Revolution. George Washington’s Continental Army was in dire need of more soldiers so it began welcoming black men into its ranks. Those newly freed slaves who connected military service with freedom in the names they chose for themselves. In the Connecticut Army, for example, of the 289 black men enlisted “five reported “Liberty” as their last name” and “18 reported “Freedom” or “Freeman” as theirs.”4 This empowering practice continued during the Civil War and after emancipation when black men and women took new first names and created surnames for themselves. Often freedmen and women chose the names of American patriots like Washington and Jefferson, thereby linking them to an American identity.5 Students in my history course read and wrote papers on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.6 In this slave narrative Douglass recounts his harrowing experience as a slave of the Auld family in Baltimore, Maryland. When explaining the paper assignment to the students, I took the opportunity to tell them that while Douglass uses a number of terms to signify black people, they will not use the same words because it is 2011, not 1854. I wrote the three terms on the board that they can use, African American, black and people of color. They giggled and looked at one another with knowing grins when I said, “These are the only terms you will ever use to refer to black people in this class and for the rest of your life. And, you will tell your friends and family that these are the only words they will ever use to describe black people, because black people earned the right to name themselves a long time ago and these are the words they have chosen.”
Frederick Douglass
In the class discussion that followed, the students impressed me with their insights, excitement and knowledge of the text. Together we shared some amazing epiphanies. For example, several students made connections between Douglass’s analysis of singing, the role songs played in slave culture and Estonians who are a “singing people.” Douglass argued that close listeners of slave songs and spirituals would hear in them “a tale of woe.” Those songs “breathed the prayer and complaint of the souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”7 Another student said that, like slave songs, old Estonian songs are either sad or acted as work songs because Estonians were “serfs, part of the land.” This next comparison still gives me goose bumps. In “Soviet times” Estonians, just like enslaved African Americans, hid coded messages in their songs and their poetry. Songs meant one thing to the Estonians who sang them, and another to the Soviets who heard them. Similarly, some Estonian poets spelled out the colors of the blue, black and white Estonian flag with the first letter of each line in their poetry.
Songs of Uncle Remus
In the biggest revelation of the evening, students told me that they and their parents grew up listening to Uncle Remus’s trickster tales about Brer Rabbit. Only the Estonian version erases Uncle Remus’s racial identity and emphasizes Brer Rabbit’s message about the weak overpowering the strong with skill and cunning. White southern journalist Joel Chandler Harris collected and published the Uncle Remus tales in 1881.8 He invented the character of Uncle Remus to provide a narrator
4
Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5 Mphande, “Naming and Linguistic Africanisms.” 6 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Dover Publications, Inc. 1845) (Electronic Text Center University of Virginia Library) http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouNarr.html 7 Douglass, 14. 8 Jennifer Ritterhouse, “Reading, Intimacy and the Role of Uncle Remus in White Southern Social Memory,” Journal of Southern History, Volume LXIX, No. 3: August 2003.
3