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.

Circa 1750, on the outskirts of Essaka, a village in Igbo (modern-day Eastern Nigeria), the grief-stricken wails of a woman filled the night air. As custom, the woman had smeared the blood of an animal on the ground in front of a small thatched house—the tomb of her mother.¹ The blood was an oblation to the spirits, in the hope that, had they not successfully transmigrated to the next life, the offering would incite them to defend the woman's people against their enemies. The woman's son, Olaudah Equiano, recounts this event in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself (1789), in which he explains the natural terror of witnessing the ceremony as a child and the heightening effect of his mother's lamentations. “As to religion,” the narrator notes, “the natives believe that there is one Creator of all things, and that he lives in the sun.” The Igbo are depicted as intensely religious. Perhaps surprisingly, they are depicted as engaging in many practices that are more commonly associated with Judeo-Christian tradition. They “believe he [the Creator] governs events, especially [their] deaths and captivity”; they are “extremely cleanly” from “many purifications and washings,” and “[those] that touched the dead at any time were obliged to wash and purify themselves before they could enter a dwelling-house”; they “practised circumcision like the Jews” (25–26); and they engaged in lex talionis (18). The passage concludes with the explicit observation that the manners and customs of Equiano's “countrymen” are strongly analogous to “those of the Jews, before they reached the Land of Promise” (28).²

Elsewhere in “the southern wild” of Africa, the child speaker of William Blake's “The Little Black Boy” (1789) also receives religious instruction from his mother. This maternal guidance—a striking echo of Equiano's passage—similarly concerns a supreme being who lives in the sun. “Look on the rising sun[,]” the mother instructs, “there God does live / And gives his light, and gives his heat away” (9–10).³ The child's dilemma as to why his skin is black when his “soul is white” (2) is explained as both consequence of and protection from this proximity to the sun. The body serves as “a cloud, and like a shady grove” that lessens the beams of God's love, which the soul may gradually learn “to bear” (16–17). The implication that “black bodies” and “sun-burnt” faces are better equipped to cope with proximity to the divine echoes Equiano's appreciation of Igbo religiosity.⁴ The Interesting Narrative blurs the distinction between Igbo and Judeo-Christian tradition, culminating in the claim (with the invocation of a throng of scriptural commentators) of African biblical ancestry, “particularly [from] the patriarchs while they were yet in that pastoral state which is described in Genesis” (28). This notion of monogenesis is paralleled in the Little Black Boy's cry of equality, “but O! my soul is white” (2). Both, then, deny the then prevalent commentary surrounding Genesis, that black skin is a mark of the curse of Ham, a product of African descendance from his son, Canaan.⁵

The perceived ambiguity of “The Little Black Boy” has left the poem occupying a confused place in the scholarship. Readings variously vacillate between the extremities of irony and racism; commensurately, Blake fluctuates between radical abolitionist and, as Anne Mellor writes, part of a liberal participation “in a cultural erasure of difference between races and individuals that gave priority to Western, white models” (350–59). In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, together with a group of Quakers, built the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade on foundations of an evangelical Protestantism that distinctly prioritized this “cultural erasure.” The Society centered abolitionism within their own wider campaign against religious nominalism in Britain, promoting pamphlets and texts that served both causes. Equiano's Interesting Narrative was one of the earliest examples of such texts, situated within a genre of narratives of enslavement that had begun to give accounts of spiritual redemption through conversion to Protestantism.⁶ Such authorial redemption at once legitimized the voice of the author within European discourse and constructed a vision of the African as “proto-European,” in service to a wider praeparatio evangelica that proselytized both Protestantism and Eurocentrism. The year the Society formed, for example, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor (of which Equiano was a member), transported four hundred black people (whose origins were multicontinental) to establish a “British” colony in Sierra Leone—so called Freetown, the “Province of Freedom.” The project has been described as “ethnic cleansing” (Carretta, Equiano 232). Many who spearheaded this campaign, including Sharp, Clarkson, and William Wilberforce, would later come to be called the Clapham Sect—a group famous for their activist role in abolitionism on grounds of evangelical Anglicanism. The purpose of Freetown, Clarkson stated, was “the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, the Civilization of Africa, and the introduction of the Gospel there” (qtd. in Walker 103). Bound up in the campaign of abolitionism, of course, is this social movement aimed at proselytizing sub-Saharan Africa—and thus the contemporaneous debates surrounding religious activism and thereby the cultures of radicalism and dissent of the 1790s. The primary aim of this essay is to extend a line of criticism suggesting that this confused milieu is evident in the confused narrative voice of the Little Black Boy and the jarring conditions of his “emancipation.”⁷ For radicals who were anti-slavery and yet political and religious dissenters, it became increasingly important to find a way of engaging with the debates surrounding the transatlantic slave trade without resorting to the various narrative frameworks of Protestant evangelism that informed much abolitionist discourse. In light of this, the poem cannot be placed within a liberal tradition that, as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o writes, “blurs all antagonistic class contradictions,” and, still less, within a tradition of conventional abolitionist discourse.⁸ Rather, the work functions as a direct and intensely critical response to spiritual autobiographies such as Equiano's narrative, and as a subversive exposition of Protestant proselytism and the resultant African-European voice central to much abolitionist discourse.

Turning to a comparison between Blake and Equiano, one might immediately note that, uncommonly, both appear to portray solar religiosity as monotheistic. The more common association between the sun and Africans, their religion and their skin, is a trope long established in European discourse, with biblical precedent. The Shulammite bride of the Song of Solomon declares, for example, “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me” (1.6). African skin, the ideology runs, is both evidence and consequence of the state of nature, of the African's bereavement from civilization. Thus, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in her May 1789 review of The Interesting Narrative: “it has been a favourite philosophic whim to degrade the numerous nations, on whom the sun-beams more directly dart, below the common level of humanity” (27–28). Prior to the establishment of The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa on 9 June 1788, the heterogeneity of African religiosity had largely been denied. African religion, language, and culture were, as Peter Brent writes, “forced by the European imagination into one mould. Out of it stepped the ‘native,’ the ‘savage,’ offering the blood of sacrifice to grinning gods” (169). Sun worship, for the European, became synonymous with Paganism or often with no religion at all.

Other African texts published in London also appealed to and distorted this association between Africans and the sun, yet all are notably dissimilar to Equiano and Blake.⁹ Paul Edwards and Michael J. C. Echeruo have linked “The Little Black Boy” with Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars (1772); in particular, Gronniosaw writes of frequent conversations with his mother, in which he would point to the heavens and ask, “who lived there?” to which his mother would reply, “the sun, moon and stars” (3). Lauren Henry has pointed to the irony of Blake's verse by drawing comparisons with Phyllis Wheatley's “An Hymn to the Morning” (1773) and the speaker's plea, “Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display / To shield your poet from the burning day” (74). In The Blind African Slave, Or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (1810), the African slave Boyrereau Brinch describes the foods of his native “Kingdom of Bow-Woo” (likely in modern-day Mali), writing that, “Threa, or onions, are a sauce which is cultivated with great attention and considered among the natives as a signal bounty of their great father the sun” (15). The anthropologist Marcel Griaule, in his study of the Dogon people of Mali, confirmed a similar belief, that Africans are “creatures of light emanating from the fullness of the sun” (17). John S. Mbiti writes that among many traditional African societies “the sun is considered to be a manifestation of God Himself, and the same word, or its cognate, is used for both” (52). Common, then, is the association of African religiosity and the sun; uncommon, however, is the specific ontological separation of God from the sun, evident in both Equiano and Blake—that is, God lives in the sun, rather than God is the sun. The sun as metaphor for aspects of the divine—omniscience, power, eternity—as opposed to the divine itself appeared only in a select number of African societies, including the Azande, Haya, Meban, and Igbo (although other sources indicate that the distinction was far more nebulous than Equiano indicates [see Mbiti 52]). It therefore seems plausible that Equiano and Blake did not come to the imagery independently.

There are various avenues through which Blake may have become acquainted with The Interesting Narrative prior to the publication of “The Little Black Boy” despite the concurrent compositions. At the time of publication, Blake was working for Joseph Johnson as an engraver, and given Johnson's interest in the abolitionist movement, his involvement in publishing Equiano, and his placement at the beginning of a list of distributors on the title page of The Interesting Narrative, it is likely that Johnson and his circle were acquainted with parts of the narrative, and Equiano himself, far prior to publication.¹⁰ Alternatively, Blake may have heard of Equiano as “The Little Black Boy” was being composed in 1787–88. Paul Edwards, for example, has drawn the circumstantial link that Blake was friends with Richard Cosway, whose house servant, Ottobah Cugoano, was another prominent African abolitionist. Through Cugoano, Edwards suggests, Blake may have been introduced to Gronniosaw's narrative (181); moreover, as Henry writes, “[if] Blake was indeed familiar with Gronniosaw's Narrative, it is almost certain that he would also have been aware of the work of Olaudah Equiano, a close friend of Cosway's servant Cugoano” (10). Cugoano and Equiano were well acquainted through the Sons of Africa, a group of twelve black freemen formed in 1786 (Gerzina 172). At the least, Blake may have read one of the many reviews of The Interesting Narrative as he engraved illustrations for “The Little Black Boy” in 1789. Wollstonecraft, in particular, seems most intrigued by Equiano's African roots: “The life of an African, written by himself, is certainly a curiosity,” she wrote in Johnson's Analytical Review, going on to quote a passage describing Igbo customs, which “[she thought] will not be unacceptable to our readers” (27–28). It is clear, then, that London radicals were particularly interested in—and widely discussed—Equiano's African childhood. Already a somewhat celebrity figure, Equiano had become acquainted with several other leading abolitionists; for example, he had been appointed to the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor in 1786, through which he met Ignatius Sancho, Thomas Clarkson, and John Clarkson.

Of particular note in these potential links is the treatment of The Interesting Narrative amongst Blake's radical contemporaries. Wollstonecraft found Equiano's account of his enslavement and journey toward freedom most interesting yet ultimately judges the text inferior because of the author's “long account of his religious sentiments and conversion to Methodism,” which she found to be “rather tiresome” (27–28). Much is made of Equiano's African roots, yet little is made of The Interesting Narrative as spiritual autobiography. This view is perhaps less a genuine critique of Equiano than an indication of Wollstonecraft's feeling toward Christianity.¹¹ Blake, of course, shared this disregard for institutional Christianity, and his interest in non-conformist sects (the Swedenborgian Church, in particular) is well documented (Bellin and Ruhl 121–32). In comparing the religious merits of various peoples, Swedenborg writes: “The African race can be in greater enlightenment than others on this earth, since they are such that they think more interiorly, and so receive truths and acknowledge them. Others, as the Europeans, think only exteriorly, and receive truths in the memory” (n. 118). Morton D. Paley has suggested that there is a promotion of African religiosity in Blake’s work, which is “derived from Swedenborg’s notion that the Africans were the remnant of the Most Ancient Church and therefore closer to God than the Europeans” (William Blake 17).¹²

Both Blake and Equiano, then, might initially appear to promote African religiosity in order to fashion some semblance of racial equality. Much scholarship has been devoted to Equiano's portrayal of the Igbo as a praeparatio evangelica, in service to the prevalent economic argument for abolitionism—that Christianized freemen can provide more value to Western society than uncivilized slaves.¹³ The juxtaposition of monotheism with the imagery of sun worship, animal sacrifice, apotropaic magic, animism (that is, stock tropes of African religion) has the effect of clouding the distinction between African and European. This provides, to Equiano's adopted Methodist fold, anecdotal and biblical evidence that the African will be receptive to missionary advances. The division is further obscured as Equiano leaves the Igbo “one Creator” nameless, even though other sources cite Chukwu (or Chineke) (see Ubah), and even though Equiano discusses the etymology of his own name and claims the significance of naming in Igbo culture—his countrymen, he writes, “never polluted the name of the object of [their] adoration; on the contrary, it was always mentioned with the greatest reverence” (26, 41). Similarly, Equiano's exposition of the Creator—that “he lives in the sun” (25)—is an uncommon anthropomorphizing of the Igbo god. This masculine gendering is more commonly associated with the Abrahamic Father.¹⁴ Equiano creates a space for Igbo religion somewhere between African and European tradition, serving his abolitionist cause. Intriguingly, Blake's Little Black Boy exists in a similar space—though notably altered; not only does the boy anthropomorphize and gender his Creator, he goes further by explicitly speaking of the Christian “God” (9), “our father” (26).¹⁵

The secondary effect of Equiano's cultural amalgamation is the construction of a speaking voice for himself within the Western tradition. That is, Equiano's voice is premised on the notion that it is possible for an African to rise from perceived barbarism to perceived civilization. The narrative's frontispiece depicts an English gentleman, Gustavus Vassa (Equiano's adopted European alter ego), befitted in the English style. This, together with the inclusion of a set of letters from white (and thus considered credible) correspondents in the front matter, functions as, to use a phrase coined by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a “Preface to Blackness”—that is, an attempt to counter racial prejudice, the “but” of the Little Black Boy's, “I am black, but O! my soul is white” (2). The frontispiece depicts Vassa diligently clutching a Bible open at Acts 4.12: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” The nameless African Creator who lives in the sun, the portrait declares, is ripe to be transposed for the Christian God; meanwhile, “The Little Black Boy” goes further by explicitly depicting the results.

Both of these depictions are refutations of deeply held cultural and racial preconceptions. Joannes Leo Africanus wrote in Descrittione dell’Africa (1550), for example, that the natives of Bornu “embrace no religion at all, being neither Christians, Mahometans, nor Jews” (293). His account is mentioned in the 1790 proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, amid their comments on Simon Lucas's analysis of the same area. The Association stated that since Leo Africanus's exploration the subsequent advancement of Islam in the region is “the progress of imperfect civilization” and “the absurd superstitions of Paganism have given place to the natural and sublime idea of the Unity of God” (201). The Association hoped to provide evidence of Africa's heterogeneity, yet even in their progressive view the concept of “religion” was used exclusively to describe Abrahamic tradition, whether Christian or not. Thus, as Equiano turns his discussion “to [Igbo] religion” (25), his employment of terminology is epistemically jarring. The use of “religion” to catalogue a form of ostensible sun worship does not fit within European discourse, yet neither does it fit within African culture. The compartmentalization of religion from more quotidian activities is a typically Western narrative. As Mbiti writes, “[African religiosity] permeates into all the departments of life so fully that it is not easy or possible always to isolate it” (21). Equiano's portrayal, of course, serves his praeparatio evangelica, deconstructing the African other in favor of a colonial subject closer to the European image.

“The Little Black Boy,” however, immediately disrupts this distortion. The portrayal of the African subsumed in religiosity is indeed spoken to in the teachings of the Little Black Boy's mother. She does not impart religious instruction in the conventional manner of theological exposition, but instead encourages her child to witness the sun (God's love) for himself. Indeed, it is not possible for the child to avoid the sun, for God “gives his light, and gives his heat away. / And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive / Comfort in morning joy in the noonday” (10–12). The mother speaks of a kind of panentheism, in which the divine pervades everything yet maintains an ontological distinction from the non-divine. The illustration on plate 9 (Figure 1) depicts this lesson under the tree, with the “shady grove” diffusing across the head of the plate, forming the shape of a cloud enveloped by sunlight. Zachary Leader notes the curve of the mother's back corresponds to the curve of the main tree (112); in parallel, the body (and raised arm) of the boy mimic the smaller tree to the right, with the branches of both leaning toward each other, not quite meeting but forming the “grove.”¹⁶ Thus, the African body (and African society) is “but a cloud, and like a shady grove” (16), inseparable from Africa itself.

Figure 1. William Blake, “The Little Black Boy.” Songs of Innocence. Copy U, Plate 9 (London, 1789). 11.1 × 6.9 cm. The Houghton Library, Object 6.

This reinforces the mother's assertion that “we are put on earth a little space” (13)—as opposed to the perhaps more expected “little time”¹⁷—echoing the association, common in slave texts, of the loss of the African self with physical rupture.¹⁸ The effect is an association of the divine with African nature and space (social, bodily, and extended) far removed from London, disrupting the mother's account of God's voice enjoining the boy to “come out from the grove” and encounter the divine (19). As he will be ripped from his mother, the familial society they share (the grove—the shade that allows them to approach the divine so intimately) is broken. The illustration still further disrupts the text as instead of pointing to the rising sun, the child points directly upward. David Erdman has interpreted this moment as the child pointing to the shady grove (15–16) and Leader has understood it as a gesture to when the sun is burning brightest (113); one might link both suggestions to the child's declaration, “But I am black as if bereav’d of light” (4). The child literally points to what might undermine this claim: the grove—that is, his and his mother's bodies—is the consequence of the very opposite of bereavement from light. This is further emphasized by the stressed syllables of the iambic feet (in particular, the element of doubt introduced by the central foot “as if” leading to the conditional “bereav’d”): “But I am black as if bereav’d of light.” In this, the imagery of the biblical Fall inherent in the word “bereaved” becomes distorted.¹⁹ The child points to the tree as his salvation, implying that he and his mother exist in an Edenic space, before the Fall. This echoes Equiano's movement from his “former happy state,” implying that enslaved Africans have undergone a forced pastoral Fall—taken from nature and God, placed in the industrializing West, and forced to adopt European culture. Consequently, the poem immediately disrupts the notion that enslaved Africans are, in the words of Equiano, “infinitely more than compensated by [their] introduction … to the knowledge of the Christian religion” (7)—the notion that, as one 1773 pamphlet stated, “removal [from Africa] is to be esteemed a favour” (Parsons 25).

Not only is Equiano's spiritual conversion undermined but also his desire for physical transformation. On arrival in England, Equiano describes an encounter in Guernsey, with a mother and daughter, with whom he was placed to lodge:

I had often observed that when her mother washed her face it looked very rosy; but when she washed mine it did not look so: I therefore tried oftentimes myself if I could not by washing make my face of the same colour as my little play-mate (Mary), but it was all in vain; and I now began to be mortified at the difference in our complexions. (51)

In a later episode at sea, Equiano (now transformed into Vassa) similarly speaks of his English company, his “new countrymen”:

I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners. (58)

This desire for physical transformation, and the associated adoption of, to use Frantz Fanon's term, the “white mask,” serves Equiano's cause by foregrounding the idea that identity is unstable.²⁰ Yet, this physical transformation—echoed in the Little Black Boy's desire to “be like him” (28)—again is undermined in the context of a pastoral Fall. The black skin of the Little Black Boy is associated with proximity to the divine; the pale skin of the Little English Boy is associated with remoteness. Equiano's fear that he will literally be “eaten by these ugly [white] men” dissolves to irony, as he is indeed consumed by Gustavus Vassa (43).

From narratives of enslavement, then, Blake borrows and distorts the African-European voice—not only in the obvious figure of the Little Black Boy, but also (and often overlooked) in his mother. The mother's voice, as remembered by her son, contributes twelve of twenty-eight lines. The purpose of her speech, despite being African and female (as emphasized in the stressed syllable of the maternal “kissed” [7]), is didactic. The mother's voice (and the wider African cultural heritage implied by the boy's recount of these memories) strains above a century of European cultural prejudice that, as David Hume wrote in his infamous 1753 note, “[t]here scarcely ever was a civilised nation of [black] complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation” (550). In fact, there had been successful black people in England; yet they were understood not as pioneers but as exceptions.²¹ Their achievements were framed from within existing European discourse, from an understanding of the “natural superiority” of white peoples. The overriding suspicion, as Hume goes on, was that “he [the black man] is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly” (550). The predominant conceptual framework relegated Africans to achievement notwithstanding their condition. That the Little Black Boy's mother has a voice at all is uncommon, that she uses her voice to impart religious wisdom is noteworthy.

The mother's voice is further amplified by juxtaposition with The Interesting Narrative. Where Equiano simply observes his ancestral custom, as an anthropologist might observe the “natives,” the Little Blake Boy is explicitly “taught” his lesson by his mother. Again, the mother strains against existing racial and gender prejudices. The plans of James Ramsay and William Wilberforce, as Sasha Turner writes, “stressed the early weaning of enslaved infants to limit the transmission of cultural vices from parents to children” (182). As Equiano perhaps wished to distance himself from Igbo custom (while still engaging in a praeparatio evangelica) to combat such notions, Blake instead explicitly depicts the direct transmission of religious tradition from mother to child. This is emphasized by the poem's contained didactic form of alternating heroic quatrains, imitating the style of nursery rhymes—that is, a pattern of stylized learning. The evangelical discourse informing texts such as The Interesting Narrative is undermined by this teaching. Equiano often turns to the religious authority of the Bible to endorse his own religiosity, but the Little Black Boy comes to the divine not through the second-hand scriptural and institutional traditions of the West but through a more direct oral tradition.²² His mother's teachings are imbued in him in a manner which the Little English Boy will never experience. This is reflected in the poem's structure, with the child narrating only the opening and concluding stanzas, his mother voicing the lines between. The child's narration envelops and subsumes his mother's teachings, allowing him to pass them on “to little English boy” (22)—an inversion of Equiano's desire for an “English” identity over Igbo or Beninite.²³

As her teachings are ostensibly not her own, the supposed transmission of “cultural vices” is still further distorted by the mother's voice. The mother speaks of the Christian God—of whom she has presumably learned from European missionaries—and she tells her child of heaven:

For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear

The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.

Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,

And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice[.] (17–20)

The African “space” of the fourth stanza (that is, proximity to the divine) is disrupted by missionary knowledge. The voice of God, promising that, in heaven, the child will leave his black skin (the “grove”) behind and be like the English child (like “lambs”), is the voice of missionaries. The mother has amalgamated Christianity with her own pastoral religiosity and transmitted the results to her child. The Little Black Boy, through his own childishness, further distorts these teachings and passes them back to the Little English Boy. The imagery is a depiction of evangelical “osmosis”—a sardonic interplay of appropriation, transformation, distortion, and return.

One might also suggest that the mother's teachings are not in earnest, in which case both the child's innocence and the process of osmosis are undermined yet further. The mother has undergone colonial contact, and so is undoubtedly aware of the slave trade, of the horrors that are to come; thus, her promise of equality before God might be understood as an act of soothing before her child is inevitably chained, bodily and psychologically. In such case, the mother is forced to denigrate her body and society, to deny her ancestral heritage, to indoctrinate her own child so that he might survive in this new world. Meanwhile, the boy will never know what he has lost.

The emergent contradictions reach their height in the final stanza. The child speaker, stripped of his black body in imagined death, stands next to the Little English Boy, who similarly is “from white cloud free” (23). One might expect that the children, now free of their corporeal limitations, are equal before God; however, this denouement is denied:

I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear,

To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.

And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him and he will then love me. (25–28)

The scene is unsettling; it subverts expectation. In his eschatology, the child assumes that although free he will continue to shade the Little English Boy from the divine heat. These lines have often been condemned for alleged racism—as the black child strokes the “silver hair” of the English child he imagines that he will “be like him,” and when both their souls are revealed as “white,” then, finally, the English boy will love him. Blake has consequently been understood to be prioritizing whiteness, claiming its superiority.²⁴ The poem denigrates the African, the argument runs, to mere supporting shield, absorbing the harmful rays of God's power so that the more precious European might inch closer to Him. Other arguments have conceded the anti-slavery intent of the poem—in particular, the intense pathos imbued in the iambic stress of “he will then love me” (28; my emphasis)—yet these have often continued to frame any reading from within the racial tensions of claimed equality. Ngugi, for example, writes that the scene portrays the “white liberal's dream of a day when black and white can love one another without going through the agony of violent reckoning” (19–20). These readings, however, miss the situational irony of the child's condition. Plate 10 is not racism; it is a depiction of evangelism. The Little Black Boy appears to have adopted partial Christian faith, yet this conflicts with his earlier experiences of pastoral religiosity and ironically distances him from the divine. The child comes to occupy an incongruous space between evangelical Christianity and African religiosity. He cannot return to the pastoral Eden of plate 9, yet he is unable to participate in the imagined heaven of plate 10 (Figure 2). A slight separation is maintained between the Little Black Boy and the entwined bodies of Christ and the English child. The latter two form mirror images of one another: Christ peers lovingly downward, the child gazes obediently upward; Christ's staff mirrors the angle of the boy's body, and his hands are lain flat, while the boy's hands, clasped in prayer, point directly upward.²⁵ The Little Black Boy, meanwhile, is awkwardly positioned in a different plane, half facing the observer, with hand outstretched, poised to stroke his counterpart's “silver hair” (27).

Figure 2. William Blake. “The Little Black Boy.” Songs of Innocence. Copy U, Plate 10 (London, 1789). 11.1 × 6.9 cm. The Houghton Library, Object 7.

The tragedy of the scene is that the Little Black Boy does not realize his condition. The contradiction of this final imagery with the mother's promise that in death they will be free of their association with blackness has a jarring effect, disrupting the poem. The speaker's childish understanding comes to the fore as he appears not to be aware of the inconsistency. This naivety is emphasized by the child's use of language: the missing apostrophe in “fathers knee” (25), the use of “joy” as a verb (24), the missing article in “thus I say to little English boy” (22), the fantastically unreal “silver hair” (27). The child's naivety speaks to the multidenominational Christianization of sub-Saharan Africa, of what Jon Butler has termed the “African spiritual Holocaust” (130). The child unwittingly loses himself in the Little English Boy's heaven, much as Olaudah Equiano is devoured by Christianity and resurrected in Gustavus Vassa. The child's African roots are distanced and diminished to the unidentified “southern wild” (1), much as Equiano's countrymen are transformed into mere “natives” (25). The Little Black Boy is free of his black skin but still dissimilar from his English counterpart, much as Equiano comes to realize that manumission is a liminal state between freedom and slavery—not the freedom of his “original free African state” and “in some respects even worse” than slavery as freemen are forced to “live in constant alarm for their liberty; and even this is but nominal” (97).

The distorted heaven of plate 10 reflects that even in manumission those who have been enslaved are denied freedom at every turn. As a freeman, Equiano struggles to recoup the money he had loaned to the captain of a ship upon which he traveled and he constantly fears recapture. Even the very condition of his manumission is contradictory—a slave cannot own anything, thus Equiano is unable to “own” the money needed to “buy” his freedom. He is left with the mere option of transformation so that in some sense Vassa might purchase Equiano. Physical enslavement gives way to a kind of spiritual and psychological bondage, and Vassa comes to engage in the slave trade himself, completing his movement from pastoral innocence to “English experience.” In an equivalent manner, the pastoral innocence of Blake's plate 9—the dense foliage, the open space, the vines swirling around the border, the bird soaring in the right-hand margin—gives way to the suppressed experience of plate 10. The latter is confined by the willow tree, far more barren and drooping than the tree of plate 9, with roots (in copy Z) stretching out like fingers, clawing at the earth. The tree, dissimilar from all others in Songs of Innocence, more closely resembles that of “The Poison Tree” (1794) in Songs of Experience— a representation that in “The Human Abstract” Blake would call the “Tree of Mystery” (a reference to the biblical tree of knowledge).²⁶ The figure of Christ is also dissimilar from other portrayals in Innocence. Rather than the usual standing pose, he is bent double due to the confinement of the branches; rather than the muscled archetype, he appears feeble; rather than the usual white robe, he is draped in pale purple in copy Z and pale blue in copy AA; and despite the previous association with the sun, the Christ of copy B is remarkably dark. Leader has suggested that the figure is, in fact, the “Creeping Jesus” of Blake's The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1818), the Christ of experience, the sardonic representation of overtly public displays of religion (115). In such case, this is the final denouncement of the evangelical discourse informing narratives of enslavement.

In light of Vincent Carretta's assertion that Equiano was in fact born in South Carolina (as state his baptismal record and a naval muster roll), the irony of his condition becomes even greater (“Olaudah Equiano” 96–105). Equiano is not only partially consumed by a foreign culture but is, if one agrees with Carretta, forced to invent an entirely new, African-European voice. This, however, is likely unimportant in a comparison with Blake. It is unlikely that, in 1788–89, Blake would have questioned the authenticity of Equiano's African childhood. Blake's contemporaries, including Wollstonecraft, appear to have taken The Interesting Narrative's veracity for granted until claims of inauthenticity arose in the 1790s, which were swiftly dismissed as anti-abolitionist propaganda (Layson and Tikoff). The “authentic” detailing of the Middle Passage was central to abolitionist discourse. Indeed, in a timely publication, the narrative was released two weeks before a round of parliamentary debates on the slave trade was due to begin; thus, Members (of whom, several were engaged in African slavery through ownership of Caribbean plantations) were afforded enough time to read the text, or at least to read the opening chapters detailing the horrifying realities of removal from Africa and the evangelical promise of the Igbo.

These debates followed several previous attempts to forgo the slave trade, instigated by various parties in London, yet like Equiano's Narrative these were often constructed within an imperial framework of evangelical Protestantism. In response to this problematic milieu, “The Little Black Boy” takes the evangelical imagery of the African Creator who lives in the sun to its logical conclusion, transposing the Creator for the Christian God (an exchange for which the celebrity Equiano became a totem par excellence). In a heuristic process, the reader witnesses the Little Black Boy's pastoral Fall, partial assimilation, and false redemption. Thus, the poem reframes the implications of imperialist evangelism by acting out the contradictions and ironies inherent in the “mind-forg’d manacles” of English Christianity engaging in the physical and psychological enslavement of Africans. Even manumission, the poem suggests, is powerless to free a slave, and once proselytized the African is unable to reclaim her or his former proximity to the divine. The child speaker serves to foreground the tragedy of the liminal space occupied by “freemen” as he is apparently unaware of his condition, of what is behind him, and of what lies ahead. The boy, unknowingly, comes to worship the foreign deity of the Little English Boy, the deity that texts such as Equiano's Interesting Narrative proudly advocate. This cultural contamination parallels the stories of freemen in London, such as Equiano, who must consign themselves to the mental enslavement of the West in order to obtain their physical freedom. Both the poem and narrative, then, occupy a problematic and nuanced place in the abolitionist tradition. This particular response speaks not only of African promotion but also of European demotion—the Little English Boy of plate 10 points to the false sun crouching in shade, while the Little Black Boy of plate 9 points to the grove, to himself and his mother, surrounded by light.

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).