Symbols of Literacy and Reading in the Early Black Atlantic

Scenes of reading in early Black Atlantic literature are often taken as autobiography: the enslaved subject acquiring Western literacy as a tool to bargain for freedom. This misreads them. When James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, and Prince Hall write about literacy, they are not describing a skill but staging it for a white readership that used print culture - authentication prefaces, signed certifications, the demand for proof - to police the boundaries of human subjectivity. Their scenes of reading are rhetorical traps. They do not request inclusion; they manipulate the reader's assumptions about who can possess an interior life, and force a confrontation with the author's. Across the late eighteenth century, the symbol evolves: literacy withheld and dramatized as exclusion in Gronniosaw, literacy surveilled and offered as forensic evidence in Wheatley, literacy self-governed and built into institutional infrastructure in Hall.

This essay will argue that across Gronniosaw, Wheatley, and Hall, the figure of literacy operates as a rhetorical instrument that inverts the evaluative gaze of the white reader, turning the audience from judge into the judged

The foundational scene of Black Atlantic textuality occurs in James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative (1770), wherein the author relates his childhood encounter with a Dutch ship captain reading a prayer book:

"[I] follow’d him to the place where he read. I open’d the book that he had shut, and thought I should hear it speak to me... I put my ear down close to it, in great hopes that it would say something to me; but was very sorry and greatly disappointed, when I found that it would not speak."

On a literal level, this "talking book" trope symbolizes alienation, illustrating the young Gronniosaw’s exclusion from European textuality. Symbolically, however, the scene functions as a carefully curated rhetorical mirror held up to the white readership. The reader is forced to watch the very technology of their culture refuse a human being, dramatizing the structural silences that characterize the colonial archive.

This scene, crucially, is narrated retrospectively by a literate, highly articulate author. The trope only exists because Gronniosaw has already seized the very literacy the text initially denies him; the symbol is, by definition, self-conscious. As a literary device, Gronniosaw uses this moment to achieve a specific rhetorical end: he collapses spiritual conversion and textual access into a single, indivisible event. By tying his emergence as a Christian subject directly to his command of print, he challenges what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identifies as the "silencing" inherent in historical production. Trouillot argues that power dictates not only what is recorded, but which voices are framed as capable of generating meaning. By pre-emptively narrating his own silencing and immediately reversing it through the existence of the published Narrative, Gronniosaw uses the talking book symbol to assert that his claim to Christian subjectivity and his authority as an author are entirely inseparable.

Where Gronniosaw stages textuality as initially withheld, Phillis Wheatley imagines this leitmotif as literacy granted but placed under intense institutional surveillance. This dynamic is well delineated by the famous authentication preface to her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), in which eighteen prominent Bostonian men felt compelled to certify that she was the author of her own work. Within this framework of skepticism, Wheatley’s erudition, her bibliophilic curiosity, her hyper-literacy - the rigorous deployment of Latinate sources, neoclassical elegiac conventions, and sophisticated evangelical theology—ceases to be mere ornament. It becomes a self-conscious literary symbol acting as forensic evidence.

Every heroic couplet Wheatley writes operates as a performance addressed directly to a skeptical audience. This hyper-literacy does not signal submissive assimilation; rather, it is a deliberate authorial strategy designed to indict the reader’s original doubt. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," she writes:

"Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join the th’ angelic train."

Here, the literary mastery demanded by her white critics as a baseline proof of humanity becomes the exact device for a piercing moral critique of slaveholding Christianity. Saidiya Hartman’s theoretical work on the violence of the captive spectacle aligns with this. Hartman notes that the dominant culture frequently demands that Black suffering be displayed explicitly to satisfy white curiosity or skepticism. Wheatley subverts this by mastering the elite neoclassical poetic forms of her captors, thus transforming her poems into a mode of counter-evaluation, putting the oppressive readers (at that time) in the light. The reader who opened the text to evaluate whether an enslaved girl could possess a soul finds that Wheatley has used her literacy to put the moral and spiritual interiority of Western society itself on trial.

By the late eighteenth century, the idea of literacy scales up from individual self-fashioning to corporate resistance. Prince Hall’s Masonic charges and petitions from the 1790s do not offer narratives of learning to read, nor do they seek authentication from the whites. Instead, Hall’s texts presuppose African American literati and use print culture to build a lasting institutional structure around it. Through petitions for public schools, programs for mutual aid, and the establishment of the African Lodge, Hall converts literacy from an individual performance into a collective, self-governing resource. In his 1797 charge to the African Lodge, Hall utilizes biblical typology, didactic^[1] language, and classical history to outline a glorious, ancient African lineage:

"Let us remember what a dark situation we were once in... But blessed be God, he hath raised up a Light among us."

By employing print to record and distribute these charges, Hall uses literacy in direct defiance of a state apparatus that treated Black intellectual community as a pernicious anomaly, a threat.

Katherine McKittrick’s framework of Black geographies are especially relevant here;  she posits that Black subjects frequently subvert dominant, oppressive spatial arrangements by constructing alternative, parallel geographies of survival and resistance. The African Lodge, preserved and legitimized through its own self-generated archives, records, and rituals, functions as precisely such a space. By utilizing the transnational framework of Freemasonry, Hall’s literacy symbol achieves a radically new end: it moves past proving the individual soul to white skeptics, instead asserting corporate citizenship and self-authenticating Black sovereignty.

To view this trajectory as a straightforward march toward institutional inclusion, however, would be to reduce and undermine the radical diversity of the early Black Atlantic archive. John Marrant’s Narrative (1785) and his subsequent sermon to the African Lodge (1789) offer a critical counterpoint to any progress narrative aimed primarily at white recognition. Marrant’s deployment of literacy operates on a separate, divergent track; he utilizes biblical typology and expansive historical lineages not to appease Western skepticism, but to construct a usable, autonomous past specifically for Black audiences.

When Marrant traces the history of the Church, he deliberately highlights African church fathers, asserting a spiritual lineage that bypasses European mediation entirely. His literacy is not staged as a response to surveillance, nor does it function as an appeal to a white judicial framework. Instead, Marrant’s texts look inward to the Black diaspora, treating literacy as an internal, indwelling tool that fosters collective resilience and spiritual autonomy. The symbols of literacy in the early Black Atlantic could just as easily be used to refuse the necessity of white validation altogether. It is not necessary that they only be parsed and empowered by the sentiment of one community, one suppressed literary tradition.

To conclude, the figure of literacy in early Black Atlantic literature coalesces to form a highly sophisticated mechanism of rhetorical inversion that helped liberate and transfigure the meaning of literacy to freedom. Whether tracing the dialectical movement from Gronniosaw’s dramatization of exclusion, through Wheatley’s subversion of imperial poetic forms, to Hall’s creation of independent institutional archives, these writers consistently refused to let literacy remain a passive object of evaluation. Instead, they weaponized textuality to control the hegemony they were born into. Treating the act of reading and literacy as a self-conscious symbol is how these authors completely upended the power dynamics of the eighteenth-century print world. The white reader who approached these texts under the assumption that they were judging the intellectual limits of Black authors encountered an archive that was actively evaluating, deconstructing, and reading them instead.

Work Cited

• Cugoano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. 1787.

• Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw. A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince. 1770.

• Hall, Prince. A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy. 1797.

• Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.

• Marrant, John. A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black. 1785.

• McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.

• Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. 1773.

^[1] Didactic is meant in a good, learned way, one generous with teaching; that term often has a negative, condescending connotation