Tara Bynum’s maxim, “Black living matters,” propels her taut and compelling study, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, although the work doesn’t lead to an examination of reader-response criticism or cultural history, as might be expected from the title (p. 133). Instead, this book lays out a series of adroit readings of the works of Phillis Wheatley, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, and David Walker, four early Black writers who all, as Bynum argues, found space in their rage, their passions, and their devotions to frame their work and their lives with love—indeed, they framed their work with good feeling despite the privations of living while enslaved or nominally free.
These four readings are deeply informed by history, of course, and most particularly, by the ways it can fail us. Bynum’s coda to the book, “Reading Pleasures: Looking for Arbour/Obour/Orbour,” for example, is not an afterthought but instead one of the most compelling sections of the book, where she walks readers through the steps and stakes of tracking down the scant archival information about Wheatley’s close friend, correspondent, and sometime sales agent, a woman identified as Arbour Tanner in some sources and either Obour or Orbour Tanner in others. This coda is a powerful example of why Bynum’s arguments so powerfully land as they do, where they do—often with an immersive sense of how important individuals are either completely invisible or only marginally present in the archive. It also helpfully engages with what it means for contemporary scholars to push through what, in Bynum’s view, is the pervasive “illegibility of Black living” in the archive, and to consider the ways in which silence or archival absence can “beget new ways of reading, new points of entry” (130). Indeed, Bynum closes her argument about joy, a notion she sees as tied to Black living that allows an interiority or space to fashion such emotions, by pointing out that Wheatley’s friend Tanner existed, and that we need to read even the scantiest archive with an eye to presence, not absence. Tanner’s very existence begs us, as Bynum sees it, to reconsider what’s already there – to read with possibility in mind for the imaginative opportunities. She also promotes an approach to reading such materials that understands the archive as not just a “scholarly euphemism for library” but also a site of “interiority and uncertainty” (p. 131). Even when the archive is “quiet,” it can invite us to share in its intimacy (p. 130).
In order to unpack this notion of how interiority can uncover joy, as suggested by early Black writing, in her first chapter, Bynum examines the letters Wheatley wrote her friends. Bynum reads these through the lens of scoping for interiorities—that is, seeking to better understand in particular Wheatley’s desires and her satisfactions. The second and third chapters grapple respectively with the ways in which ministers Marrant and Gronniosaw wove together their testaments in order to play out for readers their love, their joy of knowing about God’s love and what it meant for them to share their own love for God. Bynum’s final chapter is, in a way, the most challenging of all because David Walker’s Appeal, the 1892 essay series known more fully as “An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” is so regularly singled out as an extraordinary and effective polemical cry of rage and demand for political action. In contrast to common interpretations of the Appeal, Bynum’s reading of the essay highlights its fundamental vision of the delights of free citizenship. In this chapter, Bynum illuminates Walker’s hope and aspiration for the future—one of “imagined brethren” feeling joy “from making the world anew” (p. 35).
All these chapters model beautiful close readings, and to weave them together, Bynum returns again and again to a few key themes. Along the way, she unpacks new models of reading for early Black American writing. For example, she walks readers through a reframing of the “Talking Book” codified by Henry Lewis Gates’s readings of John Marrant and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. As Bynum sees it, instances of the Talking Book trope, in which an illiterate individual is frustrated and puzzled by the ways in which they cannot hear a book because, as they understand it, the book refuses to speak to them the way it is willing to speak with to a literate reader (such scenes or situations that appear in writings by Marrant, Gronniosaw, and John Jea—although Jea isn’t studied in this volume), are certainly evidence of how a Black subject might see themself as marked by “a flawed way of being,” as Gates might have it (p. 67). Nonetheless, Bynum views these scenes as reflective of hope and unrequited desire. These scenes illustrate a story about misreading and desiring—for instance, Gronniosaw seeks to share this anecdote because “it primes the religiously learned” for “his forthcoming religious conversion,” thus allowing readers to be reminded that they and the subject are “always worthy of God’s love” (p. 68).
Her work on Marrant is, perhaps, her most original contribution, because here she intervenes in a work somewhat less examined than the works of Walker, Gronniosaw, or Wheatley. She reads his narrative with the understanding that Marrant finds new iterations of joy in his “pleasure in his faith” and the way God’s faith in him, in return, brings him pleasure too (p. 80). This focus does not negate the fact that the life of Marrant that Bynum walks through is certainly a messy one full of surprising and complicated moves and decisions (such as abandoning his family, and choosing to work as a freeman in the South while surrounded by enslaved people). These decisions make sense, according to Bynum, only when we consider his “pleasures in faithful living” despite or even because of hard circumstances (p. 102).
Overall, through detailed and careful close readings interspersed by historical perspectives of significant moments in early America, this book unpacks how these works of early African American literature performed a kind of joy that historically has often been neglected by readings only framed by a White gaze. For scholars of literacy and instruction, the book offers little information about the acquisition of literacy itself, but it does model a study of how literacy was deployed and imagined in ways a bit difficult to parse for modern, often secular, contemporary readers. The spiritually deep and biblically informed literacies of these writers intrinsically shape their arguments and their art. David Walker’s righteous fury, for example, can often mask a more interior exultation—his joy in envisioning the future of delighted citizenship. As Bynum argues in her introduction, #BlackLivesMatter as a twitter hashtag can be understood as a protest and as a claim of resistance, of course. But when lives matter, it is their broader value that also needs to be reckoned with. #BlackLivesMatter is a claim for the future and the possibilities of betterment, and a yearning for pleasure.
