only intensified since Jefferson’s reflections on Anglo-
Saxon law, Melville’s writing about a slave revolt, and even since the indis-
creet comments by the Romney aide. Articles proliferate about “The End
of White America,” articulating fears surrounding demographic change
and expected shifts in power structures that have made writers revisit ques-
tions of origins and whether or not a majority-minority future means a
34
Toni Morrison, “Melville and the Language of Denial” The Nation, January 27, 2014.
diminution of white liberty.35 In the late years of Barack Obama’s presi-

dency the nation’s political system was stalled by a political party that
sought a return to original principles, to “take the country back,” a phrase
that haunts in its desire to see progress as moving backwards in time. This
era of American history is troubled by the same shadows Benito Cereno
feels haunting him by the end of Melville’s novella: a fear of impending
change, a fear of a movement beyond the “clarity” of the past, a fear of
blackness.
Owning Time
Could he have meant—hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were
to affirm, the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or
at least not the men who did the violence. Did he mean to say “yes” because
he knew that the principle was greater than the men, greater than the num-
bers and the vicious power and all the methods used to corrupt its name?
Did he mean to affirm the principle, which they themselves had dreamed
into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, and which they
had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own
corrupt minds?36
The eponymous character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)

muses about the meaning of his grandfather’s dying words. The grandfa-
ther, a freed slave, charges the Invisible Man to “keep up the good fight”
and “overcome ’em with yeses”—cryptic advice that the narrator puzzles
over throughout the text. These words only begin to gain definition in the
novel’s epilogue wherein the narrator traces out possible lines of meaning.
To do so, he makes a complex argument about the nature of history and
the place of the American project within it. His reference to principles
“dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past” in
part evokes the historical teleology of Marx, its charting of progress from
feudal economic relationships to modern capitalist ones. Simultaneously,
the narrator engages in the conversation begun by Jefferson suggested by
35
For example, Hua Hsu, “The End of White America?,” The Atlantic, January 1, 2009;
Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik, “Census: Minority Babies Now Majority in the United
States,” The Washington Post, May 16, 2012; John Blake, “Are Whites Racially Oppressed,”
CNN March 4, 2011; Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2010), 8.
36
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 574.
16 M. X. VERNON
his reference to “the principle…dreamed into being out of the chaos and
darkness”—about the break from the feudal power structure that ordered
English society into the eighteenth century. American liberty, both
Jefferson and Ellison argue, would instead be constituted by the promise
that individual potential would translate into social advancement, a step
into the future.
The relationship between Jefferson and Ellison’s theories of America’s
relationship to a feudal past is instructive for detailing competing notions
of subjugation and liberty as co-extant with the construction of racial
myth. Reading Jefferson’s theories about the Middle Ages’ significance
alongside those of Ellison brings into focus a larger project that “maneu-
vered ancient English history so as to produce a discursive crisis within
contemporaneous U.S. discourses of racial stature and purity.”37 Jefferson
likened a westward journey across the United States to “the progress of
man” towards technological and cultural advancement. Consequently, he
read the push of American force across the country as a means of moving
the nation through stages of development:
And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the
meantime been receding before the steady step of amelioration, and will in
time, I trust disappear from the earth.38
Jefferson used temporality to distinguish the American project as a revolu-

tionary one in the sense that American independence constituted an
abrupt shift in temporal progress, something that would not have been
possible under a “feudal” British regime. Instead, by linking progress in
time with progress over land, Jefferson recalls his arguments about Anglo-
Saxon freedom as premised upon what he believed to be the “allodial”
Anglo-Saxon system of law discussed above, one that emphasized an indi-
vidual’s ownership over the land and his or her potential to improve it. To
conceive time in this way is to have a unique sense of ownership over it.
The rupture the revolution constitutes is not simply a break with the past,
but an opportunity to excise part of history, that is, the revolution and its
37
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic
Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 45.
38
Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh and Robert Holland Johnson eds. (Washington, DC: Thomas
Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1904) 74–75. See the discussion of this passage in Horsman,
84.
subsequent legal reforms would not just allow for freedom in space but
freedom in time. Jefferson simply rejects a portion of British history, feu-
dalism, as unsuitable to his conception of the nation.
While Jefferson ostensibly sought to free himself from “feudalism” as
represented by English power, he defended slavery and fashioned himself
in the image of a feudal lord—a man with absolute and arbitrary authority
over those on his land. The great rupture in world history that the
American Revolution represented would be darkly echoed by the great
historical rupture of American slavery, which cast African-Americans as
alien and without a past.39 For Jefferson, the liberties of the nation were
predicated upon the primacy of Anglo-Saxon heritage. This reasoning pre-
cluded the participation of African-Americans, as they were outside of the
genealogy he proposed. Ellison, on the other hand, places a unique bur-
den upon African-Americans; slavery and the subsequent programs of
racial discrimination functioned to keep African-Americans outside of the
narrative of historical progress:
Historically, American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that

has swept them from slavery to the condition of industrial man in a space of
time so telescoped (a bare eighty-five years) that it is possible literally for
them to step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by
moving across the Mason-Dixon line.40
Slavery and southern discrimination as read by Ellison reconstitutes feu-

dalism, or to use Jefferson’s words “an engine of immense oppression.”41
In this way, African-Americans were uniquely positioned to understand
and critique the idea of moving towards modernity from feudalism, as
they were acutely subject to the harsh transition between the two.
While Jefferson and Ellison create arguments reminiscent of one anoth-
er’s in terms of how they read the feudal past to understand the nation
within a longer historical trajectory, they crucially disagree on the question
of where one locates the moments of historical progress and who the par-
ticipants in that development were. This friction between these two ways
of reading American history, particularly the discrepancy between inter-
pretations of when the United States departs from a medieval point of
39
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1985), 38.
40
Ralph Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Harper’s Magazine (August 1964), 53.
41
Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Edmund Pendleton,” Philadelphia, August 13, 1776.
18 M. X. VERNON
origin, reveals the potency of the Middle Ages as a metaphor used to

understand American mythologies of race and competing visions of social
progress. Frederick Douglass anticipates the disjunction Ellison identifies
between past and present, plantation and free, in his My Bondage and My
Freedom (1855):
In its isolation, seclusion, and self-reliant independence, Col. Lloyd’s plan-

tation resembles what the baronial domains were during the middle ages
[sic] in Europe. Grim, cold, and unapproachable by all genial influences
from communities without, there it stands; full three hundred years behind
the age, in all that relates to humanity and morals.42
To be implicated within the system of slavery and the subsequent patterns

of racial oppression is to be denied control over the promises of forward
momentum in time; “the order of civilization is reversed.”43 Instead, one
is subject to what should be an archaic and foreign political system, and
yet is outrageous in its vitality and its dictates on human life.
The previous section of this introduction demonstrates that the Middle
Ages offered an important conceptual framework for white writers and
politicians to articulate the shape of the nation while simultaneously silenc-
ing those parts of the American population and history that threatened the
logic of programs which consolidated white power and racial identity.
While this is a powerful conduit for the mobilization of the Middle Ages,
it is by no means the sole one. African-Americans throughout the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have utilized the critical matrix of
meaning bound up within the Middle Ages—its association with individ-
ual nobility, the cultural reconciliation and hybridization implied by the
Anglo-Norman period, theories of feudal land attachments, the sociolin-
guistic implications of speaking and writing in English, even the notion of
Anglo-Saxon slavery—to expose the fantasy that underpinned discourses
of citizenship and to suggest alternative terms of belonging within the
nation. This too is a project of recovery, one that runs counter to the
mythologization of whiteness, but it has largely been forgotten beneath
arguments that are premised on the consolidation of racial identity in the
nineteenth century. The friction between the legal promise of full enfran-
42
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin Books, 2003),
50.
43
Ibid., 41.
chisement and the subjective experience of being marginalized by the

nation’s narratives revealed lines of contestation that African-American
writers and intellectuals sought to challenge through critical re-examinations
of those defining myths.
This strategy of reappropriation’s contours may be traced in the writing
of W.E.B. Du Bois. He first encountered serious discussions of the Middle
Ages in a Harvard course taught by William James.44 Du Bois took this
course in 1888 and wrote his final paper on the major shift in the relation-
ship between faith and philosophy after the decline of medieval scholasti-
cism. Not only would his search for a “Christian pragmatism” inform
much of his writing, he would continue to meditate on the meaning of the
changes between the Middle Ages and the early modern period through-
out his career. Decades after the class, Du Bois took a tour of cities in the
Midwest to find out the condition of “the race problems.”45 He, like
Ellison, read his progress across the nation and the patchwork of laws and
unofficial rules regulating the lives of African-Americans as akin to a jar-
ring transition between archaic and modern structures of existence; that is,
he likened the trip to traveling back and forth through time. He associates
Toledo with antiquated segregation and Cleveland with “the present,” the
result of years of hard-won rights. In between these two he identifies
Oberlin, Ohio as “the mystic city of the future,” on the basis of its thriving
community of color and Oberlin College’s stance on integration. As the
conflation of space and time suggests, the temporal meaning he assigns to
each place is unstable. Du Bois ends his meditation on his Midwest tour
with a concern that those promising African-American students and resi-
dents in Oberlin were worked to keep at bay “the bonds of medievalism.”46
The “past” was not simply something one could move beyond, but a con-
tinual threat to the modern rights assured to citizens. Nearly a decade after
writing this, Du Bois noted that over ten percent of African-Americans
still lived with “the hateful badge of slavery and medievalism” because
they were reduced to the “anachronism” of menial labor no one else
would deign to do.47
44
DuBois said of James: “[He] guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to
realist pragmatism.” Quoted in: Robert Richardson William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism (New York: Mariner Books, 2007), 316.
45
W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Winter Pilgrimage,” The Crisis Magazine 1.3 (1911), 15.
46
Ibid.
47
W.E.B. DuBois, Darkwater in The Oxford DuBois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 540–541.
20 M. X. VERNON
The potential scope of Du Bois’s mode of reading is astonishing. In his

wide-ranging, multi-genre work, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil,
published in 1920, Dubois uses the Middle Ages not just to analyse the
problems of racism in the United States but to unify the diverse sorts of
oppression visited upon people of color across the globe. Writing in the
shadow of WWI (World War I), Du Bois reads global warfare as “the jeal-
ous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker
races.”48 Du Bois engages the mythology that the West had constructed
around its own past and breaks apart assumptions that received the aura of
truth conferred by their supposed antiquity. In their engagement with pre-
colonized countries, European powers strayed far from “rules of fairness—
equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions” established in the Middle
Ages.49 He singles out Belgium’s ruthless rule over Congo as a particularly
egregious example of how the West had betrayed the ancestral values it
claims to hold dear:
Down the dark forest of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the
name of “the noble-minded men of several nations,” to introduce com-
merce and civilization. What came of it? ‘Rubber and murder, slavery in its
worst form,’ wrote Glave in 1895.50
This is a particularly sharp critique, as Du Bois chooses the questing knight

who achieves the Holy Grail to heighten the sense of a European fall from
grace in the desire to exploit rather than ennoble. Du Bois directly
responds to the arguments outlined in the first section of this introduction
that sought to unify disparate countries that embarked upon campaigns of
conquest and colonization through appeals to the Middle Ages. Du Bois’
observations fittingly come in an essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,”
as he reveals “whiteness” to be a fiction separate and apart from medieval
source material. DuBois argues that medieval foundational fictions helped
create the imagined community of whiteness out of separate European
and North American states. The reference to Galahad ironizes nostalgia
for a chivalric past that implied the inherent virtue of those who con-
48
W.E.B. DuBois “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater in The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois
Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 507.
49
Ibid., 501.
50
Ibid., 502. Here Dubois refers to Edward J. Glave, the writer of In Savage Africa: or Six
Years of Adventure in Congo-Land, which recounts Belgian cruelty in the Congo published
in 1892.
ducted campaigns of conquest. As has been argued elsewhere, these

mythologies were profoundly misused as they justified atrocities in the
name of nobility and self-sacrifice.51 From the perspective of Du Bois, the
war did not as much expose the fractures between European nations as it
reified the fraudulent claims of control over “darker races.”
The problems of racial identity as presented in “The Souls of White
Folk” work along both the axes of history and mythology. Du Bois looks
for the historical roots of racism and finds them to be quite shallow:
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very

modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The
ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age
regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth
century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal
Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth.
Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional con-
version has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!52
For Du Bois, whiteness itself had become its own mythology that then was
joined with other cultural products to cloak it in the mantle of virtue. This
investigation into the interrelationship of history and mythology allows
Du Bois to intervene into the question of temporal situatedness raised by
Jefferson and then advanced by subsequent writers who used the language
of the Middle Ages to construct a narrative of progress for the United
States. Jefferson used temporality to both distinguish the American project
and to lend venerability to it through a connection to the Anglo-Saxon
period. This impressive reach backwards in time contrasts with the “com-
pression” in time that Du Bois and Ellison argue inflects African-American
participation in the nation. The “Anglo-Saxon” system of Jefferson
depended upon the “feudal” one to which Du Bois and Ellison objected.
While one symbolized freedom within time, the other meant becoming not
just subject to feudalism but having to continually evade its shadow as late
as the mid-twentieth century. The critiques of Du Bois and Ellison pre-
sciently diagnose a problem of lingering “pre-modern” sentiments that
much later historians of global politics and revolutions, such as Arno Mayer
51
See Allen J. Frantzen’s excellent study on the place of chivalric imagery and the idea of
Christian self-sacrifice in the propaganda of WWI: Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the
Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
52
Darkwater, 497–498.
22 M. X. VERNON
and Greg Grandin, similarly identify.53 Those scholars alternately use and
question the language of Marx and capital to calibrate how they analyse the
“persistence of the old order” and indeed, Du Bois and Ellison construct
readings inflected by Marx.54 But the language of feudal order and “medi-
evalism” carries a different valence within African-American discourse as it
must be read within the longer tradition of Anglo-Saxonism, the revival of
chivalric literature during the Civil War, and the adoption of medieval
tropes to understand American social and technological progress.
The Middle Ages, understood through myth, history, and metaphor,
demonstrate a range of ways that “the medieval” could be reinterpreted by
African-American writers and intellectuals to conceive of alternative pos-
sibilities for how the society around themselves might be constructed. Du
Bois would even darkly propose as a direct response to the “progress” that
WWI represented the “impossible dream” in which nations might be
comprised entirely of “serfs.”55 Du Bois and Ellison question the bases of
foundational fictions and read African-Americans as uniquely positioned
to take ownership over those narratives because of their peculiar situation
without the prevailing timeframes that define the national project. More
simply, one could put it in the way Ellison’s Invisible Man ultimately puz-
zles out the charge incumbent upon himself and other African-Americans
conferred by founders who never imagined his being: “to affirm the prin-
ciple, which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and
darkness of the feudal past.”56
A Desire for (Medieval) Origins

Despite the clear political and cultural importance of medievalism in
American history, the task of considering the significance of medievalisms
has largely been read as an academic luxury at best or at worst the catalyst
for policing of racial lines. One need only consider the Ku Klux Klan’s
53
See Greg Grandin, “Living in Revolutionary time: Coming to Terms with Violence of
Latin America’s Long Cold War,” in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent
Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 12–14.
54
Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe and the Great War (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981), 5.
55
W.E.B. DuBois “The Hands of Ethiopia,” in The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois Reader (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 517.
56
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 574.
language of knighthood or Thomas Dixon’s language of crusades to see

the latter point.57 To put it bluntly, the questions of medievalism and the
Middle Ages have been read as the province of whiteness, only dealing with
race and African-American identity as subjects external to or defined against
the products and interpretation of the Middle Ages. However, to conduct
research without considering this critical racial history risks replicating the
implicit assumptions and blindness found in the nineteenth-century texts
discussed in previous sections. The deployment of medievalisms in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century should be read within the context
of the work done to cultivate racial identity as tied to a set of political and
technological narratives. More importantly, African- American literature
and political writing should be read as a source for medievalisms that can
be read against the narratives advanced by white authors.
Concurrent to discussions by writers like Whitman about their literary
and genealogical inheritance (framed within their mythologization of the
past), African-American intellectuals engaged in conversations about ori-
gins and intellectual identity. Several of these lines of inquiry have been
traced in recent academic studies. One prominent vein has run through
the discipline of classics. Scholars in that field have uncovered the prob-
lems that colonial education’s reliance on training in the classics posed for
American and Caribbean authors in the nineteenth century.58 This type of
learning created bitterly ironic scenes of racial injustice as well as a stan-
dard discourse for responding to such affronts. George Washington had a
slave named Hercules; Southern Senator John C. Calhoun defied anyone
to find a slave that could conjugate a Greek verb, a sarcastic taunt to allege
57
In fact, Thomas Dixon called his work a “historical romance,” which underscores the
blurring of lines between fact and fiction discussed throughout this introduction. Dixon
heavily interlards the language of chivalry and knighthood into his book, most notably in his
description of the clansmen riding on horseback:
At the signal of a whistle, the men and horses arrayed in white and scarlet swung into
double-file cavalry formation and stood awaiting orders. The moon was now shining
brightly, and its light shimmering on the silent horses and men with their tall spiked
caps made a picture such as the world had not seen since the Knights of the Middle
Ages rode on their Holy Crusades.
Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New
York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), 316.
58
Emily Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature
and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
24 M. X. VERNON
the superiority of the white mind.59 The mother of African-American let-

ters, Phyllis Wheatley, a slave, learned both Greek and Latin. Moreover,
some of the most important figures in nineteenth-century African-
American political and intellectual life were deeply informed by the clas-
sics. William Sanders Scarborough was both a classical scholar and the
president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. Charles Chesnutt used
Ovidian tropes to inform the writing of his popular collection of short
stories, The Conjure Woman.60 The power of the classical education con-
tinues to resound in the work of the Nobel Prize winning poet, Derek
Walcott, who adapted the Odyssey in his Omeros. The interaction between
African-Americans and classical education has been discussed in studies
such as Emily Greenwood’s Afro-Greeks as well as William Cook and James
Tatum’s African American Writers and the Classical Tradition.61
Scholars have similarly turned to the early modern period as a point of
origin for understanding African-American literature. The writings of
Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Shakespeare, and Spenser provide
the language of encounter that would be so important for theorizing race
in ways that would continue to inform the subject of race through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More importantly, this period fuses
the language of difference with that of economic conquest, a conjunction
that would have obvious and long-lasting implications for the way that
colonists read the New World. The human body obtains its valence as a
commodity on a large scale with the economic and technological changes
that signal the end of the medieval period. These avenues of inquiry have
led critics to trace out the vocabulary and imaginative channels used
throughout the period to define what makes a human. There has been rich
research done by scholars including Ania Loomba, Jonathan Burton, and
Stephen Greenblatt about race in the early modern period.62 This work
59
The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture,
1892–1938. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007), 240.
60
Karen Magee Myers, “Mythic Patterns in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s the Conjure
Woman and Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Black American Literature Forum 13.1 (Spring 1979),
13–17.
61
William Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers and the Classical Tradition
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).
62
Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002); Jonathan Burton and Aina Loomba, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A
Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous
Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
has been productive not just for understanding the evolving meanings of
race across the period, but also for setting the groundwork for reading
later responses of African-Americans to early modern texts, such as the all-
black cast of Orson Welles’s Macbeth, or retellings of Caliban’s story, like
Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest.
Little attention, however, has been spared for reading how the legacy
of medieval literature and the study of the Middle Ages—from the tools
of philology honed by medieval studies, the historical analogy of racial
integration suggested by Anglo-Norman history, the construction of her-
oism and virtue as filtered through readings of chivalry—have inflected
the development of African-American identity in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. This silence is striking given the crucial point of ori-
gin the Middle Ages represents for American identity notable through
the explosion of interest in the Middle Ages during the nineteenth cen-
tury, sparked by the pre-Raphaelite movement and sustained by broad
educational shifts from classical to English literature by the turn of the
twentieth century as well as the common allegorization of the defeated
South as the subjugated Anglo-Saxons.63 This is not an insubstantial
realm of inquiry, although the importance of the Middle Ages to American
identity has perhaps been too narrowly construed; whiteness is too often
the assumed context that informs medievalism.
Comprehensive studies of medieval themes in American literature and
political life are rare. The first major literary study undertaken on this sub-
ject was Allen J. Frantzen’s Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English,
and Teaching the Tradition which laid much of the groundwork for subse-
quent studies of medievalism and its legacy.64 Franzten contrasts the
Jeffersonian history of Anglo-Saxon studies, one that had major political
gravity, with the current, disinterested style of research conducted by
Anglo-Saxonists to demonstrate the problematic position Old English
occupies within the academy. In terms of historical analysis, Frantzen was
preceded by Reginald Horsman’s study: Race and Manifest Destiny: The
63
See the discussion of Old and Middle English’s significant role in early philology in:
Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2009), 1–4; See also: Ritchie Devon Watson Jr’s study of how southerners mobilized medi-
eval history to glorify the Civil War defeat in: Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology
and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2008).
64
Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the
Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
26 M. X. VERNON
Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, which delves deeply into the

European sources for American Anglo-Saxonism as well as the body of
“scientific” research that supported popular mythologies of white racial
supremacy. Several literary studies have built upon the initial research of
Frantzen and Horsman, notably: Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of
Social Identity and The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain,
Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway.65 The former is an edited volume
that addresses both how cultural identity was generated within the Anglo-
Saxon period and modern reassessments of the mobilization of Anglo-
Saxon texts. The latter studies the entrenchment of medieval themes in
the work of prominent American authors to demonstrate how available
and intelligible medieval material was for writers and their audiences
through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. None of these
works address the role the Middle Ages and medieval themes played in the
lives of African-American authors.
My work will explore the critical connections between the fields of
medieval studies, medievalism, and African-American studies. Although
these fields have long engaged similar questions and have influenced each
other, little comprehensive work has been done to put them in conversa-
tion. Only two books address the subject of African-Americans and
medievalism: Christopher Hanlon’s America’s England: Antebellum

Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism and Dennis Looney’s Freedom
Readers.66 Hanlon traces the ways in which American identity was informed
by narratives borrowed from British history, such as how the conflict
between Saxons and Normans was mapped onto the American Civil War.
While the subject of analysis is pertinent for understanding African-
American history, it largely deals with the issue obliquely. Perhaps the clos-
est study in terms of scope and archive to The Black Middle Ages is Dennis
Looney’s Freedom Readers, which engages the use of Dante in African-
American literature, film, and music from the early nineteenth to the early
twentieth century. There is a loud silence on the part of nineteenth and
65
Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams,
Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1996); Allen
J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997).
66
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic
Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dennis Looney Freedom Readers
(South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2011).
early twentieth-century scholars about this subject and medievalists have

done little to break it.67
Medievalists do many things well, but we have been similarly complicit
in constructing a Middle Ages that presages later nationalist narratives.
This is in no small part because of the field’s origins within the nineteenth
century, which organized the fundamental modes and avenues of research
around a critical posture that belies the ideological implications of our
studies.68 It is not at all unusual to begin a medieval studies argument with
a discussion of Thomas Jefferson, as this book does, but a turn to Frederick
Douglass would seem foreign to medieval inquiries. The tenor of medieval
studies is slowly changing with magisterial and polemical work like
Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s Idols in the East, and Geraldine Heng’s Empire
of Magic and The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.69 What is
significant about these works is that they so well delineate the challenge of
reading from east to west that undergirds the language and imaginary
used to understand difference. To motivate their studies, Akbari and Heng
in Empire reach for the tragedy of 9/11, which gave new urgency for
medievalists to reckon with “medieval encounters of Christianity, Islam
and Judaism in the crucible of violent historical transformation.”70 This is
vital work, but not the sole touchstone for thinking about the intervention
that medieval studies might make in profiling the deep context for political
struggles. At the time of the writing of this book, the nation is in the midst
of sesquicentennial remembrances of the Civil War, through films, news-
paper articles, popular texts, and scholarly books. Simultaneously, as noted
above, the United States is experiencing spasms of political stagnation and
violent acts by individual actors as well as political parties that seek a return
to the “original values” of the country. The tactics of politically extreme
organizations—such as the Tea Party, which insists on the sovereignty of
states—differ wildly from those of radical individuals, who call for armed
67
There is a rich vein of criticism that is interested in transnational blackness from The
Black Atlantic to Black Cosmopolitanism. However, it is important to underscore that this is
not an international project. This book is interested in how what should be the base of
European identity morphs into the language that informs national citizenship.
68
This is the primary contention of Desire for Origins.
69
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the
Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Geraldine Heng, Empire of
Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003); The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018). Because of their pulblication dates, this book is not able
to fully engage with the arguments of Heng’s latest study.
70
Heng, 13.
28 M. X. VERNON
rebellion or who use racially divisive language to incite violence.

Nonetheless, both recall the language mobilized before the Civil War and
through the Reconstruction period that imagined a world before the
meeting of races. Those questions of sovereignty and the fantasy of pure
blood derive from a romance with the Middle Ages, a desire for origins.
Given the medieval period’s justly earned reputation for its curiosity
about the human form and the relationship between the external and the
internal, the reluctance on the part of medievalists to approach the ques-
tions raised by race and ethnicity in channels that scholars of the classical
and early modern periods have so comfortably occupied is curious.
Medieval studies is the ideal venue for directly undoing some of the distor-
tions visited upon medieval texts by later hands. At the very least, it might
be an opportunity to question why medieval material has been so given to
certain types of misinterpretation. There are a multitude of sites in which
medievalists can intervene that constructively resonate with ongoing
research in African-American studies: Ethiopia as a metaphor for a source
of human knowledge and as the site of incredible blackness; the mixture of
cultural identity and the plasticity of skin tone (such that a Saracen woman
who converts can change from dark to light); the theorization of the ver-
nacular; the language of migration and persistence of diasporic mythology;
the questions about the form of humans and the interrogation of faith in
the face of a catastrophic loss of life.71
A Story to Pass On: Reading Against the Discourse

of Time
As this book will argue, the earliest African-American scholars also read
the texts of the Middle Ages but they approached the study of the Middle
Ages as a strange sort of inheritance, one in which they could dimly see the
outlines of their own struggles and envision alternative means of reading
their existence within the United States. The study of the Middle Ages
became a surrogate tie to a deeper past. But the surrogacy reveals an
absence, a convex image of the void, the “bloodstained gate” at the center
71
See, for example: Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing
the Saracen Woman in the Medieval French Epic (New York: Routledge, 1998); Nicholas
Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989); Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
of African-American history.72 The present study seeks to create a geneal-

ogy of sorts, or perhaps better stated, it is an anti-genealogy; one that
charts how the Middle Ages were used among African-American writers in
conversation with white writers. In doing so, I seek to undermine the
unstated primacy of blood within research on medievalism that tacitly
reaffirms problematic significations of the Middle Ages. My work depends
on the theories of “surrogated kinship” in opposition to the seemingly
literal kinship that undergirds many discussions of the Middle Ages and
whiteness. In doing so, this study nuances literary theory that reads sur-
rogacy as a way of recreating and reproducing culture.73 African-American
scholars and writers who examine the Middle Ages as a point of origin or
a creative point of departure resist the language that would write them out
of history. Rather than adopting medieval tropes as a way of reiterating the
notions of power and conquest that are latent within how the Middle Ages
have often been mobilized, these African-Americans intervened within the
language surrounding the Middle Ages to articulate their own visions for
participation within the nation.
One might consider this to be an anti-genealogy in part because it
resists thinking in terms of purity that so often traps scholars thinking
about medievalism. This research reads against the grain of the predomi-
nant narrative of medievalism—as a uniform and clearly-defined means of
consolidating white identity—to find ways to see the desire for origins
broadly. The Black Middle Ages argues that the question of what consti-
tutes the Middle Ages is asked and reassumed across generations of writers
with no direct racial claims to the period. In the hands of African-American
writers, the adoption of medieval texts can be read as an example of sur-
rogated kinship: the convergence point where metaphorical relationships
subsume literal ones. Surrogated kinship allows these writers and intellec-
tuals to forge links of identity that would not be possible under the
demands of documentary knowledge.
Jamaica Kincaid, through a series of essays about gardening, offers a
reading of the stakes and necessity of enacting literary surrogacy within
African-American/Afro-Caribbean letters that is illuminating about this
72
This is Frederick Douglass’s term, remobilized to think about the broad problems of
contending with the silences of the African-American historical archive in: Saidiya Hartman,
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 20.
73
See Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.
30 M. X. VERNON
subject. She meditates on literal and metaphorical planting and transplant-

ing to discuss her relationship with Wordsworth. At the center of this are
her reflections on being a young girl and having to memorize Wordsworth’s
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” The strangeness of daffodils, to a little
girl raised in the Caribbean, awoke within her a sense of displacement
from the literature she was forced to learn:
Let me show you a picture of the little black-skinned girl, with hair strands
curlier than wool, an imagination too vivid for the world into which I was
born, my mind (whatever that meant or means) shining new and good,
certainly good enough to know that there were things it was not allowed to
know. The daffodil, for one: What was a daffodil, I wanted to know, since
such a thing did not grow in the tropics.74
Kincaid recounts how she filled her garden with those flowers, as though
to pluck the lofty vision of daffodils and plant them into the earth: five
thousand of them to Wordsworth’s ten thousand. Kincaid frames the
planting, not as a competition between herself and Wordsworth to match
one another, daffodil for daffodil, but as a way to detach the poem from
the context it once held for her as an inscrutable, but oppressive artifact
from a colonial education. The memory of the poem and the significance
of the daffodil linger for Kincaid.75 They grew in the soil of her young
mind and came to signify “literature’s political role in the work of
empire.”76 Wordsworth wakens within Kincaid the strangeness of the col-
onized subject in the Caribbean: the unspoken narrative of the slave trade,
the evidence of forced diaspora made evident by the transplanting of
Wordsworth into the tropics.
Kincaid’s reflections on education chart a complex matrix of significa-
tions behind what it means to learn within a tradition that deeply informs
one’s life, but at the same time is foreign to one’s lived experiences. For
the writer, the dawning knowledge of a genealogical break finds its com-
plement in the surrogation of learning; that is, she seeks out a heritage in
the written word and maps what she finds there onto her own experience.
The revelations of Wordsworth’s poem and the act of memorizing it open
her mind to questions of origin and historical trauma she would continue
Jamaica Kincaid, “Dances with Daffodils,” Architectural Digest 64.4 (2007), 78–82.
74
Jamaica Kincaid, “Alien Soil,” The New Yorker, June 21, 1993, 47.
75
76
Ian Smith, “Misusing Canonical Intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth and
Colonialism’s ‘Absent Things,’” Callaloo, 25.3 (Summer 2002), 801–820.
to work through for decades within her writing. Digging here is the work
of literary excavation; she finds unsuspected materials within a substrate
that would seem foreign to it. Wordsworth’s daffodils sprout in Kincaid’s
imagination. His words, subjected to Kincaid’s interpretation, reveal
unlikely connections and points of contact that reward the attempt. The
young Kincaid sees herself as estranged from the poetry of Wordsworth
but also aware of her body as a “little black-skinned girl” for whom this
poetry was not meant:
Somewhere I read that Wordsworth worried about misreadings of his poem.

It can’t be that he worried about the uses to which his countrymen would
employ the product of his genius (they were busy trading slaves, not educat-
ing them). I believe it possible, though, that with his sensibility, so finely
tuned to the unknown in the human realm, so finely tuned to our universal
confusions and misunderstandings, he was, when worrying about misread-
ings, thinking of someone like me.77
Perhaps what is most striking about this passage is the closeness Kincaid
assumes to Wordsworth, to the point that she imputes a generosity of soul
that could imagine the writer herself.
At its root, the subject of this book is the power of misreading, of the
sort which Edward Said argues “plays havoc with the stability of texts
and authors, indeed with the whole order of culture. The past becomes
an active intervention in the present; the future is preposterously made
just a figure of the past in the present.”78 These sorts of strategic misread-
ings, as we see with Kincaid, function as a way to forge kinship across
the boundaries of time and the constructions of race. While contem-
plating the English literary tradition forces African-American writers to
confront a history of excluded voices, misreading—how Kincaid assumes
Wordsworth’s thoughts to reread “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—
creates nodes of connection and spaces to reform meaning through unex-
pected conjunctions. This is the working of both allegory and kinship.
Unlike Gordon Teskey’s theories that relate allegory to violence, here
the connections are vital for remediating the psychic trauma of being on
alien soil.79 This work of reading against chronology or, etymologically
77
“Dances with Daffodils,” 82.
78
Edward Said, “The Poet as Oedipus,” The New York Times Book Review, 13 April 1975,
24.
79
Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 5–6.
32 M. X. VERNON
speaking, the “discourse of time” is at the heart of The Black Middle

Ages. It identifies a counter-narrative that African-American authors have
offered as a response to dominant narratives of history’s progress and the
implied roster of its participants.
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks describes her writing as an “incubator for
the creation of historical events—and, as in the case of artificial insemina-
tion, the baby is no less human.”80 This philosophy encapsulates the pos-
sibilities of productive misreading, what a writer must do in the absence of
documentation, or worse, the willful silencing of the past. For example,
Morrison ends her novel Beloved with the paradoxical injunction: “This is
not a story to pass on.” The sentence demands that the reader take two
competing stances on the preceding work, both that the novel and the
underlying historical circumstances should be left behind, and that this
story cannot be circumvented.81 Saidiya Hartman amplifies this ambivalence
in her personal and scholarly study, Lose Your Mother. She explores the
frustrating gaps in both historical and familial records of a slave past. In
her search to learn about the history of slavery in her family’s past, she
would continually come up against both an unwillingness to speak on the
part of her family and lacunae in the records of southern slavery. These
absences in records were set against her own desire to know and to
uncover:
Would I never know? Were gaps and silences and empty rooms the sub-
stance of history? If ruin was my sole inheritance and the only certainty the
impossibility of recovering the stories of the enslaved, did this make my his-
tory tantamount to mourning? Or worse, was it a melancholia I would never
be able to overcome? […] Alongside the terrible things one had survived
was also the shame of having survived it. Remembering warred with the will
to forget.82
80
Suzan-Lori Parks, “Possession,” The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1997), 4.
81
The story the novel recounts is based on scraps of information, what little is known
about the life of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who murdered her children rather than
have them become enslaved. The story is horrific and as such, the novel argues, it is some-
thing to be remembered and to be left behind.
82
Saidiya Hartman Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 16.
Her work necessarily had to create a novel form of analysis that located
origins where it could, to merge fictive and speculative connections with
what the historical record supplied. The line between the historical and
the fictional, the biological and the literary, in the case of African-American
literature and literary studies is not at all clear.
The Black Middle Ages is structured in a way that breaks from more
traditional readings of the subject that linger on one period or one set of
texts so that it can track connections as they come: historical or elective,
linear or elusive. I begin with two readings of late-nineteenth and early
twentieth-century uses of the Middle Ages. In Chap. 2, I follow how the
political purchase of the Middle Ages could be marshaled to renegotiate
the terms of belonging in the nation in ways that planted intercultural
contact and fusion within the core of American identity. While white
Americans often read the Anglo-Saxon period as an era of purity inter-
rupted by the Norman invasion, these African-American scholars read the
hyphen; they focused on the Middle Ages as a period of racial mixing and
political possibility between Angles, Saxons, and Normans. The chapter
then offers a historical reading of archival materials charting the earliest
writing about and teaching of the Middle Ages among African-American
intellectuals. This work reveals how the philological approach that was
important to early medieval research could be wielded to the political ends
of African-American education, in particular as a set of tools for under-
standing African-American history through linguistic study.
Chapter 3 resumes the set of questions provoked in Chap. 2 about
using the past as a political tool to intervene into the construction of race
and ethnicity. The chapter expands the study’s inquiry to look at the place
of the novel within the depiction of the Middle Ages, particularly the ways
in which it disrupts the tropes of romance. I put into conversation Mark
Twain and Charles Chesnutt, who use the novels A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court and The House Behind the Cedars to escape and cri-
tique the authorial shadow of Walter Scott. Ostensibly, both novels parody
the work of Scott, particularly Ivanhoe, for its “sham grandeurs, and sham
chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.”83 Chesnutt
and Twain take pains to show how flimsy the mythology underpinning
Scott’s work is. (They do this quite literally at points; Chesnutt, for exam-
ple, dresses up his “knights” in cardboard and gilt paper.) But, as this
chapter argues, both authors recognize the power of Scott’s myth-making
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904), 347.
83
34 M. X. VERNON
to penetrate the sphere of social reality by offering an attractive mythical

history consonant with the desires of some Americans for a pure lineage.
This interpretation of Scott’s legacy recalls the author’s own estimation of
a novel’s potency and its close relationship to romance—forms that he
hybridized in Ivanhoe. Chesnutt and Twain critically engage and super-
sede Scott’s legacy by addressing the fundamental appeal of his work, that
is, its claims to provide a fictional heritage for its readers. Both writers
unstitch romance as inherited from Scott by staging disruptions within the
expected temporal and genealogical progression of their narratives. In par-
ticular, they ask whether African-Americans can be incorporated within
the myth-making of romance. This work builds on the second chapter’s
assertions about the plasticity of medieval romance within the lives of
those who read it.
Chapter 4 proceeds with a consideration of a set of medieval texts that
raise questions about how the Middle Ages were being constructed and
mythologized within the period itself. This chapter provides a vital coun-
terpart to the argument constructed over Chaps. 2 and 3, that are pre-
mised upon finding latent ambiguities and ambivalences within medieval
narratives. In particular, in this chapter I discuss the ways in which
post-
colonial readings can critically intervene into interpretations of
Gerald of Wales’ The History and Topography of Ireland and The Conquest
of Ireland. Gerald’s “historical” work on Ireland is vexed by his vitriol
against the inhabitants of Ireland, which has led this work to be largely
neglected or read as a curiosity. However, The Conquest of Ireland is a
revealing site for the complex network of physical and literary genealogies
that inform Gerald’s writing. Gerald interlards his “historical” account of
the conquest of Ireland with quotations from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
The History of the Kings of Britain, the early twelfth century pseudo-his-
torical account of British rule up to the ultimate Anglo-Saxon conquest
and exile of the Britons to Wales. This mobilization of Geoffrey allows
Gerald to perform what he imagines to be Welsh identity: Gerald’s belief
in the Welsh right to rule, set against his acute awareness of his disenfran-
chisement from power within England because of his Welsh descent. Read
from this perspective, Gerald is a test case in understanding the intersec-
tion between fiction, ethnicity, and political power. The “historical” prism
Geoffrey constructs frames Gerald’s social mobility and the way he reads
his own life. More importantly, for the purposes of this book, this reading
foregrounds the flexibility inherent within Geoffrey’s text. The History of the
Kings of Britain was not just popular in its own time, the descriptions of
Arthur and his linkage between the progress of history and genealogy
would form the basis of many later iterations of the Arthurian legend. The
most significant of these would be those produced by Sir Walter Scott,
who was a vital conduit for American medievalisms throughout the nine-
teenth century.
Chapter 5 moves to consider more abstract questions of inheritance by
examining how an African-American writer can position her own work in
relationship to a larger literary tradition, derived from the Middle Ages. It
focuses on Gloria Naylor’s use of Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer in
her sequential novels Linden Hills and Bailey’s Café. Naylor encountered
both of these authors in a college “Great Literature” course and struggled
with treating them as her literary antecedents.84 Their position within the
literary canon and the lineage of texts that followed them seemed to chart
a trajectory that would not incorporate her authorial voice.85 The rewrit-
ing of these texts, the chapter argues, is Naylor’s way of reading them not
as “classics” to which she is beholden and which would prescribe the sorts
of engagement she could have with them. Rather, she places Dante and
Chaucer within the context of a living discussion of vernacular literature,
a conversation in which she is only the latest participant. The idea of the
“vernacular” allows Naylor to propose a literary mode that connects her
to foundational medieval texts. It would include a host of voices that have
their own individuality and melody but have been denied the status of
“literary” because they were too “vulgar” in the Dantean sense of the
word. This analysis is germane to the larger themes of literary surrogacy
this study advances. However, Naylor’s novels attempt to upend the idea
of literary history as a paternal search for origins and instead work to
reclaim kindred voices across time.
The book ends with a study of Quentin Tarantino’s film Django
Unchained. This final chapter (Chap. 6) acts in part as a response to Carolyn
Dinshaw’s groundbreaking study, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and
Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Her provocation to think about what
it means to “get medieval”—borrowing the line from Tarantino’s Pulp
Fiction—ends with a return to the film itself. Dinshaw found the film to be
lacking in terms of how it deals with sexuality, particularly homosexual rela-
tionships. Despite the riotous acclaim the film received for its willingness
84
Gloria Naylor, Conversations with Gloria Naylor, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 56.
85
Ibid.
36 M. X. VERNON
to deal with edgy material, Dinshaw argued that the film is far less radical in
how it engaged these issues than actual medieval texts could be. Django
offers the ideal impetus to revisit the project of reading “the medieval’s”
relationship to radical readings of contemporary issues through the film’s
reassessments of race relations and the Siegfried myth. While Dinshaw
looked at a popular appropriation of the Middle Ages and found it lacking,
I argue that Django adroitly utilizes the flexibility of medieval mythology to
question the presentation of African-Americans within the founding narra-
tives of the nation. Not only does this line of questioning address the his-
tory of the Western and the Hollywood epic, but undergirding these
questions are concerns about how to challenge authoritative versions of
history and overcome silences within narratives that focus on major politi-
cal actors. This final chapter demonstrates the longevity of the questions at
stake through the entirety of The Black Middle Ages.
The (W)hole of History

But like the crutchmarks of the cripple by the Beautiful Gate, this blurred
record is now out of print. From a tattered copy, rescued by the merest
chance from the rag-pickers, the present account has been drawn, which,
with the exception of some expansions, and additions of historic and per-
sonal details, and one or two shiftings of scene, may perhaps be not unfitly
regarded as something in the light of a dilapidated old tombstone
retouched.86
In perhaps the least read and most anomalous of Herman Melville’s nov-
els, Israel Potter (1855), Melville provides a curious meditation on grand
narratives of history and their relationship to personal accounts. Melville
bases his work on an autobiographical account by Potter, who sought to
publish it to secure a pension when he could not otherwise prove that he
fought in the Revolutionary War. In the hands of Melville, this attempt to
be remembered through one’s own account casts Potter in a pathetic
light; his book becomes a meager memento of his life. The author at one
point in the novel places the eponymous character, who was an American
spy, in a hidden room of an old English country home during the
Revolutionary War. Before the exit is sealed, Potter’s benefactor, Squire
86
Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (New York: Penguin Books,
2008), 1.
Woodcock, enjoins him not to speak, at the risk of revealing himself and
jeopardizing the mission. Potter is left to simply stare at the walls, which
themselves have an elaborate history:
It seemed that this part of this old house, or rather this wall of it, was
extremely ancient, dating far beyond the era of Elizabeth, having once
formed portion of a religious retreat belonging to the Templars. This
domestic discipline of this order was rigid and merciless in the extreme. In a
side wall of their second story chapel, horizontal and on a level with the
floor, they had an internal vacancy left, exactly of the shape and average size
of a coffin. In this place, from time to time, inmates convicted of contumacy
were confined; but strange to say, not till they were penitent….This coffin-
cell of the Templars had been suffered to remain in the demolition of the
general edifice, to make way for the erection of the new, in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth. It was enlarged somewhat, and altered and additionally
ventilated, to adapt it for a place of concealment in times of civil
dissention.87
Melville places Israel Potter in a hole in history, literally forgotten (his

benefactor dies unexpectedly before releasing Potter, leaving him friend-
less) and, more significantly, swallowed up by the history around himself.
The (w)hole in history signifies both Potter’s silence, and that he has no
choice but to contemplate the totalizing force of history, the grand sweep
that has at its foundation the Middle Ages. Melville juxtaposes the antiq-
uity of the space with the impermanence of the man entombed within it.
The choice to present Potter in this way is fitting given the context of the
novel. Melville, who published Israel Potter in its full form the same year
as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, witnessed the gath-
ering momentum behind a war that would fundamentally alter the coun-
try. Perhaps for this reason, Melville structured Israel Potter to meditate
on the question of founding through this “found” work that only by good
fortune came to the notice of the writer. Israel Potter depicts several found-
ing fathers who present the construction of nation as defined by the work-
ings of great actors. This is a proximal history of origins for Melville. The
Revolutionary War generation was just a step removed from the time in
which Melville was writing. The novel, through its long digressions on
Potter’s time in England, probes the depths of the national mythos and
reaches as far back as the Middle Ages to show how imbricated British
Ibid., 79.
87
38 M. X. VERNON
history was within America. Melville, by putting Potter within this modi-
fied medieval “coffin-cell,” argues that one needs to contend with history
on such a large scale to fully understand the changes the coming war
would bring to the country and the ways in which the United States had
already strayed from its founding principles.
In a class I teach about American literature after the Civil War, I ask my
students: When does the Civil War-era end? Is it after the final shot is fired
in the war? Or the surrender at Appomattox? Or should we read the Civil
War as mediated through the memorials and literary testaments that would
succeed a war whose size, violence, and political meaning would continue
to transform after 1865? Which one signifies the endpoint at which the
meaning of the war can be fully reckoned? When the historical projects
that brewed before the war and exploded into violence have finally run
their course? How much digging must be done to know the contours and
to be satisfied that the narrative one has constructed is sufficient? Toni
Morrison describes her surprise at uncovering the story of Margaret
Garner—whose decision to kill her children rather than return them to
slavery would be the seed for her novel Beloved—as an accident in the
archive, an unsought voice that spoke to her across a wide stretch of time.
The point I hope to convince my students of is two-fold. First, I wish to
have them see that past and present are coincident in the realm of histori-
ography and fiction, that is, narratives are renewed over time, making
“past and present contemporaries.”88 At the same time, I urge them to see
where narratives are suppressed, which stories, in the process of history-
making—the historian and literary scholar’s work of digging and
uncovering—bury and silence others.
The hole as absence, or void, is a prevailing metaphor in African-
American literature, and in literature about African-Americans. The
strength of this image rests in its double meaning, that the hole is both an
absence and a shape in itself, that to read African-American history as sim-
ply an absence neglects its (de)formational potential. The converse of
blackness as a void is the act of digging as a type of excavation, the produc-
tive act of digging downwards to learn what lies beneath. Parks, in her
America Play, describes African-American history as “a great hole” which
signifies a lacuna, but also the possibility of what can be unearthed by
88
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacon Press 1997), 19.
those willing to dig.89 The hole can be a space of creation or of destruc-

tion. For Parks, her writing is an act of creation, a way to “make history.”90
This study attempts to “make history,” and to contemplate the hole itself,
to think about gaps and absences, to push against the imperative to see
totality where there are only pieces. The story of medievalism as used by
African-Americans is one that has clear importance, but has largely been
forgotten, in part because this story must be pieced together from materi-
als available from nineteenth century African-American archives that are in
some cases merest suggestion, in others crumbling to dust. These are set
alongside the vibrant newness of the celluloid images of the twenty-first
century that serve to illuminate, but threaten to overshadow, their paper
antecedents. But the silence behind this story is also due to the loud
presence of a counter-narrative that insists on its primacy. I place all of
these archives and meanings on the background of the used and oft-
misunderstood “medieval.” By looking at the critical overlap of these
pieces, one can view a set of projects to formulate how African-Americans
fashioned identity within the nation, a way to read an ongoing and diffi-
cult set of questions about being placed on “alien soil.”
Literary analysis is my spade. I’ll dig with it.
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CHAPTER 2
Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages

in African-American Scholarship
and Curricula
“We can never be a people without education.”

—G.M. Elliott, “We Must Educate,” AME Church Review 1 (1884):
330.
The problem with which [the Negro] is confronted is whether he shall be
an alien in the land of his birth or shall continue to hold unimpaired
and undiminished the rights guaranteed to him by the United States
Constitution.
—Frederick Douglass, “The Negro in the Present Campaign,”
AME Church Review 9 (1892): 115.
The derivation of Fredrick Douglass’ name is well known. In the Narrative

of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) Douglass
describes his decision to change his name from Bailey upon arriving in the
North. He first considers “Johnson” but learns that this name is common
among runaways. He instead gives the honor of choosing his last name to
his benefactor in New Bedford, Nathan Johnson. Johnson suggests
“Douglass,” a name taken from the Walter Scott poem The Lady of the
Lake.1 The moment passes with little emphasis paid to the significance of
the choice and perhaps it did not hold much for Douglass at the time the
Narrative was published. But he surely found greater meaning in his name
1
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. Ira Dworkin (New
York: Penguin Books, 2004), 104.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_2
46 M. X. VERNON
within the next few years when he traveled to Britain. Douglass used the
trip to promote his abolitionist message and issue a sharp rebuke to the
United States for continuing to allow slavery. He juxtaposed the former
colony that “boasts of holy liberty and light” with the antiquated—to
American eyes—British monarchy and wondered how this older nation
could have advanced the cause of abolition before its scion.
Douglass located the solution to this question within the antiquity of
Britain itself. In particular, he understood the long struggles for Scottish
independence to be a strategic cultural node into which he could draw the
campaign for emancipation through his name’s history. While in Scotland,
Douglass wrote a response (1846) in William Lloyd Garrison’s The
Liberator to A.C.C. Thomson, a man who sought to discredit the narra-
tive of the “recreant slave by the name of Frederick Bailey.”2 Douglass
refutation offers a striking commentary on the affinities between his own
bid for freedom and those for Scottish independence that were generated
by his adopted name:
Frederick Douglass, the freeman, is a very different person from Frederick

Bailey (my former name), the slave. I feel myself almost a new man—free-
dom has given me new life. I fancy you would scarcely know me. I think I
have altered very much in my general appearance, and know I have in my
manners. You remember when I used to meet you on the road to St.
Michaels, or near Mr. Covey’s lane gate, I hardly dared to lift my head, and
look up at you. If I should meet you now, amid the free hills of old Scotland,
where the ancient “black Douglass” once met his foes, I presume I might
summon sufficient fortitude to look you full in the face; and were you to
attempt to make a slave of me, it is possible you might find me almost as
disagreeable a subject as was the Douglass to whom I have just referred. Of
one thing, I am certain—you would see a great change in me!3
Douglass does subtle but sophisticated work to explode the expected lines
of racial and national attachments and reconfigure them to construct a
transnational community that objects to oppression. The name, which
begins as a subtle marker of his manumission, here refers to a fundamental
2
A.C.C. Thomson, “Refuge From Oppression. From the Delaware Republican to the
Public. Falsehood Refuted.” The Liberator, 12 December 1845.
3
Frederick Douglass, “Letter to William Lloyd Garrison, Jan 27, 1846,” in The Life and
Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers,
1950), 133.
MEDIEVAL SELF-FASHIONING: THE MIDDLE AGES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN… 47
change in identity that connects Douglass to the medieval wars for Scottish
independence. Visible within this passage is the romantic image of the
Middle Ages as constructed by a writer like Scott, but here too is Douglass’
own imagining of his relationship with the historical figure of “the black
Douglass,” the fourteenth-century Scottish chieftain.
Beyond asserting his trans-Atlantic positionality, Douglass formulates
a cross-temporal set of solidarities with his audiences in America and
Britain. The Middle Ages, through their reimagining in the hands of
Walter Scott and in the historical form of the “black Douglass,” furnish a
historical analogy and imaginative landscape within which Frederick
Douglass negotiates his sense of self in relation to his own past of enslave-
ment. He espouses this medieval personage as part of the larger political
strategy of his lecture circuit through Britain; he shows himself to be a
trans-Atlantic actor capable of positioning his own narrative to ally it
within the terms of liberation struggles that were legible to his British
audiences. Simultaneously, Douglass troubled the fictive bonds with
medieval England to which white Americans laid claim, particularly the
notion that they were inheritors of a “Saxon spirit,” which legitimated
their rule over other races.4 Instead, Douglass offered himself and his own
journey from slavery to freedom as a more suitable echo to parts of medi-
eval Scottish mythology and history; the medieval “black Douglass”
could assume new vitality in the form of a nineteenth-century black free-
man named Frederick Douglass.
This example presents the imaginative place afforded to the Middle
Ages during the nineteenth and early twentieth-century resurgence of
interest in medieval subjects within the United States. Frederick Douglass
used the Middle Ages; he actively manipulated the cultural significance of
the period as a symbol for black enfranchisement within his country. He
utilized the power behind narratives, which associated the Middle Ages
with the full promises of “natural rights” for citizens.5 Douglass feared
4
This was a common reading of American expansion. An example of this perspective’s
reach within American culture can be read in Walt Whitman’s editorials for the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle about the need to people the “New World” with the “noble race” of Anglo-
Saxons. See Heidi Kathleen Kim’s arguments about this in “From Language to Empire: Walt
Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism,” Walt Whitman
Quarterly Review 24 (Summer 2006): 1–19.
5
See Reginald Horsman’s discussion of the freedoms with which descendants of Anglo-
Saxons were to be naturally endowed: Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American
Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18–23.
48 M. X. VERNON
that the African-American would become “an alien in the land of his
birth,” even decades after the Civil War and the incorporation of African-
Americans into America’s body politic. He suspected that African-
Americans were regarded as a “diseased member” of that body, and that
the refusal to recognize them compromised the integrity of the nation.6
The conferral of legal citizenship did not, for Douglass, convey the deeper
goal of “belonging” within the nation, that is, realizing promise of social
advancement and “the common benefit of association.”7 Without that
crucial step of creating a “common country” for all, he dismissed the pros-
pect of African-American citizenship as a mere “delusion.”8
Throughout his life Douglass struggled to find the right framework to
express the commingled feelings of alienation from and belief in the
nation. In perhaps his most famous address, “What, to the American slave,
is your 4th of July?” (1852), Douglass balanced admiration for the found-
ing father’s revolutionary movement against how the nation failed to
apply the principles of American independence to slaves. Eric Sundquist
succinctly describes this strategy: “Douglass placed himself outside the
American dream but within the circle of the post-Revolutionary genera-
tion’s principal rhetoric.”9 Douglass recognized that this type of analogiz-
ing was essential for rendering legible the contradictions inherent within
African-American life, and for drawing support for his political causes.
Similarly, African-American intellectual circles, during and for decades
after Reconstruction, sought modes of reading American life that effaced
the color line and instead placed emphasis on the work of self-fashioning
that African-Americans undertook. When W.E.B. Du Bois entered this
discussion with Darkwater (1920), he argued that the United States
eroded its own commitment to democracy by “training” European immi-
grants “to this despising of ‘niggers’ from the day of their landing.”10 Like
Douglass, Du Bois framed the fight for racial integration not as one to be
6
Frederick Douglass, “The Nation’s Problem: An Address Delivered in Washington D.C.
on 16 April 1889,” The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, vol. 5,
eds. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992), 407.
7
Ibid., 415.
8
Ibid., 411.
9
“Introduction,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14.
10
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk” in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed.
Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 508.
staged in the courtroom or the battlefield, but in the sphere of cultural

production. While other arenas of encounter made manifest the mechanics
of racial discrimination, for Douglass and Du Bois the cultural work done
to define African-American identity as outside “the possibility for human
brotherhood” shaped the terms in which other modes of social engage-
ment between races might occur.11 It was necessary to undo this “train-
ing” by presenting alternative means through which African-American life
could be understood.
The mythology of the Middle Ages provided the discursive means for
African-American intellectuals to fashion their identity in the decades after
the Civil War. Contemporary re-imaginings of the medieval period offered
narratives of power, subjugation, encounter, and national foundation that
African-Americans could wield to position their cultural experience as
integral to the larger arc of American history. Moreover, the philological
tools of medieval studies provided an analytical means to engage ques-
tions about the history of African languages and African-American letters.
Taken together, this early piece in the lineage of African-Americans work-
ing with medieval materials redounds to the power of subversive histories.
In writing against the grain of pervasive narratives which justified cam-
paigns of racial oppression by linking contemporary America to a medi-
eval heritage—visible in discussions of Manifest Destiny and arguments
about the fitness of white Americans to rule over other races—African-
Americans could critique how national identity was articulated. The
nineteenth- century African-American experiences of slavery, forced
migration, and circumcision from the centers of political power were read
through popular medievalisms about Saxon migration and the Anglo-
Norman conquest.
This strategy troubled representations of American power that did not
reckon with the integral place of African-Americans within the creation of
the American state. African-American intellectuals contemplated a radical
reorientation of the way American history was read that would fundamen-
tally alter the “ancient relation” between races which pre-supposed
“Anglo-Saxon blood” to be superior to all others.12 In doing so they
11
Ibid.
12
James McCune Smith to Robert Hamilton, 27 August 1864, Weekly Anglo-African in
Black Abolitionist Papers Vol. 5, eds. C. Peter Ripley et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press: 1992), 300–301; James McCune Smith, The Works of James McCune Smith:
Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 259.
50 M. X. VERNON
worked towards a theory that could foster solidarities that cut across the
lines of race and, ultimately, those of nation. For example, soon after the
Civil War, Douglass theorized that America needed to use immigration
policy to become a “composite nation,” one that reflected his estimation
of global demographics: “only one fifth of the population of the globe is
white, the other four fifths are colored.”13 Douglass’ argument proceeds
by suggesting that the strength of the nation depends on both respecting
human rights and embracing diversity. To solidify his argument he notes
that the most developed parts of Britain are those that “have received the
largest and most diverse populations.”14 In contrast, he argues that those
parts of Britain that believe themselves to have “pure blood” from the
“ancient Britons” and to have never been conquered have little to recom-
mend them: “no man can contemplate them without wishing they had
been conquered.”15 The history of this myth will be discussed in Chap. 4,
but here it suffices to say that Douglass chooses an example that has clear
medieval roots. He understands the potency of presenting England as hav-
ing a history of subjugation that it surmounted to develop into a global
power. Moreover, he complicates the analogy by showing Britain as still
divided about its past in a way that echoes the divided sentiment about
where people of color fit within the nation.
Abolitionist James McCune Smith makes a similar argument in his
1859 article “The German Invasion.” He refutes the notion of a pure
Anglo-Saxon heritage and questions whether or not such a fantasy might
even be desirable:
[T]he frequent admixtures or amalgamation of variously endowed men

which grew out of these repeated invasions, resulted in a composite intellect,
greater in force, wider in grasp, more active in detail, than could have grown
out of any one tribe or race, Cimbri or Celt, Angle or Norman, which ever
dwelt on the British isle.16
13
Frederick Douglass, “A Composite Nation” (1869). In Racism, Dissent, and Asian-
Americans from 1850 to the Present: A Documentary History, eds. Philip Foner and Daniel
Rosenberg (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970), 215–231.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Both Douglass and Smith had spent time in Britain. Smith even received his medical
training at the University of Glasgow. Their readings of medieval history must be read as
inflected by their lived experiences in Britain.
James McCune Smith, “The German Invasion”, The Anglo-African Magazine 1 (1859), 44.
What is remarkable about Smith’s article in relationship to Douglass’

speech is both the congruity between them and that they were produced
over a decade apart. The breathless optimism of one—Smith likens “the
Negro” to a hero from “Romance times”—anticipates the global con-
sciousness of the other.17 While the circumstances of African-American life
changed dramatically over that period, the positioning of African-
Americans’ integral status within the nation as articulable through a set of
foundational fictions bespeaks both the power of such narratives and the
ambitions of those who mobilized them. “The great change” Douglass
sensed constituted the beginnings of a vision for the nation as a whole to
progress in a way that accords with a bold reading of its mythical past.
The Construction of a Medieval Past: Anglo-Saxon,

Anglo-African
The Saxons were a race of people—she told me all about them when I was a
little girl. They were wild, like Indians, only they were white. And they had
blue eyes, and yellow hair, and they were awful fighters.
As she talked, Billy followed her solemnly, his eyes steadily turned on hers.
“Never heard of them,” he confessed. “Did they live anywhere around
here?”
She laughed.
“No. They lived in England. They were the first English, and you know the
Americans came from the English. We’re Saxons, you an’ me, an’ Mary, an’
Bert, and all the Americans that are real Americans, you know, and not
Dagoes and Japs and such.”18
Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913) leaves little doubt about
the conjunction of Anglo-Saxon history with the era of America’s frontier
expansion. He conflates the medieval past with the novel’s present in the
way he switches from referring to a Saxon people in the past to Saxons
who, in fact, still exist. The Saxons resemble the native people of the
United States in their “wildness,” and thus are equally suited to possess the
land. Billy, one of the novel’s protagonists, has eyes that are “deep blue and
wide” like those of the “historical” Saxons. London even names the pro-
tagonist “Saxon Roberts” as though to eliminate any remaining ambiguity
about the relationship between past and present. All of the complicating
Ibid., 48.
17
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 17.
18
52 M. X. VERNON
factors in London’s analogy are excluded; the speaker, Saxon, does not
accept people of Italian or Japanese descent—well-established populations
in California by the time the novel is written—as any part of American
culture.19 “Real Americans” have unimpeded access to a Saxon past and
the most audacious claims of nineteenth-century America: over the land
and human life. Saxon envisions American migration to the West to be a
shadow of Anglo-Saxon conquest:
Yet, palpitating and real, shimmering in the sun-flashed dust of ten thousand
hoofs, she saw pass, from East to West, across a continent, the great hegira
of the land-hungry Anglo-Saxon. It was part and fiber of her.20
London’s depiction of Saxon’s reverie holds forth the possibility of a mys-

tical union with the past. At the same time, the effort to associate Anglo-
Saxons with white Americans reveals the nostalgic gaze cast over the
project of Manifest Destiny as nation-building. London evokes “the great
hegira” to create the sense of proximity between American history and the
adventus Saxonum, but he simultaneously indicates that a total rapproche-
ment with the Middle Ages is not possible. There is no land to be con-
quered in the novel; the characters spend much of their time facing down
their disappointment with the realities of a multi-racial, industrialized
California. The idea of a pure Anglo-Saxon lineage and the attendant fic-
tion of a land waiting to be claimed by them responds to a desire to retreat
from the modern and “recover the hard but satisfying life” of a pre-
modern existence that is being threatened with “overcivilization.”21
London’s work exemplifies the attitude of many middle-class white
Americans from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century
who used the Middle Ages as a fantastical escape from the realities of a
19
This sentiment is particularly significant as London writes this the same year that
California passed the “Alien Land Law” which restricted the rights of Asian immigrants to
own land.
20
London, 40.
21
This argument borrows from T.J. Jackson Lears’ No Place for Grace, which presents the
wide usages to which medieval narratives were put in this period. See: No Place of Grace:
Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 96.
modernizing America or as a justification for the means of consolidating

racial and political hierarchies.22
This renewed interest in the Middle Ages likewise guided nineteenth-
century scholarly endeavors, as medievalist Allen J. Frantzen argues in his
Desire for Origins:
Anglo-Saxonists were vigorously engaged in issues of social and cultural

change; they did not pursue knowledge for disinterested reasons. They used
Anglo-Saxon studies to identify, and then recover, their cultural beginnings.
Early Anglo-Saxonists identified closely with their subject. They recognized
themselves in the texts they studied and were aware that they shared a hori-
zon of interests with the horizons expressed in Anglo-Saxon texts.23
As was the case in France, Germany, and England, American philological

study was a locus for national pride. The academicizing of the Middle
Ages was woven tightly into the fabric of American foundational fictions.
Thomas Jefferson, who was an antiquarian with an intense interest in
Anglo-Saxon literature, cultivated the idea that America’s own coloniza-
tion was akin to the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. He sought to cod-
ify this connection in the University of Virginia by attempting to make
Old English a “regular branch of academic education” required for all
students.24 Jefferson’s insistence on the importance of the Anglo-Saxon
language, particularly its relevance to the law, was propelled by a belief
that Old English continued to shape the thoughts and order of the societ-
ies that spoke a version of the Anglo-Saxon language.25
The philosophy of American medievalists followed in the tradition
Jefferson initiated. Implicitly, the superimposition of medieval on American
history carried a racial valence whose potency only strengthened as
22
Medieval narratives were also mobilized as a spur to chivalric action and self-sacrifice for
the nation. This is the premise of Allen J. Frantzen’s Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the
Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
23
Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the
Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 22.
24
Thomas Jefferson, An Essay towards Facilitating Instruction in the Anglo-Saxon and
Modern Dialects of the English Language (New York: John F. Trow, 1851), 8.
25
Jefferson’s initial encounters with Old English derived from his study of the law. He
flatly denied that the contemporary language of English speakers was substantially different
from that of the Anglo-Saxons. He goes so far as to dismiss the influences of Latin, Greek,
French, and Italian upon the language as mere “engraftments in [English’s] idiomatic stem.”
Ibid., 4, 8.
54 M. X. VERNON
American medieval studies flourished after the Civil War. The subject pro-
vided a narrative onto which some white Americans could displace their
concerns for maintaining a sense of identity, that is, “originary status”
conferred by their venerable lineage. Even when direct lineage was not
claimed, the medieval world provided a useful historical analogy for these
Americans. Southern schools began to expand the number of Old English
classes taught in the years leading up to and after the Civil War.26 Before
the war, the study of the Anglo-Saxon period provided southerners with
historical justification for their paternalistic oppression of African-
Americans. After the war, Anglo-Saxon history allowed some southerners
to cast themselves as a politically oppressed people stubbornly preserving
their culture from the invading North, that is, a modern version of the
Anglo-Saxons after the Norman invasion.27
At the core of projects to read American history in parallel with medi-
eval British history was a willingness to reinterpret and reshape the past
based on fictional ties; the terms of belonging depended upon barriers
that were arbitrary. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously critiques the fickleness of
racial myth in The Great Gatsby, a novel about the power of fiction to alter
one’s personal circumstances.28 Reasoning about race through an appeal
to medieval history depends upon fictive alliances with the past; it, of
26
Gregory A. VanHoosier-Carey, “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South,” in
Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, eds. Allen J. Frantzen and John
D. Niles (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 157–172.
27
Ibid., 161.
28
Tom Buchanan, a pompous blowhard, expounds to his friend Nick Carraway the details
of a “scientific” theory about race about which he had been reading:
This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infini-
tesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.
“—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and
art, and all that. Do you see?
Tom here refers to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard’s popular work The Rising Tide of
Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) which advanced the notion of that the
“white race”—the race that had guarded its “racial integrity”—was in danger of being
overwhelmed by the other races of the world. Although the book focuses on creating
an international, atemporal, “Nordic” race, Stoddard would clarify in his later work
that America was founded by the “Anglo-Saxon Nordics.” Within The Rising Tide,
Stoddard makes reference the essay “The African Roots of War” by fellow Harvard-
educated intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois. The relationship between WWI and Du Bois’s
theories about race are discussed in the introduction to this book.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 19.
necessity, must depart from the rigours of historical analysis and enter into
myth-making. As arbitrary and fictive as the lines of race generated by
these fictions might be, they had serious consequences as they seeped into
popular discourse, laws, and, most insidiously, when the language of the
Middle Ages became an uncontested synonyms for wealth, privilege, and
whiteness, as is the case with the acronym W.A.S.P.29
The flexibility that made these originary myths so potent in shaping
nativist narratives and fashioning the language of possession over the
country also gave access to other groups seeking to articulate their own
claims to the integrity of their own experiences in the projects of nation-
building. In particular, during this crucial post-war period of promise and
self-fashioning when African-Americans were seeking social equality, medi-
evalia provided the means by which they could assert their place as citizens
on equal terms with white Americans.30 Douglass’ fear of being “alien in
the land of his birth” found its counter in the discourse of the Middle
Ages, which offered African-Americans language to frame themselves as
equally possessed of rights as those who constructed “Anglo-Saxon” heri-
tage to be a natural reason to claim political primacy. African-Americans
shifted the language of conquest and domination to “amalgamation” and
racial integration. Although many of the sources that will be discussed in
this chapter were written after the Civil War it is important to foreground
that this cultural project began long before the war’s conclusion.
The following lines punctuate an 1832 address to those gathered at the
“National Negro Convention,” subsequently published in The Liberator:
This is Our own

Our Native Land.31
29
Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard,
Yale and Princeton (New York: Mariner Books, 2006), 83–84.
30
Here I am borrowing the terms used by Frederick Douglass throughout his “The Civil
Rights Case: Speech at the Civil Rights Mass-Meeting Held at Lincoln Hall, October 22,
1883” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York:
International Publishers, 1950) 4: 393.
31
Henry Sipkins and Philip A. Bell, “Second Annual National Negro Convention” The
Liberator, September 22, 1832, in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United
States: From Colonial Times Through the Civil War, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: The
Citadel Press, 1968), 134. See Christopher Z. Hobson’s discussion of this line where it
appears elsewhere in African-American speeches in The Mount of Vision: African American
Prophetic Tradition, 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 91. Similar lines
appear in George W. Bethune’s popular song “Patriotic Hymn,” however his Lays of Love
and Faith: With Other Fugitive Poems, which contains the song was published in 1847.
56 M. X. VERNON
They come amid a longer argument against plans for African-Americans

to colonize other countries; the writers suggest that African-Americans
need to “present to the world a general character, that they will feel bound
to respect and admire” by building schools and learning all the arts of
“civilized life.”32 The address’ authors seem to paraphrase the above lines
from Walter Scott’s poem, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” which Scott
claimed to shape like a metrical romance. The poem purports to tell of the
“customs and manners, which anciently prevailed on the Borders of
England and Scotland.”33 The transposition of this “medieval” story into
the context of nineteenth-century African-American life works counter to
the mythologization of Anglo-Saxon history. The appeal to Anglo-Saxon
origins often asserted the “natural order” of the world by placing Anglo-
Saxon culture at the foundations of global civilization; to be part of the
Anglo-Saxon race necessarily meant having some claim to the innate
genius of the race. This 1832 address’ reference to British history points
to an alternative argument about cultural heritage that does not derive
from the Anglo-Saxons. The authors, Sipkins and Bell, revise the reading
practices that linked race, nation, and the Middle Ages. Their allusion to
Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel transposes that text’s mediations on the
possibilities for constructing both regional and national identities out of
the friction at the seams between England and Scotland to America’s racial
dynamics. Although this shift reified race as a category of difference, a
semi-permeable boundary that would delineate a recognizable “general
character” for African-Americans, it would also bring into view the imbri-
cation of African-American identity in American society.34 This is an asyn-
chronic and transnational argument in that it refutes the primacy of British
ancestry but adopts the claims to citizenship and progress that were
implicit within the discourse around the medieval.
Sipkins and Bell’s subtle intervention made through the appropriation
of Scott’s phrase foreshadows the utility subsequent authors would find in
engaging the Middle Ages. Reading as a critical practice would enable
African-American intellectuals to assert alternative visions of race and the
nation. African-Americans’ new enfranchisement would allow for tremen-
dous advances in the establishment of forums of culture: schools, journals,
and books. It was through these enterprises that writers and scholars made
32
Ibid., 135.
33
Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (London: James Ballantyne & Co., 1808), i.
34
Aptheker, 135.
claims on citizenship and belonging of the sort that Douglass so adroitly

executed in his letter to Garrison. These arguments crucially differed from
the discussions of genealogical descent such as those made in Jack
London’s The Valley of the Moon. The unlikely affinities asserted by African-
Americans in reference to questions of American cultural inheritance
untangled the complex of meanings bound up with “Anglo-Saxon” ori-
gins, which in turn struck at the construction of whiteness. This mode of
critique unstitched the nineteenth-century association of the Anglo-Saxon
with the unchanging character of whiteness and revitalized its association
with encounter and the incorporation of difference. At the same time, the
contest over the narrative of the nation created space to showcase erudi-
tion that even those who held opposing perspectives on race and nation
would “feel bound to respect and admire.”
Previous scholars of medieval studies and medievalism have largely
neglected the story of the unique possibilities afforded by medieval history
and literature as ways of explicating African-American history in the post-
bellum period. There is perhaps good reason for this. The archival evi-
dence is scanty and the priorities for these early schools were often general
or industrial education rather than less practical subjects, like Old English.
In fact, black intellectuals of the time often reprised Booker T. Washington’s
concern over whether black institutions of higher learning should exist at
all, as this type of education was considered inadequate to prepare black
students for the types of work available to them. The ethnic complexity of
this field of inquiry likewise frustrates a well-delineated reading of the
sources. Although this chapter will often employ the term “African-
American” to designate the ethnic make-up of institutions, the reality was
of a far more inter-racial educational setting in which white faculty taught
many courses and most of the assigned books were written by white writ-
ers. This would change as more African-Americans were educated, but as
is often the case in education, this change was gradual and, to the outside
observer, barely perceptible.
Nonetheless, this is a crucial moment of identity formation that should
be studied through this confluence of perspectives, rather than unexam-
ined because of them. The prevailing sentiments held by white Americans
who considered themselves descended from “Anglo-Saxons” informed
and worked in conversation with the counter-narratives constructed by
African-Americans. At times those narratives would work antiphonally,
and, at other times, the narrative constructed by white Americans about
their Anglo-Saxon origins would be taken up and harmonized with the
58 M. X. VERNON
progressions of African-American thought. For example, when Frederick

Douglass was faced with the circular argument that African-Americans
were innately inferior to white Americans because they were enslaved, he
appealed to the history of Anglo-Saxon and Norman conflict to subvert
dominant narratives:
This charge of inferiority is an old dodge. It has been available for oppres-
sion on many occasions. It is only about six centuries since the blue-eyed
and fair-haired Anglo Saxons were considered inferior by the haughty
Normans, who once trampled upon them. If you read the history of the
Norman Conquest, you will find that this proud Anglo-Saxon was once
looked upon as of coarser clay than his Norman master, and might be found
in the highways and byways of old England laboring with a brass collar on
his neck, and the name of his master upon it.35
This passage grounds itself in the medieval heritage Americans found for
themselves, but it also inverts or usurps the narrative; the strategy of exclu-
sion based on heritage is exposed as a fiction and instead is inverted for
Douglass’ historical analogy. From the perspective that Douglass adopts,
the Anglo-Saxon origins of white American citizens are little different than
those of African-Americans. In this he takes justification by genealogy at
its word. He accepts that the medieval may indeed inform the current
condition of modern Americans insofar as it functions as a reminder that
slavery was a common condition shared by Anglo-Saxons and African-
Americans. In this reading, the Anglo-Saxon period need not signify a
moment of cultural purity but instead could be mobilized to support the
concerns of other peoples and times.
Perhaps the clearest case of the political purchase behind this cross-
temporal mapping comes in an 1841 issue of The Liberator. Abolitionist
Lydia Maria Child published a short story entitled “The Black Saxons” in
which a white slave owner, Mr. Duncan, after reading a history of the
Norman conquest, slips into a reverie about the Anglo-Saxons who resisted
the Normans (to his mind the ancestors of Robin Hood) and a regrettably-
named slave, Bigboned Dick, who has recently escaped and set about tak-
ing the products of nearby plantations.36 Duncan is startled by this
35
Howard Brotz, African American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920 (New York:
Basic Books, 1966), 281.
36
Lydia Maria Child was an abolitionist and an early advocate for transracial adoption,
about which she wrote extensively. The implications to this overlap in ideas between historical
association and fears that his slaves, who just that day had asked leave to
go to a Methodist service, might be in league with the runaway:
“The black rascal!” exclaimed he. “If my boys are in league with him!”-----
The coming threat was arrested by a voice with-in which, like a strain of
music from some invisible choir, all at once struck up the lively ballad of
Robin Hood; and thus brought Bigboned Dick, like Banquo’s Ghost,
unbidden and unwelcome, into incongruous association with his spontane-
ous sympathy for Saxon serfs, his contempt of ‘base Saxon churls,’ who
tamely submitted to their fate, and his admiration of the bold outlaws who
lived by plunder in the wild freedom of Saxon forests.37
Although this story has mostly been forgotten, what happened next to it
can give some indication that, however briefly, the impress of this story
was felt widely.38 Five years after its publication, an African-American
Oberlin College student, William Day, read a poem inspired by the story,
titled “The Black Saxons: A Tale of America” before his Phi Kappa Pi liter-
ary society, and then, more remarkably, at an Emancipation Ceremony in
Cleveland. Part of his poem was then reprinted in the Daily True Democrat
in 1850.39 There are rich implications to this chain of uses for this story.
Day’s decision to modify the title of the story to accentuate the ties
between the imagined history of resistance against slavery and the aboli-
tionist movement bespeaks a high degree of agency over the narrative.
More generally, that Day preserved his college poem and recited it before
a crowd on Emancipation Day shows that he used Child’s work to
intertwine the histories of African-Americans and white Americans under
surrogacy and adoption are rich, but beyond the scope of the present study. See the discus-
sions of Child’s writing on family and adoption in Mark Jerng’s, Claiming Others: Transracial
Adoption and National Belonging (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2010).
37
“The Black Saxons” The Liberator (Boston, MA) January 08, 1841; Issue 2; col. E.
38
That is, with the notable exception of Daniel John McInerney’s The Fortunate Heirs of
Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1994), 41.
McInerney’s book examines this text in the context of several other abolitionist works that
deal with Anglo-Saxons, but this treatment is quite short.
39
Evidence of the initial version of this poem is found in the Oberlin College Archives. See:
“The Black Saxon: A Tale of America.—A Poem.” William Howard Day June 10, 1846
(Student Life: Literary organizations: Phi Kappa Pi-Box 1-History) I have only been able to
locate a fragment of the poem, which is reproduced in the appendix to this chapter. Neither
the newspaper nor the literary society program produced the poem in its entirety. Harry
E. Davis provides more of the history of William H. Day in his “Early Colored Residents of
Cleveland,” Phylon 4.3 (1941), 233–245.
60 M. X. VERNON
the mythology of medieval origins. And finally, it confirms Day’s resistance

to racialized interpretations of Anglo-Saxon history that would be taught
in literature classes, even in progressive institutions such as Oberlin. He
claims this foundational narrative as germane to an African-American
experience with seeking freedom, not as evidence of white racial
superiority.
Day’s writing bespeaks a desire on the part of many African-American
intellectuals to fashion a tradition that anticipates their participation in
American society. In the examples that follow—African-American journals
and the educational materials of universities—one can see the scale of the
ambitions for this mode of reading. The thread of African-American his-
tory that this chapter traces is bright and strong; it illuminates the difficul-
ties in creating a coherent identity in the wake of emancipation and is
interwoven into some of the most powerful articulations of global human
rights that have been leveled by African-American thinkers. The pull of the
Middle Ages in this period gains its power from multiple overlapping and
competing desires: for origins, new beginnings, prestige, and the means to
resist oppression. From this network of ideas about the fictional past
emerged strategies to escape the binaries—white and black; native and
“alien”; civilized and barbaric; Anglo-Saxon and African-American—that
threatened to limit the envisioned future of the nation’s newest citizens.
The AME Church Review: Before the Renaissance

The Anglo-African Magazine (1859–1862) was short-lived—it lasted just
four years—yet during its brief run it articulated an intellectual agenda
that would be reworked by African-American intellectuals until the cul-
tural shifts of the Harlem Renaissance. As Ivy Wilson notes, this magazine
was distinct in its attention to political and cultural works produced by
African-Americans as an act of self-representation.40 In the “Apology” to
The Anglo-African Magazine, the editors proclaimed that the magazine
would give “an independent voice” to the black community, a voice that
would show African-Americans as able to “maintain their rank as men
among men.”41 Even more ambitiously, they argued that there was a great,
40
Ivy Wilson, “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-African Magazine or, Antebellum
African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives” in Publishing Blackness: Textual
Constructions of Race Since 1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 23–24.
41
The Anglo-African Magazine Vol. 1 1859 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 1.
untapped potential within the African-American community. The African-

American presence in the country was a “noir fainéant,” a “black sluggard
[…] somehow endowed with forces which are felt rather than seen” that
may, “‘in some grim revel,’ ‘Shake the pillars of the commonweal!’” The
term “noir fainéant” is an allusion to Scott’s Ivanhoe; it is the title given
to the disguised king, Richard I, who shakes Britain out of its torpor when
he returns to the country and reveals himself. The implications of “noir
fainéant” well express the aspirational intellectual project of the magazine.
It would be through cultural production that African-Americans would
“shake the pillars of the commonweal”:
The negro is the ‘coming man’…The European race would seem to have
reached its destined development—of Arts, in Greece, of Jurisprudence in
Rome, and on Industrial Economies in England and the United States. To
advance still further, the tide of civilization requires what the great com-
moner of England prescribed for Ireland—new blood. And whence can this
be procured, unless from a race hitherto unmixed in the current civilization?42
This argument echoes the one advanced by Sipkins and Bell; it likewise
interrupts the expected narratives of civilization and citizenship to posi-
tion African-Americans within the next stage of civilization’s teleology.
Moreover, it draws upon the fractures within white racial identity, here
between the Irish and English, to point to the possibility of union across
lines that had long been considered impossible to transgress.43
There is an underlying irony to the magazine’s argument that it would
present the potential of African-Americans through what had been con-
strued as an Anglo-Saxon heritage. However, the magazine’s logic casts
African-Americans as both in parallel with and in excess of white American
formulations of heritage. The pages of The Anglo-African Magazine
would be a refutation to “up-holders of an unbroken lineal descent” who
held that only people descended from Anglo-Saxons could profitably con-
tribute to the nation. The term “Anglo-Saxon” itself, the editors argued,
implied hybrid identity: “[t]he inhabitants of Africa, like the Anglo-Saxons,
Ibid., 3.
42
By “the great commoner,” the authors refer to William Pitt who strongly argued that
43
England would greatly benefit from a stronger union with Ireland. For more on “the Irish
problem” in relationship to “the Negro problem” see Chap. 3.
62 M. X. VERNON
are a mixed people.”44 They suggested that American identity was more
genealogically and intellectually complex than was often admitted; the
idea of “cultural purity” was belied by the history that fiction relied upon.
Indeed, the name “Anglo-African” with its double emphasis on origins,
echoed the pretentions of “Anglo-Saxon” as a designation of racial antiq-
uity while it also held out the possibility for a novel reading of a social
identity constructed around recognizing the crucial role “the negro” held
within the rapidly developing West. The opening assertions of the maga-
zine emphasized the inherent consonance between “Anglo-Saxon” and
“Anglo-African” identities. The fates of both peoples were intertwined;
for the nation to advance one would have to embrace the innovative
potential of the other. The more subtle argument nested within this claim
is that to activate the potency of African-Americans as “the coming man”
would reiterate the process of development that has happened before in
Anglo-Saxon history. The magazine functioned as a medium for and dem-
onstration of the magazine’s primary contention: that the African-
American voice would be as integral to the shape of the nation as its
medieval past. When the magazine collapsed at the beginning of the Civil
War, its mission did not vanish with it. Rather, the far more renowned
African Methodist Episcopal Church Review (AME Church Review)
reclaimed this ideological territory two decades later.
In 1884, the AME Church Review, the once pre-eminent forum for
African-American political, academic, and artistic writings, began its run.
In their History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charles Spenser
Smith and Daniel Alexander Payne describe the intended audience and
tenor of the Review as “a vehicle of expression for the higher order of
intellectuals among the ministry and laity of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church.”45 Like the Anglo-African Magazine, the AME Church
Review displayed an awareness of the weight of tradition—not just the
force it can exert, but also the cultural meaning of adopting and directing
that tradition oneself. They used the resources that had once been denied
to them to insist on their place in the scholarly world; these African-
American intellectuals produced work to show themselves as shapers of
44
The writer goes yet further, describing the two as “Fratres patrueles—the Anglo-Saxon
and the Congo negro!” S.S.N. “Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-African” The Anglo-African
Magazine, 1, 1859 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 249, 250.
45
Charles Spenser Smith and Daniel Alexander Payne, History of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: Book Concern of the A.M.E. Church, 1922), 342.
the cultural landscape they saw around themselves or, as one writer puts it,
“a genuine portion of mankind.”46
The AME Church Review advanced the Anglo-African Magazine’s
assertions about “the negro” as “the coming man” not solely by using the
journal to argue about large social issues and make philological inquiries;
its predecessor had already done that. Rather, writers for the AME Church
Review questioned the ideologies that undergirded familiar historical and
linguistic arguments with which their work engaged. The Middle Ages
were necessarily a point of origin for these claims, thus writers would fre-
quently return to them. Questions about the pernicious legacies of the
Middle Ages used to construct race were yoked together with the political
implications of adopting the discourse of the Anglo-Saxons and the
Normans or the language of Alfred the Great and Chaucer. Was it possible
for African-Americans to have civil rights in a nation so deeply marked by
the stamp of the “Anglo-Saxon character”? Could African-American liter-
ary contributions mark their authors as full members within a linguistic
community and confer a degree of ownership over a language and set of
linguistic practices that had so long marginalized African-Americans? To
what degree did one’s literary and linguistic genealogy direct the trajec-
tory of one’s future endeavors?47 Some of these were questions that
American writers struggled with even in Jefferson’s lifetime, but they
gained the dimensions of race and power through these later writers.48
The inter-relationship between history, language, and personal agency
is suggested in a speech given by Booker T. Washington at The New York
46
J.A.M. Jones, “The Proverbial Philosophy of the Colored Race,” AME Church Review 1
(1884), 127. The proverbs he quotes encompass the serious and the playful; they sometimes
have European counterparts in mind. He describes them as: “coined in our own mint, not
borrowed, but circulated as our own race currency in all our social merchandise and not los-
ing one iota of value, either by frequent usage or from the lapse of time.” The following
examples contain a range of expressions: “A parasite has no root; every tree is its kindred”;
“The thread follows the needle”; “The tide carries me in and out”; “Riches are the pillars of
the world”; “‘Labor comes wealth’ or as a Roman would express it, ‘Labor omnia vincit’”
(130–131). Here too, the relationship between African-American and other literary tradi-
tions is apparent.
47
T. Thomas Fortune, “Civil Rights and Social Privileges,” AME Church Review, 2 (1885),
220.
48
Stanley Hauer discusses Thomas Jefferson’s controversial (and counterintuitive) support
of an emergent “American dialect” of English. This opinion was based in his interest in his
study of Old English and his belief that archaisms and dialects should not be abandoned. See
“Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” PMLA 98.5 (October 1983), 879–898.
64 M. X. VERNON
Home Mission Rally, which was excerpted in the 1896 edition of the
Lincoln University Herald:
Think, under God’s help and yours, from whence we have come, spurred
and cheered on in the darkest hour by our midnight groans, our songs and
before day prayers, and an inherent faith in the justice of our cause. We went
into slavery property and came out citizens; we went into slavery pagans, we
came out Christians; we went into slavery without a language, we came out
speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue; we went into slavery with the slave
chains clinking on our wrists, we came out with the American ballot in our
hands. This, this is our past.
Like much of Washington’s thinking, this thesis is both insightful and

troubling. One can see the slippage between Anglo-Saxon as a people and
Anglo-Saxon as a language, which confuses the relationship between
human beings and the language they speak. The ability to use language is
placed on the same plane as physical and political liberty. This thinking is
problematic insofar as it treats language as a means to erase the sense of a
past that precedes enslavement; the use of the “proud Anglo-Saxon
tongue,” for Washington, was a marker of African-American progress
from their pre-linguistic and seemingly pre-historic state into modern
society. Through his reference to the Middle Ages, Washington linked
African-American emancipation to the origin myth of the United States.
In doing so, he shows the hazard of simply adopting this fictive history as
one’s own; the history of slavery becomes subsumed under the narrative
of progress, while the meaning of enslavement itself as it relates to the
construction of the nation is effaced.
The AME Church Review, through its discussions of the Middle Ages,
acknowledged the significance of medieval tropes within American society
but also harnessed them to challenge the racial sentiments they encour-
aged. In taking up medieval narratives and redirecting them to contend
with “the African-American presence” within the United States, these
writers intervened into ongoing discussions of nationalism and the nation’s
constitution. Through much of the nineteenth century, work on the
Middle Ages in both popular and learned venues was inflected by a desire
to set a medieval heritage above and in opposition to other lineages.49 In
49
Allen J. Frantzen offers a rich study of these nineteen-century attitudes as a crucial part of
“orientalist” projects and the expansion of empire in his Desire for Origins: New Language, Old
English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 27–61.
its American iteration this meant transuming British claims on their

cultural heritage. For many of the Revolutionary generation, eighteenth-
century British law contained “corruptions introduced into the English
constitution after the Norman Conquest.”50 The same was argued about
the English language. Noah Webster used the word “corrupt” to charac-
terize British English which was riddled with regionalisms. Americans,
despite being “children” of Great Britain, spoke a language free from such
impurities.51 Thomas Jefferson based part of his claims of American inde-
pendence on the fact that “[i]n the earlier ages of the Saxon settlement,
feudal holdings were altogether unknown.” Jefferson argued that it was
the Normans who subjected the Anglo-Saxons to “feudal burthens.”52 As
the United States was not won by William the Conqueror, the king had no
rights to the land occupied by colonists. Rather, they should be governed
according to the “Saxon laws of possession.”53 The war, when read from
this perspective, was an opportunity to reinvigorate the mythology of
Anglo-Saxon liberty to inform the construction of the new nation.
The flimsy reasoning that situated Americans as inheritors of a “medi-
eval spirit” and cast the nation’s expansion as an echo of medieval British
conquest invokes what Benedict Anderson calls “the magic” of national-
ism which can “turn chance into destiny.”54 Proponents of this position
operated under the belief that “Anglo-Saxon supremacy would ensure
the ultimate expansion and supremacy of the United States.”55 It is pre-
cisely the malleability of nationalism that African-American scholars
exploited to broaden the roster of participants in American narratives of
progress. This vision of history emphasized the medieval period as one
in which social fractures could be sutured and true civil progress made.
50
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1981), 19.
51
Ibid., See also: Noah Webster, “Author’s Preface,” in An American Dictionary of the
English Language (Originally Published in 1826), Revised and Enlarged (Springfield:
Merriam, 1862), xiii, xxi.
52
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg:
Clementina Rind: 1774), 17.
53
For a full discussion of the legal reasoning behind Jefferson’s Summary View see: Brian
Steele, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Birmingham: University of Alabama
Press, 2012), 29.
54
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Oorigin and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2006), 12.
55
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny:The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 180.
66 M. X. VERNON
The subtext to this historical reading is the desire to fashion a narrative

of medieval history that could be used to proleptically answer the politi-
cal problems of post-War America. By recalling the “secular legacy of the
Anglo-Saxons”56 as a cultural matrix that subtended America’s founding,
these writers could frame the post-war period as an opportunity to criti-
cally re-examine the promises of the Revolutionary and Early Republic
periods. Reverend R.L. Beal, for example, in 1888 describes the pre-
Norman Conquest governing system and Anglo-Saxon resistance to
Norman rule as evidence of a political structure that shares commonali-
ties with the American governing system:
A people [Anglo-Saxons] of noble ancestry, who never bowed willingly to

the yoke of any potentate—a people who from their earliest times brought
to their island home a love for independence which is the genius of true
liberty. While continental Europe bowed the knee in humble suppliance and
worshiped monarchies, England recognized her king merely as a chief or
father, who was assisted in ruling by councilors from among the people.
They were at all times seeking to make the monarchy the mildest form of its
kind known. But, overpowered and overawed by the greatest military chief-
tain and soldiery of the age rarely was subjugation more complete.57
Beal’s reflections on Anglo-Saxons’ “genius of true liberty” echo those of

Jefferson. Both Beal and Jefferson saw the potential for political theoriz-
ing through an appeal to medieval history. However, Jefferson’s argu-
ments read Anglo-Saxon and Norman conflict as a basis to maintain a
schism between England and America, which would never be reconciled.
Beal, on the other hand, revises the historical narrative Jefferson follows to
suggest that some reconciliation might be possible between the oppressor
and the subjugated, as was the case “when neighborhood and traffic and
intermarriage drew Englishmen and Normans so rapidly into a single peo-
ple, that the two people soon ceased to be distinguishable from one
another.”58 Beal uses the AME Church Review to advance this alternative
history of the United States that sees the medieval period as a crucial guide
for how the United States could develop in opposition to Jefferson’s
Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 2.
56
Rev. R.L. Beal, “The Successful Mission of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte,”
57
AME Church Review, 5 (1888), 97.

58
Ibid., 98.
model which presented liberty derived from the Anglo-Saxon period as an

end in itself.
Beal’s article also highlights the space the AME Church Review created
for advancing challenging perspectives on issues with national implica-
tions. Because the AME Church Review was a venue in which major
African-American voices responded to one another’s ideas, its articles pro-
vide insight into the complexities of narrating one’s intellectual tradition
in the midst of large-scale political discussions about American policy
towards African-Americans. Fittingly, the initial references to the Middle
Ages come in an early issue of the journal. The poem “Dante”59 appears in
the first volume of the AME Church Review, directly following the discus-
sion: “The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?”60 The roster of
interlocutors in this article included the pinnacle of black intellectual
authority, from political leaders Fredrick Douglass and W. S. Scarborough,
to writers Frances E. W. Harper and Timothy Thomas Fortune, to a host
of lawyers and clergy. Fortune concisely describes the purpose of their
discussion as being to speak out against the “Democratic party as a men-
ace to [African-Americans’] inherent and constitutional rights.” The presi-
dential election between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine was tightly
contested. Cleveland’s victory was thought to be a sign of American weari-
ness with Reconstruction and a general fear of “negro supremacy.”61
Douglass begins his comments with a jeremiad, lamenting the loss of the
advances the country has witnessed under the power of the Republican
Party, the party which:
has suppressed a stupendous slaveholding rebellion, abolished slavery,

enfranchised the freedmen, reconstructed the rebellious states, made the
American Negro an American Citizen, proclaimed equity as the fundamen-
tal law of the land…62
59
AME Church Review 1 (January 1885), 231.
60
“The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?,” AME Church Review 1 (January
1885), 213–230.
61
This language of “supremacy” abuts the notion of “white superiority,” one was used as
a foil for the other. Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, December 4, 1888 (Gilder
Lehrman Collection).
62
“The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?” AME Church Review. Vol. 1 (1884), 213.
68 M. X. VERNON
Douglass’ statements represent the indignation of all the writers against a

state poised to deviate from twenty-four years of faithful governance, a
situation that seemed nothing short of betrayal. The vehemence of these
statements underscores the fracture separating the newfound sense of
belonging in the country from the impending alienation from the coun-
try’s new identity.
In her response, the poet Frances E.W. Harper articulates the unique
position African-Americans occupy as both part of and separate from their
country by making the familiar comparison to the Israelites, who, she
argues, were similarly oppressed.63 However, she disrupts the expected
mapping between the Israelites and African-Americans by suggesting that
the former did not have to undergo the mental struggle of becoming part
of the nation that oppressed them:
[The Israelites] left behind them the land of their oppressors, and turned
their faces to a land made sacred by the grand traditions of their race and
memories of their kindred dead. But the negro, torn away ages since from
Africa, having in many instances in his veins the blood of the dominant race,
and being in physiological accord with America, has no grand historic mem-
ories or sacred traditions to impel him to Africa.64
In the context of this discussion about the tenuous hold African-Americans

had on the promises of liberty, even the familiar analogy to the Israelites
falls short; African-Americans never received the benefit of being disartic-
ulated from their oppressors. This quotation speaks to the larger project of
a people trying to find a voice within a culture that is oppressive not only
in its political practice but also in how thoroughly it had been able to erase
cultural identity—“memories” and “sacred traditions”—available to
Africans before the Middle Passage. The Democratic Party even threat-
ened the emerging structures of thought and tradition contributors to the
journal sought to create. W.S. Scarborough, president of Wilberforce
University, framed the growing unrest about the election results as a clash
between the forces of civilization and barbarism:
63
This discussion should recall the famous anecdote about Thomas Jefferson’s design for
the great seal of the United States which would have the Israelites being led through the
desert by a pillar of fire one side and Hengist and Horsa arriving in Britain on the other.
64
“The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?,” 223.
Already in parts of the South and North there have been signs of trouble
between the lower stratum of the Democratic party and citizens of African
descent—the former taunting the latter with the boast that the Democratic
party is now in power and negro rule is at an end. Such treatment with many
outrages will probably increase in the less civilized parts of the South and
North, inasmuch as this element of that party will feel that it has the support
of the Democratic Administration behind it.65
The time of this writing represented a moment of possibility, but more

profoundly, it was a moment of possibility denied. The edges of black
liberty were already eroding in the eyes of all involved in this discussion.
Notably, this period saw inroads into African-American political advance-
ment blocked; P.B.S. Pinchback, who also contributed to this article,
assumed the seat of Louisiana’s governor and served for just thirty-five
days. Years later he was elected to the House of Representatives and the
Senate. These last two results were contested and eventually overturned
on the grounds of corruption. In writing about his disappointment with
recent political developments he turned to the words of James G. Blaine,
the man whose loss embodied this moment of missed opportunity. Blaine
predicted that if African-Americans did not receive full suffrage in the
South, the balance of electoral power would be weighted towards the
South with catastrophic consequences for the structure of American
society that developed after the Civil War:
Even those who are vindictively opposed to negro suffrage will not deny that
if president electors are assigned to the South by reason of the negro popula-
tion, that population ought to be permitted free suffrage in the election. To
deny that clear proposition is to affirm that a Southern white man in the Gulf
States is entitled to double the political power of a white man in Northern
lake states. […] If that be quietly conceded in this generation, it will harden
into custom, until the badge of inferiority will attach to the Northern white
man as odiously as ever Norman noble stamped it upon Saxon churl.66
Blaine likened the expected shift in political power to the cultural moment
that forever changed the English people, yet he switches the expected
referents. Although one might expect “Saxon” to be a term broadly
applied to all white members of society, Blaine revisited the roots of
65
Ibid., 215–216.
66
Ibid., 218.
70 M. X. VERNON
English racial myth and found a narrative of oppression to divide whites in

the country as a way to account for the African-American voting bloc.67
African-Americans functioned as the fulcrum point over which Blaine bal-
anced his vision of America’s identity: on one side were the northerners,
modeled as the oppressed Saxons, and on the other, the haughty and pow-
erful southerners, styled as Normans. This reference to the Middle Ages
constructs a metaphor that depends on African-Americans to coalesce, but
without space for them within its rhetorical system.
This is a telling elision of African-American agency within the American
political system. Although Blaine sympathized with African-American vot-
ers deprived of political power because of a system of “cruel intimida-
tion…violence and murder,” he read the issue of black suffrage not as a
moral issue or an opportunity to conceive of racial integration, but as a
means of consolidating his party’s power.68 His reference to Saxons and
Normans merely reinforces existing racial divisions. Pinchback, by framing
this quotation within the AME Church Review, reoriented the meaning of
this organizing metaphor to argue for the centrality of African-American
voting power, but more importantly, to underscore the sense that African-
Americans were being abandoned by their political allies.
This background in which the promises of suffrage and civil rights were
replaced by political betrayals provides the critical context for the poem
67
Gregory A. VanHoosier-Carey presents the history of Anglo-Saxon study in the South in
“Byrhtnoth in Dixie: The Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South.” He
quotes Schele De Vere (1820–1898) a University of Virginia professor who advanced the
idea that Anglo-Saxon history could be read as a story of cultural triumph against the invad-
ing Norman forces: “The Normans had conquered the land and the race, but they struggled
in vain against the language that conquered them in its turn, and by its spirit, converted them
into Englishmen.” Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen
J. Frantzen (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 161.
68
Frederick Douglass lamented that the Republican Party traded away its moral authority
and thus its most potent asset against the Democratic Party:
The defeat of the Republican party in 1884 was due rather to its own folly than to the
wisdom of the Democratic party. It despised and rejected the hand that had raised it
to power, and it paid the penalty of its own folly. The life of the Republican party lay
in its devotion to justice, liberty, and humanity. When it abandoned or slighted these
great moral ideals and devoted itself to materialistic measures, it no longer appealed
to the heart of the nation, but to its pocket. It became a Samson shorn of its locks.
Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Mineola: Dover, 2007), 406.
“Dante.”69 This poem, which immediately follows “The Democratic

Return to Power—Its Effect?,” speaks to the two topics debated by
African-American intellectuals that this chapter has been outlining: the
political implications of beginning an African-American literary tradition
and the terms under which full citizenship could be realized. The conflu-
ence of these factors—the desire for their words to be promulgated and
preserved and the exercise of a newfound voice that celebrated emancipa-
tion but had begun to be tempered by disdain for political setbacks—gains
expression through Henrietta Cordelia Ray’s poem. The poem draws an
explicit connection between Dante’s rage at being exiled from Florence
and the contemporary fear that the Democratic Party would erode the
gains made towards racial equality after the Civil War:
Through the dim centuries thou speakest still

In tones of thunder; and subdued by awe
We listen for thy intuitions fine,
Thy country’s weal a cherished charge became;
And Destiny stern frowning o’er the land,
Upheaved thy feelings and inflamed thy speech.
Indignant at the wrongs that Florence bore,
Florence, thy well-beloved, thy hallowed home,
With stern denunciation thou didst wage
Against the law’s lax mandates bloody war…70
Dante speaks, “we listen.” The poem transmutes Dante’s concerns about
exile and political alienation in thirteenth-century Florence into those of
the nineteenth-century African-American life. The poem lingers over the
historical distance Dante’s word is able to eclipse through the enjambment
which stretches from the Italian writer’s utterance to its reception two
lines later.
Although Ray wrote other poems with clear political themes, including
“Lincoln” and “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” and several about other writers,
including “Shakespeare” and “Milton,” only “Dante” makes the ambi-
tious conjunction between time periods and subject matter. This presenta-
tion of speech’s longevity mirrors the intellectual agenda of the AME
Church Review, which sought to create its own forum within which the
words of the great intellectuals of the time could resound. Fittingly, the
69
The full version of this poem is reproduced in the appendix to this chapter.
70
“Dante,” AME Church Review (January 1885), 25.
72 M. X. VERNON
poem’s description of the denunciation Dante leveled corresponds to the

critiques advanced within the Review’s pages. This relationship is particu-
larly noticeable in the way the poem presents Dante’s indignation about
the disregard for law.

Against the law’s lax mandates bloody war…71
The war he wages is one of words, victory would mean a return to the rule
of law within his native Florence. The focus on Dante as exile, social critic,
and eloquent voice of civitas resonates with the larger discussion con-
ducted within the magazine about how to understand the patchwork of
legislative achievements and setbacks across the country. The analogy ele-
vates the set of political problems facing African-Americans at the end of
the Reconstruction Period out of narrow issues like constructing voting
coalitions and into the enduring problems of preserving the “country’s
weal.” Protecting minority rights is read as a fundamental issue for ensur-
ing the health of the democracy. This is not to suggest that Ray merely
ventriloquizes Dante to make his poetry echo ideas already voiced by
African-American leaders. Rather, she allies Dante with late nineteenth-
century African-American political thought to contextualize and order the
issues that were before the country. The dissenting voices of African-
Americans speak to enduring and fundamental issues of governance and
justice. Dante’s voice cuts across the divisions of race and dwarfs the tim-
escale of the young nation; this strategic reading suggests that the prob-
lems brewing because of the Democratic Party’s return to power threatened
to darken the future of the whole nation for generations.
Moreover, the poem borrows from the Commedia its chronological
and spiritual trajectory. Just as Dante travels through spiritual realms
towards Paradise, the poem moves from its worldly concerns with the law
to rapturous peace. This tracks the progression of thought in the preced-
ing article, “The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?”, which moves
from bleak assessments of the present to optimism that some positive
change will emerge from contemporary circumstances. Douglass con-
cludes this article by testifying to his belief in the human inclination to
righteousness the rest of the contributors share:
71
Ibid.
I however think this period of suffering will not last long. There will be
satiety here, as elsewhere. Even the taste for blood will fail. Besides, I am not
without hope for the Democratic party. Though it is, by its history and
antecedents, bitterly opposed to every measure of justice and equality urged
in our favor, it is still composed of men, men with heads and hearts like
other men.72
Douglass’ faith that the hateful rhetoric and violence of the period would
subside in favor of more civil discourse is remarkable. However, this is not
naiveté on the part of a man who understood the depths of human cruelty.
Douglass intertwines clear-eyed political observation and faith in a way
that suggests that the project of achieving racial equality depended upon a
belief in the inexorable movement from chaos to order and from violence
to peace, that is, the progression of Dante’s pilgrim from the Inferno to
Paradise.73
As the example of Ray’s “Dante” indicates, the Middle Ages offered a
lens through which to read the paradoxes and complexities of contempo-
rary politics. The analogy positioned the progress of African-Americans
towards social equality as integral to the nation’s movement forward. The
power of the mapping between medieval and American history was mag-
nified when trained backwards onto the roots of African-American identity
and the means by which the nation was constructed: the proximal history
of slavery. The Middle Ages were read as a critical moment in history in
which slavery was abetted and in some cases perfected into the form it
would take in America. Feudal economics and a desire for conquest were
understood to have been the legacy the Middle Ages bequeathed to the
United States. African-American slaves were simply the latest targets in a
longer pattern of European rapacity. When T. Thomas Fortune, editor of
The New York Freeman, argued that the “Anglo-Saxon character” has
“enabled that people to dominate, wherever they have planted the stan-
dard of St. George,” he posits this same narrative of “progress” premised
72
Ibid., 214.
73
Dennis Looney discusses Frederick Douglass’ connections to Dante throughout his
book Freedom Readers. While he does build an argument about Cordelia Ray’s poem, he
does so on the basis of a 1910 revision to the work. Given its place of prominence within the
AME Church Review, particularly its relationship to “The Democratic Return to Power—Its
Effect?” I would argue that it is essential to read the earlier version. See: Dennis Looney,
Freedom Readers (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press: 2011), 58–61.
74 M. X. VERNON
on medieval barbarity.74 Rev. C.O.H. Thomas, in an 1893 issue of the

AME Church Review, charted a history of slavery in which medieval slav-
ery was only a step removed from the African slave trade:
In the Middle Ages the pirate and kidnapper, together with the conqueror,
still continued the slave trade. The Saxon race carried the most repulsive
forms of slavery to England, where not half the population could assert a
right to freedom, and where the price of a man was not four times the price
of an ox. Even after the conquest, slaves were exported to England from
Ireland, till in 1102, a national synod of the Irish, to remove the pretext for
an invasion, decreed the emancipation of all their slaves.75
Thomas borrows significantly from George Bancroft’s account of Saxon

and English history. However as the article’s provocative title, “The
Negro–His Past and Present,” indicates that Thomas recenters Bancroft’s
history to create a transnational argument about blackness, slavery, and
inequality, of which British history is an intersecting factor but not the sole
determinant of African-American progress. By disarticulating slavery from
race, he dismisses the notion of slavery as a natural or necessary condition
for “the negro.” Rather, his critique rests on a failure of “progress,” in the
nineteenth century meaning of the word—a concept that, not coinciden-
tally, was central to Bancroft’s ethos as the chronicler of American histo-
ry.76 Instead of seeing the nation as Jefferson did—the cradle of liberty—or
the century as Bancroft did—a steady stream of technological and military
advancements, including “the new conquest of Mexico”77—Thomas casts
American history as mired within the past of slavery. This argument was
necessary because the opposite seemed so evident; for many, that Western
civilization had in fact left behind Anglo-Saxon barbarism was hardly in
74
AME Church Review, 2 (1885), 220.
75
“The Negro-His Past and Present.” AME Church Review, 10 (1893), 472. This is not
to say that Bancroft minimized slavery’s importance or its cruelty. He spends a considerable
amount of time tracing its history. However, as mentioned above, his emphasis is on its
implications for America. See George Bancroft’s The History of the United States of America,
from the Discovery of the American Continent, 1 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1870), 162.
76
See George Bancroft, The Necessity, the Reality and the Promise of the Progress of the
Human Race: An Oration Delivered before the New York Historical Society (New York:
New York Historical Society, 1854).
77
George Bancroft, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft. Edited by Mark Anthony de
Wolfe Howe, 2 vols. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 2:36.
doubt. Thomas inverts the polarity of Bancroft’s historical parallels to

argue that true progress depended upon the “coming man” and his new
relationship with the world after emancipation. Here, one cannot help but
recall the arguments advanced in Frederick Douglass’ North Star object-
ing to various campaigns of expansion through the Americas. An unsigned
editorial laid bare the historical and racial dimensions of the paper’s stance
on the United States-Mexico War: “Mexico seems a doomed victim to
Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.”78 A crucial piece of African-
Americans understanding hemispheric solidarities caused by American
expressions of force is this evocation of mythical self-conceptions.
Despite the optimism that limns much of the preceding discussion of
the AME Church Review’s intervention into imagining African-American
relationships with the past, the medieval period was hardly an ideal time to
be reclaimed. Rather it was a precursor to the sorts of violence that would
be visited upon African-Americans centuries later. In 1901, the educator
Edward L. Blackshear forcefully reiterates this type of argument to directly
put into parallel historical instances of feudal servitude and American plan-
tation life:
The plantation, with its broad cultivated acres, its forest lands, its hunting
grounds, its grand mansions,—the theatre refined, elegant, leisurely, home-
life and of beautiful and lavish hospitality—its retinue of happy, careless, but
willing servitors who were like the feudatories of Middle Age Chivalry in
their loyalty; its Negro quarters of hardy brawny slave workers, with the
master as Lord of the Manor, whose will in his boundaries none presumed
to dispute, presents the ideal on which the Southern State was based. The
planter was a sovereign among equal sovereigns, and among equals there
could be no coercion. […][Slavery] produced the master class by the con-
stant, daily, personal exercise of domination over the enslaved class: an impe-
rious will, an ever-present consciousness of superiority, and a growth of
personal independence and personality paralleled only in the feudal system
of Europe.79
78
“The War with Mexico,” North Star, January 21, 1848, quoted in Roderigo Lazo, “The
Ends of Enchantment: Douglass, Melville, and U.S. Expansionism in the Americas,”
Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel
Otter (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 218.
79
Edward L. Blackshear, “The Negro as Passive Factor in American History,” AME Church
Review, 20 (1901), 62–363.
76 M. X. VERNON
For the author, reference to the Middle Ages can be deployed as a seduc-
tive illusion that disguises historical fact. Blackshear exposes both the
strength of this fiction and its clay feet by following its logic from the
people who benefitted most from the narrative down to those who were
most exploited. In overlaying the plantation and the feudal estate,
Blackshear works with the familiar fictions of a refined and venerable
medieval society to expose how incomplete those characterizations were.
The quotation is subtle in its progression. It begins with the facade of
order, both on the imagined medieval estate and the plantation, and then
moves through that appearance into the atrocities that lay beyond.
Blackshear disarticulates the fantasy of the past—southern gentlemen as
the “knights-errant of the New World”—and the realities of the labor
upon which it depended; he indicts the mythology of the medieval feudal
estate that was mobilized to disguise slavery’s abuses, but more impor-
tantly, he lodges slavery within the framework of feudalism as an eco-
nomic, political, and psychological system. Although he rejects the
nostalgic depiction of the feudal estate as a parallel to the plantation, he
does accept the institution of slavery served to tie the country more closely
to its feudal heritage.
This final example underscores the utility of the Middle Ages to articu-
late the political aims of the AME Church Review. The most far-reaching
implications of Blackshear’s argument break down race as a barrier to
equality. If Britain could revise the relationships between ethnicity and
class as it moved from a feudal economy, America could realize similar
ends with race after the Civil War. The Revolutionary War generation mis-
apprehended, or miscast, a victory that depended upon a social hierarchy
that betrayed the nation’s newfound principles; America could only
achieve its promises of liberty by making possible the emergence of
African-American “independence and personality”—the intellectual and
material growth of African-American communities. More generally, the
approach that AME Church Review writers themselves deployed was part
historical analysis and part myth-making; that is, it sought to capture some
of the rhetorical power available within the immanent text of medieval
history. It produced narratives that could begin to put the brutality and
mnemonic damage caused by American slavery within a longer pattern of
history, a strategy that could have rendered past wrongs and enduring
social uncertainty, if not surmountable, at least intelligible.
From Vernaculus to Vernacular: The Medieval in African-

American Education
“Not a single drop of foreign blood” says Max Muller, “has entered into the
organic system of the English language. The grammar, the blood, the soul
of the language, is as pure and unmixed in English as spoken in the British
Isles, as it was when spoken on the shores of the German Ocean by the
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes of the continent.”80
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, philology held forth the
promise of disinterested linguistic analysis, what Max Muller would call
“the science of language.”81 Yet, often this endeavor merely cloaked the
inherent political and racial valences of seeking the origins of language; in
the case of English, philology and mythogenesis were allied in their con-
struction of an august British past. Educational texts purporting to tell the
history of English, spoke of Old English in terms that personified and
valorized it. To one writer “Anglo-Saxon” formed “the ruling and ascen-
dant” influence on modern English.82 To another, Old English took on
the guise of a romance hero: “briefly humbled” while the “foreign”
Norman language “reigned in the castle” of England, but ultimately was
able to outlast the threat to its purity.83 Muller, whose scholarly imprint
widely influenced nineteenth-century philologists, deploys a metaphor
that fuses human development and linguistic change. His analogy between
“organic systems” and the “pure and unmixed” English language shows
how readily the analysis of language could morph into arguments with
nationalist and racial import. The category of the “foreign” is absolute for
Muller and many of the writers who followed in his footsteps. As Allen
J. Frantzen argues, such a reading of language has a clear relationship to
patterns of Orientalism within academia developing in nineteenth-century
Europe.84 Colonialist projects to master the languages of colonized nations
80
Arthur Gilman, First Steps in English Literature (New York, A.S. Barnes & Company,
1870), 30. Textbook used by Atlanta University during the final quarter of the nineteenth
century.
81
Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London: Longmans, Green and
Company, 1871).
82
Richard Chenevix Trench, English, Past and Present (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1877), 31.
83
Hannis Taylor, The Making of the Constitution (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.,
1899), 81.
84
Desire for Origins, 29.
78 M. X. VERNON
were paralleled by scholarly efforts to establish an English literary tradition

that reaffirmed the notion of innate Anglo-Saxon superiority.
African-American colleges, universities, and journals that developed
after the Civil War operated within these metaphorical and disciplinary
spaces to challenge the political and racial meanings that had become
implicit within the study of language. The examples from the AME Church
Review demonstrate the power that creating cultural institutions held for
African-American scholars and intellectuals in giving voice to their posi-
tions on national political issues. Evidence from the AME Church Review
is indicative of strategies for mobilizing access to education and modes of
“scientific” discourse that became increasingly available to African-
Americans throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth cen-
tury. Educators deployed the tools and social purchase of philological
study to construct intellectual frameworks that contested predominant
narratives of language and nation. The projects these scholars developed
intervened in existing paradigms for the generation and propagation of
scholarship related to the imagined boundaries of the nation.
As Christopher Hanlon argues in his study America’s England, the ter-
ritorial instability of the nation leading up to the Civil War generated mul-
tiple overlapping alignments of identity that reflected influences from
foreign countries and dissatisfaction with domestic policies.85 Similarly, the
desire among African-Americans to articulate their identities to contend
with newfound freedoms and social obstacles they met with in the decades
after the Civil War provoked complex assemblages that overlaid seemingly
irreconcilable social fictions. Frustrations with incomplete social integra-
tion, such as those discussed in “The Democratic Return to Power—Its
Effect?,” led African-American writers and intellectuals to speculate upon
alternative positionalities that could collude with and co-opt established
forms of social legibility to stake out space within the public imaginary.
While legal citizenship had been achieved with the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, this status was merely a promise of equality that
could not be redeemed without significant shifts in the meaning of
American citizenship as a cultural abstraction. This argument is not meant
to make a detour around strategies of violence that sought to erect and
enforce the jagged line of race. Rather, I wish to foreground the place of
this cultural work as one locus of resistance that held the potential to
85
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and American
Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11.
reconstitute or further blur the lines upon which racial divisions were
drawn. At its utmost potency, this alternative perspective proposed a global
reassessment of social order premised on vernacular linguistic connection
as opposed to the color line that would continue to be theorized into the
late twentieth century. This is discussed with respect to the novelist Gloria
Naylor in Chap. 5.
Higher education was one of several arenas where this “cultural mis-
sion” to undo the logic of citizenship as a function of biological essential-
ism or an affinity of “spirit” was advanced.86 The apparatus of higher
education, in particular the study of language, offered critical tools to
theorize racial identities that encompassed a long, transnational history of
America. This work adopted perspectives that placed the development of
the nation within a lineage of intercultural contact and evolution that had
its roots in the adventus Saxonum and held the development of African-
American cultures as the latest iteration in a pattern of cultural intersec-
tions. To position the study of African-American language and history
within a larger project that defined the nation’s imaginary contours implic-
itly critiqued the political legacies embedded within the academic disci-
plines they used.
The case of Lorenzo Dow Turner illustrates how the study of language
and the space of the university could reassess the place of African-Americans
in the foundation of American history. In 1917, Turner, a scholar of
English literature, took up his first post as an instructor at Howard
University after graduating from Harvard University with a master’s
degree. He taught American literature and British prose from Arthurian
romance to the present. In this he was both like and unlike his predeces-
sors in the post. Until the first years of the twentieth century, new faculty
at Howard often taught the general course on English literature—the
basis of further English education—which began with the Middle Ages
and ended in the nineteenth century. In the decade’s first years, the depart-
ment steadily began to offer more classes in medieval literature, starting
with medieval drama, expanding to Chaucer and, finally, Old English.
Turner, perhaps because of his training in philology, began to teach
86
W.E.B. Du Bois uses this term “cultural mission” to describe the educational philosophy
behind Atlanta University. He underscores the financial and social pressure the school was
under to alter its principles to teach subjects deemed befitting for the “caste” of
African-Americans.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Cultural Missions of Atlanta University,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A
Reader, ed. Meyer Weinberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 187–200.
80 M. X. VERNON
Chaucer and Old English as he rose to become the head of the depart-
ment and until he left the university in 1928.87
Turner is not known for his accomplishments as an English professor at
Howard. Rather, his scholarly gaze turned from the island of England to
the barrier islands off South Carolina. There he began a movement in
linguistic research whose repercussions are still being felt. While in South
Carolina he heard a type of speech he could not identify; it was a linguistic
pattern that had long been considered nothing more than a particularly
thick accent. Turner dedicated himself to the study of this language,
returning there for years to investigate the particularities of what he would
later classify as the Gullah dialect, a tongue developed by a remnant of
slaves left on the islands, thus a true American vernacular, both in the
sense of this word’s etymological meaning—the language of slaves—and
in the sense of being a native tongue, particular to a locality, separate from
British English but also from African languages.88 Read in a certain light,
Turner’s research takes on the dimensions of myth: the violence of forced
migration, the survival and development of a culture away from the main-
land. Although this story is clearly not one of myth—the violence of slav-
ery was real—Turner did not discover the Gullah language, but instead
was one of many scholars who had examined it. His treatment of Gullah
and his conviction of its place as a language has pushed Turner’s work into
a place of cultural pre-eminence,89 as David Decamp, one of the scholars
who worked on African-American vernacular in his wake suggests:
The possibility that the black, like the Chicano, may have (or even may have
earlier had) a separate language of his own is of immense importance to
those who are trying to give the black child pride in his cultural heritage…
Turner devoted his career to making the study of black English academically
respectable. He was a scholar, not a political activist, but he brought about
his own little revolution.90
87
For example, among his other courses, Turner took classes in Old English poetry,
Beowulf, and “The Structure and Growth of Language” at the University of Chicago while
also employed at Howard University. See: Margaret Wade-Lewis, Lorenzo Dow Turner:
Father of Gullah Studies (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 43.
88
Here I am referring to the OED’s etymology of “vernacular”: f. L. vernacul-us domestic,
native, indigenous (hence It. vernacolo, Pg. vernaculo), f. verna a home-born slave, a native.
89
He traveled throughout the country to speak on this subject and was even a research
fellow at Yale University, during which time he spoke about “the survival of 400 African
words and phrases that are still in use in coastal South Carolina and Georgia.”
90
Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2002), xi.
The discourse surrounding the classification of language would have been

particularly close to the mind of a professor like Turner, who simultane-
ously taught a subject that had generated a narrative of racial purity and
worked in a university which was, for a time, home to a radical brand of
scholarship on race. Turner’s work occupies the space between these two
sides, employing the tools and structure of a traditional field to construct
a revolutionary idea.91
Turner taps into a deep-seated connection between language, national-
ism, and the attendant vocabulary of cultural superiority. Language, par-
ticularly the way in which it is codified, has long been inflected by
nationalist pride. James Boswell recounts how Samuel Johnson considered
himself equal to finishing his dictionary in three years, as compared to the
forty years it took forty French scholars to complete a similar undertaking.
When met with incredulity, he justified his confidence by appealing to his
national superiority:
This is the proportion. Let me see: forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As
three to sixteen hundred so is the proportion of an Englishman to a
Frenchman.92
The American lexicographer, Noah Webster, went so far as to consider it

“treason against the character and dignity of a brave, independent people”
for American citizens not to have command over their national language.93
For Webster, asserting the difference between American English and the
“corrupted” language of Britain was part of the American revolutionary
cause.94 Standardized speech would “annihilate” the transformations of
language adopted from foreign influence.95 Where external powers were
91
Turner was not alone in this endeavor. The instructor of Old English at Atlanta University
from 1927–1957, Nathaniel Tillman, demonstrated a similar interest in the African roots of
southern English dialect. In 1942 he published a brief article that suggested a possible
African derivation for the word “tote.” “A Possible Etymology of ‘Tote’,” American Speech
17:2 (1942): 128–129. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “Lydgate’s Rhymes as Evidence
of Pronunciation” and was similarly oriented towards philological research.
92
James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birbeck Hill (London: Oxford
93
Noah Webster Dissertations on the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and
Company, 1789), 406.
94
Ibid., 20, 397.
95
Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language: with Notes, Historical and Critical
(Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Company, 1789), 19, 107.
82 M. X. VERNON
not to blame, linguistic differences among Americans were attributed to

social fractures within the country. For example, the paucity of slave own-
ership in the New England region, writers following Webster argued, led
to a diffident style of speech among New Englanders as compared to
“those who are accustomed to command slaves.”96 These discussions of
English as emblematic of cultural difference, particularly Anglo-Saxon
superiority, inextricably link politics to real and metaphorical types of
contestation.
For Turner, Old English would have carried a host of significations
about race, learning, and exclusion within contemporary American soci-
ety. This was how early European history was presented at Howard around
the time of Turner’s tenure at the school, as exampled by the course
description for “English History” first offered by the university in 1908.
The purview of this course spans nearly a millennium:
The aim of this course is to concentrate attention upon the growth of

Anglo-Saxon institutions and to trace the varied phases of English civiliza-
tion, as that civilization has affected and still influences a large part of the
world today. The various invasions are shown in the effects upon the fusion
of races and the blending of their tongues and in the modifications of the
life, customs, laws and characteristics of the people. The details of war are
dwelt upon only so far as to illustrate and contribute to the progress of soci-
ety and thus are subordinated to the exhibition of the stages of English civi-
lization…This course, while self-sufficient, has also the ulterior object of
laying a broad foundation for the intelligent and fruitful study of American
history, as showing the root out of which American institutions have grown
and have been in large measure fashioned.97
The description shows an underlying suspicion of a “pure” Anglo-Saxon

identity. Rather, the course emphasizes “the fusion of races” and “blend-
ing” as critical stages in British history. This perspective is suggestive given
the course’s overriding interest in presenting a discernable chain of
influence from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, from Britain to the
United States.98 This evidence serves as a valuable complement to the
96
Horace E. Scudder, Noah Webster (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1890),
210.
97
Howard University Course Catalogue 1908–1909, Howard University Archives, 46.
98
The use of older texts as a reflection of the present was by no means a ubiquitous intel-
lectual maneuver. In an analogous class taught in 1898 at Oberlin College, the students are
instructed using Stubbs’ Selected Charters and the description warns that “the work of the
argument presented in the first section of this chapter about how medieval
events and mythologies were used as a prism through which one could
read contemporary American history.
The intellectual ambitions of the Howard’s “English History” course
come into sharper focus when they are compared to the movement to
found and codify an African-American historical lineage simultaneously
being formulated within the university. As this history course was being
taught at Howard University, Carter G. Woodson—the man who estab-
lished what would become Black History Month—began to teach “The
Negro in American History.” While the university’s archives do not con-
tain this course description, one can read a likely version of Woodson’s
class program in his book, The Mis-education of the Negro, a response
against schools in which “[n]egroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the
Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African.”99 Although
Turner’s debt for his later work to Woodson is widely acknowledged, I
would argue that the discourse of linguistic “survivals”—to use Turner’s
word—as well as the deployment of the tools of philology, are as steeped
in the intellectual milieu of Howard’s English history course as Woodson’s
reflections on the history of Africans.100 It is important to note again that
the language of survival, which has become so fraught in contemporary
scholarly discussions of African-American life, has a critical antecedent in
this discussion of linguistics. In The Mis-education of the Negro, Woodson
presents the case that even the most basic education is freighted with the
racial conceptions of the people who formulated it, thus disciplines must
be reconceived to contend with “the body politic” as a whole and the
meanings generated by “a particular race.”101 The “English History”
course’s careful negotiation between its vision of the past and its relation-
ship to the present evidences the type of thinking that Woodson argues is
year may not extend beyond the War of the Roses and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty,
A.D. 1485.” The course shows none of the insistence on the relation between medieval his-
tory and the immediacy of the present.
99
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Washington, DC: The Associated
Publishers, 1933), 1.
100
Wade-Lewis, Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies, 35.
101
Turner in his initial description of Gullah writes: “Gullah is a creolized form of English
revealing survivals from many of the African languages spoken by the slaves who were
brought to South Carolina and Georgia during the eighteenth-century and the first half of
the nineteenth. These survivals are most numerous in the vocabulary of the dialect…”
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. 3rd edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 2002), lix.
84 M. X. VERNON
essential to African-American education. The course offered a critical re-

examination of what had, since the time of Jefferson, been considered the
foundational material for American institutions.
This section will seek to contextualize how educators like Turner used
their instructional work in colleges and universities to reshape the myth of
continuity and progress from the Middle Ages to the present, appropriat-
ing and redefining contradictory elements hostile to it.102 Turner’s cele-
brated research and the shift of many scholars during the 1930s to Black
Studies must be understood in the context of early educational materials
and courses, which were at times alienating and at other times provided
the intellectual apparatus and impetus for thinking about African-American
experiences. Language will be the primary focus of the following argu-
ment because it bears so much significance as a receptacle of memory and,
at times, as an actor working in tandem with its speakers.
Language, because it could explicate the history of its speakers, was
viewed as having enormous potential as a political tool for achieving the
mission of social equality and as an intellectual tool that could combat
arguments of the sort advanced by Max Muller and Noah Webster. In an
1887 article on the history of the English language, Josephine Turpin, an
instructor at Wilberforce University, repeats the myth of Old English’s
survival after the Norman invasion:
Linguistic supremacy is a natural attendant of political ascendancy. French

became the language spoken at court, the language taught in the schools
and used in all judicial proceedings. The common people clung to their
native vernacular with the greatest tenacity. It was their speech; they knew
no other, they wanted no other. The allegiance saved it from absorption and
preserved it from decay.103
This is a common reading of the English language’s history in the nine-

teenth century. However, in the hands of Turpin, the language of linguis-
tic survival and its political effect carries a different valance than that
offered by most contemporary writers on the subject. For Turpin, the
102
Woodson, 25. Here I am also referring to some of the language Larry Scanlon employs
when he refers to the work of early African-American scholars and poets who are reacting
against a tradition of sociolinguistics and philology. “Poets Laureate and the Language of
Slaves,” in The Vulgar Tongue, eds. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 227.
103
“The Origin and Progress of the English Language,” AME Church Review 4 (1887), 280.
interaction between the Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages and the nar-
rative of linguistic inheritance had significance that transcended academic
interest:
No language is so widely used as is the English. What it will ultimately

accomplish we cannot know. It will be neither stronger nor weaker than the
men who use it. Language is but a sign, a symbol, a token, a representative
of something which lies back of it. [sic] Representatives lose force when that
represented has no existence. Upon the future of the English-speaking peo-
ple, depends what the English language will be.104
Turpin’s conclusions stand in stark contrast to Noah Webster’s reflections

on language. While Webster sought to constrain English through his
emphasis on prescriptive standards, Turpin argues for the boundless
potential of language as expressed through those who deploy it.105 She
destabilizes the study of language to make both the evolution of English
and the simultaneous development of people who use the language dual
focuses of study. She substantially broadens the scope of Webster’s claims
about language as a means of making a coherent community. Absent from
Turpin’s writing is the language of purity and the boundedness of the
nation that were crucial to Webster’s theories of an English-speaking
America. For Turpin the potency of the language rested within its ability
to expand and incorporate new voices. This is an argument that has clear
relevance to the writers of a fledgling journal whose members are those
who labor to augment the rights of African-Americans.
The living, mutable potential of vernacular language for African-
American scholars found its most consequential precedent in their own
recounting of medieval history. The vernacular, in this formulation, was a
mode of speech that bore the marks of oppression, made visible in its
deviations from the dominant tongue:
The survival of the Vulgar tongue in modern times, where the influence of
formal and conventionalized civilization has penetrated among primitive
communities, is in dialect, the attempt of the invaded, enslaved, and sup-
pressed peoples to imitate phonetically the speech of the dominant class or
race. Dialect is not, thus, the corruption of the folk, or tribal language, of
Ibid., 284.
104
The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ed. Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth
105
Closs Traugott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 449.

86 M. X. VERNON
the Frankish invaders of Gaul, of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of ancient

Britain, of the absorption of the African savages—who may be likened in
every tribal respect to the Franks, Angles and Saxons—by America, but of
the language of the Latins, the Britons and the English.106
Here William Braithwaite usurps the narrative of linguistic survival that

was frequently used as an analogy between Anglo-Saxons and southern
whites. Instead, he abstracts the notion of the “suppressed peoples” to
encompass a much wider swath of humanity linked by a linguistic mode
that operated within structures of power that reproduce themselves over
time. His argument responds to the concern that African-American
authors had “no inherited poetic traditions,” because of slavery’s violent
displacements.107 This suggestion carried the implication that African-
American literature was underdeveloped and needed to proceed through
a “civilizing process” of centuries to produce great literary work.
Braithwaite rejected this analysis of African-American literature through
his formulation of the vernacular. The vernacular was a reactive mode
whose character is responsive to dominant political ideologies and expres-
sions of the state’s power. The trajectory of the vernacular in the cases of
French and English foreshadowed the development of African-American
letters as a form that could absorb and adapt the “standard” tongue and
then contend with the meaning of conquest and suppression.108 In the
case of the nascent forms of African-American literature, the vernacular
bore evidence to the global and historical forces implicated in the con-
struction of American institutions. For this reason, Braithwaite argued,
the African-American literary work produced as the successes and failures
of Reconstruction became known were representative of a wider “American
cultural nationalist revival” movement.109 The vernacular of African-
Americans evidences a yearning for “full and complete nationalism—that
of American democracy.”110
106
“Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race” The Crisis 17 (1919):275–280, Reprinted in
The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 50.
107
Ibid.
108
Ibid., 54.
109
George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press: 1996), 151.
110
“Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race,” 53.
This reasoning that elided cultural history and contemporary politics

mirrors the animating philological myths discussed above, but inverts
their polarity. Braithwaite, in his analysis of the vernacular, seeks to impli-
cate African-American literature at the heart of a larger conversation about
the health of American democracy and the limits of American culture, as
expressed through the nation’s protection of minority rights. Braithwaite
demonstrates that literary critique itself was a political intervention into
discussions of African-Americans within the world. The utility of the work,
as a necessary component of realizing oneself within the nation, was a
strategic assertion of both intellectual ability but also the impulse to do
comparative historical work to chart the development of African-American
integration within society. The arguments Turpin and Braithwaite make in
terms of using philological inquiry to assert a cultural inheritance, in terms
of language, redound to the approach of African-American schools to
teaching English as a political act, as is visible in the archival evidence of
university education.
The oldest versions of curricula in African-American schools empha-
sized the classics, a tradition from which they departed at uneven rates.
However, the turn to English literature was universal. The liberalization of
education in terms of developing English departments seemed to have
engendered great pride in the language. It bore the extra significance of
being a token of citizenship because English was discussed as a sign of
membership into a community of speakers, and into the power that the
community wields. A zealous example of this manifestation comes from
Professor W.G. Sears of the Lincoln Institute:
The history of language is the history of our race and its development and
great command over the resources of language is only another name for
great command over the ideas and conceptions which make up the wealth
of intellectual life. No question arises as to the necessity of knowing how and
what our predecessors thought: nor does anyone doubt that language is the
channel through which that knowledge must come to us; for language is
indeed, but the medium and the telescope.111
In this formulation, language is a conduit to a much deeper past; to take

part in this heritage of language is to gain possession of the country’s
111
W.G. Sears of the Lincoln Institute, in part quoting the educational reformer J. G.
Fitch. AME Church Review 3 (1885), 13.
88 M. X. VERNON
other legacies. Sears suggests that these predecessors are not his literal kin,
but those connected by the ties of language. His use of the phrase “our
race” subtly avoids the point of disjunction in his argument, privileging
language over racist ideology. He goes on to list those he thinks should be
on the list of required authors, and he stresses his disdain for the classics.
For early education, grammar would be taught through Irving, Addison,
and Goldsmith, with the “highest grammar” as Shakespeare. He would
then proceed to Milton and preserve Chaucer as the “crown” of his liter-
ary regime. This educational structure would displace Latin and Greek as
the foundation for a complete education. Sears’ idea was at the forefront
of an educational reform that would develop gradually across historically
black schools. At roughly the same time as Sears proposed his course of
study, Atlanta College still adhered to a rigorous program of Latin and
Greek study, which it believed to be the only safe course, “which has never
been improved upon and never will be.”112 Yet the general trend towards
teaching English literature in black colleges and universities was undeni-
able. In Atlanta College, the English department introduced Shakespeare
and Milton first in 1877, by 1881 it began to offer American texts. The
number of classes dedicated to specific fields of literature gradually
expanded. Through these years they used general literary histories, which
presented English literature as a great chain connecting the Anglo-Saxon
period to their own; modern readers were the direct inheritors of this liter-
ary tradition. There are many examples of this, but here only two will be
highlighted. English Literature, the textbook by Brainerd Kellogg (1882)
used in Atlanta College, speaks of the English tradition with the same
exuberant identification one detects in Sears’ statement:
The History of English Literature.—This is the story of what great

English men and women thought and felt, and then wrote down in good
prose or beautiful poetry in the English language. The story is a long one.
It begins about the year 670, and is still going on in the year 1882. Into this
book, then, is to be put the story of 1,200 years. English men and women
have good reason to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in prose
and poetry. Every one who can write a good book or a good song may say
to himself, “I belong to a great company which has been teaching and
112
Letter to Horace Bumstead from Board of Trustees, Box 12, Clark-Atlanta University
Archives.
delighting for more than 1,000 years.” And that is a fact in which those who
write and those who read ought to feel a noble pride.113
More frequently, there was some admission that the language was not a
product of a singular culture. An extreme version of this was Henry
Pancoast’s description of the creation of the English language from the
textbook used by Fisk University at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury. He argues against the periodization of English literature, as the lan-
guage had “a continuous life and growth for more than twelve hundred
years”:
We thus see that on every side the characteristic of this preparatory period
was the progress toward unity, by the absorption and combination of separate
elements. One race is made by the fusion of many; one language by the amal-
gamation of French and English; one literature out of the literature of the
English, the British, and the Norman, enriched and developed by the learn-
ing and culture of Rome.114
Pancoast whittles the meaning of racial-linguistic unity down to near

meaninglessness as he delimits it to transformations in the language
brought about by medieval migration, invasions, and education.
It is important to linger over literary histories such as Pancoast’s because
they were the conduit through which African-American students received
narratives of language that informed the political issues behind them. For
example, during the first twenty years of the twentieth century Atlanta
College constructed its core literature course by using such anthologies to
113
Brainard Kellogg, English Literature. (New York: Clark & Maynard Publishers, 1882),
22. Kellogg’s text goes on to frame the survival of language as akin to a military victory, cit-
ing how resilient English was against the invasions of both Scandinavian and Norman forces:
But that which happened to the Danes happened to the Normans also, and for the
same reason. They were originally of like blood with the English, and of like speech;
and though, during their settlement in Normandy they had become French in man-
ner and language, and their literature French, yet the old blood prevailed in the end.
The Norman felt kindred with the English tongue, became an Englishman, and left
the French tongue to speak and write in English… There are early sermons of the
same century, and now early in the next century, at the central time of this struggle,
after the death of Richard the first, the Brut of Layamon and the Ormulum come
forth within ten years of each other to prove the continuity, survival and the victory
of the English tongue.
114
Henry Spackman Pancoast, An Introduction to English Literature (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1895), 11. Emphasis in the original.
90 M. X. VERNON
“have the students form an acquaintance with all the reputable English
authors by reading extracts from the best productions of those authors.”
In the absence of full texts, students had to work with the intellectual
frameworks constructed by the literary historian. Although these early
materials often made racially exclusionary arguments, they worked as the
critical grounding out of which later arguments about the expanded canon
emerged. The focus on “racial unity” provided the critical purchase for
writers like Turner, Turpin, and Braithwaite to mount their radical linguis-
tic and historical reassessments of medieval English’s value for reading
African-American voices as a new participant in a linguistic community.
The ties between language, nation, and race are crucial for understanding
the force of the critiques these scholars make. Their meditations on the his-
tory of language enter into the long-standing conversation about the pro-
duction of an American vernacular English that functions as a post-colonial
refutation of the British empire’s “degradations.”115 Early Republic Era
assertions about “American English” failed to contend with the “vernacu-
lus,” that is, slaves within the country, and the contradictions implicit within
being a slave-holding nation that sought to define itself against the subjuga-
tions of its colonial past. African-American scholars re-engaged this discourse
of language as a proxy for race and the freedoms of citizenship in ways that
exploded assumptions about the means by which language is controlled.
This resistance was ultimately made manifest in appeals for African-Americans
to write their own textbooks as a demonstration of their intellectual indepen-
dence from the narratives generated by white Americans.116
Benjamin Brawley’s A New Survey of English Literature, the first literary
history written by an African-American, represents an endpoint to the tra-
jectory that this section has graphed. It symbolizes the maturation of a
115
Vincente Rafael, “Translation, American English and the National Insecurities of
Empire,” Social Text 27.4 (2009): 7, 9.
116
R.R. Wright, president of Georgia State Industrial School for Colored Youth
(1891–1921) issued this call for African-Americans to begin to make their own distinct tools
for education:
But it is requisite to remark that not all has been gained, nor could be gained under
Anglo-Saxon teachers. Good and successful as those noble teaches have been, I yet
propose to say I think the negro is on the eve of graduating from their tutorage. This,
too, is in the line of progress. The next stage of our development is to be under Negro
teachers and by Negro methods and not without textbooks written by Negros.
R.R. Wright, AME Church Review Vol. 10. No. 4 (1893), 460.

generation of scholars, who began to teach in and run African-American

colleges and universities. In 1926, the year after Brawley’s book was pub-
lished, Howard University elected John A. Gregg as its first African-
American president.117 Atlanta University began to focus on graduate
instruction, and John Hope became the first African-American president
of the new institution in 1929. Brawley’s book, besides being the first of
its kind by an African-American author, was published by a major com-
pany, Alfred A. Knopf. Despite the meaning with which the book is
freighted, the actual text itself is ecumenical in its stated goals to appreci-
ate “the best efforts of the human to express itself in words.”118 This
work’s silences about the potential intellectual and political importance of
Brawley’s Survey are eloquent in that they signal the development of deep
ambivalences about the question of literary origins.119
Brawley was steadfastly disappointed with the state of African-American
letters. He rejected the Harlem Renaissance’s creative output as e vanescent,
merely “the glitter and tinsel of Lennox Avenue.”120 Instead, he posited a
type of “vernacular” that would form the African-American literary canon:
“when the permanent books written by Negroes appear, they will come
from the great open spaces and not from the sidewalks of New York.”121
While he could point to few examples of writers who fulfilled his vision of
creating books from the “open spaces,” Brawley devoted much of his liter-
ary energy to constructing volumes of triumphalist African-American his-
tories that showed what he believed could be the basis of such writing: A
117
He, however, did not serve. Believing his calling was religious work in South Africa, he
demurred and Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, another African-American man, was elected and
served. See: Walter Dyson, Howard University: The Capstone of Negro Education (Washington,
DC: The Graduate School Howard University), 398.
118
Benjamin Brawley, A New Survey of English Literature (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1925), xiv.
119
He does write the book The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States, but his
premise in the book is that African-American letters have a promising future:
No race can rise to the greatest heights of art until it has yearned and suffered. The
Russians are a case in point. Such has been their background in oppression and striv-
ing that their literature and art are to-day marked by an unmistakable note of power.
The same future awaits the American Negro. The Negro in Literature and Art in the
United States (New York: Duffield & Co., 1918), 7.
120
Benjamin Brawley, review of The Negro in Contemporary Literature by Elizabeth Lay
Green, Opportunity 6 (1928), 381.
121
Quoted in John W. Parker, “Benjamin Brawley—Teacher and Scholar,” Phylon 10.1
(1st Qtr., 1949): 22.
92 M. X. VERNON
Short History of the American Negro, The Negro in Literature and Art, A
Social History of the American Negro, and Negro Genius. Although his
work on the broad strokes of English literature was widely accepted and
used in classrooms, these histories of African-Americans drew the derision
of younger writers who accused Brawley of engaging in a “minority jingo,”
that is, essentializing the realities of African-American life and decontextu-
alizing the lives of the African-Americans he profiled. One critic went so
far as to describe Brawley’s Negro Builders and Heroes, as “totally innocent
of the least perception of the deep and complex and distorted tragedy of
class relations of American society.”122 This sentiment is representative of
a strain of critique that gained potency in the late 1920s and 1930s among
African-American writers seeking the means to conceive the intervention
of African-American letters within a global literary scene.123
The debate around Brawley’s work represents a crux in the thinking
about origins that had been so vital in the shadow of the Civil War. The
two sides of this conversation, while seemingly opposed, both seek to
revisit the terms under which the allegiances between African-Americans
and the deep history of the nation could be understood. As part of a larger
strategy to theorize blackness as a transnational and transhistorical con-
cept, both Brawley and his critics depart from arguments that positioned
African-American literature within an English literary tradition that
derived from the Middle Ages. This maneuver is perhaps an ironic response
to earlier assertions about the place of African-American letters within a
larger literary matrix because it provoked suspicion that the ties of black-
ness might be just as fictive as the bonds of language:
To divorce himself [the African-American writer] from the American past

and the challenging present in the interest of a mythical alliance with the
black folks throughout the world is as mistaken and regressive an effort as
122
Benjamin Stolberg, “Minority Jingo,” The Nation, 145 (October 23, 1937), 437–39.
His scathing review drew enough attention to spur Alain Locke to write a response, “Jingo,
Counter Jingo and Us,” Opportunity, 16 (1938), 8.
123
Although there was fervent opposition to Brawley’s positions on African-American lit-
erature—he believed that the Harlem Renaissance would not produce great literature, which
set him against many of the most prominent writers of his time—their positions were perhaps
not quite as far apart as they might seem. Brawley himself once claimed African-American
literature to be on equal footing with other world literatures because there is “something
very elemental at the heart of the race, something that finds its origin in the African Forest,
in the sighings of the night wind, and in the falling of the stars.” The Negro in Literature and
Art, 7.
trying to overcome the evils of industrialism by wrecking factories and

returning to the simplicity of the medieval guild system of handicrafts…As a
writer, he uses the language that Shakespeare spoke and Milton wrote, the
language of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.124
Nonetheless, the idea that African-American letters might be traced to

medieval origins began to lose currency during the early twentieth-century.
The cultural work that led to the efflorescence of African-American litera-
ture and scholarship in the 1920s and 1930s had been done so thoroughly
as to be rendered invisible.
Although Brawley himself seemed to reject any special emphasis on the
Middle Ages as they relate to African-American literature, two of the poems
for which he is best remembered make reference to the Middle Ages:
“Chaucer” and “My Hero.” The Middle Ages as read through his poetry
occupy an imaginative space for Brawley that is not clearly discernable in his
scholarly work. Both poems were reproduced in The Book of American
Negro Poetry (1922).125 Brawley’s poems take up subjects that are distant
from one another: “Chaucer” describes the author’s reaction to reading
Geoffrey Chaucer’s oeuvre; “My Hero” was written in memory of Robert
Gould Shaw, and likens the Colonel of the African-American Civil War
regiment to the “Blameless knight” Galahad.126 Despite the disparity in
topics, his use of the Middle Ages achieves what he describes as the “true
touchstone for poetry”: suggestiveness.127 In defining the term he writes:
124
Charles I. Glicksburg “The Negro Cult of the Primitive,” The Antioch Review Spring
10.1 (1944): 48, 52.
125
James Weldon Johnson, editor, The American Book of Negro Poetry (New York, Harcourt
Brace and Company, 1922), 197–199.
126
Brawley fully engages with the tropes of medievalisms in “My Hero” by touching upon
chivalry, martyrdom, and the other knights who engage in the grail quest but fail. This poem
is a fitting but probably unconscious counter to the poetry of the Civil War that evoked simi-
lar language and themes to describe members of the Confederate army. For example, the
General Turner Ashby was nicknamed the “Knight of the Confederacy” and his life was
memorialized by verse that framed the conflict between the North and South as akin to a war
between Christians, “Moors and Pagans.” Ashby led his side with his “sabre” and “manly
breast.” See Cynthia Wachtell, “The Author of the Civil War,” The New York Times, 6 July,
2012. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/the-author-of-the-civil-war/.
127
A New Survey of English Literature, xiii.
94 M. X. VERNON
That which is remote or strange or unattainable beckons us away to an ideal

realm of wonder; it is this ‘devotion to something afar’ that accounts for the
appeal of the Middle Ages or fairyland or hereafter.128
Read through this lens, his poetry seems to use the Middle Ages as a
vehicle to express the sublime, his ecstatic visualization of what is out of
reach. These poems carry the added significance of appearing in a volume
edited by James Weldon Johnson, one of the most important literary crit-
ics of his time. This is to say, even as young writers sought out novel points
of origin, the medieval was embedded within one of the earliest attempts
to envision an African-American literary canon.129
Johnson himself was the subject of a poem that makes extensive reference
to the Middle Ages. It appears on a notecard addressed to Johnson, written
by an African-American member of Cornell University’s literary club:
King Arthur Speaks:

Spread the Round Table, sound the clarion call!
Bring choicest viands, rich and mete for all!
And Galahad and Percivale, be fleet,
For such as you our lordly guest must meet.
Athwart the table see a shadow creep!
The Holy Grail, envisioned bright and deep,
Make way! Give place! Let welcomes abound!
A gallant knight comes to the Table Round!130
The poem, written in heroic couplets, is partly a joke, thus one should not
overburden it with interpretation. However, there is something to be
gleaned from the use of King Arthur’s court as a recognizable cultural
point of reference on a piece of ephemera. The frivolity of the medium and
the poem’s deliberate anachronism are freighted with the history of the
Middle Ages discussed above and bespeak the cultural penetration of
medieval narratives. Given Brawley’s vision of the sublime power of the
128
Ibid.
129
In his preface to the volume, Johnson sardonically argues that the book needed to be
written so people would know that there were African-American poets. The American Book
of Negro Poetry, vii.
130
Haille E. Queen, Personal Note written to James Weldon Johnson. Mss. 797, 3.4.
Emory University Archives. Queene also corresponded with Du Bois. In a 1907 letter she
mentions that she is her club’s literary critic and sole African-American member. “Letter to
W.E.B. Du Bois” Ithaca, February 11, 1907. The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Vol 1.
Edited by Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973.
medieval, it is fitting that this poem provides a fantasy of Johnson, who

asserted in his own writing the importance of transcending race, arriving
at a court in which all are equal.
Appendix: Dante
Henrietta Cordelia Ray
Rare medieval Spirit! brooding Seer!

Grand, lonely Poet! scaling heights divine,
And lifting from grave mysteries the veil,
Through the dim centuries thou speakest still
In tones of thunder; and subdued by awe
We listen, for thy intuitions fine,
Thy insight keen discovered motives hid,
And aim close wound in aim thou couldst perceive,
Unwinding minor aims in which ’twas wrapt.
Knit with the very fibres of thy soul,
Thy country’s weal a cherished charge became;
And Destiny stern frowning o’er the land,
Upheaved thy feelings and inflamed thy speech.
Indignant at the wrongs that Florence bore,
Florence, thy well-beloved, thy hallowed home,
Against the law’s lax mandates bloody war,
And all unawed, rebuked the false decrees
Of kings, of conquerors, popes and cardinals,
The pure “white flower” waving in thy hand.
Thy thought self-poised, self-centered, dragged thy soul
Into what depths of grief and deepest pain!
But to posterity thou didst bequeathe—
Despite the scathing of the contest fierce—
Thy reveries’ illuminated page.
The groans of spirits plunged in woe’s abyss,
The sweet repentance of the wistful souls
Climbing in patience Purgatory’s steep,
Called thee to muse on life’s strange mystery.
Before thy vision what fair vistas stretched,
Empurpled with the glow of Paradise!
Thou heardst in dreams the harmonies sublime
Of martyr glorified and rapturous saint.
96 M. X. VERNON
And she, Beatrice the celestial one,

Who woke thy heart’s best love and sweetest joy,
Alone was meet to guide thy willing steps
From planet to fixed star, and onward still,
Above the splendor of the luminous stars,
Where blessed souls their orisons uplift,
And isles supernal bloom with amaranth fair,
Up to the Empyrean’s crystal courts,
Where Majesty Divine enthrones itself.
And soon the Perfect Vision met thy gaze,
The mystic Trinity all solved by light,
Three colors, three reflections in the one,
Christ was revealed—the Human, the Divine!
God’s plan for our redemption clear to thee!
And now, O lonely Spirit, brooding Seer!
So long in conflict, weary with unrest,
Within the beatific realms above,
Bathed in that Light Ineffable thou dwell’st,
O yearning Soul, at last, at last in peace!
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CHAPTER 3
Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark

Twain and Charles Chesnutt’s Black
Romance
The historical material presented in Chap. 2 shows an unexpected network

of connections between African-American authors who made strategic use
of medieval material and medievalisms across the nineteenth century and
into the twentieth century. This chapter seeks to move from the broad
evidentiary base presented in that chapter and into sources that must be
read through their ambivalences and the gaps in archival records. Such
works are elusive and deeply allusive; they demand a mode of critique that
can engage with the multiple attitudes they present and, equally impor-
tantly, these texts must be read as negotiating between the tradition that
informs them and the creator’s revivification of that source material. Here
one might consider a quote from Harryette Muller’s article on passing and
racial forgetting that contrasts with the primary intervention this chapter
makes about the nature of myth as it relates to the construction of race:
It may be African-Americans, supposedly those Americans with the most

sketchy genealogical records, who have most consistently constructed racial
identities for themselves that do not rely on myths of racial purity.1
In her article Muller advances the larger argument that “America’s ethnic
minorities have remembered what other Americans have chosen to
1
Harryette Mullen, “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” Diacritics
24.2 (1994), 72.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_3
104 M. X. VERNON
forget.”2 Specifically, she points to an inter-racial past that is often

whitewashed from popular iterations of national histories. Her assertion
about racial memory intersects with the argument made in Chap. 2 about
African-Americans’ use of medieval materials to deconstruct the notion of
white purity: however, this chapter will question the opposition between
blackness and racial myth-making.
In so doing, what follows will work counter to the impulse articulated
in “Black to the Future,” Mark Dery’s oft-quoted orientation to the genre
of Afrofuturism:
Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose
energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces
of its history, imagine possible futures?3
Dery tentatively answers in the affirmative but warns that these visions of
the future must be sought in unlikely spaces and may take forms that are
difficult to reckon with. This presentation of the stakes and difficulties of
Afrofuturism stands in curious relation with those laid out by Muller; the
desire to illuminate the past despite the occluding power of myth cuts
across the decision to speculate on the future in defiance of the attraction
to construct narratives out of the remnants of history available to African-
Americans. I follow Alys Eve Weinbaum in drawing these arguments
together to suggest that a counter-narrative can emerge from the space
between such broad and contrasting claims about the agendas of African-
American literature.4 This chapter will examine the construction of specu-
lative Afro-pasts, how “myths of racial purity” were reoriented to create a
fictional heritage that contests the primacy afforded to narratives meant to
make whiteness into a mode of thought. The difficulties and rewards for
this approach to reading for these Afro-pasts are encapsulated in the
observation Mark Jerng makes about the narrative strategies of post-Civil
War romances in which writers embedded “racial markers in unusual
places in order to build in knowledge of the projected world.”5 What
2
Ibid.
3
Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourses of Cyberculture (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1994), 180.
4
Alys Eve Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in
Transatlantic Modern Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 197.
5
Mark Jerng, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (New York: Fordham
FAILED KNIGHTS AND BROKEN NARRATIVES: MARK TWAIN AND CHARLES… 105
Jerng brings to light is a complementary image to an Afro-futurist project

of interrogating knowledge formation by intermeshing generic and racial
codes. The “unusual” sites construct a speculative past loaded with mean-
ing that aspires to scaffold onto contemporary imaginings of race.
However, to access these markers requires some excavation and their
meaning can be fleeting; the optimism within creating them falters as the
authors seem to be unable to linger within their own fantasies. This in turn
prompts a corollary question to Dery’s: Can a community whose future so
often has seemed to be under threat and whose gaze is trained at ever-
evolving issues of the present, inhabit an imagined past? This chapter will
examine several evanescent moments where the expectations of medieval
romance collude with attempts to depict black bodies to briefly reveal the
interstices of race and anti-racist possibilities before collapsing under
imperatives that solidify racial boundaries.
The example of W.E.B. Du Bois’ use of romance shows some of this
dynamic’s workings. His speech and later article “Criteria of Negro Art”
(1926) is a practical call for art that is useful as propaganda. However, the
context for his argument is an unusual departure from his stated goal; he
chooses to begin with his recollections of Loch Katrine, the site of Walter
Scott’s long poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) and “the romance of the
world” which “did not die and lie forgotten in the Middle Age [sic].”6 He
pairs his reading of the critical perspective African-Americans bring to nor-
mative American ideologies with his recollections of a visit to Loch Katrine:
Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear
idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way
that white Americans cannot. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied
with its present goals and ideals?
In the high school where I studied we learned most of Scott’s “Lady of
the Lake” by heart. In after life [sic] once it was my privilege to see the lake.
It was a Sunday. It was quiet. You could glimpse the deer wandering in
unbroken forests; you could hear the soft ripple of romance on the waters.
Around me fell the cadence of that poetry of my youth. I fell asleep full of
the enchantment of the Scottish border.7
6
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in African-American Literary Theory: A
Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York City: New York University Press, 2000), 19.
7
Here it should be noted that the region that inspired Douglass, Duncanson, and Du Bois
had begun to be freighted with a parallel set of associations about black imagination that are
a step removed from the influence of Scott. Ibid., 17–18.
106 M. X. VERNON
Du Bois continues to compare his experience at Loch Katrine with those

of white excursionists to suggest that white Americans could not truly see
the world before them, but more importantly that they could not visualize
“what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we [African-
Americans] had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning
Hand, the Feeling Heart.” Du Bois alludes to Scott here in much the same
way Frederick Douglass came to read his own name through Scott’s
romances. When Douglass’ performative transformation by engaging with
the provenance of his name was discussed in Chap. 2, I suggested that he
used romance to foster trans-Atlantic allegiances: however, it is equally
significant that Douglass was reading trans-historically to align the history
of Scottish and Irish independence struggles with those of African-
American slaves, risking the “superimposition of European history”8 for
the potential power of laying claim to history-making.
Similarly, Du Bois reads black temporality and black struggles as an
index of American nationalism derived from romance. He argues that
African-Americans inhabit the dual, complementary frames of romance:
the imaginary and the imminent.9 Romance as a mode runs parallel but
counter to Ellison’s famous depiction of black progress as the “step from
feudalism into the vortex of industrialism.”10 The difference between the
perspectives of Ellison and Du Bois is fine but significant because perspec-
tive itself is in question. Du Bois presents the entanglements of blackness
within the absolutizing tendencies of nation. Du Bois’ concept allows for
the problems of modernity and narratives of progress but situates African-
Americans as uniquely capable of reading across temporal frames and thus
able to rearticulate and reorient the discursive logic that African-Americans
were subject to.
This positionality enables habits of reading that destabilize the teleol-
ogy of the Western literary tradition. Du Bois hints at this by layering
recollections of his childhood, his older self, and Scott’s Lady of the Lake
onto the physical landscape of Loch Katrine and the implied political
8
Walter Johnson, “Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality and the
History of Atlantic Slavery” American Studies 45.4 (2000), 499.
9
Fittingly, the scholar who was being honored in Du Bois’ speech, Carter G. Woodson, in
his The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 described the narratives of “the successful striv-
ings of Negroes for enlightenment under most adverse circumstances” as “like beautiful
romances.” See: Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, 2nd edition
(Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, Inc., 1919), iii.
10
Ralph Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Harper’s Magazine (August 1964), 53.
landscape of America. Du Bois’ imbrication of temporalities and geogra-

phies held immense transformational potential for the ways in which black
bodies would be perceived. He ends his address with the hope that the
world would see that “[negro] art is as new as it is old and as old as new”;
through this intervention within art he proposes that audiences would
“recognize” the humanity of African-Americans.11
Du Bois has attracted attention for his speculative science fiction work
although this classification has proved to be difficult to maintain.12 In their
introduction to the recently uncovered Du Bois short story “The Princess
Steel,” Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert use the term “speculative
romance” to loosely describe a tone and a set of generic conventions in Du
Bois’ fiction that range from fantasy, to gothic fiction, to pulp, to Marxist
propaganda, to allegory, to conventional science fiction. In locating Du
Bois within the nexus of such a broad set of meanings, the authors seek to
assert an artistic trajectory parallel to his familiar public intellectual career.
However, this recuperative work to read Du Bois as anticipating later spec-
ulative African-American writing threatens to evacuate the meanings Du
Bois calls upon when he evokes romance.
The use of romance produces a set of perspectives orthogonal to those
Brown and Rusert lay out and demand their own threads of inquiry. Du
Bois’ longest sustained version of romance, Dark Princess, which adheres
to the main mandate of “Criteria of Negro Art,” introduces an unusual
allusion to a questing knight in the midst of the reunion after a long
separation between its two main characters, Matthew Townes and Princess
Kautilya:
11
Du Bois, 23. His use of the word “recognize” should be accorded the full emphasis that
Judith Butler accords it in her Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?:
The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life

being produced according to the norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of
life. In this way the normative production of ontology thus produces the epistemo-
logical problem of apprehending life, and this in turn gives rise to the ethical problem
of what it is to acknowledge or, indeed to guard against injury and violence…The
“frames” that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot
(or that produce lives across a continuum of life) not only organize visual experience
but also generate specific ontologies of the subject.
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Princess Steel,” PMLA 130.3 (2015), 819.
12
108 M. X. VERNON
Like Galahad you would not ask the meaning of the sign. You would not
name my name. How could I know, dearest, what I meant to you?13
This reference to Galahad is provocative and somewhat puzzling. Although

it is Percival who neglects to question the signs he sees before him in most
iterations of the Arthurian legend, the choice of Galahad echoes his read-
ing of the same knight in the passage of Darkwater: Voices from Within the
Veil discussed in Chap. 1, albeit with an inversion of the reference’s
polarity:
Down the dark forest of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the
name of “the noble-minded men of several nations,” to introduce com-
merce and civilization. What came of it? ‘Rubber and murder, slavery in its
worst form,’ wrote Glave in 1895.14
In Darkwater Galahad was merely the avatar of whiteness guided by a

desire for colonization and extraction, a perverse image of the knight on
the grail quest. In Dark Princess, the global color line and “the mission of
the darker peoples” has taken the place of European imperialism.15 Du
Bois resurrects the purity of chivalry by detaching it from the contradic-
tions between legend and history; he instead attaches it to the hope for a
union among people of color represented by the “golden brown” child
Townes and the Princess conceive as well as to the legacy of racial achieve-
ment of which the parents are already recipients. This additional bit of
information about the temporal position of people of color is significant,
particularly Du Bois’ play on incorporating the antiquity of Indian history
as a natural companion to African-American political development.
The lingering conflict of the text is about whether or not African-
Americans, read through Townes, have developed enough to take their
place alongside other global peoples of color. And at the risk of over-
extending her analysis, I would suggest that Du Bois seems to outdo the
associative layering Hortense Spillers uses to discuss markers on black
female bodies that are “so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is
13
W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess, 2nd edition (Jackson: Banner Books, 1995), 224.
14
W.E.B. Du Bois “The Souls of White Folk,” in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 502.
15
Dark Princess, 257.
no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean.”16 Du Bois
risks instrumentalizing his main female character to generate a historical
lineage that can rival any European power’s. Moreover, Du Bois conflates
the Princess with the Queene of Faerie to whom he alludes in the novel’s
dedication and envoy. Not only does this link the Princess to Shakespeare’s
Titania, Kautilya attains the ultimate significance available in romance; she
determines the contours and depth of the romance’s allegory, in this case,
African-American integration into the struggles of the global color line
maps onto her narration of Townes’ attempts to be an adequate suitor. Du
Bois has rightly been criticized for diminishing the place of the black
woman in his writing, paradoxically by assigning them “surplus symbolic
value” of this sort.17 However, Du Bois’ treatment of Queen and Princess
does not operate in service of masculine desire, rather it redounds to his
concerns about the possibilities held within the genre he has chosen. Dark
Princess’ envoy concludes with a request to the Queene of Faerie to fix the
preceding text’s epistemological status:
Beg her, sometime, somewhere, of her abundant leisure, to tell us hard

humans: Which is really Truth—Fact or Fancy? the Dream of the Spirit or
the Pain of the Bone?18
Du Bois presents the dialectical problem of black fantasy’s allure against

the pressing need to address what he would later describe as the “propa-
ganda of history” and the imperative of “telling the truth about [the his-
torical actions of nations], so far as the truth is ascertainable” against “fine
romance” that comes under the guise of history. These are two seemingly
opposed engagements with temporality, signaled by the “abundant lei-
sure” available to the Queen who exists in fancy as opposed to the “hard
humans.” Du Bois offers no definitive resolution to the dilemma beyond
offering his book as a possible compromise between the two. However,
what is significant about this line is that such a question could be enter-
tained, that is, fantasy might operate on the same plane as social realism or
historical analysis to counteract the production of racist ideology. What
Du Bois offers is not speculation in the sense of science fiction or time
16
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”
Diacritics 17.2 (1987), 65.
17
Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 33.
18
Dark Princess, 312.
110 M. X. VERNON
travel. His work conjectures temporalities or modes of reading history that

contest predominant ones and implies alternative structures for formulat-
ing a history of race. Despite the narrative drive towards the child Townes
and Princess Kautilya conceive, the text is emphatically about establishing
a racial past. In this respect, his work anticipates the trends of Afro-futurism
and the recuperative narratives of traveling backwards through time found
in Octavia Butler’s Kindred or instantaneously moving across time and
space in Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café. This latter example is discussed in
Chap. 5. Du Bois is “taking time seriously”19 in speculating about multiple
temporalities that intersect with and pull against imperialist forms of keep-
ing time through the written word.
Bound together with the optimism of envisioning a “beautiful world”
is the simultaneous recognition that this alternative world has failed to
take root. The politics of failure puts stress on historical reasoning and
myth-making as a process for rationalizing power structures that have
yielded the ends visible in the world. Failure as narrative strategy creates
opportunities for usurping dominant historical or mythical narratives and
allows for a black presence to reflect backwards upon them—thus the “tra-
ditional” and what Paul Gilroy calls the “non-traditional tradition” of
black political and artistic discourse come into view at the same time.20
Dark Princess comes to a bathetic end wherein the “golden brown” child
who will unite the “darker peoples” of the world is announced, yet no
corresponding political change comes to fruition either in a final literary
flourish or, obviously, in the real world. Here again, the text’s question
about the significance of the imaginative over the historical seems tren-
chant. At the limits of romance’s means to express the modalities of black
temporality, the force of the genre’s availability to the European and white
American world is felt as an ideological lack, what Du Bois rightly identi-
fies as romance’s collusion with producing a unified and “beautiful” world.
Toni Morrison provides a theoretical apparatus for approaching work
like Du Bois’ which poses this tangle of questions about temporality,
blackness, and genre. When Homi Bhabha theorized the relationship
between race and the Western literary tradition in his The Location of
Culture, he turned to Toni Morrison’s use of a haunting narrative in
Beloved to attest to African-American lives that can only be glimpsed
Johnson, 486.
19
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge:
20

through archival evidence.21 Implicit within her strategy of countering the

“dissolution” that threatens the roots of African-American letters in the
absence of historical material is an inversion of racial expectations; she
largely kept white characters out of view and supplemented a haunting
narrative as a proxy for memory.22 Her ghost, Beloved, crosses between
the bodily and the narratival; although Beloved takes physical form and
lives with the main character Sethe (who in turn is based on the real
woman Margaret Garner), Beloved gives voice to the “dissolution,”
revealing gaps in historical memory.23 Beloved’s fragmented narration
skips between the chronological period of the text and the earlier one of
the slave trade. In a passage that recreates the Middle Passage, Beloved
refers to the main character, Sethe, as well as to Beloved’s own capture:
I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own
and I want to be there in the place where her face is to be looking at it too
a hot thing
All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not
crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouch-
ing …24
This narrative style bears no resemblance to that of the rest of the text, yet
its content demonstrates a substrate that connects the two times and their
characters in the “now,” a moment that stretches over generations who are
affected by slavery: the technologies and economies that could engineer the
slave trade and the underlying cruelty that kept the wheels of slavery in
motion. Morrison allows no space for thinking of what came before the
slave trade within her work to recalibrate our sense of the modern; Beloved’s
memories are the oldest in the book and they begin on a slave ship, a transi-
tional space to European temporal and political paradigms.25 These maneu-
vers assert the primacy of African-American narratives within the American
literary tradition, although these stories had to be excavated and recon-
structed from predominately white texts and curated with authorial care.
21
See: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 284–285.
22
For a summary of the Margaret Garner case that is thought to be the inspiration for
Beloved see: Carmen Gillespie, A Critical Companion to Toni Morrison (New York: Facts on
File, 2008), 327.
23
Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s
Tail, 1993), 178.
24
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), 211–212.
25
Johnson, 487.
112 M. X. VERNON
Morrison more fully articulates the possibilities of reading an African-

American presence written within “white” texts through her series of lec-
tures, Playing in the Dark, in which she meditates on the idea of racially
“unconscious” texts and the implications of rereading novels for embed-
ded details that radically alter their explicit meanings:
The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings,
which motions to future readings as well as contemporary ones, implies a
shareable world and an endlessly flexible language. Readers and writers both
struggle to interpret and perform within a common language shareable
imaginative worlds…
What does positioning one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society
that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What hap-
pened to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level
always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of
readers that understands itself to be “universal” or race-free?26
Reading and writing here are presented as speculative endeavors in the

sense that they create the “projective past”; they intercede in reconstruct-
ing the past and also try to imagine new configurations for reception in the
future.27 Morrison’s theorization is fueled by the interdependence of race
and language—biology and narrative—as is made visible by the desire of
African-American writers to locate a heritage of blackness within the seams
of literature dominated by whiteness or how language that has grown
mundane can be transformed by reassessing history’s burdens. The “share-
able imaginative world” reader and writer discover breaks down race as a
reified category and forces a critical re-examination of racial dichotomies
encoded to produce meanings that do not inhere within the logic of a plot
or dominant narratives of history.
This chapter will consider Charles Chesnutt’s The House behind the
Cedars (1900)28 as presenting a speculative text with a set of archival,
literary-
traditional, and temporal problems akin to those laid out by
Morrison. Here it is important to distinguish the notion of speculation this
26
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), xii.
27
Bhabha, 364.
28
All references to The House behind the Cedars and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court will be to the following editions: Charles Chesnutt, The House behind the Cedars (New
York: Penguin Books, 1993); Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(New York: Penguin Books, 1971).
chapter will advance from the intersecting arguments Saidiya Hartman puts
forth about “critical fabulation.”29 Hartman responds to the absence of
archival sources by reasserting perspectives considered “nonhistorical” or
disposable within historical narratives to “topple the hierarchy of discourse
and engulf authorized speech in a clash of voices.”30 This book instead
draws on a large assemblage of archival material and shows that when deal-
ing with the Middle Ages scholars and fiction writers often entered a coun-
ter-factual mode in the sense that they reconfigure “universally accepted,
uncontroversial fact.”31 Chapter 2 sets forth a number of instances where
African-American authors and intellectuals revisited received knowledge
about the Middle Ages to posit a multicultural medieval England with the
implicit aim of yoking that past to racial synthesis in America’s future. What
Chesnutt derives from Sir Walter Scott is more ambiguous about the rela-
tionship between the past, present, and future despite how closely his novel
hews to the romance genre. This ambiguity is partially an incident of the
context surrounding the novel’s production but is also itself an interven-
tion into the linearity of dominant historical trajectories.
Because The House behind the Cedars makes explicit reference to its
primary source, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), and because Chesnutt has
left behind an extensive archive of letters and writings that seemingly give
ample context to the novel’s evolution, it is rarely read in conversation
with other African-American writers who themselves sought to overcome
mnemonic gaps or who have to be recovered through strategies that
assume the major archival silences. Ironically, this abundance of material
has directed a significant amount of scholarship on Chesnutt through nar-
row channels, frequently directed towards the novel’s mulatta character,
Rena Warwick. One of the earliest assessments of Chesnutt’s work pub-
lished in Phylon situates Chesnutt as “the outstanding delineator of the
Negro–white offspring” and points to The House behind the Cedars as his
psychological study of the topic.32 Some seventy years later, Rena’s body
29
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12.2 (June 2008), 1–14.
30
Ibid., 13; 12.
31
Catherine Gallagher, “Telling It Like It Wasn’t,” Pacific Coast Philology 45 (2010), 12.
32
Penelope Bullock, “The Mulatto in American Fiction,” Phylon, 6.1 (1945), 81. An even
earlier overview of Chesnutt’s work emphasizes that the relationship between Rena and her
white suitor was “decent and respectable” as opposed to the highly sexualized inter-racial
encounters shown in Thomas Dixon’s work. See: Hugh M. Gloster, “Charles W. Chesnutt,
Pioneer in the Fiction of Negro Life,” Phylon, 2.1 (1941), 61.
114 M. X. VERNON
continues to be re-evaluated in ambitious ways, once she has even been

described as having two bodies.33
Rena’s body, the nuances of her biology down to the marrow of her
bones, has attracted this critical gaze, perhaps for good reason.34 Chesnutt
described the novel in strikingly biological terms: as a “favorite child, for
Rena was of ‘mine own people.’”35 Moreover, the same year that he pub-
lished The House behind the Cedars he also penned a problematic article
series called “The Future American” (1900) that lays out the means by
which the nation could “lighten the breed” through inter-racial
“amalgamation.”36 What gets lost behind the blank practicality of his sug-
gestion of “mechanical mixture” between races that threatens to darkly
mirror the discourse of “Anglo-Saxon purity” to which he objected is
Chesnutt’s awareness of racial discourse as a powerful “social fiction”—a
phrase Chesnutt uses—that requires a speculative gaze at both the heri-
tage of those constructions and the alternative trajectories for their
futures.37 The power of Chesnutt’s argument lies in his suggestion that
not only is racial admixture as a habit of thought an inevitability, it is
already a fact of America’s past. When writing about the genesis of his
popular conjure stories, he traces a literary genealogy that tracks from “the
dark continent along with the dark people” into a shared history of African
beliefs “mingled and confused with the witchcraft and ghost lore of the
white man, and the tricks and delusions of the Indian conjurer.”38
33
Melissa Ryan, “Rena’s Two Bodies: Gender and Whiteness in Charles Chesnutt’s ‘The
House Behind The Cedars,’” Studies in The Novel 43:1 (2011): 38–54. Even when Scott’s
influence is the center of an argument, it is often discussed in relationship to Rena. See, for
example, Earle V. Bryant, “Charles Chesnutt’s Southern Black Jew: Rena Walden’s
Masquerade in the House Behind the Cedars,” American Literary Realism 1.2 (1999):
15–21.
34
Stephen P. Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of
Whiteness,” American Literary History 8.3 (Fall 1996): 426–448.
35
Chesnutt to John Chamberlain, June 16, 1930, in Charles Waddell Chesnutt Papers,
Western Reserve Historical Society Library, Cleveland, Ohio.
36
Charles Chesnutt, “The Future American,” in Charles Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, eds.
Joseph R. McElrath, Robert C. Leitz, and Jesse S. Crisler (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 134.
37
Ibid.
38
This account of African-American folklore mirrors contemporary readings of white folk-
lore used to describe Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn discussed in the following
section. Charles Chesnutt, “Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South,” in Charles W. Chesnutt:
Stories, Novels & Essays, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: The Library of America, 2002),
155–161.
Chesnutt anticipates Morrison and Hartman in creating a lineage

between his stories and African storytelling before the Middle Passage as a
means of uncovering seemingly lost black voices. However, Chesnutt cru-
cially deviates from those writers in that the endpoint of this genealogy
constructed through fiction is not self-recognition. Indeed, Chesnutt
resists the clarity of racial distinctions and thus the solidity of historical
closure. The contentiousness of his narrative choices was made manifest in
his struggles to get The House behind the Cedars published in the form he
wished, particularly with respect to Rena. For example, Chesnutt sent an
early version of The House behind the Cedars to an editor of Century
Magazine who his erstwhile mentor George Washington Cable had com-
mended as able to provide a “faithful, wise word of friendly counsel.”39
After receiving a rejection, Chesnutt responded tartly to this estimation of
the editor’s skill in recognizing the historical ambivalences Rena
represented:
Its faithfulness is obvious, its wisdom I cannot question, though I shall have
to study both the letter and the story to avail myself of it, for while there is
something lacking, Mr. Gilder only very vaguely intimates what it may be.
I do not think I am deficient in humor, though I dare say the sentiment of
the story is a little ‘amorphous.’ It was written under the ever-present con-
sciousness, so hard for me to get rid of, that a very large class of people
consider the class the story treats of as “amorphous.” I fear that there is too
much of this sentiment to make mulattoes good magazine characters […]40
He adds towards the end of the letter that he would have to “drop the
attempt at realism” in order to see his work in print.41 Chesnutt shuttles
between considering Rena as representative of a racial category and as a
“sentiment,” that is, a demographic reality and an avatar for a racial
future. As he makes clear, “amorphousness” in terms of race and narra-
tive construction is the goal of the story. His resistance to fully partici-
pating within either the accepted presentation of race or genre points
to a larger refusal of the “active social relation” that links the two
39
Charles Chesnutt to George Washington Cable, June 13, 1890, in “To Be an Author”
Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1889–1905, eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Robert Leitz, III
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 65.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
116 M. X. VERNON
categories.42 His years of rewriting, including embedding Walter Scott’s

Ivanhoe deeply into the world around Rena, seemed to be geared towards
making her body more recognizable to his publishers and to the broad-
est possible audience. However, the amount of attention her body has
garnered since the book was published suggests that her body remains
only partially legible. The Century editor perhaps rightly calls the story
“amorphous” in sentiment, as it does not conform to the expectations
before it. Even when the novel met with enough success to become the
subject of the film The Veiled Aristocrats (1932) the studio altered the
story’s ending so that, in the words of the director, “an audience will
leave the theatre ‘feeling that all good must triumph in the end, and with
the words “Oh want [sic] that just wonderful” instead of gloomy
muttering.’”43 Thirty years after its publication, Chesnutt’s vision of
America’s historical trajectory was unthinkable.
While the interpretation of Rena is indeed a central issue of The House
behind the Cedars, it is necessary to read her through the negotiation and
compromise that Chesnutt undertook in the years of developing the
novel. The issues at stake in interpreting Rena’s character from the per-
spective of his evolving and more strategic approach to writing are not
ones of the body, rather they concern genre and his interpretation of
white sentiments about his character’s ambiguity. It is tempting to read
Chesnutt’s use of Scott in The House behind the Cedars as an author’s
attempt to place a “black message” in a “white envelope”: however, such
an argument would miscast the difficulties of Chesnutt’s text.44 Here the
archive’s silences become more evident as do the possibilities of reading
against them. The two clear influences on Chesnutt’s work, A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Ivanhoe, are not mentioned
within Chesnutt’s letters. He only obliquely refers to the authors of either
text. This is particularly surprising in the case of Twain, who he had met,
who shared Chesnutt’s interest in writing folk narratives, who published
in the same venues that Chesnutt wished to see his own work produced,
and who was a friend of George Washington Cable. Nonetheless, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is intimately connected to
42
Colleen Lye, “Racial Form,” Representations 104.1 (2008), 99.
43
Oscar Micheaux to Charles Chesnutt, June 13, 1890, quoted in An Exemplary Citizen:
Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1906–1932, eds. Jessie S. Crisler, Robert Leitz, III, and Joseph
R. McElrath, Jr. (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 2002), 141.
44
See: John Sekora “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority
in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 10.3 (1987): 482–515.
The House behind the Cedars through the speculative interventions both
make when adopting narratives of the Middle Ages. I will use Twain as a
critical antecedent to Chesnutt’s experimentations with reconfiguring the
imaginative domains of medieval romance as a space allowed to be “race
free.” What this chapter proposes is that just as Morrison reconstructs the
terms of black modernity in Beloved, Twain and Chesnutt reframe the
terms of American narratives of progress premised on romance to be
inflected by blackness in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
and The House behind the Cedars.
Twain and Chesnutt comprehended the utility of romance as a means
of producing a history of race, that is, mythopoesis reflected through Scott
that anticipates and renders ineluctable the consolidation of racial identity
and its expressions of power. When Twain critiques Scott’s “enchant-
ments,” “sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries” that held
sway in southern literature he diagnoses the dangers of tradition in the
sense of drawing together across space and time discontinuous symbolic
fields such that their meaning is fundamentally altered.45 Scott offers what
Frederic Jameson identifies as one of the primary strengths of romance as
a generic structure and a latent ideology:
the apparent reinforcement of the notion of tradition, of some deep and

unbroken continuity between the mythic imagination of primitive man and
the sophisticated products of the modern societies.46
The critical node for this strand of reading Scott is the marriage at Ivanhoe’s
conclusion that depicts peace between Normans and Saxons and more
broadly anticipates a distant united Britain through characters that “cut
across physical, political, legal, and cultural borders”47:
But besides this domestic retinue, these distinguished nuptials were cele-
brated by the attendance of the high-born Normans, as well as Saxons,
joined with the universal jubilee of the lower orders, that marked the
marriage of two individuals as a pledge of the future peace and harmony
45
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper and Brother Publishers, 1883),
328.
46
Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7.1
(Autumn 1975): 156.
47
Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford
118 M. X. VERNON
betwixt two races, which, since that period, have been so completely min-
gled, that the distinction has become wholly invisible…
[F]or as the two nations mixed in society and formed intermarriages with
each other, the Normans abated their scorn, and the Saxons were refined
from their rusticity. But it was not until the reign of Edward the Third that
the mixed language, now termed English, was spoken at the court of
London and the hostile distinction of Norman and Saxon seems entirely to
have disappeared.48
Scott chooses to expand his gaze beyond the timeframe of the plot and
look towards the Britain of his audience. This conclusion’s emphasis on
futurity and racial intermixture proleptically reads the development of
British society through the erasure of difference.
While this is already a problematic view of Britain, in a trans-Atlantic con-
text Scott’s romances carried an entirely different set of complications; they
created imagined communities that excised unwelcome perspectives on the
creation and constitution of the nation.49 The intersection of race, history,
and fiction gained terrible relevance in the United States for a Civil War gen-
eration “drunk on Scott,” purchasing more than a half a million volumes of
his work in less than a decade.50 The imaginative reach of this genealogical
impulse can be seen in an 1887 speech by the so-called “Spokesman of the
South” Henry Grady who provides a genealogy that sweeps across a thou-
sand years from Anglo-Saxon England to America in just three sentences:
The Anglo-Saxon blood has dominated always and everywhere. It fed Alfred
when he wrote the charter of English liberty; it gathered about Hampden as he
stood beneath the oak; it thundered in Cromwell’s veins as he fought his king;
it humbled Napoleon at Waterloo: it has touched the desert and jungle with
undying glory; it carried the drumbeat of England around the world and spread
on every continent the gospel of liberty and of God; it established this republic,
carved it from the wilderness, conquered it from the Indians, wrested it from
England, and, at last, stilling its own tumult, consecrated it forever as the home
of the Anglo-Saxon and the theatre of his transcending achievement. Never
one foot of it can be surrendered while that blood lives in American veins and
feeds American hearts to the domination of an alien and inferior race.51
48
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000), 399.
49
This argument borrows from David Blight, Race and Reconciliation (Cambridge:
50
Cynthia Wachtell, War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature 1861–1914
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 33–34.
51
Henry W. Grady, The Life and Labors of Henry W. Grady: His Speeches, His Writing, etc.
(New York: H. C. Hudgins & co., 1890), 189.
Grady’s argument harbors the danger of mythopoesis; he brings logic to a

constellation of events in order to backfill a pre-existing set of beliefs. The
goal of this is as clear as the passage’s structure: to elide the difference
between “events in illo tempore and in hoc tempore.”52 The bridging of
time periods—the adjacency of medieval and modern—is already a specu-
lative act in that it bewitches with the “hypnotic division of Americans into
black and white” or in this case between Anglo-Saxon and African-
American.53 Chesnutt’s article in response to this argument, “What Is a
White Man?,” (1889) written as he began work on The House behind the
Cedars, seizes upon the apparent fantasy of race as a constant across time
and disarticulates the solidity of whiteness into historical difference
between the “Celts and Teutons and Gauls and Slavs.”54
Given the stated resistance of Twain and Chesnutt to the literary and
biological genealogies that spring from the reception of medieval texts,
what is compelling about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
and The House behind the Cedars is that they mobilize those same sources.
The two novels differ significantly from the standpoint of genre—Twain’s
time-travel narrative and Chesnutt’s post-Civil War story—and are often
read as anomalous within the authors’ literary careers. Pudd’nhead Wilson
and The Marrow of Tradition are more commonly associated with each
other because of their meditations on racial disguise and violence.55 Yet, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The House behind the
Cedars conceive of alternative temporal trajectories premised on the rela-
tionship between race and genre. These authors embed race into the
romances they construct to critique the production of historical narratives
that subtended American parables of virtue and progress as a function of
“Anglo-Saxon descent.” In place of those genealogies, they present what
I describe in the introduction to this book (see Chap. 1) as an “anti-
genealogy,” a mode of reading race that refuses the expectations of literary
or biological lineage.
52
John D. Niles, “Maldon and Mythopoesis,” in Old English Literature, ed. R.M. Liuzza
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 448.
53
Jean Toomer to Suzanne LaFolette, September 22 1930. Quoted in Matthew Pratt
Guterl, The Color of Race in America 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001), 155.
54
Charles W. Chesnutt, “What Is a White Man?” The Independent 41 (30 May 1889), 5–6.
55
See: Sandra Gunning, Rape, Race, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature,
1890–1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
120 M. X. VERNON
This argument anticipates those I make about inter-racial collaboration

at a distance—writers separated by hundreds of years—in Chap. 5. Here,
these two novels gain new relevance when read as part of the same project
of usurping the “strange mesmeric power” of tradition to speculate on
blackness not as a deviation from the clarity of progress, but as a point of
inflection within the imaginary of foundational fictions. When read in
conversation with one another these novels conjecture “shareable” worlds,
both literary and real.56
The Two Middle Ages: Reassessing Twain’s Failure

That [Twain] had contradictory feelings does not detract from his achievement
in A Connecticut Yankee or make it a “confused” book as critics frequently
charge. Often because they shy away from the power of the social implications
in the catastrophic ending, critics undervalue the novel. They typically set up a
one-dimensional norm that they then fault Twain for violating.57
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is certainly not the first text
of Twain’s that is considered troubled by the author’s inability to make up
his mind. Critics have long struggled with how to wrestle with the possibili-
ties Twain entertained in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, particularly in
how the author dealt with the threat of lynching raised in the novel. In diag-
nosing the uneasiness at the core of Twain’s novel Ralph Ellison suggests
that the author wrestled with the “deep dichotomies symbolized by black-
ness and whiteness,” particularly centered on the former slave character Jim:
Writing at a time when the black-faced minstrel was still popular, and shortly
after a war which left even the abolitionists weary of those problems
associated with the Negro, Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel
tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype that we see Jim’s dignity and
human capacity emerge.58
Twain was acutely aware of the affiliations between what Ellison described
as the “Anglo-Saxon branch of American folklore” and African-American
folk traditions, a pattern of borrowing and inhabitation that Twain
56
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge:
57
Robert Shulman, Social Criticism and Nineteenth-Century American Fictions (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1987), 147.
58
Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke, Slip the Yoke,” The Partisan Review (Spring 1958),
215.
harnessed throughout his novel, which Shelly Fisher Fiskin outlines in her
study Was Huck Black? 59 Huckleberry Finn’s treatment of Jim reveals the
difficult balance Twain sought to maintain between his role as popular
author and social critic, a tension that created ambivalences visible
throughout the novel. Twain tries to fit the frame of American folklore,
which adds depth to the relationship between Huck and Jim paradoxi-
cally by giving them archetypal roles. The result is a perplexing set of
contradictory readings of America’s relationship to slavery. Twain’s novel
perhaps shows Huckleberry Finn’s growing awareness of slavery’s injus-
tice; or it parodies the ineffective efforts of white Americans to aid
African-Americans who continued to live in danger because of failed
Reconstruction policies; or it humanizes Jim through the inequality of
danger to his life compared to Huck’s; or it places the past of slavery at a
nostalgic remove from Twain’s present; or it minimizes the threat of
racial violence aimed at African-Americans.60
Twain’s masterpiece is vexed by its own undecidedness, its inability to
affirm any one position or even one side of its most consequential issue.
This aspect of Twain’s writing is often read as one of his great failures.
Albert Paine, Twain’s early biographer, eloquently damned the author’s
efforts to speak directly about racial equality with faint praise: “[Twain]
did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only pre-
pared the way with cheerfulness.”61 At the same time this ambivalence, his
literary “failure,” becomes a habit of reading that opens spaces for African-
American perspectives to arise as native to the set of interpretations the
59
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Contemporary audiences seemed to have felt similarly about Huck Finn. One reviewer
gamely suggests that Huck speaks from a tradition that cannot be simply delineated as white
or black:
But in Huck this imagination has turned to superstition; he is a walking repository of

the juvenile folklore of the Mississippi Valley—a folklore partly traditional among the
white settlers but largely influenced by intimate association with the negroes.
See: Brander Matthews, [Review] “Huckleberry Finn” London Saturday Review, 31

January 1885 in The Critical Response to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, ed. Laurie
Champion (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991), 23.
60
Stacey Margolis, “Huckleberry Finn; Or, Consequences” PMLA 116.2 (March 2001),
330.
61
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography Vol. 3 (New York: Harper Brothers,
1912), 1273.
122 M. X. VERNON
text provokes. Throughout the novel, Jim responds to Huck’s “common

sense” with arguments prompted by his acute awareness of his status as
property; he becomes more sharply defined through his insurgent response
to epistemic forms presumed to exist outside of time. This is to say that
Twain had begun to engage in the type of literary speculation that he
would continue in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
This mode of reading Twain gives a different dimension to the meaning
of his time-travel narrative. The author sought to merge two literary
traditions—the folk narrative (with Hank Morgan as a vernacular hero)
and romance—and to introduce race into a seemingly race-free space. His
romance is devoid of chivalry. In the eyes of his nineteenth-century pro-
tagonist, Hank Morgan, medieval England is notable only for it backward-
ness, its savagery, and its naiveté: traits he also assigns to the “Southern
‘poor white’” of the nineteenth century.62 The past and the present are
equally “backwards,” for Hank; the absolute difference between the sev-
enth and nineteenth century melts away.63 Here it is important to under-
score that Twain does not merely allegorize myths about the Middle Ages
onto modern realities. Twain does rely on such simple transpositions in
some parts of the novel. Walter Scott includes slaves in his Ivanhoe, Twain
instead describes human auctions, chain gangs, and lynchings that bear
the weight of America’s history with slavery and medieval forms of oppres-
sion. Moreover, the clear and well-studied source for much of A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is Scott’s Ivanhoe. Twain’s
disdain for Scott and his influence on American letters has been well-
chronicled, including by Twain himself, who described the renewed inter-
est in the Middle Ages during his life as “absurdity gone crazy.”64 For
Twain, such a longing for a golden age was not just careless, but danger-
ous. He accused Scott of doing “measureless harm” through his seductive
fantasies of noble self-sacrifice and feudal order that helped feed the
62
In fact, Twain borrows many of his details for the slavery episode of A Connecticut
Yankee from Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures
of Charles Ball, A Black Man (1836). See also Werner Sollors’ account of how Twain treats
race and ethnicity in A Connecticut Yankee: “Ethnicity,” in Critical Terms for Literary
Studies, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), 297–299; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New
York: Penguin, 1986), 278.
63
Werner Sollors, 295.
64
Mark Twain, “The ‘Tournament’ in 1870 A.D.,” The Galaxy X (July 1870), 135.
imaginations of southerners during and after the Civil War.65 In brief, it

would be deeply problematic to premise a reading of A Connecticut Yankee
on Scott’s romances because of the grave reservations Twain had about
works that followed in Scott’s wake.
A second perspective on romance with Sir Thomas Malory at its root is
threaded through A Connecticut Yankee and should be read as predomi-
nant. This source encourages a set of reading practices that complicates
the novel’s narrative failures and depart from a strict parody of Scott; the
narrative thrust of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485) follows the con-
tours of individual and societal failure as the chivalric order around Arthur
collapses. To make this argument is to take seriously romance as distinct
from that produced by Scott and to see Twain as intervening in and not
simply responding to the romance tradition.
Two important points of context frame the intercession Twain makes
into historiography through Malory. The first comes from The Boy’s King
Arthur, a resource Twain used to guide him through Le Morte D’Arthur
as he was composing A Connecticut Yankee.66 It has been argued that
Twain was misled by this text into believing that the Middle Ages were a
“Golden Age of childlike innocence,” and only when he was able to read
Malory without its guidance—midway through his composition of A
Connecticut Yankee—did his portrayal of the era turn ponderous and
apocalyptic.67 While this claim seems untenable given the jaundiced gaze
he had already cast upon medievalism over a decade before he began the
long period of writing A Connecticut Yankee, The Boy’s King Arthur is an
unlikely source for an entirely separate reason that speaks to the positive
use he makes of medieval narratives. Despite its name, The Boy’s King
Arthur contains a learned introduction by the editor Sidney Lanier with a
sophisticated excursus on the development of the King Arthur narrative
(and the narrative of Britain’s founding by the mythical leader Brutus)
across the Middle Ages from Geoffrey of Monmouth through Walter
Map, Layamon, and finally Malory. Lanier, a former Confederate soldier,
65
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Collier and Son, 1883), 347.
66
Alan Gribben establishes that someone in Twain’s household ordered this book and that
Twain makes reference to it. See: “The Master Hand of Old Malory: Mark Twain’s
Acquaintance with Le Morte D’Arthur,” English Language Notes 16 (September 1978):
32–40.
67
This is the argument advanced by Betsy Bowden in her “Gloom and Doom in a
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Studies in American Fiction 28.2 (Autumn
2000): 179–202.
124 M. X. VERNON
touched upon the problems of historical reliability that often attend dis-
cussions of Geoffrey, writing: “It must be confessed that [Geoffrey’s]
ideas of probability seem very unsatisfactory to the modern view of his-
toric dignity.”68 Lanier’s suspicions of the Brut narrative’s historical value
is tempered by his admiration that the story found “an English audience
still desiring to hear” it hundreds of years after Geoffrey.69 Indeed, Lanier
positions himself as a “later editor re-arranging the old grown-people’s
story for many and divers [sic] boys both of England and America.”70
Although Lanier holds at a distance the content of the medieval materials
he introduces because they confect a historical narrative, he asserts as real
a natural audience and a literary tradition in which he takes part. Twain’s
narrative choices must be understood as alert both to the allegorical
potential attendant to the historical transposition inherent in the novel’s
conceit and the novel’s participation in perpetuating the Arthurian narra-
tive for a new audience.
The second informing context, how Twain uses Malory in the novel
itself, builds from this awareness of his novel’s position in the Arthurian
tradition. Even though Twain begins A Connecticut Yankee with a chapter
from Le Morte D’Arthur, the novel’s debt to Malory often goes unac-
knowledged in Twain’s criticism. Much has been written about how Twain
employs A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a reading of
nineteenth-century technological and social developments. The medieval
setting is most readily understood as a foil for the nineteenth-century
problems that make the Connecticut Yankee want to “hang the whole
human race and finish the farce.” However, this approach to the medieval
content within the novel threatens to diminish the significance of Twain’s
choice to reject Scott’s relentless triumphalism—Ivanhoe ends in a mar-
riage, Norman and Saxon peace, and the promise of many generations—in
favor of a perspective akin to that of Malory and his particular emphasis on
the indecision and failings of his knights.
Twain accords a place of prominence to the medieval author: an
extended quotation from Le Morte D’Arthur frames the whole novel.
68
Thomas Malory, The Boy’s King Arthur Being Sir Thomas Malory’s History of King
Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, ed. Sidney Lanier (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1881), v.
69
The Brut narrative’s longevity and remobilization is discussed in Chap. 3. Ibid., xvi.
70
Ibid., xx.
Within the passage, Lancelot71 participates in combat with two giants and
later three knights, all of whom he defeats. He frees “three score ladies”
from imprisonment and forced labor. Finally, Lancelot saves the life of Sir
Kay and bestows some of his own considerable authority upon the weaker
knight by switching armor with him, which assures Kay’s security. Read
from one angle, this passage redounds to Lancelot’s greatness: his singular
heroism is able to correct inequalities he sees within medieval society;
Lancelot is constantly outnumbered and only concerned for the welfare of
the weak. Such an argument is not compelling because it only suggests
that Twain quotes Malory simply to distinguish his work from his medi-
eval antecedent.
Seen from a different angle, this passage speaks to the politics of failure
that are shot through Malory and color Twain’s novel. At the center of the
framing passage is the weaknesses of Kay, the braggart knight who never
reaches the heights of nobility Lancelot attains. However, the inclusion of
Lancelot, Malory’s epitome of secular virtue who is unable to achieve the
perfection of his son Galahad, suggests that failure will be construed more
expansively. Twain echoes Malory’s Lancelot by making his novel’s itera-
tion the ideal capitalist whose manipulation of the stock market destroys
the court. Sociopolitical instability as Malory depicts it becomes an oppor-
tunity for speculation in Twain’s nineteenth-century version of the
romance; Twain explores the productive potential of using an overlap or
fusion of identities to subvert expected symbolic systems.72 The epistemic
gap between armor and man in the cases of Kay or Lancelot glosses the
problematic interventions of Hank Morgan, the novel’s “failed vernacular
hero.”73 Hank believes that he is decidedly the superior knight because his
nineteenth-century knowledge allows him to bring modern solutions to
the injustices he sees in the medieval world; thus he resembles Lancelot in
terms of his perceived social stature. At the same time, the Yankee also
resembles Sir Kay, an overmatched man who ends up wearing armor ill-
suited for a man saddled with finding answers to problems that seem little
different than those of his world.
71
Twain uses a different spelling of this knight’s name, but for the sake of consistency,
I will use the more common version.
72
This articulation of hybridity derives from Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the concept in
The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 83.
73
Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1964), 68–69.
126 M. X. VERNON
The disjunction between the two visions of the Arthurian “golden age”
exposes the silences of nineteenth-century narratives that held up the
medieval chivalric ideal as a model for American society. A Connecticut
Yankee’s conceit is that a manuscript diary of Hank’s recollections has
survived from the sixth century into the nineteenth century. This casts the
whole fiction as a product of the Middle Ages, yet the result of a modern
mind. The Middle Ages are not easily disambiguated from the present, as
is made evident by Hank’s final, delirious speech, which he delivers on his
deathbed. It confuses, in the sense of joining, the two time periods:
I seemed to be a creature out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and

even that was as real as the rest! Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that
age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set down, a
stranger forlorn, in that strange England, with the abyss of thirteen centu-
ries yawning between me and you! Between me and my home and friends!
Between me and all that is dear to me, all that could make life worth the
living!74
Hank’s delirium causes him to believe he is speaking to his wife Sandy but
he actually addresses a person living hundreds of years later. In jumbling
past and future, Twain denies the expectation of forward historical prog-
ress that accompanies Ivanhoe. The added effect of this choice is to com-
plicate narratives of white purity that depend on the clarity of lineage as
the crucial metric to gauge white superiority. It would be too simplistic to
say that the nineteenth century becomes just another feudal age. Rather,
the collapse of time periods mires whiteness in the same atemporal morass
associated with blackness. The common critique of A Connecticut Yankee’s
handling of the subject of race and slavery is that Twain merely reproduces
pieces of Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States on a medieval back-
ground.75 Leaving aside the complicated history of how medieval slavery
was depicted in a variety of nineteenth-century texts, such a reading
diminishes the more subversive possibilities Twain’s approach opens up.
Drawing together these two time periods not only forces the reader to see
74
A Connecticut Yankee, 409.
75
This reading of Twain’s scenes of slavery has a long history in criticism and is popular.
See: John D. Williams, “The Use of History in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court” PMLA 80.1 (March 1965), 109; Howard G. Baetzhold, “Charles Ball,” in
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain, eds. J.R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 61–62.
the interpolation of blackness in a space that is traditionally reserved for

the consolidation of white identity—medieval romance—the reader is also
confronted with the challenge of reading across race without the stability
of timeframes to encode the bodies under scrutiny.
At no point are the stakes of such a reading made more evident than
during the novel’s infamous lynching scene. At this point in the novel,
Hank and King Arthur have decided to go into the countryside disguised
as peasants to observe the king’s subjects. They exit the house of a family
who has died of smallpox under the cover of darkness and approach a fire
on a distant hill. As they creep forward, Hank walks into a body hanging
from a tree and still writhing. He is only able to see it in intermittent
flashes of lightning in the middle of a thunderstorm. They continue
through the night and find eight more hanged as well as a pursuing mob
of people. The king forbids Hank from interceding for fear of discovery
and because he believes that the victims must have been justly killed. Hank
can merely observe. The next morning Hank discusses what he witnessed
with a peasant who reacts with pleasure at the night’s events. Hank reflects
on this with disgust:
It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the ‘poor whites’ of

our South who were always despised, and frequently insulted, by the slave-
lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the pres-
ence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with
slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slav-
ery and did finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an
effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution that degraded
them.76
Hank’s diffidence in naming what this sequence would surely evoke for his
contemporary readers recalls his reluctance to address lynching in The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Jacqueline Goldsby argues in her
study, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life And Literature,
Twain looks unflinchingly at the brutality of modern warfare, but in the
case of lynching he is unable to “hold democracy accountable for its crimes
of excess…because Hank insists that the mass hangings he discovers sym-
bolize the fate of ‘poor whites’ in the South.”77 Goldsby continues not by
A Connecticut Yankee, 277–278.

76
Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature

77
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 36. This, of course, is not the only perspective
128 M. X. VERNON
condemning Twain for cowardice but instead by reading the scene as a

type of eloquent silence which reports on the wider context of the con-
temporary discourse around lynching.
Twain’s depiction of lynching fits within a larger pattern of writers
engaged in a “continual renegotiation and redefinition of the terms and
boundaries of a sectional and ultimately national dialogue on racial vio-
lence in the 1890s and early 1900s.”78 The “perverse delight in racial
disorder” Twain shows in his subsequent novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson (seri-
alized 1893–1894, published 1894), however, does not appear in A
Connecticut Yankee. Instead, the American tendencies for absolutizing
racial categories, making instances of boundary crossing exceptional,
occupy the center of the novel’s attention.79 The dual timeframes of the
novel collapse around the hanged bodies as the fictional violence visited
upon medieval peasants forcefully recalls the contemporary lynching crisis.
The setting heightens the instability of how these bodies are to be read.
Shrouded in darkness, they are momentarily illuminated by flashes of light.
They are made visible through their negative: the black through the white.
The symbolism of this scene is seemingly quite clear. The text embeds the
horror of lynching in an originary narrative through the superimposition
of bodies and times to underscore that nineteenth-century racial violence
is heir to the barbarity of the Middle Ages. However, the implications of
oscillating between times and between habits of reading are far more elu-
sive. Lynching’s significance, apart from other forms of racialized violence,
is as spectacle, particularly as it implied communal action to carry out and
the circulation of descriptions and images:
Lynching terrorized…because it existed purely in the realm of representa-

tion as horrific images that haunted…It was the spectacle of lynching, rather
than the violence itself, that wrought psychological damage, that enforced
black acquiescence to white domination.80
on the way that Twain dealt with the issues of race. In his influential study of the political
stands Twain took throughout his life, Philip S. Foner offers a sympathetic account of
Twain’s writing on slavery in Mark Twain Social Critic (New York: International Publishers,
1958), 195–212.
78
Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature,
1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.
79
Ibid., 53.
80
Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America,
1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2.
Twain rejects the spectacularity of lynching in clear racial and social terms,
which creates a set of challenges for how to read the novel’s temporal
frames, particularly whether he privileges white suffering as a bridge to a
racial reading or if he means to deprive the image of the lynched body of its
racial significance. I would argue that no stable interpretation is available
here, rather the point of the scene seems to be its presentation of incom-
plete sight and the hermeneutic uncertainty that confronts the reader.
The multiple shifts that are marked within this scene recall the paratac-
tic strategies of Malory’s narrative that open inquiry about the conjunc-
tion of temporality and morality.81 The instability of subordination—the
politics of whether the Arthurian narrative should occupy a place of pri-
macy as a foundational fiction and if justice can be realized through the
paradigm of chivalry—leaves uncertain from what perspective the text
should be read. These ethical dilemmas redound to deeper questions
about the fallibility of Arthur’s knights, their inability to live up to their
own reputations or their duties.82 The metrics of just action interwoven
within the fabric of Le Morte D’Arthur complicate how Twain uses the
lynching scene as a mode of critique. This vision of a mass lynching would
abide in Twain’s imagination long after he published A Connecticut
Yankee. In “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901), Twain writes a
scene that closely resembles the above description of a nightscape crowded
with fire and death. Moreover, he weds contemporary violence to medi-
eval tropes; he notes that a few people had already begun to object to
lynching and he calls for others to join and to “wake up drowsing c hevaliers
of the same great knighthood and bring them to the front.”83 Twain
81
Here I am evoking Bonnie Wheeler’s argument about the “polysemous” nature of
Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur in “Romance and Parataxis,” Arthurian Literature XII, eds.
James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, Winter, 1993),109–132.
82
See, for example: Laura K. Bedwell, “The Failure of Justice, The Failure of Arthur”
Arthuriana 21.3 (Fall 2011), 3–22.
83
The following is an extract from the scene in which Twain, after quoting a telegram
relating a particularly gruesome murder, asks his reader to imagine the scale of the lynchings
that occurred in the last year, by thinking of them as occurring in the same place:
We ask them to read that telegram again, and yet again, and picture the scene in their
minds, and soberly ponder it; then multiply it by 115, add 88; place the 203 in a row,
allowing 600 feet of space for each human torch, so that there be viewing room
around it for 5,000 Christian American men, women, and children, youths and maid-
ens; make it night for grim effect; have the show in a gradually rising plain, and let the
course of the stakes be uphill; the eye can then take in the whole line of twenty-four
130 M. X. VERNON
makes use of medieval imagery to evoke the need for a noble brotherhood
to illuminate “a dark moment in the history of American civilization.”84
What should be a signature statement about race and violence instead
epitomizes Twain’s great reluctance to openly take a stance on this issue
without the guise of fiction and humor. Twain himself demurred from
publishing “The United States of Lyncherdom,” in part, for fear of alien-
ating his readership and killing his sales in the South.85
The comparison between A Connecticut Yankee and “The United
States of Lyncherdom” reveals how seriously Twain took the rhetoric of
chivalry and knighthood for critiquing the struggle towards racial justice.
At the same time, the comparison makes clear how far from these ideals
Twain viewed much of the country and perhaps himself to be. Hank’s
ability to see these bodies is occluded by darkness, the narrative’s view of
race is occluded by whiteness. The reader is asked to read “universally” as
Hank does when on the morning after the lynching he proclaims that “a
man is at bottom a man.”86 This thought fuels the Yankee’s optimism that
medieval peasants—“the twin of the Southern ‘poor white’”—might be
reformed to destroy the institutions that degraded them and created con-
ditions of fear and vulnerability that led to the violence the Yankee just
witnessed.87 Hank adopts a position on slavery that can only encompass
the institution from the perspective of the medieval peasant or poor white.
Read against “The United States of Lyncherdom,” Hank’s fixation on
class and social institutions and his appeal to masculine solidarity only
miles of blood-and-flesh bonfires unbroken, whereas if it occupied level ground the

ends of the line would bend down and be hidden from view by the curvature of the
earth. All being ready, now, and the darkness opaque, the stillness impressive—for
there should be no sound but the soft moaning of the night wind and the muffled
sobbing of the sacrifices—let all the far stretch of kerosene pyres be touched off simul-
taneously and the glare and the shrieks and the agonies burst heavenward to the
Throne.
Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” in Europe and Elsewhere, ed.
Albert Paine (Harper & Brothers, 1923), 239–249.
84
Editorial, “Wanted: Heroes and Martyrs of Law and Order,” Century Magazine, 62
(August 1901): 631.
85
Arthur G. Pettit, Mark Twain and the South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
1974), 136. Also, Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1966), 364.
86
A Connecticut Yankee, 278.
87
Ibid., 277.
serve to identify the frailties of people too fearful to resist being the hands
of oppression with Twain’s frustrations at moral cowardice in the real
world including, one suspects, the writer’s own fear of action.
Despite the implications of the form Twain chooses to write in and the
prospects of his character for bringing nineteenth century advances to the
Middle Ages, Twain’s novel cannot seem to escape the gravity of Malory’s
precedent. The result of Twain folding Malory into his speculative fiction
is a set of ironies the text cannot resolve. Hank despises the institution of
chivalry and yet he would fit well next to any of Malory’s failed knights
drawn to conquest. The narrative holds forth the promise of equality but
the latter half of the text relates a string of abjections and tortured involu-
tions of causality from which neither Hank nor Twain seem to know how
to escape. A Connecticut Yankee received one of the most sensitive and
clear readings of this project from William Dean Howells, writer, editor,
and friend of Twain. Howells tellingly elides the difference between the
Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, fantasy and realism:
There are incidents in this wonder book which wring the heart for what has
been of cruelty [sic] and wrong in the past, and leave it burning with shame
and hate for the conditions which are of like effect in the present. It is one
of its magical properties that the fantastic fable of Arthur’s far off time is also
too often the sad truth of ours and the magician who makes us feel in it that
we have just begun to know his power, teaches equality and fraternity in
every phase of his phantasmagory.88
What is most striking about this assessment of the novel is Howells’ rhe-
torical twist that binds Twain’s authorial ability together with the fantasy
that he employs by calling the author “the magician” that cannot help but
echo Scott’s nickname, “The Enchanter.” This is a tempting way to
approach Twain’s work because the text centers on a character that is
reminiscent of Twain. Howells’ certainty that Twain “imparts more of his
personal quality” surely works to disguise the problems of narrative and
moral integrity that have been laid out above.89
And yet, as this chapter has argued, the narrative trajectory of A
Connecticut Yankee for which Howells provides an alibi might be read as
a productive result of Twain’s brush with Malory. The fundamental fail-
88
William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 80.476
(January 1890), 321.
89
Ibid., 319.
132 M. X. VERNON
ings of Twain and thus Hank to satisfactorily meet the demands instead
should be read to reflect the iterative function of the Arthurian narrative.
Twain’s work is of a piece with Malory’s in its imperfection that anticipates
revision. Echoing the melancholy but laconic relation of knights unac-
counted for and Malory’s supplication before his reader, Twain’s novel
hastens to a conclusion and ends with the thoughts of the Yankee trailing
away, incomplete. Here, A Connecticut Yankee intersects with Chesnutt’s
The House behind the Cedars. If Twain “prepared the way” for later writers
to argue forcefully for the cause of racial equality in literature, it is
Chesnutt, who most directly sets forth on that path. Chesnutt published
his novel a decade after A Connecticut Yankee. Like Twain, he abandoned
the space of southern dialect fiction for which he had been celebrated to
enter the realm of romance. In so doing, he assumes Twain’s experimenta-
tion with the cultural charge of romance to trouble the fixity of race and
its effects in time. The Middle Ages helped both writers consider race as a
category that is imagined and flexible enough to embrace traditions and
depictions temporally far removed, yet still strangely kin.
Mythopoesis and Master Narratives: Charles Chesnutt’s Deviant

Romance
A Connecticut Yankee represents a period of erring in Twain’s literary
career, both in the sense that he misjudged his ability to handle the mate-
rial before him but also in the medieval sense of the word of wandering in
paths that allow for revelatory incidence. His book deviates from a clear
trajectory of a writer realizing his full powers. Nonetheless the resulting
text is multi-valent in terms of its speculation on the possibilities of read-
ing the problems of Americans countenancing race within the familiar
tropes of romance. The pattern of falling into romance anticipates the
peculiar progression Charles Chesnutt took in his own writing that moved
quickly from being critically lauded to being marginalized for its political
forthrightness. The rapid decline of Chesnutt’s literary fortunes can be
exemplified by the changing esteem in which William Dean Howells held
Chesnutt over the course of two years (1900–1901). At first Howells put
Chesnutt’s early stories in the company of Henry James and Sarah Orne
Jewett; by the end of this period he lamented Chesnutt’s turn to social
commentary in his “bitter, bitter” novel The Marrow of Tradition
(1901).”90 At the center of this arc is The House behind the Cedars, which
he structured around the contested text that subtends this whole chapter:
Scott’s Ivanhoe. By the time Chesnutt approached the romance, it had
been accused of distorting southern literature and values (by Twain) and
had been considered suitable reading for British and American schoolchil-
dren.91 Ivanhoe possessed the curious ideological ambivalence that ren-
dered it simultaneously dangerous and wholly innocuous in its ubiquity.
Thus its value reached a pinnacle of cultural determination within American
society that allowed it to transcend the merely textual and enter into the
realm of the mythopoetic; it permitted the interplay between the nostalgic
fantasy of nation and the realities of social boundaries erected and enforced
by adherents to that same set of desires.
Given the point of Chesnutt’s career at which he writes the novel, it is
unclear if Chesnutt mobilized Scott’s Ivanhoe to placate or provoke. As
was the case with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the text’s
difficulties stem from its willingness to interrogate the temporal and
generic terms under which it operates. However, The House behind the
Cedars troubles in ways that Twain’s novel cannot because its speculation
is implicit within the intersection of race and form, rather than explicit in
the narrative’s framing. This is to say character, genre, and social situation
pull against one another. Chesnutt undermines the solidity of Ivanhoe as a
master narrative infused with mythopoetic power by assigning blackness as
an imagined category tied to the notion of deviation—temporal and gene-
alogical—within spaces Scott uses to consolidate white identity. The novel
situates its African-American heroine at the center of what should be an
originary narrative that contains within it a proleptic view of a future
American society. Instead the narrative collapses under the weight of racial
expectations and denies the clarity of Ivanhoe’s conclusions.
90
This argument is advanced by Joseph R. McElrath Jr., one of the primary editors of
Chesnutt’s letters. See: “W.D. Howells and Race: Charles Chesnutt’s Disappointment of the
Dean,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.4 (March 1997), 474–499; William Dean
Howells, “A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction,” The North American
Review, CLXXIII (December 1901), 882. See also: Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. “W. D. Howells
and Race: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Disappointment of the Dean” Nineteenth-Century
Literature 51.4 (March 1997), 474–499.
91
By the time Chesnutt was writing, Ivanhoe had begun to find a new audience with chil-
dren. Several abridgements and school editions were published in the United States through-
out the 1890s. See: Nicola J. Watson, “Afterlives,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Sir
Walter Scott, ed. Fiona Robertson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 152.
134 M. X. VERNON
I use the term “master narrative” to invite the multiple valences that
come with the phrase, particularly Scott as the architect of dominant cul-
tural and literary conventions used in the service of racial domination.92
History and fiction collude within foundational fictions to normalize
unruly patterns of action: the operations of fantasy and erotic desire. In
Ivanhoe the reader’s expectation of political unity is mirrored, or perhaps
created, by the model of chivalric (masculine) power and the imagined
marriage bed. Chesnutt disappoints these expectations with his racially
ambiguous heroine and “Anglo-Saxon knight” character who can only
offer stalled chivalric action and a failed marriage plot. The novel’s devia-
tion from generic expectations parallel Chesnutt’s authorial deviations.
His usurpation of the master narrative, I argue, eroded his popularity but
was consequential in forming his political voice. This assertion of his
authorial identity in defiance of tastemakers such as William Dean Howells,
constitutes a point of inflection in Chesnutt’s authorial trajectory from
Twain’s; his heroine exposes the ironies of American racial myth-making
without relying on the paratactic strategies Twain employs to imply black-
ness but never fully engage it. At the same time the satisfactions of romance
still obtain; the reader is left longing for the consummation of desire across
social boundaries that inheres within Scott. An alternative world exists
within the absence created by the distance between generic expectations
and Chesnutt’s actual narrative in which a future of American race rela-
tions exists beyond the assumed mandates of an unreconciled America.
Chesnutt, like Twain, came to romance from the direction of ver-
nacular fiction. His collection of short stories, The Conjure Woman
(1899), which helped catapult him to success, acts as a critical back-
ground to The House behind the Cedars. The conceit of the collection is
that a couple from Ohio moves to South Carolina and acquires land for
grape c ultivation. They discover that a man called Uncle Julius occupies
the plantation they have purchased. They take him into their employ. In
a series of vignettes, the couple makes demands of Julius and he responds
with stories about the pre-war plantation, all of which revolve around
the trickery of a magical “conjure” woman. These tales are tangentially
related to the couple’s requests but ultimately lead to Julius getting what
he wishes out of the exchange. Chesnutt’s stories demonstrate a complex
92
Here I borrow from the discussion of master narratives and gender in medieval literature
advanced by Mary Carpenter Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski in Gendering the Master
Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
command of signifying—they play with multiple meanings and inten-

tions—a rhetorical maneuver the author uses to bind together the narra-
tive frame of carpetbaggers descending on the South and the central
stories about antebellum plantation life.93
Although the two levels of storytelling would seem to echo one
another—each has black characters fooling white ones—the interaction of
frame and tale insists on a more nuanced relationship between characters
and time periods. It is never clear if Julius is strategically retelling stories or
creating them to feed the imagination of his white audience; in either case,
his stories gain meaning from the dynamics of power and competing
desires that prompt the storytelling. For Chesnutt, the literary tradition in
which he writes these stories emerges from this system of exchange. The
stories act as a proxy for the renegotiation of power between Julius and the
couple in the absence, or shadow, of slavery. The possibility for a new
southern society premised on shared perspectives is held out by how the
characters contend with slavery’s meaning through the tales. Performing
and listening to these stories becomes critical work in reinterpreting slav-
ery, that is, making it visible and central to the politics of a post-war
South.94 Importantly, one is not meant to linger in nostalgia, as one is
tempted to in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, particularly in the “eva-
sion” episode which delays Jim’s emancipation. Chesnutt’s frame-tale
structure allows the reader to see how the past can be directly mobilized
for the needs of the present.95 Neither the carpetbagging couple, who are
ideal representatives of modernization, nor Julius, who substantially ben-
efits from them, wants to recreate the dynamics of the antebellum
plantation. The fantasy of the conjure woman, Chesnutt argues, is to be
left in the past:
Relics of ancestral barbarism are found among all peoples, but advanced civi-
lization has at least shaken off the more obvious absurdities of
superstition.96
93
Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 273.
94
See: Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of
Listening (New York: NYU Press, 2016).
95
Here it simply suffices to note that Chesnutt’s frame tale structure is in the tradition of
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Chesnutt takes similar advantage of his frame as a means
to link members of society who have apparent differences in status and perspective.
96
Ibid., 865.
136 M. X. VERNON
One could go as far to read the discrepancy between the sophistication of

the frame narrative and the simplicity of the folk tale as a hopeful assess-
ment of the social progress made from the pre- to post-war United States.
These tales demonstrate Chesnutt’s ability to use narrative structure to
make temporal and political claims. Genre and form enable the literary
interventions Chesnutt of his early work, which lends special significance
to his turn from the vernacular tale to a realist novel that draws on romance.
Whereas Twain chose Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur over Scott’s
Ivanhoe to locate his critique at the heart of Arthurian mythology, Chesnutt
directly engages Scott, who cast a long shadow over African-American
medievalism. Malory, as interpreted by Twain, gives a lie to the foundation
of American medievalism, but nineteenth-century America itself is often
kept at the remove of metaphor and analogy. Fittingly, the novel is consid-
ered an example of science fiction because its time-travel conceit enables
speculation that does not have an isomorphic relationship to the nine-
teenth century. Chesnutt is similarly making a speculative intervention
into the American past under the guise of Rowena Warwick as a reification
of the romance tradition derived from Scott.
Chesnutt hints at the type of speculation he will engage in through
“The Wife of his Youth” (1898), his story about a financially successful
mixed-race man named Mr. Ryder who is on the verge of proposing mar-
riage to a young woman “whiter than he.”97 Ryder searches for a poem to
commemorate the occasion and settles on Tennyson’s “Sir Launcelot and
Queen Guinevere: A Fragment” (1842). His preparations are interrupted
by an encounter with a woman who claims that over the course of twenty-
five years she sought her husband from whom she was separated shortly
before the Civil War. The story emphasizes that this marriage was a “slave
marriage,” implying that the expectations of commitment were
fundamentally different than those made after emancipation. In the nov-
el’s last lines Mr. Ryder reveals the strange woman to be “the wife from his
youth.” Cynthia Wachtell has suggested that the wife’s speech to her hus-
band, which seems too knowing about Mr. Ryder’s current circumstances,
is an elaborate performance of vernacular trickster fiction in keeping with
The Conjure Woman stories and a longer line of African-American folk
97
Charles Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1901), 5.
tales.98 The danger of such a reading is the allure of its explanatory power,
that this story reproduces a set of values around and within his fiction
about what is to be privileged, namely that he cannot depart from the
generic groves of vernacular fiction. Mr. Ryder leads a society of mixed-
race people called “The Blue Veins,” an allusion to the whiteness of their
skin and their desire for future generations to become lighter. Ryder
laments the inbetween-ness of being insufficiently white and unwilling to
be considered black: “The one doesn’t want us yet, but may take us in
time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward
step.”99 If this story is read as a covert trickster tale, the trick shocks him
into re-evaluating his social climbing and his vision for the future of mixed-
race Americans through the connection to his wife ’Liza Jane. Mr. Ryder’s
love of poetry would then merely redound to his literary snobbery, his
desire to assimilate that has led him to a foppish poem. More perniciously,
the elevation of the trickster narrative over romance runs the risk of reas-
serting a color line within fiction that Chesnutt sought to complicate.100
Even Howells’ enthusiastic review of Chesnutt’s early writing that com-
pared him to Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett trotted out the com-
fortable trope of African-American literature “touching all the stops…of
real tragedy, comedy and pathos.”101 James Weldon Johnson would bor-
row this phrase when writing the introduction to The Book of American
Negro Poetry to point out the limitations of early African-American dialect
writing for writing about racial themes.102 This is to say that what Howells
saw in Chesnutt was that he did not transgress the clarity of racial and
generic boundaries, he valued the author’s “simplicity” and “reticence.”103
The context given in the second chapter of this book allows for a more
multi-valent reading of this story’s conclusion. Ironically, a central part of
Howell’s praise for Chesnutt is the author’s unwillingness to indulge in
the fantasy of romance:
98
Cynthia Wachtell, “The Wife of his Youth: A Trickster Tale,” in Charles Chesnutt
Reappraised: Essays on the First Major African-American Fiction Writer, eds. David Garrett
Izzo and Maria Orban (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2009), 159–173.
99
“The Wife of His Youth,” 7.
100
William Dean Howells, “Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stories,” Atlantic Monthly 85
(1900), 700.
101
Ibid.
102
James Weldon Johnson, “Preface,” The Book of American Negro Poetry, ed. James
Weldon Johnson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), xl.
103
“Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stories,” 700.
138 M. X. VERNON
As these stories are of our own time and country, and as there is not a swash-
buckler of the seventeenth century, or a sentimentalist of this, or a princess
of an imaginary kingdom, in any of them, they will possibly not reach half a
million readers in six months but in twelve months possibly more readers
will remember them than if they had reached the half million.104
This is not only factually incorrect, it also misjudges what the mobilization
of romance can accomplish. If Chesnutt indeed takes romance seriously,
the text asks if it is possible or permissible to conceive of love originating
in the period of American slavery within the genre’s paradigms. This line
of thinking continues the negotiation between racially inflected perspec-
tives of the pre-War South that he began to explore in his Uncle Julius
stories. Chesnutt shifts the grounds of inquiry from the tragic love of
slaves as entertainment that smuggles in didacticism to the radical human-
ization of quotidian slavery practices through the extraordinary happen-
ings that romance demands.
Chesnutt quotes two stanzas from Tennyson’s poem that suggest how
he uses romance:
She seem’d a part of joyous Spring:

A gown of grass-green silk she wore,
Buckled with golden clasps before;
A light-green tuft of plumes she bore
Closed in a golden ring.
… .…
She look’d so lovely, as she sway’d
The rein with dainty finger-tips,
A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this,
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips.105
These lines, rich with references to youth, physical beauty, and springtime
have obvious connections to Mr. Ryder’s choice between the young
woman to whom he wishes to propose and his wife who is aged and worn
by her efforts to find her husband. Chesnutt astutely signals the evanes-
cence of these values by including the final stanza that recalibrates all the
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid., 9.
lines that have come before, that “waste” is the penalty for the expression
of the tremendous love Lancelot and Guinevere have for one another. The
poem meshes with the story in unexpected ways. ’Liza Jane recounts that
her husband was a free man but was forced to flee from his apprenticeship
in Missouri after she warned him that her slave master intended to sell him
to a slaveholder in the deep South. Her sacrifice for love is marked on her
body both from being whipped for saving her husband and in the form of
the intervening years of supporting herself during her search. The threat
of “waste” is thus not solely Mr. Ryder’s denied opportunity to marry and
partially realize his hopes for the future of mixed-race people, much of
’Liza Jane’s life has already been expended because of the distortions of
slavery. Just as Lancelot’s union with Guinevere is bittersweet, the narra-
tive’s conclusion is torn between the fittingness of Mr. Ryder’s decision
and the sense of an irretrievable loss.
The expectations of romance do not squarely fit upon this narrative; the
reader is asked to contend with points of convergence and disjunction that
arise from elevating these spheres of African-American life—the history of
slavery and the difficulties of being mixed-race—into the realm of romance.
The traumatic ruptures of a family caused by slavery’s economic impera-
tives and ’Liza Jane’s tremendous efforts to close those gaps are juxtaposed
with the adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere and the knight’s
heroic efforts to remain with her. Similarly, multiple temporalities within
each narrative are put in conversation. Mr. Ryder exists in two timeframes
that are wholly distinct from one another. As a member of the Blue Veins
society, his gaze is fixed upon generations beyond himself; as a man who
chooses not to remarry despite being separated from his wife for decades
he is also tied to a pre-Civil War past that irrupts into his life. These dual
time temporalities play against romance’s place as ahistorical and intimately
bound up with the production of history. The intersections between race
and romance produce a matrix of meaning that rivals the triumphalism and
unities implied by white racial mythology. African-American experiences
informed by slavery and racial violence both more fully and incompletely
fill the space that romance makes available for creating legitimating and
authenticating narratives than the experiences of white Americans; the
extremity of slavery’s cruelty that produced extraordinary narratives of
sacrifice along with the ongoing debates about what constitutes blackness
that are bound together with the voyeuristic stigmatization of a variety of
140 M. X. VERNON
inter-racial couplings created a volatile allegiance between the fantastical

and the real, with each threatening to overwhelm the other.106
That Chesnutt mobilized romance within discussions of blackness sig-
nals his willingness to intervene in the shifting ideological formation of
racial ideology. Here it is necessary to underscore how energetic this
debate was at the time Chesnutt published this story and was finishing The
House behind the Cedars. One of the articles within the same issue of The
Atlantic that included Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” describes the
strength of British and American ties through antiquated formulations of
ethnic origins to imply racial solidarities across incredible distances:
There indeed has been a large infusion of other elements into the population
of the United States, but those elements are mostly drawn from the same
sources, Teutonic and Celtic, which form the population of the British Isles
and all have been, or are being moulded into the same normal American
type…The influences of climate and institutions which tend to differentiate
them are less potent than the influences of literature and thought which
tend to assimilation.107
The article gives evidence to the anxiety around the possible dissolution of
racial identity that is held at bay through the fiction of racial solidarities
based upon categories that are themselves belated constructions. James
Bryce, in his ponderous volume on American political institutions, casts a
paternalistic gaze upon the United States, wondering if Americans would
find “a background of romance”—a common imaginary of ideals filtered
through narrative—to propel them further along the “pilgrimage of man”
as industrial progress covered the landscape.108 An Atlantic Monthly
reviewer responded by insisting that the pace and scope of progress were
the pre-conditions for creating such unifying narratives:
106
However, this notion of slavery as capable of producing the sublime had traction far
beyond Chesnutt. Not only do we see this in the examples of Du Bois and Duncanson that
began this chapter, Carter G. Woodson, in The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861
described the narratives of “the successful strivings of Negroes for enlightenment under
most adverse circumstances” as “like beautiful romances.” See: Carter G. Woodson, The
Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, 2nd edition (The Associated Publishers: Inc.
Washington, DC, 1919), iii.
107
Bryce James, “The Essential Unity of Britain and America,” The Atlantic Monthly (July
1898), 23.
108
Ibid.
Walter Scott needed to go back only sixty years to weave his magic spell, but
Scott was the voice of a civilization highly developed. The very development
of our American civilization is to give us this advantage, that what was mate-
rial for prose to our ancestors becomes material for poetry for us.109
Romance functioned as a powerful heuristic that encodes a set of expecta-

tions about the constitution and direction of the nation. It evoked a shared
history—a casual elision of “other elements into the population” that are
not Celtic or Teutonic—and a sense of joint enterprise that should unspool
the ever more perfect ends of those auspicious beginnings. Moreover,
Scott recurs as the avatar for romance; his popular interpretations of the
form preside over other available versions of it. When Chesnutt turns to
Ivanhoe in The House behind the Cedars, he does so fully cognizant of the
multiple valences it has for signaling a past of unity across categories of
difference and for speculating on the future constitution of race.
The difficulties that romance presents in mediating between the fictive
and the real emerge from ambivalences within Scott’s own work. Scott
begins his “Essay on Romance” (1834) with this evasive definition that
creates a limitation on the genre of romance that his own work does not
bear out:
Dr. Johnson has defined romance, in its primary sense, to be “a military

fable of the middle ages; a wild tale of adventures in love and chivalry.” But
although this definition expresses correctly the ordinary idea of the word, it
is not sufficiently comprehensive to answer our present purpose. A composi-
tion may be a legitimate romance, yet neither refer to love nor chivalry—to
war nor to the middle ages. The “wild adventures” are almost the only
absolutely essential ingredient in Johnson’s definition. We would be rather
inclined to describe a Romance as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the
interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents;” being
thus opposed to the kindred term Novel, which Johnson has described as
“a smooth tale, generally of love” but which we would rather define as
“a fictitious narrative, differing from Romance, because the events are
accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state
of society.”110
109
Book Review: “Bryce’s The American Commonwealth,” The Atlantic Monthly 63.377
(March 1889), 424.
110
Walter Scott, The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart: Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and
the Drama (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Co., 1834), 129.
142 M. X. VERNON
Scott labors throughout his essay to show “romance” to be divorced

from historical fact and unconcerned with the mimetic demands of the
novel. However, this argument masks Scott’s own interest in creating a
national literature by excavating the “scattered relics of an ancestral
culture.”111 Anglo-Saxon virtues—“honest simplicity and hardi-
hood”—are treated within Ivanhoe as national patrimony, the bequeath-
als of a society that preceded the cultural refinement and feudal
organization Norman rule implied. The marriage of the pro-Norman
Ivanhoe and the Saxon Rowena at the end of Scott’s text stands in for
the cycles of generation that will lead to the reader of the text: the
romance moves from the fiction of a mythical past to the reality of
modern Britain. At the same time, the proleptic conclusion hints at the
merger of genres the author tries to keep apart in his definition. Ivanhoe
begins to realize the mimetic potential of the author’s hybrid form; this
collapse becomes complete when the cultural purchase of Scott’s
mythology, the “heralds, pursuivants, pages, garter king-at-arms”112
Twain lamented, would take root in a society seemingly divorced from
the British traditions the novel celebrates. Scott’s romance affiliates
genre and genealogy structured around the linearity that governs the
seemingly wild emplotment of the text: the long interlude of carni-
valesque twists in the woods of Britain that are ultimately inconsequen-
tial to the plot.
Scott’s popularity created a problematic tradition for writers who
wished to intervene in the genre of romance without the burdens of
Scott’s Middle Ages. As argued above, Twain resists Scott through his
narrative of time travel that allows him to assert a different trajectory for
Western civilization that resembles the melancholy ends of Malory’s Le
Morte D’Arthur. The House behind the Cedars accepts Scott’s vision of
the Middle Ages insofar as it had become manifest in the attitudes and
laws of the South. The novel is studiedly ambiguous about whether
romance is a point of origin for southern traditions or merely a struc-
ture upon which these traditions hang, as is noted in the novel’s mock-
jousting scene:
111
Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel; The Gothic, Scott
and Dickens, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4.
112
“The ‘Tournament’ in 1870 A.D.,” 135.
The influence of Scott was strong upon the old South. The South before the
war was essentially feudal, and Scott’s novels of chivalry appealed forcefully
to the feudal heart.113
Chesnutt takes full advantage of the problems inherent in laying claim to

Scott as creating a historical teleology that will lead southern society to
speculate on what deviation from that history might look like, specifically
when the plot of Anglo-Saxon and Norman unity is overlaid upon the slip-
pery, contingent vector of American race. In Chesnutt’s novel, romance
and realism are never fully disarticulated from one another. Rather, the
text assumes the guise of a “historical romance” similar to what Scott cre-
ates with Ivanhoe. The House behind the Cedars mingles the tropes of
romance with “the ordinary train of human events and the modern state
of society,” to demonstrate how deeply one informs the other.
This divergence from Twain offers a profound reading of Scott. Ivanhoe
models the social cohesion that results from having a common cultural dis-
course; Scott successfully maps his romance onto the larger project of gener-
ating English identity through language, codes of conduct, and a shared
history. Violence and acts of silencing that precede the harmony at the
romance’s conclusion are only implied through the Jewish character,
Rebecca, who nurses Ivanhoe to health and becomes embroiled in the strug-
gle for power in Britain. Because of her bravery, self-sacrifice, and the strength
of her faith, Rebecca should be a model for the nascent British society that
Scott outlines at the end of the romance. Rowena, Ivanhoe’s wife, is incred-
ulous when she hears that Rebecca will leave the country. Rebecca upends
Rowena’s assumptions of the opportunities Britain holds for her:
“And are you not then as well protected in England?” said Rowena. “My
husband has favour with the King—the King himself is just and generous.”
“Lady,” said Rebecca, “I doubt it not—but the people of England are a
fierce race, quarrelling ever with their neighbours or among themselves, and
ready to plunge the sword into the bowels of each other. Such is no safe
abode for the children of my people.”114
Scott reifies British identity here in a curious way. He introduces divisive-

ness as a defining characteristic of the “fierce” Anglo-Saxon/Norman
race. At the same time, he expels from the historical narrative Rebecca,
The House behind the Cedars, 31.

113
Ivanhoe, 399.
114
144 M. X. VERNON
who exemplifies the virtues of chivalric heroism. Ivanhoe’s puzzling end-

ing bespeaks Scott’s difficulties in situating Rebecca.115 Scott’s resolution
hinges upon the primacy of genealogy superseding all other consider-
ations. Rebecca presents genealogical affiliations and a sense of historical
responsibility “to the time of Abraham downward” that extend far beyond
the scope of Saxon and Norman history. Through them she inverts the
expected coordinates of this moment of cultural genesis. Her steadfastness
to her faith becomes a model of genealogical purity cast in opposition to
Saxon and Norman intermarriage: she refuses a union that implies conver-
sion and she has a far-sighted sense of responsibility to the “children of
[her] people.” Ivanhoe thus ends ambivalently and unsatisfactorily as Ann
Rigney argues:
On the one hand, the novel proposes a view of nationality based on the
sublimation of original differences; on the other hand, it performs the fact
that differences remain.116
Scott demonstrates the reconciliation of difference, but he puts limits on

this reconciliation demarcated by historical frameworks he deems to be
incompatible.
The reader is left with an unfulfilled desire for Rebecca but more pro-
foundly they perceive the weight of history this denial confers. Scott would
claim in response to heavy criticism of Rebecca’s choice that the conclu-
sion merely bows to the mandates of accuracy and good taste:
But, not to mention that the prejudices of the age rendered such an union
almost impossible, the author may, in passing, observe, that he thinks a
character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp, is degraded rather than
exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity.117
This response to his readership’s fascination with Rebecca sublimates his

authority as creator in favor of “historical necessity.”118 Scott chooses to
115
See James Shapiro “Race, Nation, or Alien,” Shakespeare and the Jews (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), 167–193.
116
Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 91.
117
Walter Scott, “Author’s Introduction” [1830], Ivanhoe, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996 [1819]), 544–545.
118
See Rigney, 91; Duncan, xxv.
neglect the long tradition of conversions that romance heroines undergo

in romance as well as a clear source for Rebecca: The Merchant of Venice’s
Jessica. He also displaces any responsibility from Ivanhoe, who presum-
ably should be capable of recognizing and rewarding her virtues. In short,
deviation from genealogical and historical trajectories is not permissible
under the framework that Scott erects within Ivanhoe, Rebecca’s reward
must exist outside of temporality and outside of England. In assuming this
stance, Scott subtly reaffirms the larger history-making project his romance
advances within his fiction. The reader is asked to accept a set of ideologi-
cal claims in order to read its conclusion as satisfying.
That discrepancy between the stated ends and the ideological function
of Ivanhoe makes Chesnutt’s fidelity to the romance’s narrative structure
yet more perplexing. Chesnutt sets himself up to contend with a contra-
diction that becomes evident when the referent is changed to race in the
post-Civil War South. The narrative is doomed to sink under the weight of
the “historical necessity” that buoyed Scott’s work across the Atlantic.
The problems in Chesnutt’s translation of Scott become evident early and
often in the novel, as the characters begin to test the boundaries of chiv-
alry and courtly conduct that govern how the reader should approach
these characters. When Rena and her would-be lover, George Tryon, are
first introduced, they are described as though they had just stepped out of
the pages of Ivanhoe. One of the characters at the mock tournament jokes
with Rena about what her role in a romance would be:
If George were but masked and you were veiled, we should have a romantic
situation. You the mysterious damsel in distress, he the unknown champion.
The parallel, my dear, might not be so hard to draw, even as things are.119
Within the jest is the seed of the ironic connection between the two lovers
that develops through the text. George is who he purports to be, a
descendant of English “cavaliers” and has the horse-riding skills to prove
it, while Rena is actually “veiled” behind the fiction of her racial identity.
However, this also places Rena within Rebecca’s untenable position of
being both the virtuous damsel and a sign of difference that must be
rejected.120
119
The House behind the Cedars, 35–36.
120
The veil has strong resonances in both romance and the African-American literary tradi-
tion. One can think of Una’s veil in The Faerie Queene, or the number of veils seen in
146 M. X. VERNON
The text signals Rena as deviating from the normative values expected
in a romance; that is, she cannot possibly inhabit the roles that she is
assigned. However, perhaps equally revelatory about the nature of
Chesnutt’s romance is the character of Tryon who embodies the core
generic function of romance as described by Fredric Jameson: “to draw
the boundaries of a given social order” and provide an “internal deterrent
against deviancy and subversion.”121 Tryon gives voice to that project by
asserting the unbroken flow of Anglo-Saxon blood from the Middle Ages
to the present:
But no Southerner who loved his poor downtrodden country or his race,
the proud Anglo-Saxon race which traced the clear stream of its blood to the
cavaliers of England could tolerate the idea that even in distant generations
that unsullied current could be polluted by the blood of slaves.122
This sentiment straddles the same line Scott does between the mythic and
mimetic potentials of romance. Moreover, Tryon’s musing directly echoes
that of Henry Grady discussed in this chapter’s first section and points to
the potency of this narrative of continuity. However, what the contortions
of Scott in defining romance and the insistence of Grady on the unbroken
lines of genealogy lay bare is an anxiety about lineage and the need for
romance to bridge the gap between an articulated tradition and latent
realities, which in this case are inter-racial desires.
Tryon’s appeals to the natural image of a stream of Anglo-Saxon blood
from England to the American South forestalls the competing image of
the slave trade across the Atlantic as the far more apparent representation
of purposeful trans-Atlantic flows of people. The directed movement of
the Anglo-Saxons is belied by the seemingly purposeless movement of
Tryon himself. Tryon elides the difference between character and time to
make clear the directing force of Anglo-Saxon history on the individual.
However, his role in enacting the disciplinary functions of white society
around himself is characterized by errancy—wandering, questing, and
making mistakes in the name of love or what Scott would call “wild adven-
Ivanhoe. See also the magisterial study of masking and veiling in African-American literature:
Robert B. Stepto From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1979).
121
Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7.1
(Autumn 1975): 140.
122
Chesnutt, 91.
tures.” Chesnutt strategically uses the contradictory structure of the

romance that he borrows from Scott, wherein coincidence, misfortune,
and desire move his characters from scene to scene, but fidelity and devia-
tion, clarity, and deception as moral and temporal metrics preside over the
plot as a whole.
Chesnutt contrasts the freight of Anglo-Saxon history with that of
African-Americans in a scene where Rena prepares to leave her home of
Patesville to escape the humiliation following her broken engagement
with Tryon. Peering through the cedar trees, he spies Rena, who has been
reluctantly coaxed into a dance with one of her neighbors at her farewell
party. The sight of this enrages Tryon and he speeds off on horseback reel-
ing over Rena’s frivolity:
Tonight his eyes had been opened. He had seen her with the mask thrown
off, a true daughter of a race in which the sensuous enjoyment of the
moment took precedence of taste or sentiment or any higher emotions. Her
few months of boarding school, her brief association with white people, had
evidently been a mere veneer over the underlying negro, and their effects
had slipped away as soon as the intercourse had ceased. With the monkey
like imitativeness of the negro she had copied the manners of white people
while she lived among them and had dropped them with equal facility when
they ceased to serve a purpose.123
Any sort of black historical positionality is reduced to temporary and shift-

ing identity. The courtly veil disguising her features becomes the mask of
whiteness Tryon believes she can throw off to show her “true” racial iden-
tity. This should be a moment of clarity within the text, wherein her “devi-
ation” is punished and Tryon’s steadfastness is rewarded. He is, of course,
wrong in his evaluation of Rena who has stayed true in her affections. It is
Tryon who has begun to stray in the narrative.
Tryon is left in a quandary that is uniquely enabled by the genre of
romance. Once free from his marital obligations to Rena—he breaks off
the engagement after discovering her family history—he is able to move in
ways that she is not. While the difference in liberty might seem self-
evident, this observation brings to the fore central issues in the novel’s
tensions between myth and mimesis. The House behind the Cedars has been
critiqued for the flatness of Rena’s character, which has prompted efforts
Chesnutt, 141.
123
148 M. X. VERNON
to try to recuperate her as somehow existing outside the bounds of the

narrative.124 This assumes that the novel situates her as a tragic mulatta
whose subjectivity is misunderstood by the society around her. As a
romance heroine, the simplicity of her character accentuates her impossi-
bility in the eyes of Tryon—she is both a deviation from the teleology of
Anglo-Saxon history as imagined by Tryon and the real history of inter-
racial desire she embodies. As Tryon guards the color line in order to
protect the clarity of his Anglo-Saxon origins, he finds himself drawn
towards and repelled by Rena, which forces him into logical involutions:
How was he to imagine that persons of their appearance and pretensions

were tainted with negro blood? The more he dwelt upon the subject, the
more angry he became with those who had surprised his virgin heart and
deflowered it by such low trickery. The man who brought the first negro
into the British colonies had committed a crime against humanity and a
worse crime against his own race. The father of this girl had been guilty of a
sin against society for which others—for which he, George Tryon—must
pay the penalty. As slaves, negroes were tolerable. As freemen, they were an
excrescence, an alien element incapable of absorption into the body politic
of white men.125
The instability of Tryon’s desire causes him to invert the masculinist

underpinnings of his arguments about lineage to which he makes recourse
throughout the novel. He feminizes himself through his “deflowered”
“virgin heart” as though Rena’s boundary crossing has already severed the
clear streams of his Anglo-Saxon blood. Indeed, he turns his accusing gaze
towards paternity itself; he blames Rena’s father and the founding fathers
for their implication in slavery, so that he can disavow the desires he feels.
In doing so, he comes quite close to contravening the mandates of racial
purity; his arguments momentarily seem out of place in their resemblance
of abolitionist and post-war arguments for racial equality before he fore-
closes the possibilities for reconciliation. One hears the echoes of Frederick
Douglass’ image of the “child’s face standing in accusation against him
who is master and father to the child” as well as any number of novels
about tragic mulattos who lament the sins of their fathers, including the
one under discussion.126 Tryon’s claims are ironized by the erotic desire he
Ryan, 38.
124

125
126
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton &
Mulligan), 59. See also William Bedford Clark, “The Serpent of Lust in the Southern
has for Rena; he likewise seeks to reiterate the patterns of sexual exploita-
tion that he also resists.
Tryon loses himself in the forbidding woods of race. This is almost lit-
erally the case; he reverses his position on Rena and seeks to express his
love for her. To do so, Tryon dupes one of the students under Rena’s care
into leading her through the woods along a path that will lead to him.
Simultaneously, Wain, an African-American man who hopes to woo Rena,
approaches her from a different but converging path. Confronted with the
threat of having to choose between the two, she plunges into the under-
brush lining the path and then deep into the forest. Tryon pursues, find-
ing her too late after chasing the wrong woman, one “with the sallowness
of a sandhill poor white.” One is tempted to read this as a scrap of humor
in a text otherwise restrained by its form, although one suspects that
encountering this white woman he believes to be Rena is the appropriate
end for all his meanderings.
Up to this point of this argument, I have lingered over Tryon, not to
privilege him over Rena, but to demonstrate how his actions become
distorted in her orbit. Rena herself follows a less eccentric path through
the novel until its very end when she, like Tryon, gets lost. Her flight
through the woods is one of her few acts of self-determination but it is
also her act of self-eradication. The tragic mulatta narrative is premised
on the socially constructed immutability of race that anticipates its generic
recognition, yet Rena’s death is accompanied by two grim transforma-
tions that are coupled with the expectations of romance. When she is
discovered she has lost not just any racial distinction but also many dis-
cernibly human features. Her clothes are torn to rags, and the first
description “a tangled mass of dark brown hair, matted with twigs and
leaves and cockleburrs, and hanging in wild profusion around her neck”
suggests an animal rather than the vision of beauty the men in the novel
recklessly pursue.127 She transforms once more after her death. She is
described transcendently; her soul, suffused in “red and golden glory,”
takes flight. Finally, and perhaps most perversely, her willingness to die
rather than live with either man under social guises that are untrue to the
realities of her being between racial categories proves her fidelity to the
prevailing social codes that Ivanhoe propounds. Her death is a model of
Garden,” in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and

Law, ed. Werner Sollors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 301.
127
Chesnutt, 181.
150 M. X. VERNON
civic martyrdom or death into citizenship.128 She becomes incorporable

within the structures of American society via romance and the extremity
of her self-sacrifice, which finally effaces racial difference and replaces it
with the language of spiritual ascent.129
Rena’s end presents a crux in how Chesnutt theorizes temporality. He
casts Rena as an object of desire, the ideal version of his “future American,”
while he simultaneously denies the “amity between the two races whose
destiny seems bound up together in the Western world” that the romance
form promises.130 Ostensibly the narrative’s failures are an expression of
Chesnutt’s pessimism about the possibility of an inter-racial future: the
two states in which Rena ends the novel cannot exist at once. As a novel
that speculates about the nature of history, the point of divergence between
the world the reader knows and the world of the text only arises at this
final narrative crux of Rena’s death. Catherine Gallagher argues that spec-
ulative fiction responds to a desire to “tell it how it wasn’t” that allows
readers to level moral judgments on history.131 Chesnutt, on the other
hand, actually does tell it how it was. Rena testifies to the impossible logic
of post-Reconstruction racial ideologies; she bodies forth as an attestation
of a wholly different historical trajectory to that of Anglo-Saxon progress.
Rena becomes a “historical necessity” in the sense that Scott deploys the
term to describe Rebecca, a troublesome presence that chafes against the
desire for “romances of nation”: narratives that are complicit in subduing
the creole of cultures that calls nation into being.132 The marriage plot that
should conclude the romance fails, which prompts the reader to cast moral
judgments upon the future of race in American. One anonymous reviewer
128
I borrow this phrase from Julia Lupton’s study of citizenship in Othello. For Lupton,
Othello’s death is a final proof of his conversion into Venetian society. See: Julia Reinhard
Lupton, Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 105.
129
Here I think particularly of Allen J. Frantzen’s argument which reads chivalric self-sac-
rifice to be in imitation of Christ’s death. Through the crucifixion, one is meant to see “the
terror of [Christ’s] death and proof of his triumph over the end his killers intended for him.”
This linkage becomes yet more suggestive when one takes into account that Franzten’s larger
argument is about soldiers in WWI who were subject to significant propaganda that framed
their participation with this rhetoric. The ideas of dying for one’s nation and dying for virtue
collapse upon each other. See: Bloody Good: Chivalry Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago:
130
131
Gallagher, 13.
132
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10.
of The House behind the Cedars indicates the sort of interpenetration

between fiction and reality that the novel prompts:
Whether there are many “Renas” in the world we do not know; we can only
say we wish there were thousands of them. The world would be distinctly
better, taint and all.133
The reviewer’s desire for other “Renas” reveals the complicated nature of
Chesnutt’s speculative fiction. Chesnutt’s work achieved an “aura of
authenticity” such that Rena becomes a desirable model of citizenship
through her fulfillment of the mythopoetic functions of romance.
Although The House behind the Cedars was less popular than Chesnutt’s
earlier works, it conveys its speculative ends to critics with surprising
clarity:
The book is something more than a clever combination of a romantic novel

and a social study of conditions which one instinctively recognizes were not
only of the past, but are likely to become questions of the future. It will not
only interest the reader, but furnish food for thought upon certain phases of
one of the greatest problems that concern the future of our country.134
This review is emblematic of a pattern of responses to the novel as both

conveying some truth and speaking to the possibility of a new social
mythos that loosens the artificial bonds of race.135 On the other hand, the
sentiments of these reviewers profoundly miss how Rena’s death provides
an example of the deformational pressures of fitting under normative
guises. She becomes visible through the simultaneous impositions of
desire and abjections that gratify the reader’s expectations. Beneath the
generic pull of romance is the modern impulse for teleological history;
Rena represents “a broken historical narrative to which we have not pro-
posed an alternative.”136 Her signification within the here and now is held
at the remove of yesterday or tomorrow. When Chesnutt would turn to a
133
Anon. Rev. of The House Behind the Cedars “Book Reviews,” Peoria Evening Star
(November 27, 1900), 10.
134
Review of The House Behind the Cedars, “New Books,” The Wave [San Francisco]
(December 22, 1900), 22.
135
Here I borrow a phrase from Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel, 5.
136
Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 23.
152 M. X. VERNON
form that demanded to be understood as unshiftably rooted in the pres-

ent, critics turned away from it.
It is not difficult to read this final problem Rena presents in the context
of a writer seeking a generic form under which he could express the ironies
of blackness. Chesnutt briefly alights on a grammar that can capture the
dynamics of hypervisibility and invisibility, the stubborn fixity of historical
presence and the obviation of historical meaning, the aspirations and deni-
als of race. At the same time, the form seems to conspire against him. If
romance is a grammar, what it expresses in the novel is always in the sub-
junctive mood, a wish or unfulfilled demand that Rena might be recog-
nized as fully human or, as Tryon hopes, that love could be law. As was the
case with A Connecticut Yankee, the attempt to visualize race through
romance holds it at a distance. Twain and Chesnutt would abandon the
genre to work with urgency and clarity on material drawn from present
and undeniable violence. And while the political purchase of that shift is
clear, one wonders about what might have been in the worlds that the two
writers construct in which it is possible to see an escape from the dichoto-
mies of American race and to inhabit the enchantments and cadences of
romance.
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CHAPTER 4
History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales:

Medieval Theories of Ethnicity and Their
Afterlives
Calling for more complex responses than the squeamishness evident in

contemporary distaste for enlightened discussions of “race,” these
discomforting writings communicate ways that the consolidation of
modern raciology required enlightenment and myth to be intertwined.
Indeed, they reveal theories of culture, “race” and nation as supplying
the logic and mechanism of their dangerous interconnection.
Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of
Race, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2004), 59.
Paul Gilroy writes the above in an argument that resituates lesser-read

sections of Immanuel Kant within the broader context of the philoso-
pher’s work on rationalism and empiricism. Gilroy’s evocation of Kant
roots “raciology” in the heart of modernity. Read against this book’s
broader scale, that is, between the medieval and the modern, Gilroy’s
argument continues to have tremendous explanatory power, but needs to
be recalibrated to encompass different zones of contact and cultural para-
digms. This chapter differs from those preceding it in that it does not
consider the reactions of African-Americans to medieval materials. Rather,
it follows Gilroy’s prompt to deconstruct categories of difference created
by the mix of myth-making and epistemic ordination that subtends the
production of political theory and expressions of colonial power. What
follows upends the temporal logic that motivates the reification of modern
racial categories. Simultaneously, it constitutes a break within the temporal

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_4
160 M. X. VERNON
focus on the long nineteenth century that frames the previous chapters.
This is a necessary intervention into the larger argument this book makes
about alternatives to the solidity of racial origins. I propose that the inter-
twinement of myth and approaches to knowledge production—whether
read as scientific, historical, or ethnographic—is already present in medi-
eval texts; early instabilities in the narratives of origin or colonization re-
present themselves in the problematic forms Gilroy discusses as well as in
the complex recuperative strategies discussed in Chap. 2. By turning our
gaze to the medieval period we can see what might be called a pre-history
to later patterns of desire and appropriation, as certain medieval writers
struggled to contend with the shifting lines of political power that inter-
sected with perceived regional, cultural, and ethnic differences. More
broadly, this chapter will show that the fantasy of “raciology” is one that
must be repeatedly reconsolidated with maneuvers that create the space
for unexpected correspondences between identities.
Gerald of Wales (1146–1223), the prodigious writer and archdeacon,
provides a particularly attractive locus for this thread of inquiry because of
the interaction between his writing and the critical tradition that has devel-
oped from it. Gerald is frequently evoked in discussions about the roots of
racial formation in the West.1 This chapter will build upon this work, but
will begin by contextualizing Gerald through his reception as a measure of
the shifting politics around the terms used for Gerald’s identity category
which have been fraught from the earliest stages of modern research into
him and bespeak enduring questions about how he fits within them.
J.S. Brewer, an early editor of Gerald’s work, described in his 1861 intro-
duction to Gerald’s autobiography, De Rebus a Se Gestis, his wonder that
a Welshman could find any instruction in “a country so indubitably barba-
rous and uncivilized” as Wales, before modifying his position to assert that
he received the advantages of being merely half Welsh.2 The language of
historical advancement through colonization implied by the description of
Wales as well as genetic and cultural determinism has lingered through the
development of Giraldian studies. Michael Richter and Robert Bartlett
begin their ground-clearing studies of Gerald with discussions of whether
1
Indeed, Gerald is discussed extensively in a book bearing a similar title. See: Robert
Bartlett, “Illustrating Ethnicity in the Middle Ages,” in The Origins of Racism in the West,
eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 132–156.
2
Giraldus Cambrensis, De Rebus A Se Gestis in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 1 ed. J. S.
Brewer (1867; Reprint, London: Rolls Series, 1964), xii, xvii.
HISTORY, GENEALOGY, AND GERALD OF WALES: MEDIEVAL THEORIES… 161
to refer to him as Gerald of Wales or Gerald the Welshman.3 Richter cast

his subject as “an outspoken protagonist for the Welsh cause” and thereby
argued that Gerald helped give form to the Welsh natio, although Gerald
held himself outside of it.4 After a discussion of the relative ease with which
one can tell “a black man from a white one” except in “borderline cases,”
such as might be found in Jamaica, Bartlett cautions that the complexities
of twelfth-century British society render it necessary to consider him
through the inter-relationship of genetics, language, class, and religion.5
(It should be noted that Bartlett perhaps unconsciously chooses an exam-
ple that is fraught with Jamaica’s history with colonization.) However, he
ultimately gives precedence to the political and geographical category of
Marcher, which itself is a protean term that loosely refers to prerogatives
of lordship in contested borderlands in Wales.6
Subsequently, scholarship on Gerald took a post-colonial turn and with
it followed sharper critiques of familiar questions. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
and Michael A. Faletra both appeal to Homi Bhabha’s theories of the
hybrid to convey Gerald’s “own vexed ethnic identity and allegiances.”7
Shirin Khanmohamadi in her study of medieval ethnographic writing pro-
vides the most far-reaching connection between Gerald’s writing and
modern imperial projects of cataloging cultures:
A close reading of the Descriptio Kambriae suggests that these processes of

social and cultural accommodation, well under way in the period in which
Gerald wrote, may have motivated his composition of the novel treatise. For
just as in the nineteenth-century European incursion into Asia, Africa, and
the Americas gave rise to the widespread appeal to anthropological
3
Michael Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis: The Growth of the Welsh Nation, 2nd edition
(Abersteyth: The National Library of Wales, 1976).
4
Richter, 5.
5
Bartlett uses this example to illustrate the problems of seeking a singular criterion for
describing difference across shifting social situations. Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales,
1146–1223 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 13.
6
See: Max Lieberman, The Medieval March of Wales: The Creation and Perception of a
Frontier, 1066–1283 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5–22.
7
Michael A. Faletra, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain
in the Twelfth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 135. See: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,
“Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” in The Postcolonial
Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 85–104. See also Shirin
A. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 37–56.
162 M. X. VERNON
salvage”—the call to preserve traditional cultures from the ravages of

“
modernity and acculturation—so too in the medieval era’s greatest period of
expansion, we find that same call in the work of the twelfth century’s most
accomplished ethnographer of the Far West.8
Gerald’s “novel treatise,” as Khanmohamadi describes his study of the

Welsh, demonstrates the peculiar intimacies of Gerald’s intellectual pro-
duction, which sought to make absolute categories of difference despite his
own constant self-fashioning. This loose history of Gerald criticism is not
meant to detract from the scholarship by flattening its intellectual claims;
much of what follows is built upon this foundational work. Instead, what
becomes visible in this list is the attraction to seeing not just an analogy
between Gerald’s identity and the history of race, but potentially a pivot
between the construction of difference as integral to pre-modern European
imperial projects and amplified expressions of racial difference fueling
modern expressions of power over colonized and enslaved peoples.
While many medievalists rightly hesitate to solidify these connections,
there is a strain of black radical thought that firmly links modern racism
with pre-modern constructions of difference. I have alluded to this in
Chap. 2 in discussing how Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois turned
their attention to the trans-Atlantic and the global in search of solidarities,
and as a result began to seek out the origins of race. More recently, Cedric
Robinson began his study of “racialism” and Marxism with an account of
how “capitalism emerged within the feudal order.”9 Robinson’s use of the
term “racialism,” which he defines as “the legitimation and corroboration
of social organization as natural by reference to the ‘racial’ components of
its elements” should recall the pointedly awkward word “raciology” Gilroy
uses in the passage beginning this chapter.10 In deploying this word anach-
ronistically onto medieval European society, Robinson seeks to denatural-
ize the reader’s assumptions about race as constituting necessary and fixed
categories. Part of the potency of Robinson’s work is its initial emphasis
on intellectual labor and myth-making, rather than on the development of
economic systems, as one might expect in a text on Marxist theory:
8
In Light of Another’s Word, 46.
9
Robin D. G. Kelley, “Foreword,” in Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition, 2nd edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000), xiii.
10
Robinson, 2.
Thus the “Negro” was conceived. The Negro—whose precedents could be

found in the racial fabrications concealing the Slavs (the slaves), the Irish and
others—substantially eradicated in Western historical consciousness the
necessity of remembering the significance of Nubia for Egypt’s formation,
of Egypt in the development of Greek civilization, of Africa for imperial
Rome, and more pointedly of Islam’s influence on Europe’s economic,
political and intellectual history.11
That the West reorganized the historical meaning of blackness to make

possible the conquest and subjugation that fueled the modern economy is
one of the bedrock claims of Robinson’s work; he argues that fundamental
to making slavery conceivable are the “genealogical legends” that gave rise
to justifications of human subjugation.12 In turn, these narratives became
refracted within regional contexts distinct from their origins, yet bearing
the weight of self-evident fact.
The provocations at the core of Robinson’s initial inquiry are the ques-
tions of how racial myths come into being and how they obtain meanings
that are stable across historical and geographical contexts. Although racial
myths depend upon the purity of origins, a close examination of medieval
versions of these narratives that contribute to or anticipate modern racial
formation reveals the difficulties of, and the contradictions that arise
within, constructing identity even at this early point. I contend that these
narratives, because they often emerge from conflict, are themselves ambig-
uous and must be read through their ambivalences. One of the goals of
this line of inquiry will be to draw together the threads of argument
sketched above that are intimately related, yet have not been put into con-
versation. Gerald of Wales’ writing provides the ideal bridge between
medievalist attempts at excavating the origins of a British ethnographic
tradition and modern African-American attempts to reassess the black/
white binary’s place in informing the creation of capitalist and colonial
systems because of Gerald’s role in surveying bodily form and due to the
sway he held over historical form into later periods. I follow
Khanmohamadi’s argument that presents Gerald as reviving and innovat-
ing the genre of ethnography as well as the lineage outlined by early
Black Marxism, 4.
11
Ibid., 22; Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and the World
12
Economy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), xi.

164 M. X. VERNON
odernists that situates his writing on Ireland as influencing English writ-

m
ing on Ireland into the seventeenth century.13
The example of Edmund Burke’s attempts to write a history that con-
tended with the notion of “Irishness” demonstrates the longevity of the
forms Gerald erected. When Burke contracted with Robert Dodsley to
write a compact history of England (The Abridgement of the History of
England, 1757), he had a clear idea of how important the opportunity
before him was. Having chafed under the force of narratives about his
native Ireland—what he called “miserable performances which go about
under the names of Histories of Ireland”—he understood the profound
impact historical writing had on actual lives.14 Narratives of Ireland fre-
quently presented the Irish as childish, inhuman, and in need of subjuga-
tion: “canonical visions of the ‘wild’ or ‘meere Irish’” advanced by Gerald
of Wales then taken up by subsequent authors like Edmund Spenser.15 On
the other hand, arguments about English superiority and the strength of
English law depended upon the unbroken “‘Gothic’ legacy of the free
Germanic tribes, including the Saxons.”16 Burke used his history to resist
this framing of the English past while he also subtly recalled the slights of
histories about the Irish. Among his careful translations and adaptations of
source material, he noted the “barbarity” of the Anglo-Saxons and sug-
gested that the “development” of the English people was a contingent
historical development made possible by the Norman Conquest rather
than a certainty that occurred despite the formative influence of continen-
tal powers.17 Burke solidified his argument about the discontinuity of
“English” institutions with his description of the ancient Britons—the
predecessors of the Anglo-Saxons—as having been reduced to slavery by
the Romans and thus given to “stupid inconstancy” after being released
from Roman rule.18
13
In Light of Another’s Word, 37–38; Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience:
Wild Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 93.
14
Edmund Burke, Pre-Revolutionary Writing, ed. Ian Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge
15
Seán Donlan, “The ‘Genuine Voice of Its Records and Monuments’?: Edmund Burke’s
‘Interior History of Ireland,’” in Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities, ed. Patrick Donlan
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 76.
16
Ibid., 72.
17
Ibid.
18
This comment gains a curious layer of additional meaning when it is compared to his
“Sketch of a Negro Code” in which he voices concern that slaves should not be given their
immediate freedom, but gradually given rights because “the minds of men, being crippled
The broad context surrounding Burke’s The Abridgement of the History

of England helps situate both the problems of identity within Gerald of
Wales’s writing about Ireland that this chapter investigates and the larger
issues this book studies about the contest over historical/mythical narra-
tives as a site for constructing social consensus around the meaning of
racialized bodies. Most narratives of the collaborations and eventual schism
between African-Americans and the Irish begin in the early nineteenth cen-
tury with the Irish independence leader and abolitionist, Daniel O’Connell
(1775–1847). It was O’Connell who helped illuminate Frederick Douglass’
growing awareness of the global implications to the struggle for emancipa-
tion. The connection between the two men was such that Daniel O’Connell
dubbed Douglass “the black O’Connell.” The story tends to end with the
1863 violent uprising in New York City over the draft laws that placed a
disproportionate burden of military service on poor citizens who could not
pay a commutation fee to evade service.19 Beyond functioning as a means
of protest, the Draft Riots allowed groups of predominantly Irish workers
to visit didactic violence upon African-American laborers who were per-
ceived to be undercutting wages.20 These riots helped stall the potential for
class and racial solidarity between African-Americans and Irish immigrants
that had been developing for decades.
Although the contours of this narrative are valuable for understanding
the dynamics of African-American and Irish political relationships, it is
incomplete. Burke’s critical interventions into the writing of history
remind us that the roots of racialization are sunk into English histories
that mythologize British and Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, later to be
reproduced in the United States. Histories of Ireland would be used as
the foundation for oppressive policies that shaped subsequent Irish
responses on both sides of the Atlantic to the cause of African-American
emancipation. These historical narratives are essential parts of the state’s
with that restraint [of slavery], can do nothing for themselves.” Edmund Burke, The Writing
and Speeches of Edmund Burke, eds. T.O. McLoughlin and James T. Boulton (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997), 382; “Sketch of a Negro Code,” in The Portable Edmund Burke, ed.
Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 185.
19
An example of a text that uses these rough historical boundaries is Noel Ignatiev’s How
the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
20
For a discussion of labor conditions in New York preceding the Draft Riots see Iver
Bernstein’s chapter, “Workers and Consolidation,” in The New York City Draft Riots: Their
Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford
166 M. X. VERNON
biopower, which depends upon the normalization of categories of

difference:
In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is

acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in
the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the spe-
cies or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing
society, race or racism is a precondition that makes killing acceptable.21
Foucault’s conception of biopower is consonant with Robinson’s and

Gilroy’s in its emphasis on the intellectual structures that are necessary for
subsequent power relations to build upon.22 Foucault presents the bio-
logical, narratival, and genealogical as interlocking components in systems
of oppressive power. He reads the differentiation of bodies through
pseudo-scientific means, the mythologization of those divisions—identify-
ing some as superior to others—and the social construction of “pure lin-
eages,” as the necessary groundwork for populations to undertake
programs of violence and conquest.
What the example of Burke reveals (and what Foucault perhaps ignores)
is how the imposition of histories might be resisted and their power
altered. Burke’s historical work “reject[ed] the claim that the roots of
modern civilization could be traced back directly to the genius of the
‘northern’ Germanic nations.”23 He stressed breaks in political systems
and difficult cultural transitions where other writers argued for seamless
progress. Moreover, he called attention to how texts that are used as the
basis for arguments about racial purity and native superiority have within
themselves sites of contestation and ambivalence to power. The medieval
sources that British and American writers drew upon in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century to construct mythologies of continuity from the
“ancient Britons” to the contemporary English were themselves fraught
with problems of cultural identity that opened them to radical rewritings.
21
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976,
eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandreo Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 256.
22
Foucault identifies the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century as the period in
which the institutions that mobilized this power developed. This would put Edmund Burke’s
life squarely at the center of his argument.
23
Richard Bourke, “Edmund Burke and the Politics of Conquest,” Modern Intellectual
History 4.3 (November 2007), 429.
One must temper the impulse to believe that racial categories became
ever clearer throughout the nineteenth century with the countercurrent
evidence that race was not a stable or easy to define identity.24 Rather, it
was the product of competing political and economic interests; the history
of which closely entwines the Irish and African-Americans who held simi-
lar jobs, were subject to similar cultural caricature, and lived cheek-by-jowl
with each other through much of the nineteenth century.25 The intimacy
of Irish and African-American lives created a duality within Irish-American
identity that shows the haunting presence of a long history of oppression
that generates a seemingly contradictory set of positions about how to
move beyond that past. Frederick Douglass identifies this crux in a speech
given to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853:
The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere,
are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the
Negro. They are taught to believe that he eats the bread that belongs to
them. The cruel lie is told them [sic], that we deprive them of labor and
receive the money which would otherwise make its way to their pockets. Sir,
the Irish-American will one day find out his mistake. He will find that in
assuming our avocation, he has also assumed our degradation.26
For Douglass, what was sympathy on one side of the Atlantic becomes
transmuted in the cultural milieu of nineteenth-century America into the
“degradation” of servitude. The burden of history and the lure of status
to be gained through ethnic transformation together generate a paradoxi-
cal response that Douglass underscores. The work done to define Irish-
American identity against that of African-Americans only drew the two
closer within the nation’s dynamics of power.
On December 9, 1876, decades after Douglass’s prediction, Harper’s
Weekly put a political cartoon by the famous cartoonist Thomas Nast on
the cover of its latest edition. It depicted an African-American southerner
24
See Matthew Pratt Guterl’s argument about the shifting alliances between and significa-
tions of race in The Color of Race in America: 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2001).
25
Ignatiev discusses Irish and African-American neighborhoods and that the characters of
Jim Crow, Jim Dandy, Pat, and Bridget (the latter two were Irish caricatures) shared the same
stage in American theater: How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2:
178.
26
Frederick Douglass, “Speech at the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City
(1853),” in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Park Publishing: Hartford, 1881), 303.
168 M. X. VERNON
and a northern Irish-American man sitting on scales: one slack-jawed and

smiling in overalls, the other truculent and shouting. Both sport similar
grotesque, animal-like faces and the image is captioned: “The Ignorant
Vote—Honors Are Easy.” The cartoon, which was published a few weeks
after the presidential election, lampoons how easily the two political blocks
these caricatures represent could be mobilized to blindly vote for their
parties without regard for the actual policies they would advance. While
the image suggests the final breakdown of solidarities between Irish and
African-Americans along political lines it also draws an equation between
the two sides of the scale. Both the Irish and African-American man are
shown as underdeveloped humans, unfit for the responsibility of govern-
ing themselves. They are reduced to mere counters—valuable only for
their numbers—within the mechanics of national governance. Nast’s
image gives evidence to the persistence of the gaze cast on the Irish, which
sought to transform them into the tools of nation-building’s grand
designs; it holds out the promise of being distinct from African-Americans,
while it more firmly asserts the intimate implication of these identities.
A critical part of the calculation behind the political choices made to
link Irish and “white” identity was the desire to escape the lineage of his-
tories that framed the Irish as “uncultivated” and “savage”—a conceit that
lingered from the Middle Ages into the popular culture of the nineteenth
century.27 The underlying issue that Burke, as well as other writers labor-
ing in the wake of Gerald, raises is one of form in terms of genre and the
body. Gerald’s ethnographic conceits became implicated in the produc-
tion of historical narratives, which set the trajectory for resistance to the
stubborn fixity of “canonical visions of the ‘wild’ or ‘meere Irish.’”28 Yet,
Gerald of Wales’ The History and Topography of Ireland (ca. 1188) was
itself produced in response to the problems of colonial imagination that
put into contest Welsh and Irish alterity from Anglo-Norman elites. It is
necessary to understand the reification of Irishness as inhering within his-
torical difference in The History and Topography of Ireland to comprehend
later attempts to overcome that difference. As this chapter will unfold,
form will be shown to be more dynamic than has been allowed in the criti-
cism because of the dialectical relationship between Gerald of Wales and
27
Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2008), 135.
28
Donlan, 76.
his own major antecedent, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the

Kings of Britain (ca. 1136).
Gerald used The History of the Kings of Britain—the story of the rise
and fall of the Britons, later read as the Welsh—to lend authority to his
arguments about the conquest of Ireland. What is significant about the
influence that both of these writers would exert on later generations is that
their works are marked by ambivalences about the histories they purport
to tell. Ostensibly, both argue for the absolute right of the more “highly
developed” people to rule over those deemed to be barbaric. However,
the divisions between the colonizer and colonized are far more troubled
than these texts seem to allow. The Britons’ desire for conquest in The
History of the Kings of Britain, which results in an apocalyptic end to their
rule, reads as a parable for the limitations of colonial ambitions. The
Britons embark upon a campaign to conquer their parallel world power,
the Roman Empire. As will be discussed below, Geoffrey frames this final
opposition as a loss in the coherence of British identity and a failure of
historical insight, signified by the identical claims both powers make to
supremacy based on their genealogical descent from Troy and a shared
lineage of military conflict. Gerald’s own histories, which present Anglo-
Norman conquests, must engage the powerful legacy of Geoffrey’s work,
the mythical history of the Welsh as the once and future rulers of Britain,
and the contemporary realities of the Welsh and Irish as threatened with
colonization.
Ireland, for Gerald, was a cathected space; it represented the intersec-
tion of his literary ambitions, his political aspirations, and his ever-present
knowledge of Welsh oppression. He could not help but tie Ireland’s politi-
cal fate to his own success and the fortunes of the Welsh people. One can
glimpse the connection between Gerald’s Ireland and Gerald himself from
within his Autobiography when he discusses his goals for writing The
Conquest of Ireland. This comes after Gerald refuses both Irish bishoprics
offered to him by John, son of King Henry II. Although Gerald desired
the authority a bishopric would afford, he believed that John did not
intend to improve the status of the church in Ireland. Rather, he saw the
writing of Ireland’s history as a project that would provide him a measure
of gain he could not get through political or religious appointment:
Videns ergo quod comes ibi nil proficeret, sed de die in diem deteriorem per
ejus adventum terra statum haberet; considerans etiam multa ibidem nova et
notabilia, aliis aliena regnis et prorsus incognita; ut vel ipse quaestum
170 M. X. VERNON
aliquem vel conquaestum suo saltem labore faceret; primum Topographiae

suae, deinde Expugnationis Hibernicae materiam ibi colligere studio grandi
et diligentius inquisitone curavit.
Seeing that the Earl made no advance toward that end, but that the state
of Ireland was every day the worse for his coming, and considering the many
strange and notable things that he observed in that country, things found
nowhere else and utterly unknown, he [Gerald] set himself with great zeal
and diligent inquiry to collect materials first for his Topography and then for
his Conquest of Ireland, that he might at least by his own labor win some
profit or conquest.29
Gerald here refuses the type of advancement for which he spends much of
his life longing; that is, to move upwards in the Church hierarchy beyond
archdeacon. Although those ambitions were frustrated, he still sought to
direct his intellectual labor towards not only extracting some “profit”
from Ireland, but also asserting dominance over the island through writ-
ing its history. Quaestum and conquaestum are pivotal words for Gerald in
the context of Ireland. He positions his labor as a writer adjacent to mili-
tary action, a comparison that reveals the precarity of his role within the
project of colonization. Historiography—such as it is within Gerald’s
writing—is his means of claiming authority for himself and intervening
into the discourse around colonization as he derives it from Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain. Authority of this sort
would prove to be unstable for Gerald. Genre and genealogy conspired to
usurp the position he hoped to consolidate; although Gerald depended on
the precedent of Geoffrey’s popular work, The History of the Kings of
Britain constructed a mythology around the Welsh as a dispossessed iden-
tity in which Gerald became implicated. Thus Gerald found himself in the
contradictory position of being both the colonizer and the colonized at
the nexus of language and power.
The term that usefully explicates the difficulties of Gerald’s position is
“colonized intellectual,” a term I borrow from Black Studies and the dis-
course of post-colonial theory. I do so advisedly because the term emerges
from vastly different historical and political situations than Gerald’s.
29
All Latin versions of Gerald’s De Rebus A Se Gestis appear in Giraldus Cambrensis,
Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 1 ed. J. F. Dimock, (1867; Reprint, London: Rolls, 1964). I
use the Butler’s translations in Gerald of Wales, The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis,
2nd edition, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). De Rebus A Se
Gestis, 65; Autobiography, 90.
However, the idea of the “colonized intellectual” encapsulates the para-

dox of Gerald’s literary production and his political position within
twelfth-century British society. Frantz Fanon deploys the term “colonized
intellectual” in part to signify a hybrid subject that possesses a wealth of
cultural tools within an intellectual system that limits and distorts the ways
in which those skills can be deployed:
The colonized intellectual, at the very moment when he undertakes a work

of art, fails to realize he is using techniques and a language borrowed from
the occupier. He is content to cloak these instruments in a style that is meant
to be national but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism.30
The framework of the colonized intellectual allows for a critique that can
explore the intimate relationship between Gerald as a thinker and Gerald’s
lived experience of the structures of meaning erected around his shifting
identity. The vexed position of the colonized intellectual, one who is
dependent upon and at odds with a dominant political regime and its self-
mythologizing, brings into focus Gerald’s struggles with the influence of
historical narratives that precede him, most significantly, Geoffrey’s.
Gerald, writing in his Journey Through Wales, expresses his thoughts
about the value of Geoffrey’s history when describing the unfortunate
condition of a Welshman, Meilyr, who was haunted by demons:
Contigit aliquando, spiritibus immundis nimis eidem insultantibus, ut

Evangelium Johannis ejus in gremio poneretur: qui statim tanquam aves
evolantes, omnes penitus evanuerunt. Quo sublato postmodum, et Historia
Britonum a Galfrido Arthuro tractata, experiendi causa, loco ejusdem sub-
rogata, non solum corpori ipsius toti, sed etiam libro superposito, onge
solito crebrius et taediosius insederunt.
If the evil spirits oppressed him too much, the Gospel of St. John was
placed on his bosom, when, like birds, they immediately vanished. But when
the book was removed, and The History of the Britons by Geoffrey of
Monmouth was substituted in its place, they instantly reappeared in greater
numbers, and remained a longer time than usual on his body and on the
book.31
30
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2nd edition (New York: Grove Press, 2004),
160.
31
All Latin versions of Gerald’s Itinerarium Kambriae and Descripto Kambriae appear in
Giraldi Cambrensis: Opera, vol. VI. ed. J. F. Dimock (1867; Reprint, London: Rolls, 1964).
Translations appear in Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales and The Description of
172 M. X. VERNON
Meilyr, because of the haunting, gained the ability to foretell the future
and, despite being illiterate, could identify lies in books. This anecdote
seems to be much in agreement with other later twelfth-century and early
thirteenth century historians who accused Geoffrey of having an “inordi-
nate love of lying.”32 This is a popular quote for scholars of medieval his-
toriography because it suggests the vexed nature of the subject, even in the
eyes of medieval readers.33 However, this passage read as more than a cri-
tique holds forth the tremendous potential for Geoffrey’s work to influ-
ence its reader. Meilyr is oppressed by the presence of demons around
him, yet he is able to employ that malady to practice virtue and spot trans-
gressions in the men of faith around him; that is, this story is a version of
the Augustinian notion of recuperating useful material from unlikely
sources. Like the unfortunate Welshman swarmed with demons, Gerald’s
work is inumbrated by Geoffrey’s influence despite the former’s stated
resistance to the “fabulous history.”34 It is hardly a coincidence that Gerald
critiques Geoffrey’s fanciful inventions in the midst of his own colorful
fictions; Gerald simultaneously tries to separate himself from and follows
in the footsteps of Geoffrey.
Gerald’s history, not unlike Geoffrey’s, attracted the attention of critics
eager to point out the falsehoods contained in his work. Indeed, he incor-
porated the words of one critic in the preface to his The Conquest of
Ireland:
Sed quoniam difficile est fictam diu ferre personam, ad plenum a natura
degenerare non prevalens, ut vel in aliquo noceat, ut vel citra crepitum
tumor ille detumescat, in mediam distinccionem insolenter invehitur, parte
mendacii nitens summan universam decolorare. Obicit enim in hunc
modum: ‘Lupum introducit cum sacerdote loquentem, bovina humano cor-
pori depingit extrema, mulierem barbatam, hircum amatorem et leonem.’
Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin, 1978). See: Itinerarium Kambriae et
Descripto Kambriae, 58, The Journey through Wales and The Description of Wales, 117–118.
32
William uses the phrase “effrenata mentiendi libidne.” William of Newburgh, The
History of English Affairs: Book 1, eds. and trans. P.G. Walsh and M.J. Kennedy (Oxford:
Oxbow Books, 2015), 32.
33
See, for example, Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s essay “Genealogy: Form and Function in
Medieval Historical Narrative,” History and Theory 22.1 (1983): 43–53. Although she stages
an important intervention into the nature of medieval historiography, she uses this quotation
merely as an aside.
34
The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, 232.
But [his critic] cannot altogether avoid running true to its own nature,
since it is hard to keep up an assumed character for any length of time. So
that it may injure the book in some respect, or else that the swollen balloon
of pride may subside without producing a rude explosion of wind, envy
arrogantly assails the middle book, trying to besmirch the work as a whole
by making it share in its false accusation of that book. It makes its accusation
as follows: “He brings into his book a wolf talking with a priest; he describes
a human body which has the extremities of an ox, a bearded woman, and a
goat and lion copulating with women.”35
In both his choice of criticism and his framing of that critique, Gerald
betrays conflicting notions about the stability of identity that redounds
to an unsettled perspective on his writing in favor of colonization. Gerald
defends his inclusion of prodigies with appeals to the Church fathers who
include similar deviations from the common course of nature in their
work. Particularly, he adopts the Augustinian argument that it is within
God’s power to create changes contra naturam, thus his work should
not be impeached for seeming to cultivate the incredible; that is to say,
he puts distance between himself and his attempts to strategically depict
Ireland as a “land of monsters.”36 Although Gerald’s early work on
Ireland might be described as ethnographic, the idea of ethnicity implies
mutability of cultural practices that are subject to change.37 Unlike the
Welsh, the Irish are not constructed as malleable in his Topographia, he
even finds the clergy lacking in their devotion to an ancient custom
(“antiqua consuetudine”) that prevents them from conducting their
pastoral duties.38
35
All Latin versions and translations of Gerald’s Expugnatio Hibernica appear in Giraldus
Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, eds. and trans. A.B. Scott and
F.X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), 4–5.
36
Ibid.; Asa Simon Mittman, “The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the ‘Marvels
of the West,’” The Monstrous Middle Ages, eds. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2003), 101.
37
This is the argument that Bartlett makes about the terms of medieval categorization
Gerald deploys. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest Colonization, and Cultural
Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 197.
38
All Latin versions of Gerald’s Topographia Hibernica appear in Giraldi Cambrensis:
Opera, Vol V. ed. J. F. Dimock (1867; Reprint, London: Rolls, 1964). Translations appear in
Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, 2nd edition, trans. John O’Meara
(New York: Penguin, 1982). Topographia Hibernica, 175.
174 M. X. VERNON
Gerald’s construction of Ireland through monstrosity in his Topographia

aligns with Franz Fanon’s meditations on how colonized subjects are
transmogrified in the narratives of the colonizer:
In plain talk, [the colonized] is reduced to the state of an animal. And con-
sequently, when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological
terms.…This explosive population growth, those hysterical masses, those
blank faces, those shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort, these
children who seem not to belong to anyone, this indolence sprawling under
the sun, this vegetating existence, all this is part of the colonial
vocabulary.39
Given how large and varied the world of imagined creatures is, there is a
striking consonance between Gerald’s descriptions of the Irish living under
English rule in the twelfth century and Fanon’s descriptions eight hun-
dred years later of the colonized as seen through the eyes of the European
colonist. Both writers center their attention on the subjects as incomplete
humans, incapable of normative humanity’s achievements. When Fanon
writes about the colonized subject as seen by the colonizer, he uses a term
that could well be applied by both writers: he refers to him as an “under-
developed man.” This suggestive phrase ties genealogy and historiography
as inter-related narratives used to generate distance between the colonizers
and the subjected. For Fanon, the idea of the “underdeveloped man” can
refer to the perception of an oppressed subject’s lack of physical develop-
ment—that they have not progressed to the state of normal humanity; it
can refer to their stage in history—that they have not achieved some final
status which would render them as fully realized in the progress of civiliza-
tion as the colonizer;40 and finally, it can refer to people who seem to live
outside of history—that they are incapable of coherent seminal progress,
as implied by the suggestion that children do not know their parents or
that women have sex with animals.
Fanon illuminates a potential strategy behind Gerald’s imaginative con-
struction of Ireland; however, the hybrid bodies of his Topography overlap
with the hybrid form of his writing on Ireland, revealing intimacies
between writer and subject. Gerald produced at least five versions of his
Topography over the course of his life, which suggests the significance of
39
The Wretched of the Earth, 7.
40
Fanon’s anti-colonial critique pre-dated the emergence of World Systems Theory and
the Dependency School’s critiques of Modernization Theory.
the work to both author and audience—its popularity is attested to by the

forty-five surviving manuscripts of the work.41 At the same time, the fre-
quency of revisions perhaps indicates more than a writer perpetually hon-
ing his literary masterpiece. The form of the writing is itself unsettled, as
Gerald continued to change the emphasis of the examples of phenomena
contra naturam.42 But even the bridge between his two Irish works, his
first preface to The Conquest of Ireland, indicates a writer contending with
the significance of shifts in form:
Nam si dies antiquos cum eorum gestis, que secula nostra longe prevener-
ant, satis evidenter explicuimus, quanto magis ea que vidimus quoroumque
maiori ex parte testes sumus, et quorum de fide memoria tam recens hesitare
non permittit, luculento relatu depromentur.
For if I have unfolded clearly and truthfully the story of the days of old
with their deeds—deeds which have already happened long before our
time—then how much more trustworthy will be my account of those events
which I have seen happen, the greater part of which I have actually wit-
nessed, and which have happened too recently to admit any doubt as to their
really having happened.43
This passage impresses upon the reader the importance of “eyewitness

veracity,” which itself begins to concede to criticism leveled at the
Topography.44 The discrepancy over the presentation of temporality
between these two texts—the latter allowing for historical action and
progress that the Topography’s litany of curiosities frozen in time does not
permit—demonstrates a conflict over the construction of historical narra-
tives read from the gaze of the colonizer that continues to develop as he
expands upon the nature of his literary production:
Ad hec autem obiciunt multi, et hi presertim qui dicuntur amici, ob studii

vehemenciam me rebus secularibus negociisque familiaribus minus intentem,
et ob hoc segnius in mundane dignitatis gradibus provehendum; auctorum
olim, tam historicorum quam poeticorum, auctoritatem in desuetudinem
41
Amelia Borrego Sargent, “Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica: Dates, Versions,
Readers,” Viator 43.1 (2012), 241.
42
See Robert Bartlett’s discussion of the developments in Gerald’s approach to the
Topographia in Gerald of Wales 1146–1223, 104–116.
43
Expugnatio Hibernica, 2, 3.
44
I borrow this phrase from: Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History:
400–1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 185.
176 M. X. VERNON
abiisse; litterarum honorem cum litteratis principibus preteriisse; aliis hodie

viis ad honorem preveniri. Fateor hec, equidem fateor; et facile veris
acquiesco. Sequuntur enim principes improbi, curiam cupidi, codices et pix-
ides ambiciosi.
The further charge is made by many–and not least those who are alleged
to be my friends–that I pay too little attention to worldly affairs and my own
private interests, and for this reason I am bound to be slower in gaining
worldly advancement. They say that authors, both historians and poets, have
long since ceased to be respected; that respect for learning has vanished
along with learned princes; that one achieves high rank nowadays by other
routes. Indeed I admit all this is so. For reprobates follow in the train of
princes; men who are eager for money follow the court; only the ambitious
are interested in books and writing cases.45
Here Gerald casts himself as being out of time; he describes himself as dis-
tinct in his ambitions to write a history while many of his contemporaries
courted wealth and esteem by seeking to operate in the ambit of the court.
It is tempting to simply disavow his rhetoric as simply deploying the humil-
ity topos: however this is a marked change in tone from his “sycophancy”
towards the court in his previous work.46 His ambivalence towards the
court and its rewards—he would dedicate his history to Richard the Count
of Poitou (later Richard I) seemingly after he had finished the bulk of the
Expugnatio—suggests that Gerald perhaps read even himself as labile; his
authorial persona morphs along with his approach to the texts he writes.
This chapter will present Gerald as an intellectual whose writing in
favor of colonization is subverted by his own uncertainties of identity.
Here I hasten to underscore that this chapter does not seek to read Gerald
as Welsh, although he considered that to be a determinative category
against his political advancement. Rather, the stakes of this chapter are
quite the opposite: I will highlight how the history of the Welsh defined
by exile and disinheritance overlapped with Gerald’s imaginative produc-
tion of Ireland. In writing his monstrous history of the Irish, he revisits the
mythical history of the Welsh. Gerald’s works on Ireland are often treated
as oddities, too single-mindedly disparaging to be worth critical inquiry.
Jeffery Jerome Cohen considered them to be “reductive texts that
unabashedly glorify the invasion of the land, demonstrating none of the
Expugnatio Hibernica, 8–9.

45
Gerald of Wales 1146–1223, 61.

46
conflicted identifications characteristic of [Gerald’s] Welsh texts.”47 On

the contrary, I argue that Gerald’s work performs a complicated negotia-
tion among the political interests he serves. He deploys the history of the
Britons to make the narrative available to both colonizing forces and to
the Irish. For Gerald, fiction-writing, nation-building, and self-fashioning
are inter-related projects not just in terms of the profit motive, but also as
spaces of psychomachia to which he would return throughout his life.
Such a reading might inform the turn in the criticism about Gerald towards
manuscript analysis and the progress of Gerald’s revisions, which obliquely
addresses the issue that undergirds the puzzle of Gerald’s multi-tiered
identity: that he is a writer who, of necessity, kept changing his mind.48
Gerald’s writing on Ireland presents an ideal opportunity to engage in
the project of reconceptualizing post-colonial temporality. His work
emblematizes the place medieval narratives hold within critiques of colo-
nial texts. When one reads Christopher Columbus’ diary or Spenser’s A
View on the Present State of Ireland in relation to Mandeville’s Travels or
Gerald’s The History and Topography of Ireland the debt these early colo-
nial texts have to the Middle Ages is quite clear. To read the medieval
within the post-colonial “undermines the edifice of colonial modernity,”
that is, the Middle Ages trouble the identification of the post-colonial with
the modern and suggest a critical revision of the structures that under-
girded colonizing forces.49 Gerald’s The Conquest of Ireland and The
History and Topography of Ireland provide several nuances to this reorien-
tation of the relationship between the post-colonial and the pre-modern.
By associating his histories of Ireland with Geoffrey’s History, Gerald
makes a set of historiographical and narratological claims. Gerald wields
The History of the Kings of Britain’s movement towards salvation and the
promise of a future social domination for the Britons as a narrative frame-
work for his own personal and familial conquests. At the same time he
keeps in view the contrasting perspective of the Irish as having the ability
47
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of
Wales,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave,
2000), 87.
48
See in particular: C. Rooney, “The Manuscripts of the Works of Gerald of Wales” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Cambridge University, 2005); Amelia Borrego Sargent’s “Gerald of
Wales’s Topographia Hibernica: Dates, Versions, Readers”.
49
Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, “Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of
History,” in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, eds. Patricia Clare Ingham and
Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 3.
178 M. X. VERNON
to mobilize those self-same narratives. Such choices about narrative frame

matter in colonial and post-colonial contexts.50 Gerald employs these
strategies to keep dominant and subordinate perspectives in suspension.
The plasticity of this work demonstrates that the Middle Ages were not
simply an antecedent to early modern theories of nation. Rather, the
Middle Ages contain within themselves a set of competing and shifting
temporalities with pasts that were continually being recreated to mediate
desires for origins, for futures, and for conquest.
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Conquest

of Descent
[Genealogy] operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on

documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times…the
world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, dis-
guises and ploys. From these elements however, genealogy retrieves an
indispensible restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any
monotonous finality. It must seek them in the most unpromising places, in
what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience,
instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the
gradual curve of their evolution but to isolate the different scenes where
they are engaged in different roles.51
Genealogy, in the many senses that Foucault evokes, is a critical subcur-

rent to The History of the Kings of Britain and the works that are inflected
by it.52 This section will discuss the role of genealogy within The History of
the Kings of Britain that informs Gerald’s flexible mobilization of literary
and cultural inheritance in his Irish texts. Not only is genealogy the oper-
ating logic of Geoffrey’s text, as it purports to tell the complete line of
50
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), 7.
51
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 76.
52
Gerald was by no means the only writer during the twelfth and thirteenth century to
struggle within the umbra of The History of the Kings of Britain. William of Newburgh,
William of Malmesbury, Walter Map, Wace, and Layamon found themselves confronting the
legacy of Geoffrey, either directly through disparagements of Geoffrey’s fidelity as a historian
or obliquely through stylistic borrowings or adaptations of his work. These responses
redound to Geoffrey’s place as a progenitor of twelfth and thirteenth century medieval “his-
torical” writing.
succession of British kings, Geoffrey even constructs an intellectual heri-

tage for his history:
Talia michi et talibis multociens cogitanti optulit Walterus Oxinefordensis

archidiaconus, uir in oratoria arte atque in exoticis historiis eruditus, quen-
dam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum qui a Bruto primo rege
Britonum usque ad Cadualadrum filium Caduallonis actus omnium con-
tinue et ex ordine perpulcris orationibus proponebat. Rogatu itaque illius
ductus, tametsi infra alienos ortulos falerata uerba non collegerim, agresti
tamen stilo propriisque calamis contentus codicem illum in Latinum sermo-
nem transferre curaui.
While I was preoccupied with these matters, Walter the Archdeacon of
Oxford, a man most expert in the art of oratory and in arcane histories,
presented me with a certain very ancient book in the British language, which
narrated in the most refined style an orderly and unbroken relation of the
acts of all the kings, from Brutus the first king of the Britons to Cadwallader
the son of Cadwallo. So I began at Walter’s request to translate the book
into Latin, content with my own lowly style and not seeking to gather gilded
expressions from other writers’ gardens.53
Geoffrey claims to merely translate a “certain very ancient book in the

British language,” which situates his text as the latest version in a chain of
histories that have their origin in an oral tradition.54 But the genealogy that
Geoffrey constructs is not at all the “orderly and unbroken” chain of events
he purports to tell. Indeed, it is doubtful if there was even an “ancient
book” from which he derived his text.55 This claim of a fictional source,
while a common trope in medieval historiography, is an informing context
for the numerous misdirections and subversions around which Geoffrey
builds his vision of historiography.56 What appears to be translatio studii,
53
The Latin text for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain is found
in Neil Wright’s edition of the Bern manuscript: The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of
Monmouth I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
1984). English translations are from Micheal Faletra’s edition of the text unless otherwise
noted. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Michael A. Faletra
(Toronto: Broadview, 2008). The Historia Regum Britannie, 1; The History of the Kings of
Britain, 41.
54
Faletra, 41.
55
Martin B. Shichtman and Laurie A. Finke. “Profiting from the Past: History as Symbolic
Capital in the Historia Regum Britanniae,” Arthurian Literature XII (1994), 8.
56
Siân Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
180 M. X. VERNON
the work of a colonizing power being exercised over British history, is in

fact a demonstration of Geoffrey’s abilities to invent his own authorities.
Geoffrey radically interrupts an orderly chain of histories about Britain,
particularly as he claims that he could not glean enough from the likes of
Gildas and Bede. His suspicion of linearity is mirrored by the larger struc-
ture of the text itself. Discontinuities abound within the history’s move-
ment towards religious salvation in the forms of “invasions, struggles,
plundering, disguises and ploys.” Ruptures in the clarity of lineage and
succession challenge the history’s logic as a fungible reading of the past.
Rather, the text presents the pitfalls of overlooking the complications and
breaks in historical material and the logic of genealogy.
The paradoxes of genealogy and conquest are nowhere more apparent
than in the Arthurian section of the History. Until this point of the nar-
rative, Rome is a foil for Britain, a more advanced power against which
the country measures itself. The rivalry with Rome that simmers through-
out the text ensures that the memory of Troy, their mutual point of ori-
gin, is never far out of view. However, when Arthur reaches the height of
his powers, having consolidated his rule over Britain and expanded his
control over much of Western Europe, his empire begins to resemble
Rome’s as a peer imperialist power. The ensuing war between the two
represents a crux in lineage the text never resolves. As tensions between
Britain and Rome simmer, one of Arthur’s vassals, Augusel, expresses his
eagerness for the war against the Romans in cannibalistic terms, the irony
of which he fails to grasp:
At nunc, quoniam nobis licentia agrediendi promittitur, gaudens admodum

gaudeo et desiderio diei quo conueniemus exestuans sicio cruorem illorum
quemadmodum fontem si triduo prohiberer ne biberem. O si illam lucem
uidebo quam dultia erunt uulnera que uel recipiam uel inferam quando dex-
tras conseremus. Ipse etiam mors dulcis erit dum eam in uindicando patres
nostros, in tuendo libertatem nostram, in exaltando regem nostrum perpes-
sus <fuero>.
But now that we have the opportunity to fight with them, I rejoice
indeed! I long for the day when we meet them in battle. I thirst for their
blood as I would thirst for a fountain if I had been forbidden to drink for
three days. O, let the light shine upon me, the light that will be the sweet
wounds that I will either receive or mete out when we exchange blows in
battle! Even death will be sweet when I endure it to avenge our fathers, to
protect our liberty, and to exalt our king.57
The Historia Regum Britannie, 115; The History of the Kings of Britain, 180.
57
Geraldine Heng instructs readers of the History to take references to can-

nibalism seriously; in her study, she links them to the traumatic history of
British attempts at conquest in the First Crusade.58 However, Augusel’s
extreme response more proximally calls attention to the fact that the blood
the knight thirsts for is the blood of his relations, and his desire for it sug-
gests a profound misunderstanding of the historical rapport between the
two sides. His imagery not only anticipates the apocalyptic end of Arthur’s
rule, but also the monstrousness of its fratricidal nature.
What precipitates Augusel’s response is the arrival of messengers from
Rome who demand tribute, the monetary acknowledgement of subjection
(Geoffrey uses the verb subiogare), from Arthur. The king refuses and
gathers the members of his court to debate his course of action. Before
deciding he traces the history of Britain’s political relations with Rome:
Dicit enim ipsum sibi dari debere quia Iulio Cesari ceterisque successoribus
suis redditum fuerit qui discidio ueterum nostorum inuitati cum armata
manu applicuerunt atque patriam domesticis motibus uacillantem potestati
sue ui et uiolenti summiserunt. Quia igitur eam hoc modo adepti fuerunt,
uectigal ex illa iniuste ceperunt. Nichil enim quod ui et uiolentia adquiritur
inuste ab illo possisetur. Qui violentiam intulit irrationabilem ergo causam
pretendit qua nos iure sibi tributarios esse arbitratur. Quoniam autem id
quod iniustem est a nobis presumpsit exigere, consimili ratione petamus ab
illo tributum Rome et qui fortior superuenerit ferat quod habere exoptauit.
He claims that it should be given to him because it had been paid to
Julius Caesar and his successors, who came here in armed force because of
our forefathers’ disputes, and who had once subdued our fickle and quarrel-
ing homeland to their power with force and violence. Since they had
obtained the tribute in this manner, they took it unjustly indeed. Nothing
that is acquired by force or violence can be justly possessed by anyone. Since
he presumes to make these unjust demands upon us, let us use a similar tact
and demand tribute from Rome. Let the side that is stronger carry off what-
ever it wishes!59
Arthur continues to enumerate the number of British kings who have

conquered Rome in “ancient times.” Arthur here is doing the work of a
historian; he reviews precedent and sees himself in line with the tradition
of the other three kings who have overtaken Rome: Belin, Constantine,
58
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 35.
59
182 M. X. VERNON
and Maximilian. Through these kings he believes that Rome should offer
him “vectigal”: tribute or profit.60 Even in what should be a crucial
moment of self-definition that separates the two powers, Geoffrey pres-
ents their dispute to highlight how closely they mirror one another. Arthur
acknowledges that the reasoning Lucius employs to demand tribute is a
“flimsy pretext,” yet he chooses to apply the same thinking towards the
Romans.
Arthur constructs a linear narrative across these genetic and historical
links. This version of the past strips away the joint ancestry of Rome and
Britain via Troy and ignores the more immediate historical ties between
Rome and Britain that demonstrate shared historical legacies: that the
British king Constantine ruled over Rome or that the Britons wept when
Roman soldiers abandoned the island because of constant British misman-
agement.61 Arthur draws his lineage along a path of strife in British history.
He locates moments of rupture during extraterritorial invasion when the
Britons begin to lose the clarity of identity as defined by the island’s bor-
ders and identifies those periods as links in a lineage leading up to Arthur’s
own time and situation. Arthur chooses his ancestors and sheds others to
refine the idea of Britishness. Arthur “preach[es] the restoration of mem-
ory, he practices the science of forgetting.”62
The text suggests that Arthur’s version of history should be treated
with some skepticism. Although Arthur does defeat the Romans in their
initial engagement, the victory only demonstrates a misjudgment of the
issues at stake. Whereas he argues that conquest will allow the Britons to
recapture ancient claims, his foreign incursions fundamentally undermine
the political foundations of Arthur’s rule. The British army sustains heavy
losses and Arthur’s nephew fills the void in power by seizing the throne
and marrying Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. These violations, particularly the
latter which Geoffrey describes as Mordred’s “wicked pleasure,” are signs
of genealogical and successional confusion.63 After what is meant to be a
60
Ibid.
61
In her book, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066, Eleanor
Searle describes the concept of fictional kinship during the Norman period, in which fictional
connections—even fictional stories about ancestors—were created to strengthen one’s gene-
alogical pedigree. Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1988).
62
Here I borrow a phrase from Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia
63
The History of the Kings of Britain, 196.
conclusive expression of British might against the Romans, Arthur’s prog-

ress towards Rome is halted by the need to address Mordred’s usurpation.
This is to say, at the point of the greatest outward extension of British
power, the lines of succession fracture in Britain and a civil war ensues.
The Arthurian section of the History “witnesses [a] subtle negotiation
of multiplicity that both supports and resists superior powers.”64 While
Arthur’s efforts at consolidating power are treated with admiration, the
slide into empire is read as unsustainable. The totalizing narrative that
Arthur seeks to weave for the Britons about their own military supremacy
is undone by the metanarrative of the History which is marked by disjunc-
tures and unlikely political allegiances. As its long critical tradition attests,
The History of the Kings of Britain provokes anxieties about the nature of
the histories within it, and perhaps the project of writing about the past in
general.65 Other writers have sought to reject Geoffrey’s work outright
because it so thoroughly troubles the status of historical writing, most
famously attested to by William of Newburgh’s complaint about Geoffrey
quoted above. Curiously, William claims that Geoffrey’s “lies” are the
result of wanting to please the British by consolidating their power within
the pages of the book, which would seem to broadly misread Geoffrey’s
text as I have framed it. William of Newburgh teases out “the complexity
of the relationship between truth, verisimilitude and fable and the conse-
quent fluidity of the boundary between history, argument and poetry.”66
Geoffrey’s approach to historiography, according to William, holds some
danger for readers because he slides between historical truth (“historiae
veritas”) and falsehoods (“falsitas”), that is to say, he sees precisely the issue
I argue is at the center of Geoffrey’s narrative claim.67 While I would not
venture as far as to contend that The History of the Kings of Britain might
be read as a parody, the text does demonstrate a sophisticated c ommand of
historical writing that relies upon putting stress upon the expectations of
the form.68 As Patricia Clare Ingham counter-intuitively, but convincingly,
64
Michelle Warren, “Making Contact: Postcolonial Perspectives through Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie,” Arthuriana 8.4 (1998), 108.
65
See the review of the many and varied medieval and modern reactions to Geoffrey’s work
in Valerie I. J. Flint’s “The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Its
Purpose. A Suggestion,” Speculum 54.3 (July, 1979), 447–468.
66
Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400–1500, 366.
67
The History of English Affairs, 32.
68
Valerie Flint lays out the history of this claim in: “The Historia Regum Britanniae of
Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose. A Suggestion”.
184 M. X. VERNON
argues about the anxiety around the text’s popularity and its generic status,
Geoffrey’s History “is, in fact, the very place where the definition of
‘history’ gets made.”69
Geoffrey uses his fictions of the Britons to destabilize the authority
conferred onto historical narratives used to generate myths of identity.
The Britons are cast as given to war and eternally waiting for the return of
Arthur to lead future campaigns: between memory and expectation.
History becomes a binding force for the Britons in the multiple senses of
the phrase; while it lends coherence to the idea of British—later Welsh—
identity, it also functions as a limitation in what meanings can accrue to
that designation. The Britons become imbricated within the fantasy of
Arthur. Geoffrey’s imaginative history met with such success that the sub-
versive critiques it made gained a vitality that fixed his depictions of the
Britons—and the attendant ambivalences—within the popular imaginary.
The History of the Kings of Britain and its presentation of the Britons’ cer-
tainty of history’s teleological arc become an informing text and context
for Gerald of Wales. Although Geoffrey’s work lacks the paternity it
assumes in its “Dedicatory Epistle” it still bequeaths literary and cultural
frameworks Gerald must transume when he tries to write his own narra-
tives of conquest.70
Gerald’s Ambivalence
Colonialism is not satisfied with snaring the people in its net or of draining
the colonized brain of any form or substance. With a kind of perverted loci,
it turns its attention to the past of the colonized people and distorts it, dis-
figures it, and destroys it.71
The most prominent example of how heavily being a descendant of the

Britons weighs on Gerald comes in his De Invectionibus. During an audi-
ence with Pope Innocent III, the pontiff has a letter from one of Gerald’s
adversaries, the Archbishop of Canterbury, read aloud. Its text is a bitter
invective against Gerald, based largely on his connection to Wales:
69
Sovereign Fantasies, 33.
70
See Bloom’s argument about clinamen, or poetic misprision: Harold Bloom, The Anxiety
of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14.
71
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 149.
[E]t inter Anglicos et Wallenses de caetero pro posse suo perpetuae dissen-
sionis jaceret seminarium. Wallenses enim a prima Britonum prosapia, con-
tinua sanguinis successione deducti, totius Britanniae dominium sibi de jure
deberi jactitant; unde si non efferae gentis et effrenae barbariem districtionis
ecclesiasticae censura coercuisset, facta per Cantuariensem, cui gens illa lege
provinciali hactenus subjecta fuisse dignoscitur, a rege suo vel continua vel
crebra rebellione discessisset, sequente necessario totius Anglicanae regionis
inquietudine.
[Gerald] would thus to the best of his power sow the seeds of perpetual
dissension between the Welsh and the English for all time to come. For the
Welsh stock of the Britons, boast that all Britain is theirs by right. Wherefore,
if the barbarity of that wild and unbridled nation had not been restrained by
the censure of the Church, wielded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to
whom it is known that this race has thus far been subject as being within this
province, this people would by continual or at least by frequent rebellion
have broken from their allegiance to the King, whereby the whole England
must have suffered disquietude.72
For Gerald, genealogy is not a thing of the past, or something that may be
overcome through his learning. His place of birth and his heritage are liv-
ing with him and are never far from informing his present. Others’ percep-
tion of his heritage was not sufficient to map the course of Gerald’s life,
nor was it the sole angle of refraction through which Gerald understood
his identity. His intervention and conception of his position with respect
to his heritage were, as Foucault describes, multi-layered—a collocation of
myth-making, family history, and Gerald’s own historical circumstances.
This dynamic motivates much of Gerald’s intellectual work and gener-
ates the “competing allegiances” and ambivalences to his own actions.
The “distortions” of Welsh history as derived from The History of the Kings
of Britain came to hold a central place in Gerald’s self-presentation within
his writing. The text operates as part of the subjugating forces around
Gerald which render him “known” in the sense that he cannot break com-
pletely free from the narrative structures in place around him. However,
he in turn recognizes the power of this framing narrative and applies its
force against the Irish to renegotiate his place within the hierarchy of
Anglo-Norman society; Gerald uses his writing as a literary conquest while
he keeps in perspective his own position as a colonized subject.
72
Gerald of Wales, De Invectionibus, Lib. IV, ed. J.S. Brewer (Rolls Series, 1863, 1966),
15; The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis, 169.
186 M. X. VERNON
To be a colonized intellectual is to be “the living focus of contradic-

tions” for whom one’s education and set of values learned under a colo-
nizing force chafe against one’s own lived experience. When theorizing
the close relationship between the colonist and the colonized Fanon
writes:
The colonist and the colonized are old acquaintances. And consequently,
the colonist is right when he says he “knows” them.73
What Gerald has to offer King Henry II is his intimate knowledge of

Ireland. However, this knowledge creates an intellectual quandary for him
from which he never quite emerges. This section will present how the mon-
strous tones with which Gerald paints the Irish redounds to an exoticism
that he seems to apply to himself. Critics of Gerald are right to see him as
depicting Ireland as available for conquest. However, it is necessary to
complicate this perspective by understanding that conquest for Gerald was
not an unalloyed good. Rather, conquest had the potential to erase both
the coherence of the invading force and the nation being colonized.
It is difficult to underestimate the lengths to which Gerald goes to
depict the Irish as monstrous, particularly in terms of their relationship to
genealogy. In The History and Topography of Ireland, he organizes his
topography in three sections. Roughly, the first section describes Ireland’s
flora and topography, the second its fauna, and the third its people.
However, there is substantial overlap between each of these sections and
between the categories that Gerald sets up. The hybrids that his critics
found so detestable particularly create problems with these divisions. The
monstrosities related by Gerald, the half-human creatures or the Irish who
have a penchant for having sexual relations with animals, frame the Irish as
an underdeveloped people held outside of time by their regressive sexual
habits. Gerald underscores this with a long invective against the Irish end-
ing with the accusation of sexual deviance:
Quinimmo, quod detestabile valde est, et non tantum fidei sed et cuilibet
honestati valde contrarium, fraters, pluribus per Hiberniam locis, fratrum
defunctorum uxores non dico ducunt, sed traducunt; immo verius sedu-
cunt, dum turpiter eas et tam incestuose cognoscunt; veteris in hoc testa-
menti no medullae sed cortici adhaerentes, vetesque libentius in vitiis quam
virtutibus imitari volentes.
The Wretched of the Earth, 2.

73
Moreover, and this is surely a detestable thing, and contrary not only to
the Faith but to any feeling of honour—men in many places in Ireland, I
shall not say marry, but rather debauch, the wives of their dead brothers.
They abuse them in having such evil and incestuous relations with them. In
this (wishing to imitate the ancients more eagerly in vice than in virtue) they
follow the apparent teaching, and not the true doctrine, of the Old
Testament.74
His accusations of Irish incest imply that the clear progress of generations
and of faith is stunted on the island.75 What is yet more remarkable about
this passage is that Gerald claims to have delivered these remarks during a
sermon before Irish clergymen as well as clergy from Wales and England.76
The sermon’s topics encompassed the “vices and excesses” of the Irish
prelates, namely: “drunkenness,” “carelessness,” and “negligence of pas-
toral duties.”77 Gerald is sure to note that his stinging critique is a decisive
victory for “our clergy”: “the Irish clergy were covered with much confu-
sion, while ours lifted up their heads, insulting their foes and exulting in
their own victory” (“grandi clero Hibernico confusione perfuso, multa in
adversarios insultatione pariter et exultatione capita nostrates erexerunt”).78
Gerald envisions the Irish clergy as a degraded version of the Welsh and
the Anglo-Normans, a rhetorical strategy that allows him to elide the dif-
ferences between the latter two groups and offer himself as a proxy for
both. This depiction becomes more complicated in that he presents the
Welsh as similarly given to incest, although he claims this is due to an
outsized estimation of their descent and their heritage (“sanguine et orig-
ine”) rather than the observation of an incomplete brand of faith.79 Again,
Gerald tries to parse the Welsh as further along in a spectrum of historical
progress, meticulous about the clarity of their origins to a fault.
74
Topographica Hibernica, 165; The History and Topography of Ireland, 106. It is impor-
tant to note that Gerald includes the entire sermon, of which he only extracts an excerpt, in
his Autobiography. This heightens the connection between his comments about the Irish and
his evaluation of himself. The Autobiography of Gerald of Wales, 94.
75
Gerald anticipates Mandeville’s depiction of the East as a place outside of secular and
religious history. On Mandeville’s curious intolerance, see: Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous
Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 50.
76
Autobiography, 91
77
Ibid., 92.
78
De Rebus A Se Gestis, 72; Ibid., 96.
79
Descriptio Kambriae, 213; The Description of Wales, 262.
188 M. X. VERNON
His description of the Irish as having no clear genealogy bears compari-

son with the way that Gerald presents his own suitability to lend King
Henry II’s son, John, advice on how to bring about Ireland’s full subjuga-
tion. Gerald humbly describes his own qualifications:
[…]quia de primis expugnatoribus gentis illius magnum in Hibernia genus

habebat, et quia probus ipse as prudens extiterat, cum ipso transmittens.
[…]he had a great host of kinsmen there, sprung from the first conquers
of that nation and because he himself had shown himself to be an honest and
prudent man.80
The clarity of his familial connections and his own personal virtue stand in
contrast to his presentation of the Irish. This quotation brings into focus
the careful negotiation that Gerald engages in to present himself as dis-
tinct from the Irish—with even some hereditary claim to rule—while also
the ideal servant to the crown because of his intimate knowledge of them.
His attempts to work between these two positions fail. John listened to
“the counsel of young men he took with him” instead of Gerald and he
“rebuffed the honest and discreet men of the country, treating them as
though they had been foreigners and of little worth.”81 These critiques
chime with the role that Gerald assumes for himself as a mediator between
Irish and Anglo-Norman forces. The locution “as though they had been
foreigners” in particular draws into focus that Gerald neither fits as a close
confidant of John nor as a “native informant” despite familial connections
within Ireland and political connections to the king.
John, unable to make any inroads into consolidating British power over
Ireland, departs. Gerald, on the other hand, “remained in the Island to the
following Easter, that he might pursue his studies more fully, not merely
gathering materials, but setting them in order.”82 Gerald’s claim that he
would set the information he gathered “in order” distantly echoes Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s promise of an “orderly and unbroken” (“continue et ex
ordine”) history.83 The project of physical conquest is replaced by intel-
lectual conquest. Although the circumstances changed because of John’s
departure, Gerald’s calculus remained the same. He offered his innate
80
Gerald of Wales, The Autobiography of Gerald of Wales, ed. and trans. H.E. Butler
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), 86.
81
Ibid., 87.
82
Ibid., 91.
83
knowledge as a descendant of the Britons and his learning gained from

traveling through Ireland to a wide audience with the same aim of secur-
ing advancement.
At this intersection of Gerald’s genealogy and learning, Gerald betrays
a more complicated set of ties between the Welsh and the Irish. For exam-
ple, Gerald argues that the Normans were ill-equipped for a campaign in
Ireland because of their reliance on armor—a strategic weakness against
the lightly armed Irish who would be more nimble—and more impres-
sively, due to the Norman dependence on being near reliable sources of
wine, as the Normans “could not do without wine on which they had
been brought up.”84 On the other hand, Gerald suggests, the Welsh were
well adapted to what it would take to properly execute a campaign in
Ireland:
In omni igitur expedicione sive Hibernica sive Kambrica, gens in Kambrie

marchia nutrita. gens hostilibus parcium illarum conflictibus exercitata,
competentissima; puta formatis a convictu moribus, audax ex expedita; cum
alea martis exegerit, nunc equis habilis, nunc pedibus agilis inventa, cibo
potuque non delicata, tam Cerere quam Bacco, causis urgentibus, abstinere
parata. Talibus Hibernia viris inicium habuit expugnacionis, talibus quoque
consummabilis finem habitura conquisicionis.
So in every expedition, whether in Ireland or Wales, that breed of men
which has been brought up in the Welsh borders and trained in the warfare
that goes on in those parts, is the most capable, being resolute and quick to
act because their character has been formed by their environment. When the
changing conditions of war demand it, they are skilled horsemen at one
moment, at another quick moving infantry. They are not fastidious in mat-
ters of food and drink, and are prepared to do without either in an emer-
gency. Such were the men who were in at the beginning of the conquest of
Ireland. Only with the help of such men will Ireland ever see the conquest
completed.85
This description of Welsh strengths is curious because it exoticizes along

the same lines as how Gerald categorizes the Irish. The Welsh need to eat
less, are physically capable of negotiating Ireland’s terrain, and of execut-
ing sustained military campaigns because of the distorting effects of con-
tinual war. He positions the Welsh as like the Irish, molded similarly
84
The Conquest of Ireland, 244–245.
85
Ibid., 246, 247.
190 M. X. VERNON
through their interaction with the land around themselves and the vio-
lence tracked across it. The work of conquest and colonization becomes
the common ground between them.
Gerald connects the Welsh with the Irish on the basis of conquest itself,
that the history of being subjugated is part of a shared past and is a parallel
motivation for them. Gerald records a dispute he had with Rhys ap
Gruddydd, Prince of South Wales that demonstrates the slippage between
the meaning of the Welsh and Irish struggles against subjugating powers.
Gerald sets the scene carefully. He mentions that when he met Rhys in
Hereford, he was seated between William De Vere, the Bishop of Hereford,
and the Baron Walter FitzRobert, both of whom, Gerald mentions, were of
the house of Clare, that is, from Norman families. Gerald gently goads all
three men by mentioning that Rhys had just “recovered” possession of
Cardigan from Roger, the Earl of Clare, an understated description of a
revolt against King Henry’s forces.86 None of the men rise to this barb. They
choose instead to compliment each other on having won and lost land “not
at the hands of sluggards of obscure birth, but to men of such high fame and
renown.”87 Some time later, Gerald tries again, wondering aloud why Rhys’s
family had not sought to extend their conquest beyond the South of Wales.
This provokes a sharp retort from Rhys about the involvement of Gerald’s
family (the descendants of Nest) in the conquest of Ireland before the
important men assembled but also before the king’s messengers:
Resus autem quoniam in magna audientia haec dicta fuerant; quia coram
archiepiscopo et justiciario, necnon et episcopis atque baronibus qui jam
supervenerant non paucis, verecundia parumper et rubore perfusus, quia
The Chronicles of the Princes of Wales explains the matter more explicitly:
86
1163. The ensuing year, when Rhys, son of Gruffudd, saw that the king fulfilled noth-
ing of what he had promised, and that he could thus not submit honorably, he man-
fully entered the territory of Roger, earl of Clare, the man on whose account his
nephew Einon, son of Anarawd, had been slain; and dismantled and burned the castle
of Aber Rheidiol, and the castle of the son of Gwynion, and reconquered a second
time the whole of Ceredigion, iterating slaughters and conflagrations among the
Flemings, and taking from them man spoils. And after that, all the Welsh combined
to expel the garrison of French altogether.
Rev. John Williams Ab Ithel, ed. The Chronicles of the Princes of Wales (London: Kraus,
1860), 198.
87
De Rebus A Se Gestis, 58; The Autobiography of Gerald of Wales, 84.
tamen vir sapiens erat at discretus, satis modeste respondit in hunc modum
dicens: “Quia revera viri probi et strenui fuerunt et sunt qui de Nesta pro-
venerunt; et quia conquestum magnum in Hibernia fecerant, si tamen eis
remanere posset.” Propter hoc autem istud adjecit, quia nationes hae duae,
Walensica sc et Hibernica, terras omnes ad Anglicis sibi ablates semper recu-
perandi spe pascuntur.
Now since these things were said before a large audience, in the presence
of the Archbishop and Justicar and the Bishops also and Barons who by now
had joined them in considerable numbers, for a brief space Rhys blushed for
shame, but being a wise and discreet man, he answered in the same fashion,
saying that in truth the descendants of Nest were, both then and now, good
men and courageous, and that they had made a great conquest in Ireland, if
they could only be sure of keeping what they had got. Now he added this
last sally, because these two nations, the Welsh and the Irish, fed continually
on the hope of recovering all the lands which the English have taken from
them.88
Gerald stages this spat to force Rhys to reveal his own desire to continue
his campaign against the British king. He hopes that word of this will get
back to Henry II and remind the king of Gerald’s loyal service when he
“turned aside not a few of Rhys’s great armies from the king’s land.”89 In
the end, although Gerald believes that the king hears of this news, Gerald’s
advancement is still thwarted because of his “nation and his kinship.”90
This exchange between Gerald and Rhys, and Gerald’s own meditation
on the king’s non-response shows, writ small, the competing interests that
Gerald contains within himself. Gerald is slow to realize what Rhys already
seems to know. Gerald is at pains to establish the distance between himself
and the Welsh, particularly the rebels. He uses this opportunity to under-
score that his family’s assistance in the conquest of Ireland was firmly in
the favor of the king’s forces. Rhys’s response, which is teased out by
Gerald, is an unexpected one. It ties the fate of the Welsh, and their
mythological connection with British rule, to the current situation of the
Irish; the Irish and Welsh struggles are similar in their unending concern
for the restoration of lands. Moreover, Rhys exposes the inherent contra-
diction in Gerald’s pride about his own achievements, which rests heavily
on his family’s nobility and the deeper Welsh connection to the august
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid., 85.
192 M. X. VERNON
lineage of Trojans. In working to aid the king’s conquests, Gerald is

betraying the things that he claims make him so well-suited for that mis-
sion. He is submitting to the king, rather than resisting which, as Rhys
argues, is a reaction as incumbent upon the Welsh as it is upon the Irish.
Gerald of Wales seems to have become aware of the contradiction of his
position over the course of his literary career, as he bitterly expresses regret
for dedicating his early work on Ireland to royalty.91 Repeatedly passed
over for advancement by the king as well as the Church hierarchy, he won-
dered why his ploy to remind the king of his family’s service generated no
tangible results. He received “empty praise and flattery and great promises
of future reward” (“nihil tamen a Rege praeter laudes hujusmodi vanas et
adulationes cum promissis magnis accepit”) as his only payment for his
loyalty.92 Throughout his Autobiography he records requests for favor
without ever seeming to directly address the dissonance between his
actions and his reward. The language of the competing drives for whatever
power can be afforded to him and his resentment at being in such a sub-
missive position elude Gerald when he directly confronts them. Rather, it
is within the realm of his intellectual pursuit, his own literary “conquest”
of Ireland that he unpacks this problem.
Through the work of history writing he is able to elucidate the contra-
dictions of his family’s position under the colonial power of the British.
Gerald’s understanding of conquest mythology, so readily on display
throughout his writing on Ireland, undergirds his historical analysis of
both the Irish and the Welsh. Gerald is able to fluently read the story of
the Brut derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of
Britain into the conquest of Ireland; he goes so far as to justify the British
right to rule over Ireland in part by making recourse to Geoffrey’s History
(which he simply calls “the British history”). Gerald recounts the story of
King Gurguntius’s conquest of Ireland and Arthur’s later recapturing of
the land:
Quippe Gurguincium Belini filium et Britannie regum, a Dacia cum tri-

umpho redeuntem, Basclensium classem apud Orcades inventam, vie duci-
bus eis adhibitus, primo in Hiberniam transmisisse Britannica testatur
Historia. Testatur quoque famosum illum Britannie regum Arturum
The Journey through Wales, 67.

91
De Rebus A Se Gestis, 60; Autobiography, 84.

92
Hibernie reges tributarios habuisse et magne Urbis Legionum curie

Gillomarum Hibernie regem cum aliis regibus insulanis interfuisse
For the British History bears witness to the fact that when Gurguintius,
son of Belinus and king of Britain, was returning in triumph from Dacia, he
found the Basque fleet in Orkney, and having provided them with guides,
sent them for the first time to Ireland, It also recalls the fact that the kings
of Ireland were among the rulers who paid tribute to Arthur, that famous
king of Britain, and that Gillomar King of Ireland was present at his court at
Caerleon aong with other kings.93
One editor of The Conquest of Ireland found this line of reasoning a way
to “gloss over the injustice of King Henry’s pretentions to the domination
of Ireland” and “too puerile to merit a single comment.”94 And indeed,
here Gerald acts as a historical interpreter and advisor to the king. However,
to dismiss the use of British history throughout the text is to miss the rich-
ness Gerald draws out of the narrative.
The Brut narrative proves to be versatile enough to be used by both the
conquering Welsh and the resistant Irish. Roderic O’Conner, the Irish
prince of Connaught, makes use of Geoffrey’s history to rally his forces
against the king’s army, particularly those led by Gerald’s uncle FitzStephen:
[U]t civium sanguine iram satiaret inexorabilem, nec sibi, nec patrie, nec
sexui parcere duxit, nec etati. Hic ille est, ille qui olim in cunctos commu-
niter armatis exterorum viribus iam crudescit. Cunctorum itaque meretur
odium, qui ominum in commune se approbat inimicum. Attendite, cives,
attendite, animisque profundis altius infigite quod huiuscemodi occasione,
civili scilicet discordia, cuncta fere regna sunt expugnata. Iulium Cesarem,
qui bis terga Britannis ostenderat, in suam patrieque subaccionem offensus
Androgeus, et doloris augmento dolorem vindicans, tercio revocavit…Et ut
familiaribus quibusdam utamur exemplis nostroque tempori longe propiori-
bus, Gurmundum, insularam malleum, ad expugnandos Britones in pro-
priam perniciem et subieccionem Saxonum populus invitavit.
That he might sate his unquenchable rage with the blood of his fellow-
countrymen, he has thought fit to spare neither himself nor his country, nor
to show mercy on grounds of sex or age. This is the man who formerly
persecuted his subjects with an unrestrained tyranny. This is the man who is
now taking his barbarous action against all of us with the aid of foreign
The Conquest of Ireland, 149.

93
Ibid., 263.
94
194 M. X. VERNON
forces. So he who shows himself hostile to the common interests of all

deserves universal hatred. Pay heed, my fellow countrymen, pay heed and
let the fact that almost all kingdoms have been conquered under circum-
stances of this kind, namely civil strife, be deeply imprinted on your minds.
Because he felt himself wronged, Androgeus brought back for a third time
Julius Caesar, who had twice turned his back on Britain, to enslave himself
and his country, thus taking satisfaction for his feelings of resentment by
causing even greater suffering…If I may use more familiar examples, which
are closer to our own time, it was the Saxons who called in Gurmundus,
“the hammer of the isles,” to conquer the Britons.95
It should be underscored how readily Gerald casts Roderic in the position

of the British in The History of the Kings of Britain; the Irish are poised to
be overcome by foreign invaders who will end a tyrannical reign. Moreover,
the myth can be extended to encompass the Welsh themselves. Those who
should be the inheritors of Britain are cast as the great traitors of the
nation. Perhaps most damningly of all, Roderic’s language about
FitzStephen’s desire to “sate his unquenchable rage with the blood of his
own people” recalls the language of blood thirst in The History of the Kings
of Britain. Roderic offers a sophisticated reading of the “British history”
that frames the Welsh as trapped within this narrative that they hold so
dear, unable to evade its pitfalls. Particularly, Roderic highlights Arthur’s
desire to conquer Rome, which fundamentally alters the integrity of the
British state. Roderic emphasizes that the Welsh are betraying more than
just the Irish. In following FitzStephen the Welsh may be on the same
path to becoming unrecognizable to themselves.
Gerald does not stop at adding this one wrinkle or inversion to the use
of the Brut narrative. He contrasts Roderic’s speech with that of
FitzStephen to set up a dueling interpretation of the mythical past.
FitzStephen begins by discussing the blood of the Trojans, using language
similar to that which Gerald deploys to discuss the Welsh superiority in
arms. However, FitzStephen then broadens the discussion from genea-
logical inheritance to Welsh land claims:
Troiano partim ex sanguine linea descendimus originali. Ex Gallis quoque

propaginem ex parte trahimus et naturam. Hinc nobis animositas, illinc
armorum usus accedit. Cum itaque duplici natura nobilique hinc inde pro-
sapia, tam animosi simus quam armis instructi, populum inermem tur-
bamque plebiam nobis resistere non posse quis diffidet? Preterea dolo
domestico intestinaque malicia natali cum solo ampla perdidimus patrimonia.
The Conquest of Ireland, 44, 45.

95
Unde et in has partes non stipediorum ambicio, non auri ceca fames, sed
terrarum ut urbium nobis et nostris perpetua largicio nos advexit.
In part we come of Trojan stock by direct line of descent. But we are
partly descended from the men of Gaul, and take our character in part from
them. From the former we get our courage, from the latter our skill in the
use of arms. So we are equally brave and versed in arms because of our two-
fold character and noble ancestry on both sides. Is there then anyone who is
not confident that this unarmed populace, this rabble of the common peo-
ple, cannot resist us?
Besides, the broad acres of our inheritance and our native soil are lost to
us through treachery at home and malice among our own people. It is not,
then, greed for monetary rewards or the “blind craving for gold” that has
brought us to these parts, but a gift of lands and cities in perpetuity to us
and to our children.96
Although FitzStephen, like Roderic, evokes the significance of recalling

the history of the island’s possession, his inflection is different. FitzStephen
takes on the mantle of the colonist, picking up the desire for movement
and conquest that is in keeping with the actions of Geoffrey’s Britons.
This speech echoes that of Arthur talking about Rome as Britain’s inheri-
tance and rightful territory. And just as was the case in Arthur’s rhetorical
push to war, FitzStephen is adept at combining the logic of conquest with
the manipulation of dubious historical claims.
Between Roderic and FitzStephen pass a dense set of competing uses of
myth, layered between one another in Gerald’s history. These uses defy
the argument that Gerald focused his work on Ireland solely to dehuman-
ize the Irish and trumpet war. Rather, his work makes more sense within
the theory of the colonized intellectual, Fanon’s idea of the man whose
conflicting senses of belonging expose themselves within work that has
another apparent aim. Gerald’s histories are a nest of contradictions. He
wants his writing to reach a wide and popular audience, in the sense of
being able to be understood by as many people as possible. Yet, Gerald is
at odds with the language he uses to write The Conquest of Ireland. In the
second preface to the work, he requests that “some man of learning”
translate it into French.97 He even expresses jealousy that his friend, Walter
Map, gained fame through his great eloquence of speech. However,
Gerald consoles himself with the knowledge that his works will be recov-
ered in posterity.98 He paints a strange portrait of the Welsh, as both the
96
Ibid., 48–49.
97
Ibid., 177.
98
Ibid., 177–178.
196 M. X. VERNON
willing hands of the Irish conquest, and as a people worthy of indepen-

dence. Tied to this sense of Welsh duty is his own indignation at how
poorly the Welsh, particularly his own family, have been rewarded for their
services to the crown, which bubbles over at times in The Conquest of
Ireland:
Hoc etenim gentis huius omen et hec condicio: semper in armata milicia
cari, semper primi; semper rebus in marciis ausu nobili famosissimi. Cessante
vero necessitatis articulo, statim exosi, statim ultimi, statim ad ima livore
depressi. Verumtamen tante generositatis silvam livor ad plenum extirpare
non potuit. Unde et usque in hodiernum diem gens hec novic plantularum
succrementis vires in insula non modicas habent.
Qui sunt, qui penetrant hostis penetralia? Geraldide.

Qui sunt, qui patriam conservant? Geraldide.
Qui sunt, quos hostes formidant? Geraldide.
Qui sunt, quos livor detrectat? Geraldide.
O si principem tante strenuitatis merita digne pensantem reperissent, quam
tranquillum, quam pacificum olim Hibernie statum reddidissent.
For this was the destiny of that family, this was the position in which it found
itself. In time of war they were always prized and given the first place. In all
the activities of war their noble courage always won for them renown of the
highest order. But when the crisis was over, immediately they became the
object of hatred, they were immediately pushed to the back and relegated to
the lowest position through the envy of others. But envy could not com-
pletely succeed in rooting out a veritable forest of such outstanding nobility.
So to this day, thanks to the grafting on to it of new stock, this family exerts
no mean influence on that island. Who are the men who penetrate the ene-
my’s innermost strongholds?
The FitzGeralds.
Who are the men who protect their native land? The FitzGeralds.
Who are the men the enemy fear? The FitzGeralds.
Who are the men whom envy denigrates? The FitzGeralds.
If only they had found a prince who valued such outstanding valour at its
real worth, what a peaceful and tranquil country they would long since have
made of Ireland!99
Gerald is unable to resist putting the Geraldines at the center of his vision
of the conquest. Simultaneously, there are slight overtones of the Welsh
Ibid., 170, 171.

99
longing for a great leader, just as Geoffrey of Monmouth writes about the
longing for Arthur’s return. The narrative of the nation and Gerald’s own
self-fashioning are interlocked in Gerald’s mind; he uses one to shape and
redefine the other. The betrayals of the English fit into the larger pattern
of intrigues and political mistrust that has plagued the Welsh since the end
height of their power.
As he draws The Conquest of Ireland to a close, he uses a quotation he
attributes to Evodius, but which would well function as an epigram for his
whole work: “Posterity learns from the ruin of those who have gone
before, and a mistake made in former times serves as a perpetual caution.”100
He quotes this as part of a list of suggestions for how the English can best
govern the Irish. His ideas vary from erecting additional fortresses in
Ireland, to banning the Irish from carrying axes, to nominating fair-
minded judges to preserve the rule of law. He ends the list with the sug-
gestion that the Irish pay tribute to the British crown, either in the form
of money or birds:
[U]t sic in posterum cuncta gravaminis atque discordie submoveatur occa-

sio; et quoniam tempora transcurrunt, et ultra gradus omnes linea sanguinis
in evum extenditur, anno tributo, tamquam perpetuo cirographo, in
Britannici perennem tam regni quam regis honorem expugnacionis huius
memoria retineatur.
Besides, since the years roll by, and the line of our descendants stretches
beyond all our divisions of time far into eternity, this annual tribute, like a
kind of perpetual document, may have the effect of perpetuating the
memory of this conquest to the eternal honour of the kingdom of Britain
and of its king.101
This is a curious note for Gerald to sound at the end of a text about his
own ancestors’ work of conquest. In a final set of contradictions, Gerald
shows deep skepticism about the ability of a written record, particularly his
own, to properly attest to the events of the past, while he simultaneously
entertains considerable faith in the prospect of lineal descent. And perhaps
most strangely he seems to withdraw his call for the Irish to be completely
submissive to the Welsh. The divisions of people he outlines in the text—
the English (Angli), the Normans (Normanni), or the Welsh (nostri, as
100
“Ruina precedencium posteros docet, et causio est semper in reliquum lapsus anterior.”
Ibid., 250–251.
101
Ibid., 252–253.
198 M. X. VERNON
Gerald often writes)—do not mark his final vision for the rulers of Ireland.
Instead, he uses “Britannicus,” a word that he employs rarely, but which
suggests a vision of rule and of nation that supersedes those other divi-
sions. While this is an understated concession from Gerald, it is significant
insofar as it shows that, to the end of the text, Gerald is still searching for
a coherent identity through the space of Ireland.
While there are limits to trying to apply the thinking of a modern politi-
cal thinker to the products of a far distinct age, the term “colonized intel-
lectual” lends some reason to a text that threatens to be baldly inaccurate
during its best moments and toxic at its worst. Fanon uses “colonized
intellectual” to evoke a writer trying to find the idiom in which to describe
the nation. He outlines the long, furtive, and often failed process of the
colonized intellectual to situate him or herself within the new realities of a
decolonized political situation. While attempting to understand Gerald’s
inward gaze—his desire to rationalize the place of the Welsh and himself
within the spheres of Henry II’s court and the church—does not undo
Gerald’s complicity in the colonizing project, it does nuance Gerald’s
writing. Gerald’s contradictions paint a portrait of a writer trapped in the
ironies of his work. Beneath what Gerald would present as the biological
and dispositional differences between the Irish and normative humanity—
that the Irish are untrustworthy and monstrous—are the historical simi-
larities that Gerald cannot suppress. Gerald is caught in the paradoxical
role of being both colonizer and colonized, a situation that is embedded
within the history that Gerald uses as his guide. The past is oracular for
Gerald, and he believes it to be the key to validating his personal sacrifices
for Britain. What seems to elude Gerald are the far-reaching consequences
of his intellectual uncertainty, the ripples his work would cause beyond
satisfying his personal ambitions. His writing on Ireland, and his quest for
distinction, would create an intellectual template for imagining the Irish
that would be repeated for hundreds of years, through ages and countries
he could not possibly have envisioned.
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———. The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Edited by T.O. McLoughlin
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———. “Sketch of a Negro Code.” In The Portable Edmund Burke, ed. Isaac
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Douglass, Frederick. “Speech at the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York
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———. The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated by Michael A. Faletra.
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———. Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland. Edited and translated by
A.B. Scott and F.X. Martin. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978a.
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———. The History and Topography of Ireland, 2nd edition. Translated by John
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Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press,
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Bourke, Richard. “Edmund Burke and the Politics of Conquest.” Modern
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CHAPTER 5
Other Families: Dryden’s Theory

of Congeniality in Dante, Chaucer,
and Naylor
The introduction presents the prevailing goal for this study as the con-
struction of an “anti-genealogy”: a means to read medieval literature’s
legacy that refuses the primacy of nation or race. The following chapter
will press the boundaries of this argument by examining the vernacular as
a mode that is mutable but also continually reimagined by successive gen-
erations of writers as a coherent chain of formal literary subversions and
responses to power. Vernacularity, thus, is in constant motion. This chap-
ter will shuttle between meanings of this term, but will be anchored in
African-American reconstructions of medieval vernacularity. The dual
states the vernacular occupies between signifying an adherence to and a
break from established literary trajectories maps onto the development of
African-American literature as conforming to the tradition of American
letters and as an eclectic mix of forms that emerged in defiance of white
oppression’s terms. Vernacularity’s function as a bridge between codified
and unruly forms of literary production has broader implications for find-
ing alternatives to the seemingly impossible relationship between older
literary forms and the lived experience of race, as exampled in Charles
Chesnutt’s pessimistic overlay of romance and the mulatta character Rena
discussed in Chap. 3. Read as a connection to writers across time, the ver-
nacular is an optimistic retort that accepts the authorization of previous
writers on the terms that African-American writers themselves set out.
More importantly, the appeal to the vernacular countenances future trans-
formations of blackness expressed through novel literary approaches as a
critical part of a broader global literary project.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_5
204 M. X. VERNON
To frame this discussion, I appeal to Fables: Ancient and Modern

(1700), John Dryden’s melancholy “farewell to writing,” in which he
articulates a theory of congeniality that anticipates the argument about the
vernacular this chapter makes. Dryden positions Geoffrey Chaucer as his
literary predecessor and interlocutor:
I had found a soul congenial to [Chaucer’s], and that I had been conversant
in the same studies. Another poet in another age may take the same liberty
with my writings; if at least they live long enough to deserve correction.1
Interspersed within the argument for his linking of Homer, Ovid, Chaucer,
and Boccaccio are the reflections of a man who is nearing death and con-
templating his own legacy. His suggestion that Chaucer’s soul is congenial
to his is made with only a hint of playfulness, as is his discussion of the
transfusion of souls among writers:
Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Maller of Fairfax; for we
have our lineal descents and clans, as well as other families: Spenser more
than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body;
and that he was begotten by him Two hundred years after his Decease.2
Dryden, whose mind had so long been fecund, looked to his literary pre-
decessors to divine if his work would sprout any literary progeny. In doing
so he casts his gaze towards the directions such literary inheritance could
take, from the “lineal descent” that he suggests for Spenser and Milton, to
more elusive connections he makes between Ovid and Chaucer. Most
capaciously, he allows that it may take as long as the space between himself
and Chaucer—three hundred years—for a congenial soul to follow in his
footsteps. Dryden may not have received his wish with respect to his
accomplishments in fiction; The Indian Emperor is not inspiring future
generations of writers, nor would he be proud of progeny like Philip
Larkin’s saucy “Annus Mirabilis.” His writing, while at times admired, was
doomed to be “classic,” to use Matthew Arnold’s evaluation of Dryden’s
work.3 Dryden’s fiction may not have found many other congenial souls,
yet his thinking about forging “other families”—non-linear affiliations or
1
John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, Vol. VII, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 40.
2
Ibid., 24.
3
Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Vol. IX. Edited by Robert
Henry Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973) 178–180.
OTHER FAMILIES: DRYDEN’S THEORY OF CONGENIALITY IN DANTE… 205
kinship networks—through the ties of language has produced progeny far

distant from his own time.
In writing about translation, Dryden certainly has some nationalistic
truisms to observe—he leaves no doubt that Chaucer is unique and unpar-
alleled by any writer in Italy, France, or England during his age. However,
through is Fables, Dryden makes the unexpected maneuver of linking
writers across countries and times who are joined by “resemblance of
genius,” that is, a chain of connection established by the author, but put
into the common currency of English for the reader to make “a certain
Judgement” between them. His theory of translation was a generous one,
which encompassed “metaphrase,” paraphrase, and something between
paraphrase and imitation.4 In the conjunction of disparate authors in the
Fables, particularly in naming Chaucer as Dryden’s forebearer, interlocu-
tor, and early refiner of the language, Dryden presents vernacular transla-
tion, the movement of these fables into “modern English,” as a mode of
writing that argues for an adherence to the spirit of the original work,
achieved by an active manipulation of a text.
Dryden navigates this apparent contradiction by presenting Philip
Sidney’s argument that out of “veneration due to his old language”
Chaucer should not be translated.5 Dryden refutes Sidney. He observes
that few could claim to comprehend Chaucer’s language, thus the mean-
ing of the medieval author’s writing was being obscured by his outmoded
words:
Words are not like land-marks, so sacred as never to be removed: customs

are changed and even statutes are silently repealed when the reason ceases
for which they were enacted. As for the other part of the argument, that his
thoughts will lose their original beauty by the innovation of words; in the
first place, not only their beauty, but their being is lost when they are no
longer understood which is the present case…How few are there who can
read Chaucer, so as to understand him perfectly? And if imperfectly, then
with less profit, and no pleasure. ’Tis not for the use of some Saxon friends,
that I have taken pains with him: let them neglect my version, because they
have no need of it.6
4
Dryden, 594.
5
Ibid., 41.
6
Ibid.
206 M. X. VERNON
He argues for a demotic style of translation, one that takes aggressive con-
trol of the text, cutting passages and altering Chaucer “for the better.” He
is sure to emphasize that his version should not lead the reader back to the
original—although an earlier “untranslated” version accompanies his own.
Rather, his rewriting of Chaucer attempts to move away from this earlier
work and wrest it from the effects of time and the occlusion only penetra-
ble by his “Saxon friends,” antiquarians, and scholars.
Chaucer, for Dryden, had “cultivated his mother-tongue,” bringing
English to a point of maturity.7 However, in his translation he displays
ambivalence towards the fixity of language. Dryden suggests that vernacu-
lar translation, in fact, does not function primarily in the realm of linguis-
tics. Language is merely the envelope for emergent meanings the audience
discovers themselves, making possible “the communication of ancient cul-
ture to the present.”8 Vernacular translations exist in an uncertain space
between acknowledging the importance of the original text and respond-
ing to the needs of the reader. It is a fluid process, continually seeking
equilibrium between the authoritative, accessible to the few, and the vul-
gar, available to all. This dynamic system is productive; it is premised on a
sympathetic relationship between past and present and thus allows for
unexpected reformations in the terms by which both the writer and reader
might be understood.9
7
Dryden, 43; 37.
8
Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s England: Illiterate Literature (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8; Larry Scanlon begins his argument with a defi-
nition which admits to how unruly the vernacular can be. He delimits the conversation only
to show the plurality of participating voices:
[The v]ernacular seems to mark a place where disciplines allow themselves to become
a bit less than systematic, less than disciplined, where they aspire to speak of what lies
beyond them, the unlearned, the predisciplinary, or nondisciplinary, or interdisciplin-
ary, where they desire not only to speak of it but to speak for it, to get beyond their
own learned boundaries and speak from it and with it.
Larry Scanlon, “News From Heaven: Vernacular Time in Langston Hughes’ Ask Your
Mama,” in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona
Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), 221.
9
Cornish, 7. Cornish uses a wide array of words to describe the linguistic action that she
studies, a list that dwarfs the one presented by Dryden: “translation,” “version,” “vulgariza-
tion,” “vernacular translation,” and “vernacularization.” This chapter will rely on vernacular-
ization. See also, Larry Scanlon’s account of the dynamics of vernacularity and power in his
“News From Heaven: Vernacular Time in Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama,” 221.
What Dryden sets up with his meditations on congenial souls is a the-

ory of the vernacular that operates across the lines of geography, language,
and authority. His vernacular is dialectical in the sense that its various
oppositions enable it to engage what would seem to be foreign to itself
without compromising its potential to express difference.10 For example,
Dryden uses his translations as the basis for his conception of a national
literature, but to do so he integrates writing from the classical period.
Dryden alters the significations of Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses
to subdue them within the teleology that leads to Chaucer’s “refinement”
of English and Dryden’s own additions to the language. From this per-
spective, the vernacular cannot be solely identified through a single
tongue. Rather, it operates within a matrix of meaning that can expand
over time—Dryden likens the process to a nobleman who embarks upon
building a dog kennel and dies with an unfinished palace. The vernacular
takes on unexpected dimensions while preserving its essential ontological
significations.
As Stephanie Trigg notes in her study of Dryden’s preface, congeniality
conceptually diverges from a Bloomian structure of Oedipal struggle and
transumption because it is associative and allows writers to engage it even
at a generational or societal remove. She writes, “[s]hould historical con-
tinuity fail…then the souls of older English poets might still be ‘transfusd’
into those of their spiritual descendants.”11 Dryden’s model of incorpora-
tion and expansion contravenes the underlying logic of a literary tradition
that depends on metaphorical genealogical succession as witnessed in evo-
cations of Anglo-Saxonism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
tury and later in conservative interpretations of the literary canon. Here I
follow the suggestion of Cedric D. Reverand II, who provocatively frames
the genesis for Fables as Dryden’s cognizance that he had been reduced
from a place of prominence to becoming an “outcast, minority voice.”12
Reverand II argues, Dryden’s attempt to resituate himself within a shifting
literary landscape that threatened the survival of his poetic voice led him
to construct this elusive text:
10
Robert Glenn Howard, “The Transformative Potential of Discourse in the Vernacular
Mode,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media and the Shape of Public Life, eds.
Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 256.
11
Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 147, 148.
12
Cedric D. Reverand II, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 5.
208 M. X. VERNON
Fables is more than comprehensive and capacious; it is tantalizingly subver-

sive. What it gives, it also takes away…Fables engages the reader, invites him
to synthesize and connect, only to discover ultimately the limits of that
whole enterprise.13
Dryden’s theory of his translations rejects the predetermined, the linear,

and the fixed in favor of literary connections that are surprising, seemingly
disjunctive, and not tied to one nation. This interpretation of Dryden
complicates his place as the “father of English criticism,” as Samuel
Johnson somewhat ironically dubs him in his own attempt to find a con-
genial soul.14 While Dryden rightly is understood to have inaugurated a
standard of critique to which later critics adhere, it would be a misinter-
pretation of his argument to read it as a defense of continuity.
His preface fundamentally intervenes into the history of English litera-
ture by laying out the potential within elective connections between writ-
ers who are separated by temporal period yet see something worthy of
carrying over—translating—into another era. The vernacular works as the
conduit for an uneasy act of claiming, in the sense of taking for one’s own,
and also as a means of articulating a relationship with the past that informs
one’s identity. Dryden’s preface is as much about Chaucer’s legacy as it is
about his own. The vernacular translation’s impulses towards preserving
some of the venerability of an older text while offering a space for the
writer to claim his or her new voice as overtaking, or usurping, the fresh-
ness of language creates the possibility of unexpected ligatures between
writers across time.
This vision of translation and vernacularization has profound implica-
tions for explicating the meaning of African-American re-envisionings of
medieval texts. As established in the first chapter of this book, the creation
of an African-American literary tradition was intimately linked to critical
engagement with foundational literary texts. Through the twentieth cen-
tury, the concept of an African-American vernacular developed as both an
aesthetic form and an ideological system that could reckon with the his-
torical meaning of the “negro presence” in the United States, a history
marked by forced migration and failed projects of integration.15 Choosing
13
Ibid.
14
Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets. Edited by Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2006), 118.
15
In discussing the vernacular as an ideology I am borrowing from Houston Baker’s dis-
cussion of “blues ideology” and black migration in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American
one’s predecessors in distinction from the dominant literary tradition was

both a necessity and a means to frame African-American interventions
within the literary realm. Richard Wright, in his “Blueprint for Negro
Writing,” (1937) argues that the model of assembling sources to create an
aesthetic he called “complex simplicity” was an essential strategy to
encompass the strangeness of black experiences:
Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse,

Nexo, and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself
should form the heritage of the Negro writer. Every iota of gain in human
thought and sensibility should be ready grist for his mill, no matter how far-
fetched they may seem in their immediate implications.16
Wright threads together two strands of vernacular translation in an African-

American context. Heritage here is not determinative and backwards-
looking, rather it is wide-open to the possibilities of incorporation of
influences from the past. Moreover, the series of communist and socialist
authors—Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London—highlights that
African-American work should be sophisticated in terms of its literary
merits and informed by the political commitments of their literary
antecedents.
The relationship between race and a heritage of cultural production
more generally continues to provoke constellations of artists that share
difficult-to-define bonds. For example, in his 2015 novel, The Sellout, Paul
Beatty offers a definition of “unmitigated blackness” that advances
Wright’s thinking to speculate about who and what compose the field of
black art:
I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t
sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to
succeed. It’s Donald Goines, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln, Marcus
Garvey, Alfrie Woodard, and the serious black actor. […] It’s our beautiful
hands and fucked up feet. Unmitigated blackness is not giving a fuck.
Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra,
Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black and white Godard, Celine, Gong Li, David
Literature. See: Houston Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (Chicago:
16
Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in African American Literary Theory: A
Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 50.
210 M. X. VERNON
Hammons, Bjork, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permuta-
tions. Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization
that there are no absolutes, except where there are.17
What begins as a tally of familiar black intellectuals and artists veers into an
eclectic mix of people who, as the definition says, “don’t give a fuck.” This
list does not behave the way it should; it proposes temporary allegiances
and inhabits contradictions, like the notion of raceless blackness, as a
means of militating against simplistic notions of a black tradition. I would
propose that what Beatty describes as “unmitigated blackness” is an itera-
tion of congeniality as I have been outlining it in this chapter.
The novelist Gloria Naylor provides the clearest example of the poten-
tial to read congeniality in an African-American context. Her writing gar-
nered significant attention during the late twentieth-century debates
about the canon in part because she wrote prose “translations” of Dante’s
Inferno and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As was the case with Dryden, she
became “conversant” in the Western literary canon and she used her ver-
sions of both texts as critical interventions to augment the meanings of the
vernacular that Dante and Chaucer came to signify. Before her, many
prominent, mostly male, African-American writers—Frederick Douglass,
Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, and Amiri Baraka—looked to Dante as a
seminal figure for anticipating the vernacular as a literary and political
mode that could challenge standard formulations of the literary canon.
For these writers, Dante’s Inferno functioned as a paradigm for undermin-
ing the hegemony of that tradition; Dante was a kindred spirit whose
structure of divine punishment could be translated to the systems of
oppression within the United States.18
Naylor pushes the meaning of the vernacular as she receives it from
these earlier writers. She contests the model of literary succession between
men that Dante offers by presenting a black female vernacular that sub-
tends black male vernacular writing. Her radical assertion of a vernacular
voice that is present but unacknowledged led her to theorize a plurality of
vernaculars, an international community that is elusive because it cannot
be reduced to a set of literary influences. Rather, Naylor’s vernacular
17
Paul Beatty, The Sellout (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 277.
18
See Jerry Gafio Watts’ illuminating discussion of Amiri Baraka’s relationship to Dante in
Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University
Press, 2001), 88–89.
becomes a way of expressing a common lived experience. As she adopts it

from Dante, the vernacular symbolizes a culture that “extends beyond the
boundaries of dialect and idiom.”19 The scholar Joyce A. Joyce argues
more broadly that an African-American vernacular is just one channel for
characterizing the shape of that larger community:
Rather than being a “linguistic event” or a complex network of linguistic

systems that embody the union of` the signified and the signifier indepen-
dent of phenomenal reality, Black creative art is an act of love which attempts
to destroy estrangement and elitism by demonstrating a strong fondness or
enthusiasm for freedom and an affectionate concern for the lives of people,
especially Black people.20
Henry Louis Gates Jr. lambasted this line from Joyce in his essay, “What’s
Love Got to Do With It: Critical Theory, Integrity and the Black Idiom”
for essentializing black literature and rejecting the important place of liter-
ary theory (read to be a representative for the Western literary tradition)
as applied to Black Studies.21 In the light that this chapter casts upon it,
the stakes of Joyce’s argument seem to be greater than a quibble about the
style of criticism one can bring to bear on a text. Gates does not take the
suggestion about affective communities that can be reached through black
literature seriously; Naylor, on the other hand, does. In reading Joyce’s
suggestion through Naylor, it becomes apparent that rather than being a
refusal of a Western literary tradition, she reconfigures that tradition to
selectively incorporate elements of it and remobilizes them to rethink
whose voices deserve to be heard.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provides Naylor with the structure for
thinking about connections between people who are linked as much by
voice as they are by proximity. However, it is Dryden’s notion of congeni-
ality as the constant renewal of the vernacular that anticipates the breadth
of Naylor’s ambitions to link communities across the globe and across
time. Dryden writes “nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is
19
Robert R. Edwards, “The Metropol and the Mayster-Toun: Cosmopolitanism in Late
Medieval Literature,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture,
ed. Vinay Dharwader (New York: Routledge, 2001), 33–63.
20
Joyce A. Joyce, “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism,”
New Literary History 18.2 (Winter 1987), 343.
21
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “What’s Love Got to Do with It: Critical Theory, Integrity and
the Black Idiom,” New Literary History, 18.2 (Winter 1987), 345–362.
212 M. X. VERNON
altered” to present his vernacular translation as an act of conservation.22

Dryden draws the analogy between an ever-present yet evolving natural
world and the characters who populate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales not
just to valorize his own writing, but to insist that the types of voices
Chaucer evokes remain in society and are worthy of recording. Naylor’s
translations similarly bind up African-American vernaculars within a con-
versation about vernacularity that has been ongoing since the Middle
Ages. The vernacular allows Naylor to make a radical assertion of African-
American voices in a literary tradition that subtends the Western literary
canon. In Naylor’s conception, African-American vernaculars translate, in
the literal sense of “carrying over,” fundamental meanings from these ear-
lier texts. Just as importantly, she uses her translations to feed back African-
American voices into those texts; that is, to insist that African-American
vernaculars and the lives they represent reflect the plenitudinous variety of
emotion and experience that characterizes Chaucer’s pilgrims.
I use “translation” as a term that has become freighted by scholarly
arguments about rewriting and reinterpreting texts as an act of “cultural
reclamation” that was as relevant to the work of medieval scribes as it is for
contemporary novelists and poets thinking through the political problems
of writing in English.23 Naylor takes extreme liberty with her source texts.
She relies on them for the fundamental structure of her novels and for
allusions, but places them at a distant linguistic and temporal remove. This
method of approaching texts, through vernacular translation, advances
Dryden’s most fundamental assumption about the vernacular: its ability to
work as a literary mode that can bridge gaps in time, backwards and for-
wards. In Dryden’s case, his translations anchored his own legacy by tying
it to that of Chaucer. Dryden positions his work in conversation with
other long-lived writers, which recalls Chaucer’s own preoccupation with
literary lineage, language, and the human body in his House of Fame.24
Naylor, as this chapter will argue, works in a similar fashion. Although her
writing is not suffused with the immediate concern for the author’s own
literary survival that marks Dryden’s work, her novels are no less interested
22
John Dryden, “Preface to the Fables,” in Essays of Dryden, vol. 2, ed. W.P. Ker (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1900), 203.
23
Cornish presents these arguments concisely in her Vernacular Translation in Dante’s
Italy, 3.
24
Paul Fry compares the assemblage of writers in Dryden’s introduction to the congrega-
tion of souls in Dante’s Limbo. See: The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in
Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 122.
in the questions of literary survival writ large. Within Linden Hills (1985)
and Bailey’s Cafe (1992) is an overriding anxiety about a crisis of voice in
black letters.25 The evocation of a Western European literary tradition
prompts questions about African-American literary ancestry, particularly
whether in the absence of a clear lineage there can be a future of what can
rightly be called African-American literature. The underlying fear is one of
whiteness: that African-American literature could be subsumed within dis-
courses that would deny the subjectivities of African-American characters
as inflected by their racialization or would simply bracket African-American
voices as “minority literature,” somehow uninflected by other literary cur-
rents.26 The vernacular conceived as a cross-temporal and counter-hege-
monic literary mode allows Naylor to theorize a space for African-American
letters that evades race as a confine. Counterintuitively, the historical and
political implications of race keys Naylor’s access to these other voices.
Because of and not despite textual instabilities and the tremendous loss of
literary voices that mark African-American literature—poets and singers,
whose voices only survive as anecdotes or through fragmentary evidence—
it is a tradition that should be read as in conversation with centuries of
vernacular writing that take their root in the pre-modern period.
This argument works in tandem with ones raised in Chaps. 2 and 4
regarding how nineteenth-century African-Americans wielded medieval
tropes and texts to render legible the political projects of abolition and the
full protection of the law. Those readings subverted the expected set of
social relations that medieval romance often affirmed, thereby ennobling
African-American causes while calling into question uses of those same
tropes to articulate white supremacist ideologies. The vernacular, as
received from Dante and Chaucer, calls upon a more unstable set of power
relations to augment the valences of those African-American works.
When Chaucer writes in his Parliament of Fowls “And out of olde
bokes, in good feyth,/ cometh al this newe science that men lere,” he
hints at some of the difficulties and possibilities contained within mobiliz-
ing the vernacular.27 At issue is supersession, of the old by the new, and the
question of value: the transfer of cultural capital that is implied by making
25
This chapter will use the following editions of these novels: Linden Hills (New York:
Penguin Books, 1986); Bailey’s Café (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
26
Tim Engles, “African American Whiteness in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills,” African
American Review 43.4 (Winter, 2009), 661–679.
27
Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Parliament of Fowls,” The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 24–25.
214 M. X. VERNON
use of the old. The vernacular depends on this renewal. Chaucer likens it
to the annual growth of crops from “old fields,” which serves to heighten
the implication of old texts as fecund grounds for producing knowledge to
be consumed.28 Moreover, the move from “bokes” to “men” suggests
that the seemingly inert text is a valuable substrate for the living. There is
tremendous demotic potential within using what is established as the
means to achieve a level of legitimacy within the literary sphere.29 However,
the dynamic action of the vernacular depends upon maintaining the bal-
ance between the esteem in which work is held—its value—and its ability
to be “new.” John Guillory notes this tension in his Cultural Capital
when discussing the “transformative” potential of vernacular literacy for
enabling upward social mobility and for consolidating established, upper-
class sensibilities.30
This line of interrogation has the potential to lead down a well-trodden
path of the so-called “culture wars” that have been in a state of détente
since the mid-1990s. Those debates led to many urgent-sounding, but
circular arguments about control of the literary canon. While my present
argument is informed by those conversations, its stakes are quite different.
This context of Naylor’s literary career certainly situates her within debates
about the canon as inflected by an African-American writer’s experiences
working with and against the weight of a Western literary tradition.
Naylor’s first introduction to Dante and Chaucer came within a “great
books” class at Brooklyn College and she did indeed use those authors to
reflect on the struggle between aspiring to literary celebrity and simply
writing novels representative of black experiences.31 Moreover, after a
decade of attention that put her into the same conversation with Toni
Morrison and Alice Walker, Naylor has since quietly vanished from the
28
For a discussion of Chaucer’s later enlargement of the idea of books used for “commune
profit,” see: Alastair Minnis, Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 1.
29
Chaucer’s use of the word “science” here is provocative. Many scholars have interpreted
this word to mean just what it says, that Chaucer is making an argument about technical
innovation. In my argument, I am using the more general sense of the Middle English to
build an argument about knowledge gained from books more generally. See Patricia Claire
Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in the Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 151.
30
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago:
31
Margaret Early Whitt, Understanding Gloria Naylor (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1999), 2.
gaze of literary critics and the canon of twentieth-century female authors.

However, the case of the disappearing author is, as Henry Louis Gates Jr.
instructs, an irresolvable one with too many possible explanations to be
satisfactorily unraveled.32 A more fruitful line of inquiry is to trace how
“olde bokes” become “newe science,” in this case, the points of contact
between and types of translation that lead from medieval to African-
American texts. That Naylor engages works that precede her is not at all
surprising. What is more revealing is the degree to which she adopts them
as a mode of resistance to dominant forms of literary expression.
Although the culture wars of the late twentieth century—culminating
in the nineties—did little to settle debates about the canon, they laid bare
the unspoken, yet widely accepted, cultural solidarities that served to natu-
ralize the privileged position of white authors. The coherence of this gene-
alogy of literary achievement came at the expense of the diversity of voices.
These debates are often read as having been sparked by the liberal move-
ments of the sixties. I, however, argue that they replay the deeper history
of cultural contestation that this book charts.33 Chapter 2 presents the
efforts white Americans made to achieve reconciliation through the con-
struction of a shared medieval heritage. More importantly, late nineteenth
and early twentieth-century African-American writers and scholars resisted
those efforts by mobilizing the same texts and narratives to upend assump-
tions about the progression from the medieval past to the present. I read
Naylor as deploying a similar strategy as a response to a problem that never
went away. She enlists Dante and Chaucer, unquestionably canonical
authors, as literary antecedents to her own work and to the lineage of
female authors who were “awaiting their place in the sun.”34 Out of these
“olde bokes” comes “newe science”—the theorization of the vernacular
to express the ongoing, lived experience of African-Americans as a subject
worthy of literary attention. Naylor deploys the vernacular mode, as
derived from Dante and Chaucer, to refute the dominant narrative of liter-
ary genealogy and to make the larger political argument about the exis-
tence of a pluralistic, polyvocal community.
32
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Canon Confidential: A Sam Slade Caper,” in Loose Canons:
Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–16.
33
See Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015).
34
“Black Women Novelists: New Generation Raises Provocative Issues,” Ebony, 40.1
(November 1984), 64.
216 M. X. VERNON
The System of Naylor’s Inferno

Benedict Anderson’s term “reverberation,” which describes individuals
separated by geography who may not be aware of one another’s existence
yet whose lives affect each other’s, complements the argument this chapter
makes about congeniality and the value of the vernacular. Anderson con-
tends that there are imagined connections that create a shared culture,
even if the individual symptoms of that culture are evanescent or difficult
to quantify.35 The idea of reverberation is a helpful adjunct to congeniality
as it characterizes a set of relationships that work without the awareness of
parties deeply implicated with one another. The tension that underlies
Gloria Naylor’s novel Linden Hills results from complications with rever-
beration. The novel’s main characters, Lester and Willie, are poets who
spend much of the novel enumerating and struggling with literary influ-
ences while looking for work in the wealthy black neighborhood of Linden
Hills. The lowly poets believe that Linden Hills, because of the wealth and
education of its residents, contains answers to problems literary and pecu-
niary. While they work, they refine their notion of vernacular poetry by
discussing the roster of authors that inspire them from the poet-slave
Jupiter Hammond to T.S. Eliot. However, as is the case with the denizens
of Dante’s Hell, the residents in this neighborhood represent a cloud of
associations that reveals the contours and the flaws in the poets’ conception
of the multiple, intersecting communities that inform their aspirations.
In her thinking about these hidden connections, Naylor restages one of
the most significant borrowings from Dante in an African-American con-
text. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is framed around a Dantean pilgrimage
and descent; by the novel’s conclusion, it situates the Invisible Man in a
deep hole.36 The context of the Inferno complicates the narrator’s strug-
gles with race by linking him to an eternal system of punishment whose
contours are barely comprehensible to the person observing them. The
novel departs from realism and enters into the territory of allegory, hence
Invisible Man’s haunting final line: “Who knows but that, on lower
frequencies, I speak for you.”37 All readers are implicated within the

35
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 79.
36
See: Robert Butler, “Dante’s Inferno and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Study in
Literary Continuity,” in The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison (Westport: Greenwood Press,
2000), 95–105.
37
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 581.
allegorical system that Ellison constructs. The community invoked by

Ellison, is, as Anderson would have it, connected “by reverberation.” The
narrator’s invisibility is wholly premised on those around him not under-
standing the intimacy of their connection and its effects. It is this failure of
recognition that keeps the Invisible Man within the basement in which he
begins and ends the novel.
Anderson, when writing about reverberation, lingers on language as an
organizing structure that is vital to the construction of national identity.38
The creation of national identity comes with the threat of flattening the
diversity of vernaculars and differences among communities. Ellison’s
thinking derives from Dante’s reflections on a cross-temporal community
of the vernacular, but is leavened with Ellison comprehending the dangers
of being engulfed within nation-making’s sweep. Dante asserts that a
union with writers of the past is possible through grammar, the codifica-
tion of speech as exemplified in the regularization of Latin:
This was the point from which the inventors of the art of grammar began;
for their grammatica is nothing less than a certain immutable identity of
language in different times and places. Its rules having been formulated with
the common consent of many peoples, it can be subject to no individual will;
and as a result, it cannot change. So those who devised this language did so
lest, through changes in language dependent on the arbitrary judgment of
individuals, we should become unable, or, at best, only partially able, to
enter into contact with the deeds and authoritative writings of the ancients,
or of those whose difference of location makes them different from us.39
The linguistic community broadens indefinitely from the local and the
temporary because of “the art of grammar.” Latin affords a seamless con-
nection between one’s literary predecessors and oneself. Dante ventures a
step further to suggest that ennobling the vernacular might achieve similar
ends despite differences in language. Dante’s pilgrimage through sin and
into paradise charts a parallel itinerary of literary inheritance, seen most
clearly in the pilgrim’s Latin guide, Virgil, but also in Statius, Homer,
Horace, Ovid, Lucan Bibagiunta da Lucca, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Frese
Donati. This list of influences demonstrates that Dante sees the vernacular
community as unified by more than the parameters of language or time.
Anderson, 56.
38
Dante Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge:
39
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 23.

218 M. X. VERNON
He marks classical and contemporary authors as his influences and reserves

his deepest respect for the authors of antiquity who do not fit neatly into
either the category of the vernacular or that of the standard.40
For Dante, standardizing the vernacular would be a step towards mak-
ing it akin to Latin, a linguistic stance that would ennoble and codify it.
For authors, this systematization would sacrifice the flexibility of the ver-
nacular as a wandering tongue, one endowed with the evanescent author-
ity afforded to the arbitrium: artistic liberty that breaks from regulated
expression.41 The ennobling of the vernacular mode is at once alluring and
potentially destructive because of the diversity of dialects and idiolects that
might be suppressed in the name of creating a coherent vernacular tradi-
tion. Dante himself seemed undecided about advocating for the totalizing
potential of the vernacular as he does in Book One of De Vulgari Eloquentia
or writing that bespeaks the individual or operates within the well-worn
grooves of communal affiliation, as he does in Book Two. What is signifi-
cant about this tension is that it reveals the vernacular to be an expression
of the dynamics of power, indeed that the vernacular must be read as
implicated within structures of cultural power and evolving in response to
political projects.42
Ellison, writing about the subject of the vernacular in an American con-
text, describes the constant struggle between the potential unities the ver-
nacular might engender across social divisions and the anxieties about
losing the “psychic security from within our inherited divisions”:
So perhaps we shy from confronting our cultural wholeness because it offers

no easily recognizable points of rest, no facile certainties as to who, what, or
where (culturally or historically) we are. Instead, the whole is always in
cacophonic motion.43
Contestation and disruption, the messy work of expanding the contours

of belonging, are the functions of the vernacular, yet it is always under the
40
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Classics, 1982),
xxiv.
41
Justin Steinberg offers rich discussion of the legal language Dante deploys to explain the
relationship between Latin and vernacular languages. See: Dante and the Limits of the Law
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 66–68.
42
Scanlon, 226.
43
Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at the Chehaw Station: The American Artist and his
Audience,” The American Scholar (Winter 1977), 36.
threat of being misidentified for the calcified discourse of long-established

hierarchies. Invisible Man theorizes race as the informing matrix that uni-
fies everyone in the nation and which can be articulated by the common
language—the “lower frequencies”—used by the Invisible Man. And
these lower frequencies run across the length of the country and its his-
tory: through the narrator’s journey from the South to New York and
from the eighteenth-century slave mutiny alluded to in the novel’s epi-
gram through the uncertain future suggested by the novel’s end. At the
same time, the text is self-consciously idiomatic in its assemblage of
informing materials and insists on its ability to tell an African-American
story. The novel restlessly vacillates between offering “cultural wholeness”
and productive division.
When Gloria Naylor appeals to Dante to explore the vernacular as a
literary mode, she likewise lays claim to the heft the concept held for
Ellison with respect to race and nation. However, she seeks to expand the
limits of who can be included within that mode. The dynamic relationship
between speaking for the disempowered and creating a “common
language”—in the sense that Guillory deploys the phrase to suggest the
feeling of belonging within a larger social body that common possession
of language can evoke—undergirds Linden Hills.44 While the vernacular is
a linguistic mode, more potently, it should “be recognized as encompass-
ing a vast array of acts of cultural transmission, and negotiation, deviation
and/or synthesis, confrontation and/or reconciliation.”45 Naylor makes
demands on the vernacular to be more than expressive of nation or race;
she seeks a fundamental renegotiation of the terms of power and inclusion
implied by vernacularity.
Given her ambitions in conceiving the vernacular, Dante is an essential
model for Gloria Naylor. Linden Hills is part of the long history of African-
American writers who mapped Dante’s political and linguistic commit-
ments onto contemporary issues:
In Dante [African-American writers] find not only a politically engaged poet

who speaks truth to power in a way that resonates with their strange experi-
ence; they also find a master craftsman of poetic language who forges a new
vernacular out of the linguistic diversity around him, not unlike what authors
of color have had to do in this country.46
44
Cultural Capital, 93.
45
Valuing the Vernacular, 16.
46
Freedom Readers, 3. See also the discussion of Cordelia Ray’s “Dante” in Chap. 2.
220 M. X. VERNON
Dante provides a model that contests a normative version of the English

literary tradition and that makes clear the political stakes of language. The
line of critique Naylor offers is complex; while a theory of the vernacular
emerges from the poets as they wander through Linden Hills, it is one that
the characters themselves profoundly misunderstand.
Willie looks around the wealthy neighborhood of Linden Hills and
asks, “why black folks ain’t produced a Shakespeare…You’d think of all
the places in the world, this neighborhood had a chance of giving us at
least one black Shakespeare.”47 The poet’s aspiration is disquieting, par-
ticularly in its collocation of literary achievement and black status in this
hellscape. Shakespeare frequently appears in Naylor’s work as represen-
tative of the height of the English vernacular tradition. However, this
novel treats Shakespeare with suspicion because his work threatens to
function like Linden Hills itself; that is, become an ever-receding target
of aspiration that can never be fulfilled. Shakespeare’s writing can be
read as a type of vernacular achievement; Naylor here frames it as threat-
ening to the diversity of vernacular voices. While contemplating the idea
of the “black Shakespeare” and their own literary careers, Willie and
Lester are attracted to the notion despite its implications.48 Fittingly, the
names Willie and Lester make sly reference to a ventriloquist and dummy
duo, which heightens the notion that what the two offer is the repetition
of old speech.49
Naylor inserts a wholly subversive voice, that of a black woman, as a
counter to the failures in how Willie and Lester conceive of the literary
tradition to which they belong. Naylor presents the black female author
as paradigmatic of the vernacular because, in the logic of the text, she
represents fundamental problems in voice and presence: “how to negoti-
ate a relationship to an Anglo-European language and tradition that dou-
ble defines them as absence and lack—as black and as women.”50 This
intersection is important to underscore as the politics of race are read as
47
Linden Hills, 283.
48
In the novel most closely tied by critics to Shakespeare, Mama Day, Naylor goes to tre-
mendous lengths to undo or frustrate expected points in the plot as derived from Shakespeare.
See: James R. Andreas, “Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Mama Day,” in Shakespeare and
Appropriation, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110.
49
Peter Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), 132.
50
Valerie Traub, “Rainbows of Darkness: Deconstructing Shakespeare in the Works of
Zora Neale Hurston and Gloria Naylor,” in Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in
inadequate—the African-American literary tradition had itself marginal-

ized the voices of women. To many of the novel’s characters, the female
voice is perceived as little more than a noise carried on the wind and yet it
is profoundly felt by all:
The cold wind blew into the kitchen, and they didn’t know if it was the
freezing air or the long, thin howl it carried with it into the kitchen that
made the hair stand up on their arms.51
The sounds are the inarticulate screams of Willa Nedeed, Luther Nedeed’s
wife and the only female character whose voice is present throughout the
entire narrative, although she speaks directly to just one other character
before the novel’s final pages. She spends the entirety of the text impris-
oned by her husband in the basement of the Nedeed home. She suffers in
the deepest level of Naylor’s hell: the final stop in the pilgrim’s journey.
The punishment is in keeping with the system of Dante’s Inferno. In
Canto 34, Lucifer grinds Judas, Cassius, and Brutus in his mouth at the
bottom of Hell, an image which combines muted speech with physical
torture. While Dante offers a rationale for the punishment of those on
hell’s lowest level, Naylor does not. The novel never adequately explains
her husband’s cruelty, why she has been rendered infans, incapable of
speech. Rather than being a commentary on justice, Willa offers a final
twist on the notion of the vernacular as offered by Dante.
Willa Nedeed “speaks” in the interstices of the novel, between the long
chapters centered on Willie. Her chapters change the valence of the ver-
nacular to mean the unofficial channels of communication, what is left
unrecorded; Willa’s voice carries on the wind, but is also a figurative
undercurrent of the narrative, put on display in intermezzo sections
between chapters. These sections are in a different font than the rest of the
book and operate in a concurrent but separate plotline. The narrative of
Willa slowly dying in the basement functions like a gloss to the surround-
ing chapters, filling in the gaps of what is ignored in the main text and
offering a commentary on the events on the surface. As Willie reflects on
the literary influences around himself and marshals the canon of vernacu-
lar authors in African-American, white American, and British traditions to
Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (University of Illinois Press, 1993),
151.
51
Linden Hills, 42.
222 M. X. VERNON
guide him through the perils of Linden Hills, his homophonic double,
Willa, toils in her confinement; she searches through the forgotten belong-
ings of previous generations of Nedeed wives and finds a set of documents
that function like Willie’s vernacular: a Bible, books of recipes, and old
photographs. Significantly, this vernacular functions in distinction from
the assemblage Willie and Lester create. This suggests that the eclectic mix
of genres and forms constitutes a wholly different corpus of vernacular
writing, or, that what the vernacular is must be broadened to include texts
that perform differently than what can be readily reproduced on the page
or recited.
Willa Nedeed is locked in the basement with her son, who dies while
confined. She finds the Bible in the folds of a moldering wedding dress as
she looks for cloth to use for her son’s funeral shroud:
LUWANA PACKERVILLE 1837 was etched in fading gold on the bottom

border. She held the book stoically in her hand—There can be no God—and
she pressed her lips together. Then opening the cover, there in a delicate,
curled scroll were those very words…Yes, whoever you were, Luwana
Packerville, you were right about that.52
Luwana Packerville, Willa discovers, is a former wife of Luther Nedeed.

The symmetry between the women is apparent from the thought they
share while facing the Bible. What happens between the two women
through Willa’s reading of Luwana’s Bible displays, in miniature, the
type of affinity across time made possible through the vernacular as a
response to authority. The handwritten epigram for the Bible is the
first of many annotations Luwana has made. In the books of Genesis
and Exodus, she writes about being bought by Luther Nedeed (the
ancestor of the novel’s Luther), her trip North, and the first inklings
that life with her new husband will not be joyous. Amidst the laws of
Leviticus, she catalogues her attempts to maintain the Nedeed house-
hold according to her husband’s stifling rules. Between First and
Second Kings she writes of her son’s manumission, a step taken to
allow him to be the heir of the Nedeed line. By the Acts of the Apostles,
she has begun to write letters to herself in the margins of the Bible.
When justifying the change in content she takes inspiration from the
writing of the apostles themselves:
Linden Hills, 93.

52
Here, preserved for all time, are the wonderful letters of our holy men trum-
peting their joy and faith in our Savior for thirsty hearts throughout the
ages. I should drink of them and rejoice. But sometimes I do indeed wonder
what it is like to have someone to care about what you will say.53
Luwana struggles with the permanence of the Bible as having a lasting

authority for future generations and the impermanence of her own writ-
ten word. Interlarded into those doubts are her concerns that the Bible
may in fact not hold any meaning for her at all because of the disparity in
the communities that the biblical text and Luwana’s marginalia have
around them. She cannot “drink of” the Bible because she cannot imag-
ine herself as implicated in the imagined community of the text. For this
reason, Willa reading Luwana’s letters radically alters the valences of her
Bible as an artifact. Three levels of discourse are imbricated around the
book—the biblical text, Luwana’s interpolations, and Willa Nedeed’s
reflections.54 Although the responses of the two women seem to derive
from the central authority of the Bible, each has its own degree of auton-
omy that renders it distinct from its source. Luwana’s writing, a figure for
a vernacular response to an authoritative text, becomes prophetic; it
reveals the fullness of its meanings in the proper circumstances to the
right person. And while Willa can find no solace in the Bible, she does
find a congenial soul in Luwana.
Willa’s interaction with Luwana’s Bible examples the creation of a ver-
nacular genealogy that circumvents the systems of power that severed
them from the rest of society. These women are linked because of their
marginal status; Luwana’s writing gains significance to Willa because it is
in the margins. Writing in margins carries a host of metaphorical meanings
which proliferate as Willa reads the letters from her predecessor: women as
having marginalized voices, conversations carried on in the margins of
manuscripts, schools of thought formed by glossing shared texts, and writ-
ing outside the bounds of an authoritative work. Luwana unknowingly
writes for a woman in the future she cannot have imagined, a woman as
voiceless and subjected as herself. An essential component of this message
is its medium, the carrier of their communication being an orthodox text.
Luwana’s voice has room only insofar as its vehicle is a permissible object.
53
Naylor, 120.
54
Here, the glossed Bible is imbued with rich implications akin to a medieval manuscript,
particularly the Glossa Ordinaria.
224 M. X. VERNON
Yet, what is at the margins becomes more important for Willa than what is
at the center of the page.
After the Bible, Willa finds recipe books from the wife of Luwana’s son,
Eveleyn Creyton. The two represent the next generation to live in the
Nedeed house. Once again, within the form of an object permissible in the
narrow ambit of early twentieth-century women’s society, Willa finds
Creyton’s life detailed in the form of recipes that change in volume and in
purpose. The measurements of the recipes move from gigantic batches of
food meant to satisfy a deficiency in her life, to small concoctions of a love
potion to win her husband’s affection, and finally to a lethal dose of ice
cream and prussic acid to end her grief. Later, Willa finds photo albums of
the wife of Luther Nedeed who directly precedes her, their images telling
a similarly tragic story. Taken together, the Bible, recipe books, and pho-
tos add up to a vernacular archive. In it, all members share a vocabulary of
sentiment and a channel of communication via words that occupy the
edges of texts or the humble mediums for their difficult messages.
Willa’s antiphonal narrative and the archive she uncovers press on the
meaning of the vernacular as conceived of by Willie and Lester. Her ver-
nacular tradition does not have the neat form of the poetry Willie uses to
sustain himself, but rather exists as it can, in irregular and odd forms, like
the glossed Bible, or the recipe books, which irrupt and disappear at odd
intervals to testify to an existence and its loss. This vernacular is ragged,
but resilient. Willa survives weeks in the basement, escaping in the final
pages of the book in soiled and torn clothes. She emerges in part because
she has been buoyed by the words of her predecessors, whose work pro-
pels her through the period of her incarceration. However, it is not just
the voices of the previous women in the house to which she responds. This
vernacular language system is dynamic. Willa’s determination to move
upwards is not only powered by the words of “her sisters” but also by the
perpetual downward force of generations of Luther Nedeeds, which have
caused the voices of their wives to become volatile under the pressures of
time and endured violence, to form a compound so dangerous that it
threatens to obliterate all that is around it.
On Christmas Eve, Willa escapes from the basement and in a daze walks
into the room where Willie, Lester, and Luther are busy trimming a
Christmas tree. The sight of her emaciated body renders the three mute.
Luther rushes Lester and Willie from the house. They stand on the porch
bereft of even the certainty of comprehension language should provide:
Even if they could now trust their voices, there would have been nothing to
say. Where were the guidelines with which to judge what they had left
behind that door? They stood there frozen in a space of time without a for-
mula that lost innocence or future wisdom could have given them.55
Although this is the climactic scene for Willa, who burns down Luther’s
house, killing herself and her husband, it is also a turning point for Willie.
Willie had been building a concept of the vernacular that wholly operates
as a proxy for his aspirations for social status. When confronted with the
sight of Willa, he realizes how limited his thinking has been. His perspec-
tive has the virtue of a deep chronology, yet suffers from being unable to
recognize anything beyond itself. Willie, like nearly all the other charac-
ters, fails to recognize the human cry beneath the howl on the wind when
the book begins and is at a loss for how to make sense of the madwoman
in the basement at its close. As he walks, he speaks to the wind, as though
speaking the refrain of a poem: “they let it burn.” Willie repeats it three
times and then the line appears in italics, which offsets it from the rest of
the novel, as though it is unspoken: They let it burn. The sense of incom-
pleteness as represented by Willie’s struggles to understand what he has
witnessed is a fitting coda to Naylor’s thinking about Dante’s vernacular-
ity, as it insists on the vernacular as ever in process. Its subversive potential
depends on its incompleteness.56
From Chaucer to Naylor: Finding a Voice

Although Naylor seeks to echo the conclusion of Dante’s Inferno with her
ending to Linden Hills, she makes a telling emendation to one of her
source’s most poignant literary choices. After Virgil and the pilgrim have
descended to the lowest point of Hell, they hasten to leave:
My guide and I came on that hidden road

to make our way back into the bright world;
and with no care for any rest, we climbed–
he first, I following—until I saw,
through a round opening, some of those things
of beauty that Heaven bears.57
55
Linden Hills, 299.
56
Scanlon, 222.
57
Inferno, XXXIV, 133–139.
226 M. X. VERNON
Dante pays close attention to the relative positions of these characters

because it models the vision of literary supersession that informs the
entirety of the Divine Comedy. Virgil’s walking before Dante correlates to
the author’s sense of his own poetic advancement: he literally and figura-
tively follows in the footsteps of Virgil. However, at the threshold of
Paradise, Dante passes beyond where Virgil could go and thus overtakes
his predecessor’s poetic position. Naylor is conscious of the potential
within this literary positioning, as she chooses to leave ambiguous her
response to the question of literary primacy:
Each with his own thoughts, they approached the chain fence, illuminated
by a full moon just slipping toward the point over the horizon that signaled
midnight. Hand anchored to hand, one helped the other to scale the open
links. Then, they walked out of Tupelo Drive into the last days of the year.58
This is a suggestive critique of Dante’s conclusion to Inferno and Purgatorio

as it relates to questions of literary tradition. The metacanon that Naylor
constructs links herself and Dante but also pulls at the threads of a wide
matrix of female authors who have sought to forge a literary lineage. Willa
finding the work of other female writers in the basement echoes Alice
Walker’s metaphorical search for Zora Neal Hurston’s grave and it antici-
pates attempts by writers and scholars to recover female writers from
obscurity.
The circle of reference which loops back to Dante betrays a problem in
Naylor’s deployment of the vernacular. Naylor’s novel asserts the African-
American female voice within the Western literary tradition, which has
threatened to confine her writing to the political projects of her time.
Naylor never inhabits the role of Dante striding off into a future in which
she (or her characters) will be a new referent for vernacular writing.
Linden Hills ends within the shadow of finality, “the last days of the year.”
Naylor’s intervention into the literary world seems both timely and fixed
in time. Willa, the writer whose work is most suggestive of the vernacular,
dies at the end of the novel and there is no indication that Willie will
advance her story.
The conclusion pessimistically reads the longevity of connections made
possible through this alternative voice. The female vernacular that she
conjures is too contingent to survive outside of its narrow set of women
Linden Hills, 304.

58
who have experienced similar subjugations. In an interview in 2007,

Hortense Spillers, the prominent scholar of African-American literature,
voices a similar concern about a failure of voice while discussing women
“searching for a vocabulary” at the time when both she and Naylor were
making their first major interventions into the literary realm:
I was looking for my generation of black women who were so active in other
ways, to open a conversation with feminists. Because my idea about where
we found ourselves in the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, was that we were
really out of the conversation that we had, in some ways, historically initi-
ated. In other words, the women’s movement and the black movement have
always been in tandem, but what I saw happening was black people being
treated as a kind of raw material. […] The available discourses all seemed to
come out of experiences that somehow, when they got to me, did a detour.
[Laughter.] Or the language broke down.59
Later in her interview she deploys martial language—she develops a

vocabulary “to actually go to war” and she “became very good at being a
marksman and ducking”—which again links language and anxiety about
survival that transforms itself into modes of resistance.60 Spillers’ interview
provides several important contextual points to the discussion of Naylor’s
project of creating a vernacular. While the interviewers contend that
Spillers has laid critical groundwork for subsequent African-American crit-
ics, Spillers herself cautions that without careful attention the work she
initiated would need to be “rediscovered” because it is always at risk of
being “reabsorbed” or reappropriated.61 At the same time, she tempers
her language of survival by shifting the grounds upon which her work
might be understood. She notes that the unexpected allegiances that her
essays have produced not only clarify other realms of inquiry, such as
Queer Studies, but also develop the vocabulary she labored to produce.
This observation highlights the tension between the proprietary claims
necessary to maintain a discourse’s political stakes as situated in time and
the cross-pollination that occurs when that language is sufficiently rich to
59
Hortense Spillers, et al. “Whatcha Gonna Do?—Revisiting Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:
An American Grammar Book: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman,
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan,” Women’s Studies Quarterly
35 (Spring–Summer 2007), 300–301.
60
Ibid., 301.
61
Ibid.
228 M. X. VERNON
propel other conversations. In the essay the interview commemorates,

“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Spillers
moves from the captive body to language written on the body to an
“insurgent”“ text for “female empowerment,”62 a progress that echoes
Willa’s movement in Naylor’s Linden Hills from captivity through libera-
tion after uncovering a set of female narratives. Spillers and Naylor open
but leave unanswered in their respective works the issue of fugitivity, the
problems that arise once the previously obscure grammar, to use Spiller’s
word, takes flight. Does the basic grammar, transformed and put into
novel formulations, testify to the persistence and success of the literary
insurgency? Or does it mark a moment in time when the grammar brings
into historical context what had been previously unspoken in “neither past
nor future?”63 While the anniversary of Spiller’s article occasioned a major
reassessment of the waves she caused through academia, Naylor’s death a
few years later was met with little attention.
The place of the vernacular in time, the sense that its intervention is
somehow belated, is an abiding anxiety within attempts to claim the
authority of the vernacular. To return again to Dryden’s preface, one can
see the ironies that abound in how he justifies his attempts to update
Chaucer. Dryden’s “modernization” of Chaucer put the translation firmly
within the idiom of the seventeenth century even though Dryden hoped
to position the text for posterity. He argues for the vitality and “purity” of
Chaucer’s language, such that he sees in his mind’s eye “all the pilgrims in
the Canterbury Tales, their humors, their features, and the very dress, as
distinctly as if I had supp’d with them at the Tabard in Southwark.”64
Nonetheless, he reasons that Chaucer’s work represented only the
“infancy” of poetry, full of “dead coloring,” and thus seventeenth-century
readers found his work to be lacking:
[T]ho’ he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteem’d a

good writer; and for ten impressions, which his works have had in so many
successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely purchas’d once
a twelvemonth: for, as my last Lord Rochester said, tho’ somewhat pro-
fanely, “Not being of God, he could not stand.”65
62
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”
Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987), 80.
63
Ibid., 66.
64
John Dryden, The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford
65
Ibid. 528.
The predicament that Dryden finds himself in is that he needs his “prede-
cessor in the laurel” to be both significant and outdated, alive and dead,
so that he could overtake the prestigious position that he himself had
ascribed to Chaucer.
Vernacular translation functions as a literary resurrection for the author
translated, but it also reveals the desire for the translator herself to be the
new voice of the vernacular for her age. Chaucer is the most significant
author to consider in this discussion because his work has typically been
defined as the point of origin for the vernacular English literary tradition
and, as such, has been the subject of debates about linguistic transforma-
tion in relation to cultural authority since Chaucer’s own time. In the
introduction to Thomas Speght’s 1603 edition of Chaucer’s works, Francis
Beaumont argues that Chaucer’s English is one of the set of languages of
“common practice” as opposed to a “learned tongue,” and that such lan-
guages “like unto leaves must of necessity have their buddings, their blos-
somings, their ripenings and their fallings.”66 Beaumont outdoes even
Dryden in his insistence on the revivifying potential of updating Chaucer’s
language, arguing that Speght’s translation manages to render Chaucer
“both alive again and young again.”67 Here we see attempts to rejuvenate
Chaucer that are premised on an early modern desire to construct Chaucer
as a crucial precursor to contemporary literary production; Chaucer’s
greatness redounds to those who have helped construct him as such.68
Beaumont, in turn, refers to Chaucer’s own awareness of the shifting
nature of language within his work by quoting Troilus and Criseyde:
Ye knowe that in forme of speech is chaunge

Withinne a thousand yeer, and words tho
That had prise, now wonder nice and straunge
Us thinketh them and yet thei spake hem so…69
66
The Works of our Ancient and Learned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. and trans.
Thomas Speght (London: Adam Islip, 1601) http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_
ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:7609:5/ (Accessed January 26,
2017).
67
Speght, 6.
68
Tim William Machan, “Speght’s ‘Works’ and the Invention of Chaucer,” Text, 8 (1995),
148.
69
Troilus II.i., 22–25. All citations of Chaucer refer to: The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition,
eds. Larry D. Benson, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987).
230 M. X. VERNON
Chaucer continues the passage to compare speech to love, both endur-

ing realities susceptible to changing expressions. Writing—like the art of
wooing—is mutable in form, although not in content. It bears noting that
Chaucer suggests that Troilus might last long enough for people to marvel
at its strangeness. Indeed, Chaucer was complicit in the invention of
authorial persona as fit to endure through self-conscious claims about his
poem’s importance, most notably when he ushers Troilus into the world:
Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye,

Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,
So sende might to make in som comedye!
But litel book, no making thow n’envie,
But subgit be to all poesye;
And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace
Virgile, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writing of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the…70
Here the poet refuses to see his work as temporary, and instead, as
Dante does, places it in the company of the most enduring writers: Virgil,
Ovid, Lucan, and Statius. He coyly counter-poises his own mortality
against the immortality of his poetry, asking that he may live long enough
to write more and enjoining those who copy his work to do so accurately,
to protect against the “great diversity” of the language. Even at this early
point, Chaucer voices the now familiar anxiety about seeking to control
the afterlife of his work. He wishes to shift Troilus towards the realm of
codified speech, or “learned language,” where the works of Homer and
Virgil dwell. And yet Chaucer acknowledges the difference between
himself and those writers due to the “gret diversite in Englissh.” The
evolving landscape of the vernacular means that the major statement of
artistic voice Troilus represents would be subject to continual revision and
perhaps incomprehensibility.
Given his concern with the instability of English and the company he
hopes his work will keep, Chaucer makes the curious choice to pivot from
the classical subject matter of Troilus to his “comedye,” the Canterbury
Tales. This is not to say that Chaucer does not continue integrating classical
Troilus, V, 1785–1799.
70
material into his writing; however, the more significant intervention into
the English literary tradition Chaucer makes is to offer, as Dryden puts it:
“God’s plenty… for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of
nature, tho’ everything is alter’d.”71 The diversity of perspectives within
the Tales works counter to the problem of literary ossification. In an ever-
changing literary environment, it invites a dialogic relationship between a
Middle English Canterbury Tales and later revisions. As Thomas
Prendergast rightly notes, there is no “original” Canterbury Tales.72
Nonetheless, the lure of authenticity that leads writers to revisit the Tales
is enabled by Chaucer’s creation of a vernacular audience within his text
that mirrors the one outside of it. Unlike Troilus, the Canterbury Tales
embraces the possibility that his future readers would adopt and transform
his material in new and unexpected ways as is modeled by the tale-telling
game around which the text is structured. Chaucer offers a vision of ver-
nacularity that differs from the solipsistic search for a pure, unchanging
vernacular, and instead envisions a vernacular community that can encom-
pass motion and creative interplay.
These issues of supercession and the continuity of vernacular authority
are crucial to understanding the significance behind Naylor’s decision to
move from translating Dante into translating Chaucer. Although these
questions take on a different valence in Naylor’s work, which introduces
race, feminism, and the attendant problems of participating in nationalist
discourse into the discussion, the challenge of reconciling individual voice
and participating within a larger community of vernacular writers under-
pins the change in scope and focus between the novels. Linden Hills argues
for the inclusion of African-American female voices into the English liter-
ary canon, and yet Willa occupies an oppositional position to the rest of
the novel’s characters. She is not incorporated into the text’s main narra-
tive and she does not have the same literary status as Willie. Moreover, the
literary assemblage Willa relies upon militates against the vernacular canon
outlined in the primary narrative. While the novel succeeds in its opposing
traditional compositions of literary genealogy, it does not find an alterna-
tive within Dante for a pattern of vernacular writing that is not premised
71
John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, Vol. VI, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 42.
72
Thomas A. Prendergast, “Writing, Authenticity, and the Fabrication of the Chaucerian
Text,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text,
1400–1602. Eds. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio University
Press, 1999), 2.
232 M. X. VERNON
on a struggle for literary priority, particularly one in which a singular male

voice emerges at the end of the narrative. Such a model threatens to repro-
duce problems of inclusion within the canon that the text had outlined.73
The balance between literary prestige and demotic availability Naylor
hopes to strike is a delicate one. Benedict Anderson suggests that the evo-
lution of vernacular language might begin with a revolutionary democra-
tization of language, but the cultural products of that change quickly
become consolidated into the larger project of constructing national iden-
tity.74 Anderson’s primary concern is with the world after print cultures.
However, scholars in later fields follow a similar line of thinking about
vernacular language’s inherent narrowing of the receptive audience and
the elevation of that language’s status. For example, Anderson’s view of
the vernacular’s evolution is in accord with Sheldon Pollock’s discussion
of the vernacular over a much longer stretch of time—stretching nearly
two millennia—throughout which he sees vernacularization as “renounc-
ing the larger world for a smaller place,” the change from the linguistic
empires of Latin and Sanskrit to the regional efflorescence of vernacu-
lars.75 The vernacular in these terms is bounded and only able to commu-
nicate to a community within regional and temporal borders. Rather than
express difference on the part of a community with shared aspirations, it
can homogenize and delimit the sorts of cultural expression that are con-
sidered worthy of the name.
The path Naylor took to finding a stronger model for vernacular speech
that transgresses these limitations follows a pattern among African-American
writers who were dissatisfied with received terms of literary participation
for themselves within the nation. The most notable example of this is
Langston Hughes with whom, ironically, Naylor has stated ideological
differences about how to represent “the folk.” Naylor’s disagreement
stemmed from her belief that Hughes, among other writers during the
Harlem Renaissance, tried to “glorify the folk, to raise the folk up to art.”
She believed that “the folk” needed no such efforts at representation,
73
See Micheal Awkward’s discussion of African-American literature reproducing the same
patterns of “oedipal linguistic battles” that Harold Bloom identifies in his Anxiety of
Influence: Inspiring Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women’s Novels
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 6.
74
Anderson, 70.
75
Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12.3
(2000), 592.
rather they simply needed accurate portrayal: folk “is pure poetry.”76
Naylor points to Zora Neale Hurston’s “militant” position on represent-
ing vernacular speech without betraying the sensibilities she found to be
integral to it.77
Despite Naylor’s claims of disagreement between herself and Hughes,
her protestations reveal significant similarities between them. Hughes
sought a type of “intercultural positionality” that allowed him to escape
the political and artistic boundaries he found within the United States
where he constantly confronted his compromised citizenship and limita-
tions on the sorts of literary movements in which he could participate.78
From this new position, Hughes could reimagine the meaning of the lit-
erature he produced and reject formulations of black identity that were
reactive to white expressions of power. He traveled for months through
Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America, translating and having his work
translated (notably having his collection, The Weary Blues, translated into
Uzbek) as part of the search for a vernacular identity that was broader than
his American “folk.”79 Hughes sought a community of the vernacular
internationally to work in tandem with the sources implicit within his early
poetry—poets of “the folk and the fight.”80 Although English functioned
76
Gloria Naylor, Conversations with Gloria Naylor, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 62.
77
Her choice of a counterpoint to Hughes is a particularly pointed one because of the
famous attempts at collaboration between the two authors to produce a play about African-
American life that fell apart for reasons that have never been recovered. See: Henry Louis
Gates Jr. “A Tragedy of Negro Life,” in Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mule
Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, eds. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 15.
78
See Paul Gilroy’s discussion of “intercultural positionality,” the urge to escape national
boundaries to access new perspectives for cultural critique in The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6. See also the dis-
cussion of Langston Hughes and linguistic play during his trips through Eastern Europe in
Vera M. Kutzinski’s The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the
Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 25–30.
79
For a discussion of the international significance of Hughes’ work see: David Chioni
Moore, “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’ Relevance,
1933–2002,” Callallo, 25.4 (2002), 1115–1135; A. Robert Lee, “‘Ask Your Mama’
Langston Hughes, the Blues and Recent Afro-American Literary Studies,” Journal of
American Studies 24.2 (1990), 199–209; Anthony Dawahare, “Langston Hughes’s Radical
Poetry and the ‘End of Race’,” Melus 23.3 (1998), 21–41.
80
Kevin Young, trans. “Poems Written in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1932–33: From the 1934
Uzbek Translation of S.[anjar] Siddiq,” Callaloo, 25.4 (2002), 1113.
234 M. X. VERNON
as the reference language to which Hughes would ultimately return, he

used his language as a form distinct from its expression of American “cul-
tural power.”81 His transnational consciousness was vital to theorizing a
poetic tradition that interrogated the meaning of blackness so as to elude
the dichotomizing impulse around race within the United States.82 He
strategically remapped the coordinates of race and politics to forge his
particular brand of modernism that could then turn its gaze to those same
issues within the United States.
Where Naylor differs from the likes of Hughes is in the coordinates of
this positionality. While Naylor has never engaged in the type of direct
internationalism of Hughes, the movement between Linden Hills and
Bailey’s Café shows a similar desire to seek out a community of voices over
the axes of time and distance that would allow her to escape the horizon
of expectations for her writing. The creative stakes for Hughes involved a
search for a wider circle of communicants and a re-envisioning of the pos-
sibilities for literature as a connection between his literary heritage and a
more inclusive literary future. The stakes for Naylor are similarly grand,
however she, like Dryden, sought such advancement by looking to a liter-
ary community of the past and the reanimating powers of the vernacular.
This does not overstate the context of the novel; all of the characters who
find their way to the eponymous café are on the verge of suicide, but are
held onto life by the café and its community, a type of limbo wherein all of
Bailey’s Café’s tales are told.83
Bailey’s Café likewise is a place both universal and local. Bailey assumes
ownership of the café after witnessing the large-scale annihilation caused
by the bombing of Hiroshima. When he returns to the United States, he
sits on the seashore in San Francisco and a fog envelops him so that he can
no longer distinguish between land and sea. He seems to be on the edge
81
Kutzinski, 30.
82
Of course, Hughes himself was preceded by Frederick Douglass in making this type of
strategic journey to reposition himself upon returning to the United States. See the discus-
sion of this in Chap. 2. Moore notes that even while ensconced in Harlem, poets from
around the world would make a “pilgrimage” to see Hughes. Moore, 51. Seth Moglen’s
“Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso”
presents Hughes’ “populist and revolutionary” version of modernism. “Modernism in the
Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso,” Callaloo 25.4 (2002),
1189–1205.
83
The text refers to the peculiar logic of the café at several points, noting that all the café’s
regulars “all boil down to only one type, or they wouldn’t be in here in the first place,”
Naylor, 32; 222.
of a dire decision when the café—his salvation and the focal point of his
existence—appears out of the fog. As Bailey explains, the café does not
occupy a fixed location on a map, but seems to appear wherever there is
need for it, although every place signifies the same psychological locus for
those who enter it:
I guess whoever Bailey was—if there was a Bailey—he knew this place had
to be real mobile. Even though this planet is round, there are just too many
spots where you can find yourself hanging on to the edge just like I was; and
unless there’s some space, some place, to take a breather for a while, the
edge of the world—frightening as it is—could be the end of the world,
which would be quite a pity.84
The café appeals to the marginalized in terms of their psychological condi-

tions, those enveloped in the solipsism of suicidal thoughts. It also gives
access to other types of marginalities, accommodating characters from the
ends of the earth: New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Russia, and
Ethiopia. The global reach of the café means that it is a metaphorical space
not a physical one; the characters never leave their own parts of the world
to enter it. Rather, the café directly connects people on the extremes of the
nation and across the globe. And, as Bailey’s description indicates, the café
also creates linkages across time, to the point that the primary storyteller’s
own identity has become entangled within that of the original Bailey,
Chaucer’s Bailey, and presumably the other “Baileys” that have followed.
The restaurant springs into being for the narrator Bailey because of a mod-
ern crisis, in a modern city, but it predates those problems and that space
by centuries. Its oblique reference to Chaucer suggests that the origin of
the café could be quite old indeed. Like the vernacular, the place morphs
through time but maintains its essential character as a refuge for people
living in ways that assert their individuality, a place to have a voice. The
novel here resumes the argument of Linden Hills about the vernacular as
a space to appeal one’s conditions, as well as a tradition that is at least as
old as the Middle Ages.
The logic of physical displacement as it inheres within the vernacular is
evident. Bailey’s Café is a place for people who are at home nowhere, who
have no place in the world, yet find comfort in this lack of fixity. In Bailey’s
assurance that the reader can attain proficiency in the language of the café
Bailey’s Cafe, 28.

84
236 M. X. VERNON
simply by remaining near it, one can see the concern with communication
as an analogue to movement in space. The connection between language
and movement recalls the dynamic of motion as it relates to the storytell-
ing game in the Canterbury Tales. In the uncertain space of the pilgrimage
trail, the rules of nobility are left by the wayside in favor of a fluid system
of requiting through which each person’s individual nobility can be val-
ued. This is a peculiarity inherent in the strange space the pilgrims inhabit.
Although the characters in the Canterbury Tales and Bailey’s Café are
explicitly in competition (the prostitutes in Naylor’s novel compete for
men), their story-telling game implies a claim of mutual intelligibility, as
each character must be understood for the contest to function.
That each can comprehend the other is the paramount tenet of the
novel, one introduced in the second chapter, “The Vamp.”85 Bailey com-
pares the two most dissimilar characters of the novel, a nun and a procurer,
by placing their voices in parallel several times. In each iteration he “takes
’em one key down,” to show that underneath their differences in expres-
sion is a harmony of sentiment. At their lowest level both see themselves
as guardians of women who either “can’t be trusted” or “really need pro-
tecting,” which, for Bailey, demonstrates a tacit conversation or agree-
ment between them:
That’s just two of them, and they’re only minor voices. But I think you’ve
got the drift. Anything worth hearing in this greasy spoon happens under
the surface. You need to know that if you plan to stick around here and lis-
ten while we play it all out.86
The two voices are constructively resonant; each amplifies the other. This
understood homology extends to all the customers in Bailey’s Café. This
low level of understanding among the people in Bailey’s Café is possible
despite the forces of modern power, rather than because of them. Like
Chaucer’s pilgrims, the people assembled in the café are united for a com-
mon purpose. The language that is spoken in the café is a local speech, and
its rules apply only within that marginal space. The nobility of Bailey’s
85
This section is called “The Vamp,” which is a term for an improvised section of a com-
position, particularly in a jazz context, but more generally for an object that has been made
new. There can hardly be a more felicitous statement about how Naylor seeks to revisit
Chaucer in a modern context.
86
Naylor, 35.
story abuts the impish interjections of the local pimp to make the riotous
melody that underscores the cafe’s life.87
The problem with this communication is its fragility, its dependence on
the continued survival of its participants to sustain it. In reading Bailey’s
Café as a companion piece to Linden Hills, one courts a pessimistic read-
ing of the vernacular’s fate. Naylor makes the curious decision to reverse
the temporal order of these companion novels, such that Bailey’s Café is
set before Linden Hills. By the time of Linden Hills, characters who are
cognizant of the need for a global vernacular because of their sense of
global solidarities forged by white oppression have largely disappeared.
The novel explores the fate of such a person through the character
Beckwourth Booker T. Washington Carver, also known as Miss Maple
because of his penchant for wearing dresses. This habit exteriorizes this
sense of understanding one’s individual worth, but is unable to express it
in a way that can be comprehended in the world at large.
He adopts his habit of transvestitism after an ugly incident of racial
violence during his youth. Miss Maple as a child is home schooled, or, in
his father’s words, he is given a literary “legacy” through his reading.88 As
a crowning gift to his education, his father orders a handsome set of
Shakespeare’s plays which they need to pick up at the town freighting
office. Local white rowdies corner, forcibly strip, and then lock them in a
storage closet. Nude and humiliated, Beckwourth turns on his father and
demands to know why he never fights back, to which he answers that he
hoped language would be his son’s defense:
87
Naylor encourages the reader to think of the novel as part of one musical composition.
She refers to musical terminology throughout the novel. Most significantly, the chapter
introducing the characters is entitled “The Vamp”—an introductory cord progression—and
the conclusion “The Wrap.” See Don Michael Randel, The Harvard Dictionary of Music
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
These references to music as well as the interwoven nature of the serious and the joyful on
the pilgrimage trail should also recall The Testimony of William Thorpe, an autobiographical
account of heresy proceedings from the year 1407. The text is structured as a dialogue
between William and Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although the veracity
of the account is unclear, the Archbishop argues that the music and singing of pilgrims is
necessary to “solace þe traueile and werinesse of the pilgrims.” William Thorpe, “The
Testimony of William Thorpe,” Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxford
88
Naylor, 174.
238 M. X. VERNON
From the day you were born I’ve been speaking to you in a language that I
wanted you to master, knowing that once you did, there was nothing that
could be done to make you feel less than what you are…And I wanted their
words to be babble, whatever they printed, whatever they sent over the
radio. Babble-as you learned your own language, set your own standards,
began to identify yourself as a man.89
Despite this reasoned speech, Beckwourth’s father does indeed lose his
temper when their attackers tear apart the plays and shove them under the
door. The father and son clothe themselves with what is nearest at hand,
unclaimed women’s clothing, and fight their attackers.
The trauma that prompts Beckwourth to adopt the habit of wearing
dresses is suggestive. Beckwourth is saddled with a superabundance of
male names meant to recall famous African-Americans. The clear absence
is his mother. She is briefly described as “the youngest child of a fugitive
Texan slave and a Mexican ranchero” and we learn that she has been raped
and murdered.90 His father’s aggression coupled with his aspirations for
his son prove to be formative as the gate to Beckwourth’s self-recognition.
This moment inverts the “outrageous caricature” of drag Hortense Spillers
identifies as part of the “social pathology” of how black bodies are con-
structed.91 Instead of a black male’s body being read as both insufficiently
capable and feminized because it follows “the condition of the mother,”
this scene refuses the clarity of gender signification; the father and son lay
claim to their masculinity through feminine signifiers. Naylor posits a
familial orientation that defies easy categories and redounds to alternative
modes of self-expression. It is certainly not a coincidence that Beckwourth’s
father explains himself to his son after his copies of Shakespeare are
destroyed. Unlike Linden Hills, there is no recourse to the solidity of
established voices in the novel, its characters struggle to construct their
“own language.”
The father’s philosophy bears the disadvantage of being incomprehen-
sible to those outside the father and son. In public interactions, Beckwourth
is often at a loss. He attends Stanford and tries his hand at English litera-
ture and philosophy. After receiving low marks on his papers, he retreats
to a language that is wholly unambiguous, that of mathematics.92 Although
89
Naylor, 182.
90
Bailey’s Café, 117.
91
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 66.
92
He cites Beowulf as his example of a text his professors find him unable to criticize.
he excels at it, he is unable to secure a job despite ninety-nine applications.

On his ninety-ninth try he is accepted to an industrial research corporation
in Pittsburgh. Naylor observes that at this moment the state is beginning
to think about using nuclear energy to power its cities, as though to again
raise the specter of a terrifying future. While he speaks to his would-be
colleagues, particularly the lone black man who has quickly risen to the
second-in-command of his division, his desire to do something that makes
complete sense to himself, but outside the bounds of decorum, bubbles
up. So in the stifling business meeting he begins to undress. His assertion
of his individuality is an act of repulsion from the uniformity he perceives
in the upcoming generation. In this meeting, and particularly in the black
manager, he senses a danger fully realized in Linden Hills. He articulates
his fear in an apostrophe to his father:
There is no doubt—nor ever will there be—that I am a man. And it doesn’t

bother me that practically no one in this country understands a single word
I say…Change is hope; you’ve always told me that. I’m a young man; I will
see a lot of change. And that is what worries me, Papa, because today I had
lunch with the future.93
Beckwourth links sexual expression with unaccepted social behavior.

However, that social behavior is simply asserting his own brand of mascu-
linity as bequeathed to him by his father. In looking forward to the next
generation of meek company men, he despairs. He seeks to commit sui-
cide after this incident, but finds the café before he is able to do so. Within,
he gains the name Miss Maple and habitually wears dresses. There the
charge of this act is inverted. What was a marker of his incomprehensibility
becomes a sign of his liberty to act as he feels. However, such freedom
comes at the heavy cost of having to always be near the café, which is to
always be on the outside looking in and to know that the world is advanc-
ing in a direction that does not include him.
Here again, Naylor raises questions about the vernacular that are diffi-
cult to answer. What good is the vernacular if it is the speech of the mar-
ginalized while history seems to be tilting towards the elimination of the
space for it and indeed the very people who seek to preserve it? Yet, per-
haps the answers are within the shape of the novel itself. The crisis of voice
Bailey’s Cafe, 212.

93
240 M. X. VERNON
that Naylor articulates here should not be seen as the province of the past,
solely the issue for the black community before the Civil Rights era. What
Naylor achieves by constellating the Middle Ages and the modern period,
pre- and post-war America, is to insist that these problems—of vernacular,
of communities that become marginalized according to gender, race or
space—are problems that reproduce themselves over time. The anxiety of
authorial mortality and the imminent disappearance of an audience fluent
in the language of the vernacular, that which Naylor writes and that her
characters speak to one another, is assuaged by the linguistics of addition
that the novel inherently propounds. This novel does not represent the
first iteration of a vernacular community, nor is it the last.
Bailey begins the final chapter of the novel, “The Wrap,” by disavowing
any sense that closure is possible or even desirable:
My old man used to say, Always finish what you start. It’s a sound principle,
but it can’t always work in this café. If life is truly a song, then what we’ve
got here is just snatches of a few melodies. If this was like that sappy violin
music on Make-Believe Ballroom, we could wrap it all up with a lot of happy
endings to leave you feeling good that you took the time to listen. But I
don’t believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel
miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.94
If there is solace to be taken, it would be the presence of the book itself,

or more precisely, the book’s attempt to catalogue its fictional voices and
perpetuate the narratives of Chaucer and Dante. In Chaucer’s unfinished
poem, “The House of Fame,” which in many ways seems to be the poet’s
own take on Dante’s Inferno as well as Dante’s theories of language, the
main character, Geoffrey, has a dream in which it is explained to him that
there exists a House of Fame to which every utterance lingers in its right-
ful place, as a type of afterlife for words:
Now have I told, yf thou have mynde,

How speche or soun, of pure kynde,
Enclyned ys upward to meve—
This mayst thou fele wel I preve—
And that same place, ywys,
That every thing enclyned to ys
Hath his kyndlyche stede:

94
That sheweth hyt, withouten drede,

That kyndeley speche, of every soun,
Be hyt eyther foul or fair
Hath hys kynde place in ayr.95
Chaucer’s notion of “kindly”—a word that has a field of meanings ranging

from proper to noble to natural—substantially resonates with the underly-
ing logic of Bailey’s Café. Chaucer uses the word to draw together the
linguistic and the physical, “speech and sound” are “kindly;” they have
their “kind” space to which they return. The idea that language, even the
less reputable sort, can be preserved and that it will have its proper place
with fitting dignity accorded to it is the fantasy made literal in Bailey’s
Café. As the world outside changes, the café itself continues to receive visi-
tors who add to the perpetual archive represented in the community of
speech. The fictional location, but also Naylor’s actual novel, are reposito-
ries of voices, carrying and transmuting the works of Chaucer and Dante
and a host of other writers within itself. Like many of Chaucer’s tales,
Bailey’s Café ends inconclusively. The novel ends soon after a woman has
given birth in the café. The mother dies and the baby temporarily becomes
Bailey’s charge. The presence of the infant temporarily upsets the order of
the café. Appliances stop working, anxiety is in the air and the final pages
of the novel are backgrounded by the wailing of the newborn child. And
indeed, the presence of the child calls attention to the conspicuous absence
of generation throughout the novel.96 While the baby cries, Bailey offers
an apology for the unsettled end:
It’s the happiest ending I’ve got. Personally, I’m not too down about it. Life
will go on. Still I do understand the point this little fella is making when he
wakes up in the basket: When you have to face it with more questions than
answers, it can be a crying shame.97
The novel ends with an explicit juxtaposition of the old and the new, the
noise of the infant and the lyrical simplicity of Bailey.
The baby is a child of a Jewish Ethiopian woman, as though Naylor wants
to leave no doubt about the depth of tradition as suggested by the novel’s
95
The House of Fame, ll. 823–834.
96
There is perhaps a troubling subtext about African-American paternity that runs parallel
to the argument this chapter makes about the vernacular as it relates to literary inheritance.
97
242 M. X. VERNON
discussions of Judaism, and the possibility of unexpected liaisons. This is the

plasticity of the vernacular, its ability to emphasize both the individuality
and multiplicity of voice. As Ellison suggests, the vernacular can be found in
“mixture, the improvised form, the willful juxtaposition of modes”; it
“play[s] irreverently upon the symbolism of status, property, and authority,
and suggest[s] new possibilities of perfection.”98 Chaucer, Dryden, and
Naylor argue that old books in the vernacular mode can be mobilized for
new uses, to accommodate new voices. The reader finishes in much the
same place as he or she did in Linden Hills, with more questions than
answers. Yet as Chaucer, Dryden, and Naylor would argue, it is this incon-
clusiveness which gives the text a life that is unendingly evolving, a life cycle
with buddings, blossomings, ripenings, fallings and, of course, rebirths.
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2000, 45–53.
CHAPTER 6
Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django

Unchained
In the conclusion of her field-changing study, Getting Medieval, Carolyn

Dinshaw lingers over a line that had a peculiarly strong resonance with
fans of Quentin Tarantino’s film, Pulp Fiction. After a rapist is castrated
with the blast from a shotgun, his victim, an African-American crime boss
named Marsellus Wallace, solemnly proclaims that he will “get medieval”
on the “ass” of his rapist; he will be tortured before he dies. Dinshaw
reads this catchy turn of phrase and its life beyond the film against the
arguments she makes over the course of her study about medieval queer-
ness. The virulent gay panic motivating the character’s peculiar formula-
tion of his desire for revenge, she argues, drastically misattributes the
solution to its anxieties: to “get medieval” would signify a wholly different
approach to homosexual sociability evidenced in her excavation of medi-
eval texts. What Dinshaw locates beyond the rhetorical convenience of
this line for a particularly astute reader is the powerful shorthand these
casual references to the Middle Ages have for informing questions of
genre and temporality far beyond the expectations that Tarantino’s film
can countenance. Dinshaw forcefully rejects Tarantino to leverage her pri-
mary claim: “getting medieval” should instead be read as a broader form
of intimacy with the past “in our efforts to build selves and communities
now and in the future.”1
1
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 206.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_6
248 M. X. VERNON
The scandal around Pulp Fiction has long since ebbed and the politics
that propelled the problematic success of Tarantino’s “cool” aesthetic of
the nineties have thankfully shifted. However, the director has retained a
curious desire to mobilize the medieval, an interest that intersects with his
turn to African-American narratives about slavery and nineteenth-century
racial reconciliation. In light of the topic at hand and the changes within
the director’s gaze, I believe that it is necessary to revisit the notion of
“getting medieval” in the twenty-first century. In particular, I argue that a
different set of possibilities emerge from considering the contact between
medieval and African-American narratives that cut away from the intellec-
tual foreclosure Dinshaw found so distasteful in Pulp Fiction. Specifically,
Tarantino’s film Django Unchained presents a reparative narrative gov-
erned by the medieval myth upon which the film rests.
To understand the turn Tarantino makes in his thinking about the past
it is important to revisit briefly some of the issues and images in Pulp
Fiction that reappear in Django Unchained. Tarantino signals the racial
and political implications of the rape scene by setting the sex dungeon
where it occurs beneath the “Mason-Dixon Pawn Shop” and by having
the rapist, who is described as a “hillbilly,” freely use the n-word towards
Wallace. Dinshaw astutely reads the tight white t-shirt, blue jeans, and
motorcycle of Butch, the man who frees Wallace from the dungeon, as a
wry quotation of a butch gay man. However, when he descends in the
dungeon in his blood-stained white shirt, it is far simpler to read him as
the American flag personified. This is all the more evident given that the
viewer is told Butch’s father and grandfather both died as soldiers. Just as
Dinshaw found the heteronormativity of the film’s violence intolerable, so
too is the white savior narrative. Nonetheless, in the film’s logic the central
act of what is meant to be retributive justice, the rapist’s castration, initi-
ates several restorative acts. Butch and Wallace, characters who attempted
to kill one another over the course of the movie, end their feud.
Subsequently, the entire temporal logic of the film is reversed. Pulp Fiction
recommences, repeating nearly word-for-word its first scene. A character
who has been killed earlier in the diegetic timeline returns alive. The cold-
blooded gangster Jules Winnfield, played by Samuel L. Jackson, renounces
his life of crime for one of contemplation. In short, the film’s temporal
structure allows for a set of new beginnings only possible by eschewing the
demands of realism for the satisfactions of an imaginative speculation that
runs slightly askew from what the audience already knows; Pulp Fiction
offers the possibility of a return to the beginning with a difference.
CODA: TRUE AND IMAGINARY HISTORY IN DJANGO UNCHAINED 249
The idea of righting the wrongs of the past has clear implications for
cinema about the South that “fetishized [a] set of icons and memories
culled from the messiness of history and consigned forever to a past irre-
trievable except through representation.”2 Although, this was prevalent in
the early days of cinema, it is by no means solely a relic of the past.3 When
Tarantino directed the Western-style revenge film situated in the South, he
appropriated the valences accrued from the southern plantation romance
and the southern imaginary: the “amorphous and sometimes conflicting
collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories
and fantasies about a shifting geographic region and time.”4 To this he
adds the lowly genre of the Western, a form that bears similar historical
freight as cinematic representations of the post-Civil War South, albeit
with greater flexibility in terms of its iconography. To begin her seminal
essay on the Western, Marcia Landy quotes Nietzsche to anticipate her
argument about the historical possibilities contained within the genre:
A historiography could be imagined, which had in it not a drop of common

empirical truth and yet could lay claim to the highest degree of objectivity…
When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an Architect
of the future and know the present will you understand it.5
Landy’s essay intervenes in the scholarship of the Western which had

largely focused on the genre as a meditation on America’s westward expan-
sion; that is, a nearly literal mapping between the subject matter of the film
and its referent. She expands her argument to posit that the Western has a
long history of posing questions about how the nation imagines itself: that
2
Scott Romine, “Things Falling Apart: The Postcolonial Condition of Red Rock and The
Leopard’s Spots,” in Look Away: The U.S. South in New World Studies, eds. Jon Smith and
Deborah Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 176.
3
Sofia Coppola chose not to represent the sole slave character from the novel on which her
film, The Beguiled, was based. She claimed, in part, that the character would detract from the
clarity of her film’s exploration of “denial and repression.” Emma Stefansky, “Sofia Coppola
Responds to The Beguiled Backlash,” Vanity Fair, July 15, 2017. https://www.vanityfair.
com/hollywood/2017/07/sofia-coppola-beguiled-racism-backlash.
4
Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McKee, eds. American Cinema and the Southern
Imaginary (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 2.
5
Friedrich Nietzche,“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely
Meditations quoted in Marcia Landy, “Which Way is West?” Cinematic Uses of the Past
(Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996), 67.
250 M. X. VERNON
the Western can be a fecund genre for planting questions that strike at the
core of the idea of national identity.
Django is well-schooled in the Western; it uses visual quotations from
John Ford’s The Searchers and borrows wholesale the bounty hunter plot
from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Beyond being aesthetically akin to
other Westerns, Tarantino’s film follows what Landy identifies as an essen-
tial part of the genre; it uses the Western as a form within which to ask
questions that exceed the boundaries of the historical American West. And
the film does not spare a moment in doing so. It begins with a series of
both wide-angle and close-up shots of the mountainous and arid land-
scapes that are iconic of the mythic West. However, the film breaks one of
the unwritten rules of imagining that land in that it features black charac-
ters—slaves—in the first scene and indeed throughout the movie, some-
thing that Westerns rarely do. Moreover, King Schultz, the bounty hunter
who partners with the slave character Django, announces himself to be an
immigrant in the film’s first scene. By upending the expected cast of char-
acters who typically people this familiar landscape Django prompts the
viewer to rethink the mythos of the foundation of America.
The film even presses on the boundaries of the possible landscape
itself, or, to paraphrase Landy, it asks, “Which way is west?” Django
moves from the expected landscape of the West to the South; the charac-
ters travel from Texas to Mississippi. In the penultimate line of the film,
Schultz gives Django the nickname “the fastest gun in the South” which
plays on the cliché, by substituting “South” for “West.” This verbal play
encapsulates the thought experiment in which the film engages. Django
enters into the discussion of the Western not to reaffirm a familiar account
of the American experiment in nation-building, but to explode that
mythology. By featuring the nineteenth-century South as the background
to the Western plot, Django calls attention to slavery’s typical absence in
works about American myth-making, both in Westerns and in films more
explicitly about the nation.
The crucial component of this genre choice is that the fictional and the
mythological are essential for the form’s success. The Western often takes
place in a non-specific yet iconic past and place to construct narratives that
focus on the moral dilemmas of the characters that traverse its landscape. In
keeping with this, Django is set in 1858, a year that is accompanied in the
film with the subtitle: “two years before the Civil War.” No reason for the
year is ever articulated, and it would be safe to assume that this is simply a
convenience to highlight the film’s events as occurring before freedom for
African-Americans was possible under the means afforded by the

Emancipation Proclamation. The year could just as well have been 1857.
However, that the film proposes a specific temporal framework but then
depicts black heroism impermissible under history’s terms suggests the gap
between a desire for a monumental black narrative and the conceptual and
historical boundaries that militate against Django’s presence within such a
story. Although the fundamental place of slaves in the history of literal
nation-building and the heroism of slave uprisings and escapes are undeni-
able, the film’s move to depict the “objective truth” without any “common
empirical truth” shocks as much as anything in Pulp Fiction.
To the two overlapping fantasies of the past—the southern gothic and
the Western—Tarantino adds medieval romance, which helps create an
alternative set of expectations for how Django can operate within the nar-
rative. Schultz tells Django a version of Siegfried the dragon slayer’s story,
which is echoed throughout medieval literature. Moreover, he calls Django
a “real-life Siegfried” because Django seeks to be reunited with his lover,
who happens to be named Broomhilda. Schultz relates the basics of the
narrative to Django:
Schultz
It’s a German legend, there’s always going
to be a mountain in there somewhere. So, [Broomhilda’s father]
puts [Broomhilda] on top of the mountain and he puts a
fire-breathing dragon there to guard the mountain.
And then he surrounds her in a circle of hellfire.
And there Broomhilda shall remain, unless a hero
arises brave enough to save her.
Django
Does a fella arise?
Schultz
Yes Django, as a matter of fact he does. A fellow named Siegfried. […]
He walks through hellfire because Broomhilda’s worth it.
Django
I know how he feels.
Just as the film transposes the antebellum southern landscape over the
shape of the Western, the viewer is being asked to see Django in relation
to this older mythology.6 Django, who is a freed slave that seeks his lover
6
This latter type of overlay has an august heritage in the English literary tradition, most
notably in Beowulf. After his victory over Grendel, Beowulf is treated to a rendition of the
story of Sigemund, the dragon-slaying father of Siegfried. This is one of the great metafictional
252 M. X. VERNON
Broomhilda and will exact revenge upon the people who enslaved her,
cannot help but recall the Siegfried story once Schultz describes it. This
use of a medieval narrative to recalibrate how one reads love and slavery
echoes the Charles Chesnutt story, The Wife of His Youth, discussed in
Chap. 3. Moreover, the unexpected connections between these African-
American characters and the medieval recalls the argument made in
Chap. 5 about congeniality and the potential for new critical perspectives
to emerge from the affective identification with and revivification of earlier
literary modes.
The medieval narrative rescues Django Unchained from being a hollow
simulacrum of a Blaxploitation film. Django lacks the political and social
stakes of both the seventies film movement and subsequent attempts to
produce “black cinema.”7 This suspicion certainly motivated Spike Lee’s
sharp response to the idea of the film; he vowed never to see Django
because it was “disrespectful to his ancestors.”8 Content and approach
were certainly not the cause of his objection; its marketing framed the
movie as homage to both strands of film-making. Read through the
Siegfried myth, the film moves beyond the boundaries of Blaxploitation
and raises broader questions about blackness in cinema. Django rejects a
proprietary sense of history in terms of race. It questions who “our ances-
tors” are and what their lines of descent might be. In so doing it makes a
complicated maneuver around the white savior narrative that was so trou-
blesome in Pulp Fiction. As a “real-life Siegfried” Django mobilizes a
heroic model akin to those discussed in this book’s introduction that were
used to justify westward expansion and white supremacy under the aegis
of the indomitable Anglo-Saxon spirit. Django’s subversion brings into
focus the stakes of the film as a proposition about the possibility of black
moments in English literary history as Beowulf’s achievements are put in relation to those of
the mythical hero who precedes him. Within the fiction of the poem, Beowulf and Siegmund
mirror one another as fellow monster slayers. However, the text transcends the fictional in that
Beowulf presents its own literary inheritance in this scene while also acknowledging the poet’s
own innovation within that tradition. See: Christine Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon: Parallels
and Analogues (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 48.
7
See Laura Cook Kenna’s careful exploration of Blaxploitation’s origins: “Making
Exploitation Black: How 1970s ‘Blaxploitation’ Discourse Marginalized Industry History
and Constructed Black Viewers’ Tastes” in Beyond Blaxploitation, eds. Novotny Lawrence
and Gerald R. Butters, Jr. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 204–224.
8
Adelle Platon, “Spike Lee Slams Django Unchained: ‘I’m Not Gonna See It,’” Vibe,
December 21, 2012. https://www.vibe.com/2012/12/spike-lee-slams-django-unchained-
im-not-gonna-see-it/.
heroism and black liberation that escapes the black-white binary. Django
does not free himself—Schultz kills his captors—but the conditions and
durability of his liberation indeed do rely on his individual heroism that
follows the contours of the story Schultz tells. Django’s ancestors are not
Broomhilda and Siegfried, but that does not matter in the imbricated
generic space that already is motivated by the fantasies of creating origins
and recuperating a “past irretrievable except through representation.”9
Unlike the flippancy with which Marsellus Wallace throws off the line
about “getting medieval” in Pulp Fiction, Django stays within the role
of Siegfried as told by Schultz. The myth remains active in the viewer’s
mind because it is subtly but undeniably alluded to throughout the
film: Calvin Candie is constantly smoking, Django walks through the
fiery wreckage of Candie’s mansion after he blows it up, and of course,
the film plays a “fella arising” against Django’s uprising. Thus, viewers
must reconcile the seemingly disparate strands of the American West’s
mythology, a medieval Germanic myth, and the history of slavery within
the United States. This follows the arguments I make in Chap. 3 about
the presence of medieval romance as interrupting the narrative struc-
tures of the nineteenth-century texts in which they appear. Django
holds these narrative strands in tension, particularly the prevailing
problem of how it will negotiate the relationship between what the
viewer has been told about the Siegfried myth’s heroic individuality
against her knowledge of slavery’s violence and social deprivations.
These come to a head after the scheme to free Broomhilda is discovered
by the house slave Stephen. Schultz is killed and Django is bound, nude
and upside down in a barn awaiting some punishment to befall him. At
first he is threatened with castration. Subsequently, Stephen enters and
relates a plot for the rest of Django’s life that refuses the exceptionalism
of the Siegfried myth. Rather, he will be worked until he dies an obscure
death in a mine:
When you get there they are going to take away your name and give you a
number and a sledgehammer. […] They are going to work you all day, every
day until your back gives out. And then they gonna hit you on the head with
a hammer, throw your ass down the nigger hole and that will be the story of
you, Django.
9
Scott Romine, 176.
254 M. X. VERNON
This set-up darkly echoes the castration scene in Pulp Fiction. Whereas in
the earlier film castration was used as a cruel joke about a gangster’s notion
of justice, here it is the closest brush the film has with presenting slavery’s
perverse logics, which cannot countenance the generative ideology of
romance that had begun to take hold in the narrative. Instead of the
implied marriage bed of Scott’s Ivanhoe, discussed in Chap. 3, Django and
Broomhilda briefly reunite before a literal bed. Afterwards she cannot
contain her joy, which is the scrap of evidence used to tear apart the plan
to rescue her and temporarily frustrate the quest narrative. Moreover,
Stephen argues that sending Django to the mines will be worse than cas-
tration because it enacts another form of generative closure: the produc-
tive filiation with narrative. Stephen’s proposal inverts one of Orlando
Patterson’s arguments about castration as a form of absolute dominion
that produces the “ultimate slave.”10 Django’s exceptionalism, emerging
from the self-fashioning he undertakes after hearing about the Siegfried
myth, would be stripped away by the social death of his life in the mines,
hence the suggestive line “that will be the story of you.” The heroic plot
would be substituted with an anonymous burial plot. The threat resounds
because it brings into focus the stunning determinative power of slavery
over the lives of the enslaved through Django’s awareness of an alternative
narrative that has motivated his actions.
Just as the castration scene in Pulp Fiction marked a point of temporal
departure in that film’s narrative structure, after the threat of castration,
Django loses its linearity. Tarantino interchanges action and intent, the
past and the present, in Django’s climactic moments. After Django escapes
from the slavers taking him to the mining company, the film enters a mon-
tage that is just as ambitious as the sudden turn at the end of Pulp Fiction.
Interposed into the shots of Django racing to exact revenge on the Candie
estate are images of the plantation’s houses burning and its overseers
being gunned down. The past and the present become compressed as the
revenge narrative nears its conclusion. More broadly, through the proxi-
mal past of Django’s desire and the deep past of Django operating as the
vengeance seeker in the mode of Siegfried, the film achieves the
Nietzschean goal of identifying a historiography that is both imagined and
true, medieval and modern.
10
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1982), 314–331.
The shuttling between temporal and narrative frames creates a repara-

tive fiction, a term I use to evoke the clear valences it has in African-
American history. Here I understand reparative in the provocative way
Ta-Nehisi Coates defines reparations in his essay “The Case for
Reparations”:
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the

full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the
price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.11
The political act of making reparation for slavery is a long-deferred fantasy

at the base of which is the idea that African-Americans could fully enter
into the terms of American citizenship. This change implies a radical reor-
ganization of material wealth but equally importantly of the national
imaginary. More than one hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil
War reparation in the political sense has dwindled into being little more
than a short-hand for a lineage of racial oppression that has morphed from
the slave ship to the state prison; from the failed Freedmen’s Bureau to
urban redlining. Even the most ardent supporters of this form of repara-
tion would concede the impossibility of ever finding a value for that scale
of loss. The secondary meaning of reparation as an imaginative act is para-
doxically more attainable, albeit infrequently mobilized. Django
Unchained’s primary intervention is as a demotic representation of black
bodies within foundational narratives, and thus it asks viewers to revise
where and how they conceive of the nation’s origins.
There is of course a danger in too flagrantly disregarding fact in favor
of fiction, desire instead of reality. The film is one of many cultural and
historical reassessments in the wake of Barack Obama’s election. The
myth-making of Django is in the ambit of conversation with the Tea Party
political movement, which strenuously argued for a return to the princi-
ples of the Founding Fathers, a return to a historical moment of revolu-
tion, so that they might remake the country as it was. They would set the
country on the course “headed back to where we started.”12 This foray
into speculative history, the idea that one time could model itself after
11
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014. https://www.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
12
Sean Hannity, The Sean Hannity Show, Fox News, New York, April 15, 2009. Quoted in
Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8.
256 M. X. VERNON
another, did not produce a desire to critically analyze the reflections and
ambivalences of the many stripes of people, slave and free, male and female,
who lived through the period of the American revolution. Rather, the Tea
Party movement seemed to produce a mythical set of Founding Fathers, a
genealogical heritage (as seems to be indicated by the word “father”) that
both stands at odds with and reaffirms the seminal connection between
generations.13 That is to say, the modern inheritance of the Founding
Fathers, from the perspective of the Tea Party, is an intellectual one; yet
the set of ideas appear to be drawn from a smaller set of white males, and
whittled so thin as to render the men nearly two dimensional. Historian
Jill Lepore characterizes the modern Tea Party’s vision of the past as a cast
of characters narrowly defined so that they could see the resemblance of
themselves within it:
There were very few black people in the Tea Party, but there were no black
people at all in the Tea Party’s eighteenth century. Nor, for that matter, were
there any women, aside from Abigail Adams, and no slavery, poverty, igno-
rance, insanity, sickness, or misery. Nor was there any art, literature, sex,
pleasure or humor. There were only the Founding Fathers with their white
wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting
against taxes, and defending the right to bear arms.14
Lepore calls this kind of thinking “anti-history” because it does away with
inconvenient facts about America’s past in favor of confabulations to fit
the convenience of the present moment. This movement was both a denial
of the past and of the present—the history of diversities in the country in
the eighteenth century, and the demographic realities of the modern
period as embodied by President Obama. The Tea Party was perhaps the
most visible modern instantiation of this engagement in myth-making.
Admittedly, Django Unchained similarly walks this dangerous ground.
It is a movie that indulges in extremes of gore and racially-charged lan-
guage, accompanied by a disregard for history’s particularities. Yet Django
engages a vastly different timescale and demonstrates a commitment to
inhabiting the realm of myth, as it draws from a source as deep as the
Middle Ages. The medieval in Django refers to history that transcends the
frame of American history. More importantly, it allows for surprising con-
13
For a discussion of genealogy as it relates to both engenderment and literary production,
see Michael Warner, “Irving’s Posterity,” ELH 67.3 (2000): 773–799.
14
Lepore, 95.
nections among peoples and interpretive possibilities. It casts Django’s

relationship to the Siegfried myth as an elective affinity, something that
Django embraces to inform how he conducts himself. In a similar moment,
when he has the opportunity to choose his own clothing, he outfits him-
self in a stunningly anachronistic way, with ruffs and knee breeches suit-
able to an eighteenth-century gentleman. On the level of the film, Django
creates a delirious confluence of genre, voice, and race—Blaxploitation,
the Western, the medieval romance, rap, classical music, synthesized
sound—to imagine an integrative, vernacular film that demands recogni-
tion not of blackness per se, but of the essential pluralistic American iden-
tity from which blackness cannot be extracted. The backdrop of the
medieval evokes the matrix of meaning that the Middle Ages has within
American society as a constitutive force around which national identity has
coalesced and extends that network of connections to encompass the mul-
tiple significations of Django.
Tarantino pushes to the fore the strangeness of the film’s undertaking.
For example, at one point, Django meets a gambler, played by Franco
Nero, who also acted as the title character in the 1966 film Django about
a gunslinger whose quest for revenge leads to brushes with the KKK. The
brief exchange between the two men underscores how radically Tarantino’s
Django alters the template of the Western—in moving from Nero to
Foxx—but also demonstrates its debt to a film made over half a century
earlier. The 2012 Django resumes the 1966 film’s explorations of race and
violence. At the same time, it considers the complex legacy of the Western
as a medium for making serious interventions into large-scale social ques-
tions. This is to say, what seems like yet another of Tarantino’s moments
of self-reference, “the culture in and of this film,” reveals itself to be cul-
ture writ large. The two Djangos exemplify a larger set of interconnections
across continents and time, between fiction and history: that Django, a
nineteenth-century character, would see something of worth in a European
myth; that there could be a collocation of the medieval, the nineteenth
century, and the twenty-first century; and that the myth and history of
America and Northern Europe could enable the bridging of racial divisive-
ness that Dinshaw indicted in Pulp Fiction.
This chapter’s ambitions are more modest than those of Dinshaw. It
argues that the “medieval” in Django Unchained is not something that is
bandied about as an idea of the archaic and brutal but rather signifies
access to meaning that defies the historical. The medieval allows the film
to transgress the boundaries of “objective history.” This chapter’s title is
258 M. X. VERNON
meant, in part, to recall Hayden White’s own ambivalence about the rela-
tionship between what he refers to as “the true” in contrast to the histori-
cal and the fictional. He presents narrative as a crucial complicating feature
of history-writing that both makes the events of the past legible but also
pushes them to the edge of fiction:
What I have sought to suggest is that this value attached to narrativity in the
representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display
the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and
can only be imaginary. The notion that sequences of real events possess the
formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only
have its origin in wishes, daydreams and reveries.15
White, of course, does not go so far as to say that we must dispense with
narrative history, but calls for a re-examination of what we would consider
the objectivity of history-writing; he argues that we must be mindful of
the myth-making that imbues the move from a spare, disjointed outlining
of a series of events to the creation of a historical narrative. As his counter-
examples to modern historiography, White uses medieval annals and the
medieval chronicle. The turn to medieval historiographical forms is par-
ticularly provocative because of the slippery relationship they have with
the factual as exampled by the experimentation of Geoffrey of Monmouth
and Gerald of Wales. Their “wishes, daydreams and reveries” reflect frac-
tures in British imaginings of social order on insular and international
levels and are subsequently used to mend those divisions.16 The imagina-
tive confections of the Middle Ages hardened into realities of material
consequence in terms of constructing the sovereign and rationalizing
colonial ambitions.
In modern usages of the medieval, the confluence of fantastical and real
constructions of community should be read as an effect that derives from
a number of medieval textual artifacts; the constellation of courts and
courtly conduct, the evolution of languages, and the assertion of marginal
identities feed back into constructions of communal identities. The proj-
ect of utilizing this textual spolia to imagine society is aspirational in the
15
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 24.
16
See Patricia Ingham’s argument about the need to read fantasy as part of the imaginative
construction of medieval British communities: Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and
the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 21–50.
sense of seeking something out of reach. This search gains new signifi-
cance when applied to an African-American context, as it proposes an
alternative trajectory to the precarities and foreclosures of life within the
nation, while simultaneously pulling on the “intricate network of connec-
tions” which bound African-Americans to the larger society.17 Fantasy is
not escape, but a mode of reframing cultural discourse to serve the needs
of writers seeking to expose how deeply enmeshed African- Americans
have always been in American society as a whole, and a means to propose
ways of realigning those relationships.
As David Blight has argued in his study Race and Reunion, the mem-
ory of the Civil War’s causes and the means to “clasp hands over the
bloody chasm” depended upon selective memory, the myth-making that
could turn away from the Civil War’s origins and instead generate senti-
ments around the nobility of battle shared between the North and the
South.18 Indeed, that phrase, “bloody chasm,” comes from a letter by
Horace Greeley, the Democrat and Liberal Republican presidential candi-
date accepting his party’s nomination. He would continue in the same
sentence to express his belief that “masses of our countrymen North and
South” were eager to “forget […] that they have been enemies in the joy-
ful consciousness that they are, and must henceforth be brethren.”19 The
rhetoric of forgetting and brotherhood speaks to the affective ties that
began to romanticize the meaning of the Civil War during Reconstruction,
and, more importantly, continues to inflect the discourse around how the
war is remembered from flags, to statues, to national politics.20 The
post-war period’s attempts at protecting racial equality all too quickly gave
way to efforts to delimit and mythologize participation in the Civil War in
terms that have never fully been uprooted:
17
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 253.
18
Blight, 127.
19
Horace Greeley, “Letter of Acceptance,” in Lurton Dunham Ingersoll’s The Life of
Horace Greeley: Founder of the New York Tribune (New York: Union Publishing, 1873), 550.
20
In 2015, there were heated debates and protests around the Confederate flag being
flown over the South Carolina statehouse. The governor of the state for some time defended
the flag as “a way to honor our ancestors.” Richard Fausset and Michael Barbaro, “Nikki
Hayley, South Carolina Governor, Calls for Removal of Confederate Battle Flag,” The
New York Times, 22 June 2015, A1. The complex after-effects of the Civil War on contem-
porary politics are discussed in Steve Estes’ Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power
in the South after the Civil Rights Movement (Charleston: University of North Carolina Press:
2015), 125–135.
260 M. X. VERNON
Appomattox, like the Civil War more broadly, retains its hold on the
American imagination. More than 330,000 people visited the site in 2013.
In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” as in many other popular portrayals, the
meeting between Lee and Grant suggests that, in the words of one United
States general at the surrender, “We are all Americans.”
Although those words were allegedly spoken by Ely Parker, a Tonawanda
Seneca Indian, and although hundreds of thousands of African-Americans
fought for the nation, the “we” in the Appomattox myth all too often is
limited to white Americans.21
Eric Foner uses a memorable phrase to express the power of the “reminis-
cence industry” through the Reconstruction Era and beyond: “the
Confederacy lost the war on the battlefield but won the war over
memory.”22
Django Unchained as a participant in the debates about the enduring
presence of the Civil War and Reconstruction in American society contests
the victory over memory. It presents an alternative history that goes
against dominant narratives of social division and asserts the vital place of
African-Americans at the root of American culture.23 This film overcomes
the absence of historical voices and pushes against a preponderance of
countervailing material through conjecture and counter-factual history
that colonizes the space occupied by narratives of white heroism. In doing
so, the film moves nimbly through the thicket of issues of cultural appro-
priation, national mythologies, and cross-temporal influences to create
something unruly, unexpected, and open to unstable readings. Django
enters into a lineage of interventions that reassess racial and ethnic lines,
finding their roots in affective connections and fictional ties to the past.
Django fully comprehends the potency of cultural spolia, fragments from
the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, juxtaposed to create a fantas-
tic lie or a riotous truth. It has gotten medieval.
21
Gregory Downs, “The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox,” The New York Times, April
12, 2015, SR 12.
22
Eric Foner, “Selective Memory,” New York Times Book Review, March 4, 2001, 28.
23
In terms of the unstable presence of the document as it relates to African-Americans,
here one might consider the years of debate about Barack Obama’s citizenship and thus his
eligibility to be the president of the United States as a vestigial example of displacing African-
American participation in the public sphere. The denial of proof functions as the gateway to
a type of alternative history in which the nation has not had an African-American president.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Django Unchained. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. The Weinstein Company,
2012.
Secondary Sources
Barker, Deborah E., and Kathryn McKee, eds. American Cinema and the Southern
Imaginary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2011.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, June 2014. Accessed
August 10, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/
the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Downs, Gregory. “The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox.” The New York Times,
April 12, 2015, SR 12.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Estes, Steve. Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the
Civil Rights Movement. Charleston: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Fausset, Richard, and Michael Barbaro. “Nikki Hayley, South Carolina Governor,
Calls for Removal of Confederate Battle Flag.” The New York Times, June 22,
2015, A1.
Foner, Eric. “Selective Memory.” New York Times Book Review, March 4, 2001,
28.
Ingersoll, Lurton Dunham. The Life of Horace Greeley: Founder of the New York
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University of Minneapolis Press, 1996, 67–106.
Lepore, Jill. The Whites of Their Eyes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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Platon, Adelle. “Spike Lee Slams Django Unchained: ‘I’m Not Gonna See It.’”
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D.S. Brewer, 2000.
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Index1
A Benito Cereno, 13, 14

The Abridgement of the History of “Black Douglass,” 47
England (1757), 164, 165 “The black O’Connell,” 165
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “The Black Saxons,” 58
120, 135 Black Shakespeare, 220
The Anglo-African Magazine, 60, 63 Black temporality, 106
African-American vernaculars, 212 “Black to the Future,” 104
African Methodist Episcopal Church Blackshear, Edward L., 75, 76
Review (AME Church Review), Blaine, James G., 67
62–64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 74–76, 78 The Book of American Negro
America Play, 38 Poetry, 137
Anderson, Benedict, 216, 217 The Boy’s King Arthur, 123
Anglo-Saxon, 4 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 86
Anglo-Saxonism, 2, 6, 22 Brawley, Benjamin, 90–92
Anglo-Saxon principles, 1 Burke, Edmund, 164
Arthurian section, 183 Butler, Octavia, 110
B C
Bailey’s Café, 35, 110, 213, 234, 236, Cable, George Washington, 115
237, 241 Canterbury Tales, 210–212, 230,
Beatty, Paul, 209 231, 236
Beloved, 32, 110, 117 Cereno, Benito, 13
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5
264 INDEX
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 35, 204–206, E

210–215, 228–231, 235, 242 Ellison, Ralph, 15, 17, 21, 22, 106,
Chesnutt, Charles, 33, 34, 112, 114, 216–219, 242
115, 132, 137, 138, 140, 141, “Essay on Romance,” 141
143, 147, 252 Expugnatio, 176
Child, Lydia Maria, 58
Cleveland, Grover, 67
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 255 F
The Conjure Woman, 134, 136 Fables: Ancient and Modern (1700),
A Connecticut Yankee, 123, 124, 126, 204, 205
130–132, 152 Fanon, Frantz, 171, 174
A Connecticut Yankee in King Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 54
Arthur’s Court, 33, 116, 117, Fortune, T. Thomas, 67, 73
119, 120, 122, 124, 133
The Conquest of Ireland, 34, 172, 177,
193, 195–197 G
“Criteria of Negro Art,” 105 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 211
Critical fabulation, 113 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 34, 169, 170,
180–182, 184, 188, 192, 258
Gerald criticism, 162
D Gerald of Wales, 34, 160, 164,
Dante Alighieri, 35, 70, 73, 210, 211, 168–170, 173, 176, 177,
213, 215, 217–221, 225, 226, 187–192, 196, 197, 258
231, 240 Getting Medieval: Sexualities and
Dark Princess, 107–110 Communities, Pre- and
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Postmodern, 35, 247
Veil, 20 Giraldian studies, 160
Day, William H., 59 Grady, Henry W., 118, 119, 146
De Invectionibus, 184 The Great Gatsby, 54
De Rebus a Se Gestis, 160 Guillory, John, 214, 219
Dery, Mark, 104
De Vulgari Eloquentia, 218
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 35, 36, 247, H
248, 257 Harper, Frances E. W., 67, 68
Divine Comedy, 226 Hartman, Saidiya, 32, 113
Django Unchained, 35, 36, 248, 250, The History and Topography of Ireland,
252–257, 260 34, 168, 177, 186
Douglass, Frederick, 9, 18, 37, 47–50, The History of the Kings of Britain, 34,
58, 67, 68, 106, 148, 165, 167 169, 170, 177, 178, 178n52,
Dryden, John, 204–207, 211, 212, 180, 183–185, 192, 194
228, 229, 234, 242 The House behind the Cedars, 33, 112,
Du Bois, W.E.B., 19–22, 48, 49, 113, 116, 117, 119, 132–134,
105–107, 109 140–143, 147, 151
INDEX
265
House of Fame, 212 Linden Hills, 35, 213, 216, 219, 220,
Howells, William Dean, 131, 132, 226, 228, 231, 234, 237–239
134, 137 London, Jack, 51, 52, 57
Hughes, Langston, 232–234 Lose Your Mother, 32
Hurston, Zora Neale, 226
M
I “Making Contact: Postcolonial
Inferno, 210, 216, 240 Perspectives through Geoffrey of
Invisible Man, 15, 216, 219 Monmouth’s Historia Regum
Israel Potter, 36, 37 Britannie,” 183n64
Ivanhoe, 34, 113, 116, 117, 122, 124, Malory, Thomas, 123, 125, 131, 132,
133, 134, 136, 141, 143 136, 142
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 30 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An
American Grammar Book,” 228
Mandeville, John, 177
J Map, Walter, 195
Jameson, Frederic, 117 The Marrow of Tradition, 119, 132
Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, Master narrative, 134
16, 17, 65 Melville, Herman, 13, 36, 37
Jerng, Mark, 104 Milton, John, 204
Johnson, James Weldon, 137 The Mis-education of the Negro, 83
Johnson, Samuel, 81, 208 Morrison, Toni, 14, 32, 110, 111,
Journey Through Wales, 171 115, 117, 214
Joyce, Joyce A., 211 Muller, Max, 77, 84
My Bondage and My Freedom, 18, 37
K
Kant, Immanuel, 159 N
Kincaid, Jamaica, 29–31 Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Kindred, 110 Douglass, an American Slave, 45
Naylor, Gloria, 110, 210–212, 216,
219, 228, 232, 234, 242
L Negro Builders and Heroes, 92
The Lady of the Lake, 45, 56, A New Survey of English Literature, 90
105, 106
The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 56
Lee, Spike, 252 O
Le Morte D’Arthur, 123, 124, 129, Obama, Barack, 15, 255, 256
136, 142 O’Connell, Daniel, 165
The Liberator, 46, 58 Ovid, 204
266 INDEX
P Thomas, Rev. C.O.H., 74

Parks, Suzan-Lori, 32, 38 Topographia, 173, 174
Parliament of Fowls, 213 Topography, 175
Patterson, Orlando, 254 Tragic mulatta, 148
Pinchback, P.B.S., 69 Translation, 208, 212
Playing in the Dark, 112 Travels, 177
Pollock, Sheldon, 232 Troilus and Criseyde, 229–231
Prendergast, Thomas A., 231 Trump, Donald, 2
“The Princess Steel,” 107 Turner, Lorenzo Dow, 79–81
Pudd’nhead Wilson, 119, 128 Twain, Mark, 33, 34, 117, 121, 122,
Pulp Fiction, 247, 248, 251–254, 257 125, 129–132
R U
Ray, Henrietta Cordelia, 73 “The United States of Lyncherdom,”
Rena Warwick, 113, 116 129, 130
Reverand II, Cedric D., 207
Romance heroine, 148
Romney, Mitt, 1 V
The Valley of the Moon, 51, 57
The Veiled Aristocrats, 116
S Vernacular, 35, 77-95, 125, 207, 208,
Scarborough, W. S., 67, 68 210–213, 216, 218, 222, 229,
Scholarship on Gerald, 161 231, 232, 239, 240
Scott, Walter, 33, 45, 56, 105, 106, 113, Vernacularity, 203, 212, 225, 231
116–118, 122, 133, 141, 142, 147 Vernacularization, 208, 232
Sears, W.G., 87 Vernacular literature, 35
The Sellout, 209 Vernacular translation, 208, 229
Shakespeare, William, 220, 237 A View on the Present State of
Siegfried, 252 Ireland, 177
Siegfried myth, 252–254
“Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere:
A Fragment,” 136 W
Smith, James McCune, 50, 51 Walker, Alice, 214, 226
“Song of the Exposition,” 10, 11 Webster, Noah, 81, 84
Spenser, Edmund, 164, 177, 204 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 104
Spillers, Hortense J., 108, 227, 228 Western, 249–250
Strategic misreadings, 31 “What Is a White Man?,” 119
White, Hayden, 258
Whitman, Walt, 8–11
T The Wife of His Youth, 136, 140, 252
Tarantino, Quentin, 35, 247, 257 William of Newburgh, 183
Tea Party movement, 255, 256 Woodson, Carter G., 83
Tennyson, Alfred, 136 Wordsworth, William, 30, 31

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T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S

Matthew X. Ver non

More information about this series at

The Black Middle

The New Middle Ages

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942752

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Zoonar GmbH / Alamy Stock

Printed on acid-free paper

About the Nature and Structure of This Study

“feudalism” or “romance” they did so with a deep understanding of the

Davis, CA Matthew X. Vernon

Alastair Minnis, Stephen Yale-Loehr, Susanne Wofford, Robert Stepto,

1 Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy,

2 Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-­

3 Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain

4 History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval

5 Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality

6 Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained 247

Introduction: Reading Out of

© The Author(s) 2018 1

were victims of “modern global corporatism” could regain their “self-­

What the Anglo-Saxon has done, [Kipling] has memorialized. And by

London nimbly skips through timeframes and across continents to advance

The quest to conserve “Anglo-Saxon” virtues on the part of political

All the other races have a character to overcome first or to be understood

Van Evrie’s reasoning demonstrates the topsy-turvy reasoning that was

nation. In fact, he seemed to believe abolitionist projects were overzealous

Whitman subverts the expected formulation of “Saxon domination” with

The Crusaders’ streams of shadowy, midnight troops, sped with the

“Song of the Exposition” puts several timeframes in parallel: the mythical

His willingness to read the structures of the United States government

philosophy of history. Among English writers it may be traced at least as far

H.L. Osgood, an American historian and contemporary of Hosmer, makes

sophisticated interrelation of black and white characters that confuses the

Morrison, a writer deeply invested in critiquing literary origins, is acutely

diminution of white liberty.35 In the late years of Barack Obama’s presi-

The eponymous character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)

Jefferson used temporality to distinguish the American project as a revolu-

Historically, American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that

Slavery and southern discrimination as read by Ellison reconstitutes feu-

origin, reveals the potency of the Middle Ages as a metaphor used to

In its isolation, seclusion, and self-reliant independence, Col. Lloyd’s plan-

To be implicated within the system of slavery and the subsequent patterns

chisement and the subjective experience of being marginalized by the

The potential scope of Du Bois’s mode of reading is astonishing. In his

This is a particularly sharp critique, as Du Bois chooses the questing knight

ducted campaigns of conquest. As has been argued elsewhere, these

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very

A Desire for (Medieval) Origins

language of knighthood or Thomas Dixon’s language of crusades to see

the superiority of the white mind.59 The mother of African-American let-

Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, which delves deeply into the

early twentieth-­century scholars about this subject and medievalists have

rebellion or who use racially divisive language to incite violence.

A Story to Pass On: Reading Against the Discourse

of African-American history.72 The present study seeks to create a geneal-

subject. She meditates on literal and metaphorical planting and transplant-

Somewhere I read that Wordsworth worried about misreadings of his poem.

speaking, the “discourse of time” is at the heart of The Black Middle

to penetrate the sphere of social reality by offering an attractive mythical

The (W)hole of History

Melville places Israel Potter in a hole in history, literally forgotten (his

Davis, CA Matthew X. Vernon

1 Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy,

2 Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-

3 Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain

4 History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval

5 Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality

6 Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained 247

were victims of “modern global corporatism” could regain their “self-

early twentieth-century scholars about this subject and medievalists have

untapped potential within the African-American community. The African-

From Vernaculus to Vernacular: The Medieval in African-

essential to African-American education. The course offered a critical re-