Black Biography Finally Comes of Age

‘The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence’Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages‘The Autobiography of W.E.B. Dubois: Great Barrington Edition’Berkshire Publishing Group, 392 pages‘Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy’By Damien LewisPublic Affairs, 496 pages‘Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson’By Ashley BrownOxford University Press, 616 pages‘The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker’By Maryemma GrahamOxford University Press, 696 pagesBlack History Month is always crowded with biography, and even the best of the lot, I have found, gets overlooked. This is sadly fitting, as the same happened to many Black women and men over the years: Their stories have been forgotten, misconstrued, misrepresented, maligned, or obfuscated — sometimes by their executors, sometimes by racists, and sometimes by the biographical subjects themselves. Perhaps first in the malignity line is Thomas Jefferson, who called the poetry of a slave, Phillis Wheatley, “beneath the dignity of criticism.” As David Waldstricher observes in his trenchant biography: “The quickness of the dismissal is rhetorical, deliberately over the top, and essential to the dubious argument. Her poetry becomes merely religious to Jefferson in order to say it has neither classical nor modern virtues.”It is Black history’s misfortune and ours that W.E.B. Dubois entrusted his archive to Herbert Aptheker, a communist so keen to highlight the legacy of Dubois’s late-in-life conversion to the movement that Aptheker published a re-arranged “Autobiography” to suit an ideological program, as Berkshire Publishing’s owner, Karen Christensen discovered: “I had been hearing Dubois’s story for years, at events and over the dinner table, and even published a volume based on his teenage writings about a little church in Great Barrington. I was familiar with the opening line, ‘I was born by a golden river in the shadow of two great hills.’ I thought of it often because my study window looks across the Housatonic Valley to those hills.”Then Ms. Christensen read Aptheker’s 1968 edition, and the opening line she expected did not show up until Chapter 6. Instead, Aptheker or someone in his employ had front-loaded the autobiography with Dubois’s communist beliefs. Ms. Christensen began a search for the original typescript, and now we have the “chapters about his early life … in their proper place.”In Josephine Baker’s case, the untold story is, as Damien Lewis explains, of her own doing because it is in the nature of clandestine work that to be effective, the agent does not disclose her activities and achievements as an anti-Nazi. This spy-thriller biography has received many accolades, but investigate it with caution, for what Mr. Lewis presents is, to use his own wording, “very possibly” true.As a great tennis champion, Althea Gibson had a different problem, and how she coped with it is suggested in the title of Ashley Brown’s biography. Gibson disliked being treated as a representative of her race. Even in the celebratory moments accorded a champion, she could be screened away in prejudice. Here is Ms. Brown crafting a typical instance of Gibson’s troubling bifurcated world in a passage that is redolent with a word that has rich Southern white connotations: Gibson, a Wimbledon winner, becomes the “belle of the Wimbledon Ball … dancing the traditional first dance with Lew Hoad, the men’s single champ from Australia. Blonde and White, Hoad guided her around the dance floor. Some attendees watched in admiration; others stared with displeasure.”Gibson is guided by a white male, but that is not enough for some, who do not want her there at all. She had little help from the press, who wanted her to act and speak like a symbol and thought she was surly when she said she was serving herself.What a relief for the writer Margaret Walker, author of “Jubilee,” one of the first great African-American treatments of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to have beside her “a young, quite uncertain student,” a kind of Boswell who watched her for nearly two decades, The result is that “Walker’s voice and mine often merge in this book as I become her interpreter,” Maryemma Graham writes. Honest collaborations between biographers and their subjects have been a long time coming, and only by knowing how Black biography has been suppressed or disparaged is it possible to understand the great achievements of contemporary biographers and their subjects. Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”

Black Biography Finally Comes of Age

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