Black Lives (Have Always) Matter(ed)
Literary historian Dr. Tara Bynum tells a local audience about her new book
Not long ago at the grocery store we ran into a friend who told us about a book signing the next day at the new Mary C. Jenkins Center in Brevard. So, being book lovers but knowing nothing about what to expect, that Saturday afternoon Sam and I went to the Center.
We arrived a few minutes late and the young author, Tara A. Bynum, was already speaking to a seated audience about her new book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America.
She was talking about the excitement of discovery she feels as a writer when she tries not to assume anything about her subject. In her research, she said, she lets curiosity lead the way.
For example, she knew that in 1773 Phillis Wheatley became our first African-American published poet. At around age 15, Wheatley wrote about having been kidnapped as a child in West Africa, taken on a ship to America, and sold into slavery.
Reading this poem today, I’m struck by what must have been the child’s heartache and utter bewilderment. Her life forever after such an experience must certainly have been tragic.
Now, Bynum was asking, was Wheatley really as isolated and oppressed all her life as her situation might seem to us in 2023? Instead, she suggested, Wheatley could have enjoyed a private life as a woman, with all the feelings, relationships and pleasures that make life worth living.
To my ears, Bynum’s challenge came out of nowhere. She was asking us in the audience to try to imagine that an 18th-century American Black woman had a life beyond enslavement. Her intense question, “Did she have friends?”, was followed by our silence.
I felt disoriented. My 21st-century mind assumed two conflicting things.
First, in principle, human slavery is a grave injustice that I can hardly imagine. How can anyone who suffers such oppression ever find a place in life for anything else?
Second, every woman I know has a private life, personal concerns, pleasures, and friends. So why wouldn’t Phillis? I was surprised to feel a human kinship with her.
Here we were, talking in a familiar way about a particular, 18th-century Black woman — and I felt confused. I realized I knew nothing.
Dr. Bynum is Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She’s a scholar of pre-1800 African-American literary history.
As she took us back in time, I shared her wonder that in the unsettled period of the Revolutionary War, this recently-freed slave named Phillis Wheatley had somehow become an educated, confident young woman. She was not only writing poetry, she was publishing it.
At the same time, this Boston poet was exchanging letters with Obour Tanner, her friend in Rhode Island. “Imagine,” Bynum said, “imagine the ink, the paper, the intimate thoughts, the couriers who added their signatures to these letters.”
“The intimate thoughts.” It has occurred to me that no one but herself owned Wheatley’s thoughts. She shared them freely with her friend, even in a climate of slavery and social disruption. Her letters show us today that they enjoyed their relationship.
I can recognize such intimacy. For instance, on May 10, 1779, Wheatley wrote to Tanner,
Tho’ I have been Silent, I have not been unmindful of you …
Just yesterday, I might have written the same to my friend in Louisiana, (though I wouldn’t capitalize “Silent”). So it’s easy for me to understand Wheatley and Tanner’s long-ago relationship.
In an interview on Amanpour & Co., Dr. Bynum was asked about Reading Pleasures. Why does she write about daily life rather than about the suffering of enslaved Black people?
I’ll paraphrase some of Dr. Bynum’s words from the interview:
Suffering does not have to completely define a life. Even in a climate of oppression, everyday interpersonal experiences can occur. Might there be a way for Phillis Wheatley and Obour Tanner to just be two friends talking to one another?
In fact, they figure out a way to keep talking even when they are wartime refugees from their respective homes. They talk about things like the death of Mrs. Wheatley (the poet’s former owner), about the sale of Phillis’ books, and about their deep, shared belief in God.
These two Black women were figuring out how to navigate life.
Bynum says that she wants to show in her work,
how the Black community even back then was committed to taking care of itself, and to keeping the records that would one day tell their story.
Today we tend to see historical Black people as two-dimensional; this way we can make them serve our own present need for resistance, complacency, whatever our agendas are calling for in the moment.
It’s important to me to speak to the interior life of these people, so that my students and readers can think about the true complexity of Black lives.
After the event, I spoke to a friend of ours who was also in the audience. I wanted to know what he heard in the author’s talk. He said,
We need to spend time getting to know each other. Respect each other as human beings and see the world through each other's eyes. We each have a point of view. Try to understand it.
“Try to understand it,” he said.
I’m still thinking about my feeling of disorientation when I heard Bynum comfortably talk about the pleasures of poetry and friendship that occurred during a time of unimaginable personal abuse and national disruption.
She was saying, “This is how Black lives have always mattered.”
For myself, as an older white woman in 21st-century America, it’s a huge task to break my lifelong assumption that Black Lives Matter isn’t about me personally, despite my urge to honor it by supporting change in our community.
Tara Bynum’s simple words about a friendship in letters connected me to Phillis Wheatley as another woman.
I see Bynum as an activist. She challenged me to break up traditional differences. And I felt disoriented, trying to retrieve the difference my culture told me I was supposed to feel.
The ground is profoundly changing under our feet. I think that Tara’s talk about the humanity in our past was really about recognizing it in our future. I hope so.
All my thanks, Susannah, I will change it on the permanent post and announce the correction at the start of my next post. This is so important and I send you hugs.
Hi Deda! Lovely commentary on Dr Bynum's talk. However, I must point out an error (as I know you would want me to). The "photograph" of supposedly Phillis is actually one Sara Forbes Bonetta, an African princess who became a goddaughter of Queen Victoria around 1850 (and photography was not invented until the early 19th century anyway). Also a fascinating woman! Tell Sam I said hello. -- Susannah Hogan