What happens when you read the foremost [white] expert on a person’s work, before reading the work itself?

No person of my complexion can visit this country without being struck with the marked difference between the English and the Americans.

American abolitionist, historian, and author William Wells Brown, upon arrival in Liverpool, July 1849.

For the better part of the last two years I’ve been working on a Civil War-era project, consuming primary source material and analysis spanning the 19th century. This month, my reading brought me to William Wells Brown’s The American Fugitive in Europe, a travelogue chronicling his five years abroad from 1849-1854.¹

As with many works by the formerly enslaved, the book’s Preface includes a plea for readers “kindly to remember … the education [Brown] has acquired was by his own exertions, he never having had a day’s schooling in his life.”

Brown needn’t have worried; his observations are as pleasurable to read as any author’s. But his plea resonated with me, as someone without formal training as a historian or literary critic. Even before cracking the spine on the navy canvas volume with its slender, silky ribbon (a clear sign of Very Serious Literature), I worried I might have difficulty following the 19th century vernacular, historical references, and writing style. So I sought out reinforcements: William Wells Brown: A Reader (University of Georgia Press 2008), edited by Ezra Greenspan, a compilation of excerpts from Brown’s published works, along with introductions and footnotes supplied by Greenspan. This, I thought, would ensure I got Brown and his writing. After all, Greenspan is Brown’s contemporary biographer, and was the editor of my own Library of America compilation with its silky blue ribbon.

In the Reader, Greenspan writes of The American Fugitive,

Brown pursued his excursions with the aid of guidebooks, and he must also have had a fast familiarity with travelogues, which were one of the most popular genres of mid-nineteenth-century letters. What distinguished Brown’s work, as he clearly understood, from dozens of European travelogues readily available on the transatlantic market was its African-American perspective. He was more sparing in interjecting racial matters into his travelogue, however, than was his nearly inveterate writing habit. The most likely explanation for his relative restraint is that travel writing constituted one of the most restrictive, convention-bound modes of popular middle-class literature. During his British residency he generally conducted himself with the decorum expected both in social relations and in this genre of literary discourse. (page 133)

With Greenspan’s primer in the forefront of my brain, I felt prepared to get Brown. But it took only for me to reach The American Fugitive’s early pages, however, to wonder whether I’d made a mistake in reading Greenspan first. More expansive than a travelogue, I experienced The American Fugitive as a hybrid work of travel writing, memoir, literary criticism, cultural criticism, reportage, and in small part, autofiction; all of my favorite genres rolled into one book. Far from the stodgy text I’d expected, I found myself enamored and delighted by Brown’s descriptions of Europe’s landscapes and people.

He who taught the sun to shine, the flowers to bloom, the birds to sing, and blesses us with rain, never intended that his creatures should look so sad. There is a wide difference between the Americans and any other people which I have seen. The Scotch are healthy and robust, unlike the long-faced, sickly looking Americans. (page 309)

Moreover, I found Brown’s commentary on race anything but “sparing.” In fact, nearly every chapter of the book’s 32 chapters includes a reference to Brown’s personal experience, and /or to the experience of Blacks in America more generally. While some of these references were overt, speaking directly and at length of American “slaves,” perhaps more exciting to read were the hidden references; those that felt like a coded discussion between Brown and his Black readers designed specifically to subvert the “restrictive, convention-bound modes of popular middle-class [white] literature.”

For example, Brown writes upon viewing the work of famed French painter and revolutionary, Jacques-Louis David:

When I looked upon the many beautiful paintings of the last-named artist [David] that adorn the halls of Versailles, I did not wonder that his fame should have saved his life when once condemned and sentenced to death during the reign of terror. The guillotine was robbed of its intended victim, but the world gained a great painter. (page 261)

Brown himself was at this time a fugitive, his African American brothers and sister at home in the U.S. suffering and dying daily by horrific means; yet his own fame had brought him to a French palace on a continent where, according to Brown throughout, he was treated as an equal to white inhabitants. When he writes of David, I wondered, is he not also writing about himself?

And how he must be thinking about the possible, perhaps desirable future of southern plantation owners in contemplating the ruins of Tintern Abbey,

In contemplating these ruins more closely, the mind insensibly reverts to the period of futile and regal oppression, when structures like that of Tintern Abbey necessarily became the scenes of stirring in highly important events. How altered is the scene! Where were formally magnificent and splendor, the glittering array of priestly prowess, the crowded halls of haughty bigots, and the prison of religious offenders, there is now but a heap of moldering ruins. The oppressed and the oppressor have long since lain down together in the peaceful grave. (page 306)

I can go on and on,² but these excerpts are nowhere in Greenspan’s Reader. Rather, the Reader focused on what I would characterize as the relative few incidents in which Brown describes himself through a white gaze, alongside one anecdote best described as autofiction. To the extent the Reader is meant to, as Greenspan writes in his Introduction, “present one of the most historically and culturally significant African American writers to the current generation of [white] readers,” I suppose it meets its aim. But I’m left to wonder whether someone seeking to present one of the most historically and culturally significant writers to a generation of readers of all races might have done so differently.

In a five star review of the Brown biography, An African American Life, an Amazon reviewer calls Greenspan, “the foremost William Wells Brown scholar.” According to Merriam-Webster, “foremost” means “of first rank or position: preeminent.” So by giving Greenspan this honorific, the reviewer is saying it is a white man who is the authority on the thoughts and ideas of a Black man. This bothers me.

But now is the part of this post where I feel it necessary to make concessions, lest I flout the restrictive, convention-bound modes of popular middle-class literature. I have not read Greenspan’s Brown biography. I haven’t even read the Reader beyond its American Fugitive excerpts, nor have I read Brown’s other work. Maybe I would feel differently after spending more time with both men’s complete oeuvres. Maybe Greenspan already made all the observations I scribbled into the margins of The American Fugitive and reproduced here but didn’t have space for them in the Reader, and maybe I would know this had I read the biography before crafting this post.

Moreover, I am woefully aware of the amount of text I am expending on critique of Greenspan’s analysis of Brown, versus Brown’s thoughtful, funny, and poignant writing about his own lived experience, thereby perpetuating the underlying problem I set about to expose in the first place. To this last part, I observe only that whiteness is sneaky like that; as an American and a transracial adoptee, I’m so conditioned to center it that sometimes I default to parsing through whiteness to get to the Black, even when I don’t need to. (Even though I should never have needed to).

My purpose here is not to dismiss Greenspan and scholars like him, whose work provides insight and understanding to readers who may not otherwise have it. I’m offering only an additional point of view on one, particular piece of his writing upon which I have an opinion based on my own reading.

Also, there was a time when people like Brown were reliant upon white gatekeepers to get their stories told. This is still true today for contemporary Black writers. And it is still true today for William Wells Brown and his contemporaries, whose stories are being excavated and analyzed by far more white historians than Black, supported by a complex system of institutions and publishers who have continued to undervalue diversity in their decision making bodies. And it is these same institutions that still teach my people that simply being a reader is not enough, without their foremost stamp of approval on our backgrounds and opinions.

Brown prefaces The American Fugitive with an apology for his background and lack of formal schooling, but he ends it with a stirring diatribe against antebellum America, the authority of which cannot be questioned. It’s the kind of writing that makes you want to stand on your own coffee table and preach to an invisible audience.

I am that audience. Brown does speak, and always has spoken to, us; sometimes in words only we were meant to hear.

The course of the future may be judged by the sound of the footsteps of the past.

William Wells Brown

1. Brown wrote widely across genres, publishing six books during his lifetime: Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847); Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853); The American Fugitive in Europe (1855); The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858); The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863); and My Southern Home (1880). I purchased a consolidated volume, Clotel and Other Writings (Library of America 2014), which includes these, as well as many of Brown’s speeches and public letters. It is from this volume that I quote Brown’s work.   ↩︎
2. Okay, maybe one more. By titling his work The American Fugitive in Europe, I would argue Brown intended to paint every interaction and observation with the brush of a Black man living on a precarious edge between liberty and bondage. Rather than “sparing” in his racial interjections, I would argue Brown, with the title alone, interjected race into the entire manuscript. ↩︎