God Lives in the Sun: The Critique of Evangelical Abolitionism in William Blake's “The Little Black Boy”

ABSTRACT

Late eighteenth-century narratives of enslavement were, for London readers such as William Blake, an “authentic” source of information about the British Empire's slave trade—the horrors of the Middle Passage, the humanity of the peoples who found themselves in chains, the wonder of the distant lands from which they were ripped. From the 1770s, such texts had begun to give accounts of spiritual redemption through conversion to Christianity, thus legitimizing the voice of the author within European discourse. This essay focuses on one particularly prominent example, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative (1789), and examines the possibility that Blake's “The Little Black Boy” (1789) is a direct and critical response. The essay argues that Blake's poem speaks not with conventional abolitionist rhetoric, nor with oft-suggested ambiguity, inconsistency, or racism, but rather with intense criticism of the Eurocentric evangelical discourse that came to inform abolitionist campaigns and of the resultant African-European voice constructed in texts such as The Interesting Narrative. In particular, the distorted heaven depicted in the poem is seen as sardonically imitating the liminal space occupied by the African in London—between freedom and slavery, between pastoral religiosity and institutional Protestantism.

Notes

1 For more on animal sacrifice in traditional African religion, see Insoll.

2 For discussion of The Interesting Narrative's endeavor to connect Igbo culture to Judeo-Christian tradition, see Kelleter 73.

3 This connection between Equiano and Blake has also been pointed to by Lauren Henry (84–85).

4 For an analysis of Equiano's portrayal of Igbo religion, see Frederiks.

5 See Genesis 9.25; for discussion of the Hamitic theory in a classical context, see Goldenberg; and for the influence on eighteenth-century debates, see Haynes.

6 I follow others in using “narratives of enslavement” throughout this essay to distinguish from the American “slave narrative” genre.

7 Particularly relevant for this essay, Lauren Henry has argued for a reading of “The Little Black Boy” as ironic based on comparison with a number of texts authored by African writers. Employing something like W. E. B. DuBois's “double consciousness,” Henry suggests that Wheatley drew on imagery of solar religiosity to maintain an African identity and resist complete cultural assimilation—a resistance that Blake mimics in verse. For Henry, “as the little boy of this poem grapples with the religions of his past and his present, Blake suggests that confusion, contradictions, and irony are the necessary results of Christianity's involvement in Africa and the slave-trade, and, perhaps also of Evangelical involvement in the anti-slavery movement” (82).

8 Dennis Welch, for example, has suggested that the sentiment of Blake's “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793) echoes Equiano's desire for racial equality.

9 For an excellent discussion of the relation of African solar worship to “The Little Black Boy,” see Henry 75–86.

10 For a comprehensive account of the association between Blake and Johnson, see Erdman 152–62; for a comprehensive list of Johnson's association with anti-slavery texts, see Braithwaite 77–78.

11 Virginia Sapiro, for example, has suggested that William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman portrays Wollstonecraft as a religious sceptic (273–74).

12 In Blake, Paley also finds Swedenborg's conception of “the Africans' direct intuition of the Divine Humanity” (“New Heaven” 68). The imagery is also evident in contemporaries—for instance, the abolitionist Charles Bernhard Wadstöm, “colored by Swedenborgianism” (to use Paley's words), in his Observations on the Slave Trade (1789):

They [the Africans] believe simply that there exists one God, the Creator and Preserver of all things; and, in order to fix their ideas, they think on God, in some form or other; for, to believe in any thing without form, they seem to think, is to believe in nothing. Yet, although some of them appear to consider the sun as the emblem of God, for they turn their faces towards it when praying, they seem all to believe, that God must be a man, or in human form; as they cannot think of any more perfect or respectable form to compare him with. (qtd. in Paley, “New Heaven” 85)

Around the time of authoring “The Little Black Boy,” Blake had annotated his copy of Swedenborg's The Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788), in which he had commented on a quoted passage from the earlier Last Judgment:

The Gentiles, particularly the Africans, who acknowledge and worship one God the Creator of the Universe, entertain an Idea of God as of a Man, and say that no one can have any other Idea of God: When they hear that many form an Idea of God as existing in the Midst of a Cloud, they ask where such are; and when it is said that there are such among Christians, they deny that it is possible.

To which Blake responded in his marginalia: “Think of a white cloud. as being holy you cannot love it[;] but think of a holy man within the cloud love springs up in your thought. for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the afffections. thoughts alone can make monsters. but the affections cannot” (Swedenborg, Wisdom 12).This raises the interesting possibility that both Equiano and Blake (independently or dependently) came to the conjunction of the imagery of sun and anthropomorphic divine in African religiosity through Swedenborg.

13 See Elrod for an excellent discussion of the scholarship.

14 Edmund O. Egboh, in his study of the Igbo language, has suggested that Chukwu is a portmanteau word—“chi” (spiritual being) and “Ukwu” (great in size); thus, a direct translation is “great spiritual being” with no anthropomorphic association (68).

15 The contemporary reader would likely have assumed this terminology to be a reference to the Christian God. Certainly, the capitalization of “God” speaks of monotheism in much the same manner as Equiano's “one Creator.” The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century proliferation of capitalized nouns had largely faded in London by 1788, in favor of use for distinction. While Blake does make use of capitalized nouns elsewhere in Songs of Innocence, they are conspicuously absent in “The Little Black Boy”—reserved for “English” and “God” (3, 9, 22, 24).

16 My thanks to Benjamin Colbert for this suggestion.

17 Equiano, for example, uses the phrase “a little space of time” (96).

18 Amid the Middle Passage, for example, Equiano recounts, “I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat … I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me” (39).

19 For an interpretation of this line as a Fall narrative, see, for example, Bloom 48.

20 Equiano reinforces this notion of changeability on three other occasions: first, by quoting John Mitchel's comment, “The Spaniards, who have inhabited America, under the torrid zone, for any time, are become as dark coloured as our native Indians of Virginia” (29); second, “I whitened my face, that they might not know me, and this had its desired effect” (149); and, lastly, his account of a Miskito Indian calling him “white” (168).

21 As examples, Francis Williams read law at Cambridge in the 1720s (Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano” 216); Job Ben Solomon was elected to the Gentlemen's Society of Spalding (Austin 61); George Augustus Bridgetower was described in newspapers as one of the “musical wonders of the Age” for his “extraordinary genius” on the violin (Barker 26).

22 For an excellent discussion of Equiano's reliance on the religious authority of the Bible, see Elrod.

23 Equiano writes of his desire to return to “England, where my heart had always been” (121) and his love for “old England” (97).

24 For a survey of twentieth-century readings of “The Little Black Boy,” see Richardson 233–34.

25 In many of the colored copies the child points to the sun as Christ's halo. Blake's first printing in 1789 produced seventeen (possibly eighteen) copies: U, W, and possibly untraced V were printed in black ink on 31 leaves; I, J, and X were printed in green ink on both sides of the leaves; A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, K, L, M, and Z were printed in yellow ochre or raw sienna ink on both sides of the leaves.

26 See Blake, “The Human Abstract,” Songs of Experience (1794).