A Silent Book, Some Kisses, and John Marrant's <em>Narrative</em>

Abstract

The book-often a Bible or prayer book-never speaks. Despite its silence, scholars call it a strangely insistent metaphor, a curious image and the first repeated and revised trope of tradition, first trope to be Signified upon.1 Found in several early African American narratives, talking book generally describes a scene in which an individual (traditionally, an African slave) spies his master reading a book.2 The sight produces a desire to hear text speak, but upon touching book-either in form of placing one's ear or lips to text-it remains silent.3 In his 1774 Narrative, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw offers this account:And when first I saw [my master] read, I never so surprised in my whole life when I saw book talk to my master; for I thought it did, I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so to me. . . . I follow'd him to place where he put book, being mightily delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I open'd it and put my ear down close upon it, in great hope that it would say something to me but very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found it would not speak.4According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gronniosaw remembers a failed conversation between an eager listener and a prayer book that refuses to speak. This refusal denies very possibility of literacy, the ultimate parameter by which to measure humanity of authors struggling to define an African self in Western letters.5 This silence ensures that Gronniosaw has no access to any proper measure of humanity. Yet, silence begets a response-namely, a call for revision to which John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, John Jea, and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano respond.6Gates's reading of this curious sight privileges a desire-imagined a longing that seeks satisfaction-for literacy. When book does not talk, this unsatisfied desire mobilizes revisionism that marks, according to Gates, beginning of an African American literary tradition. Moreover, Gronniosaw, a first, collectivizes a way of being-that is, possessing an inability to hear book his master does-which is mediated through a feeling of suffering; he writes of his displeasure, I was very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found [the book] would not speak.7 In Gates's reading, when John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea revise Gronniosaw's words, they reproduce this suffering and in so doing participate in a collective experience of embodied and ontological suffering or race-making of African American literature. Thus, result mobilizes an idea of race as a stable and transhistorical category of that is lived an experiential and collective way of being mediated through a collective feeling of great suffering.8 Herein lies origins of this written tradition.Gates's reading of talking book adequately memorializes a presumed misunderstanding of sight and act of reading but is too simplistic. Maybe Gronniosaw suffers when book does not speak, but I question whether his suffering births a cohesive racial identity, literary category, or even if this scene marks a desire for actual book learning.9 Moreover, his narrative seemingly sidesteps scholarly need to (im) properly racialize him in order to note profundity of his religious experiences. It is at this point in classroom discussions that students begin to ask, If it's not about race, then what? But answer-Christian faith-is quite clear to these early writers, such Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Phillis Wheatley. Because race does not function a stable or transhistorical category of identity in early African American literature (though this fact should not deny an emergent racial collectivity), faith makes real their stories and their self-making.I argue for a revision of Gates's reading by way of an examination of minister Marrant's deployment of trope of talking book in his 1785 Narrative. …