Framing Mark: Reading the Africanist Presence in Early American Broadsides

Abstract

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• Framing MarkReading the Africanist Presence in Early American Broadsides
• Rebecca M. Rosen (bio)

As formal, occasional documents that attempt to contain acts of racialized legal violence, early American texts produced—and in a sense demanded—by carceral systems and their literary adherents present challenges to modern scholars. Whether created or distributed by ministers, jurists, newspaper editors, or printers, such documents often provide proof of resistance by their subjects to spoken and embodied co-option while they also, paradoxically, hold up these subjects as mouthpieces for salvific surrender. This essay examines two such texts, the broadsides produced in conjunction with the executions of two African American people, Mark and Phillis, for poisoning and killing their notoriously cruel enslaver, Captain John Codman, in September 1755: namely, a poem, A Few lines on occasion of the untimely end of Mark and Phillis, and an execution narrative, The Last & Dying Words of mark, Aged about 30 Years.¹ While they take different forms—one, a work of memorial poetry that excoriates Mark and Phillis as representative symbols of African American revolt and punitive anatomy (the practice of anatomizing the bodies of the condemned as an extra layer of punishment); the other, a mediated autobiographical document that represents Mark's life as one of public utility and exemplarity—both broadsides attempt to reduce acts of self-liberation to punitive object lessons. In an effort to recover the voices of self-liberating subjects, how are we to approach such documents?

This essay applies two of Toni Morrison's key concepts from Playing in the Dark (1992) that distill the concomitant development of racial slavery and racialized tropes in American fiction—American Africanism and the Africanist presence—to grapple with that question. Morrison presents the two concepts as interlocking and overlapping. The first of these concepts provides a means of examining the ways that, as Morrison puts it, [End Page 419] "American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless" (7). That is, American Africanism is a way of presenting Black subjects that precludes their specificity and agency, rendering them background characters and yet essential to white plots, metaphorical and literal. Morrison goes on to define the "Africanist presence" as representing, for white writers, what is always there and never acknowledged. That is, "Africanist presence" is denoted by white writers' stunted and self-negating efforts to acknowledge the existence of Black subjects and interlocutors, an endeavor Morrison frames as confounding to them. This is part of a literary landscape in which "Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative—displays of the agile writer's expertise" (Morrison 16). But at the same time, "the fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of … fears and desires … [and] is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity" (17). Taken together, Morrison's ideas capture the literary expression of this country's slave system and its aftermath, an embedded and yet always self-conscious project that highlights Black subjectivity while its writerly output simultaneously "argues against noticing," a mode ideally suited to frame Black subjects as culpable or palpable, but not as truly legible interlocutors (Morrison 10).

Morrison's concepts, though originally applied to fiction, have particular utility when applied to two eighteenth-century broadsides that center Mark. This is particularly true of the poetic broadside, which, with its formulaic language of blood guilt and graphic woodcut, mutes Mark and Phillis through its commonplace constructions of guilt and visual dismissal. Its graphic depictions of their two bodies—the former gibbeted and hyper-visible, the latter erased in a cloud of smoke—relies on the construction of each subject as an Africanist presence to deflect attention from Codman's acts as a violent enslaver. By contrast, Mark's dying speech, in its narrative progression and clarity, dissolves the pretense that his death is symbolic of spiritual or civic justice.²

Notably, although four people were tried in the case and we have extensive testimony...