Uncle Jeff and His Contempos

Books by Wilson Jeremiah Moses

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Uncle Jeff and His Contempos

By Wilson J. Moses

I have been laboring to improve my French by painfully struggling with Condorcet's essay against slavery. His and other discourses in that genre—written by Herder, Kant, Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Adam Smith—sent Thomas Jefferson into paroxysms of neurotic self-justification.

True enough, all of the above manifested varying degrees of racism or racial condescension, but none of them believed that "black inferiority" could justify slavery or the oppression of the blacks, or the exclusion of them from the human family. Only Jefferson specifically attributed to Negroes the prurient instincts of an ape, while breeding mulattoes. Only Jefferson advocated extending slavery into the territories acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. As late as the 1820s!

Another subject: You are aware that Du Bois wrote fairy tale vignettes, based on Biblical, Germanic, and classical, mythology. These appeared in Darkwater, The Crisis, and The Souls of Black Folk.

This morning I was struggling with the Contes of Charles Perrault and a versions of Le Roman do Renart, designed for the lycee level. Andre Norton published a translation the trial of Reynard the fox for children, which I read as a kid in Detroit. I have a long-standing interest in European fairy tales, including Mallory's Morte d'Arthur.

I have been reading Lessing's 1759 essay on fables and his translations into German of Aesop (a Negro?) yesterday morning. I don't know what influences Lessing might have had on the Grimm Brothers. I think Lessing must have influenced people like Leo Frobenius, an important German student of African myths and legends around 1900.

Senghor and Cesaire say the French negritude poets were fascinated by Frobenius' work, when it was finally translated into French. Du Bois read Frobenius in German, and Frobenius was a major influence on his book The Negro (1915), Black Folk, Then and Now (1939, and The World and Africa (1946), Du Bois writes of the influences of Richard Wagner on himself in his Autobiography.

As Du Bois did, I have read some of Wagner's librettos in German, and have found that Wagner's experiments with archaic poetic diction, like Du Bois's were thrilling. I believe I have said elsewhere that Du Bois's story, "The Coming of John" is based on (and makes direct references to), Wagner's opera Lohengrin, which is a version of the Hansel and Gretel myth. Lohengrin is the version of the warrior caste, and "Hansel und Gretel" represents a version that survived among the peasantry. But there are other versions of the myth, discovered by the Grimm Brothers.

I intend to see which West African fairy tales Frobenius might have found that are similar to "Hansel und Gretel." The Grimm brothers found a West African variant of Snow White, but the main character in their version is neither white, nor a woman. He is a beautiful black prince, with a shining star on his forehead. (Biblical cognate?)

The Grimm brothers, unlike Jefferson, believed that all human beings were united by the same capacities when it came to literary expression. As did Herder, they rejected Jefferson's sneaky hypothesis that we are a link between the human and the orangutan. Gobineau, although he is remembered only for his Anti-Semitism, believed that the Negro was artistically equal to other races and attributed the artistic triumphs of Egyptian civilization to mulaticization. Several authors of the New Negro Movement recognized the usefulness of Gobineau to their agenda, as did Senghor, even as late as the 1960s.

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Wilson Moses, the product of home schooling, was introduced to European literary and intellectual history by his mother, Ida Mae Johnson Moses, a self-educated, proletarian intellectual. The ideas above are more fully developed in Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms, published by Penn State Press, and others in Afrotopia and still others in Creative Conflict, both of the latter published by Cambridge University Press. See also: http://php.scripts.psu.edu/dept/history/faculty/mosesWilson.php

posted 21 August 2005

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update 3 November 2006