 | As soon as we begin to talk about equal rights, the cry of amalgamation is set up, as if men of color could not enjoy their natural rights without any necessity for intermarriage between the sons and daughters of the two races. Strange, strange indeed! Does it follow that the Indian or the African must go to the judge on his bench, or to the governor, senator, or indeed any other man, to ask for a helpmeet... I promise all concerned that we... have less inclination to seek their daughters than they have to seek ours. Should the worst come to the worst, does the proud white think that a dark skin is less honorable in the sight of God than his own beautiful hide? All are alike, the sheep of his pasture and the workmanship of his hands. To say they are not alike to him is an insult to his justice. Who shall dare to call that in question?
William Apess, A Pequot, 1835 |
| It is William Apess's voice that will first strike a reader new to him and that continues to resonate among those who have begun to know his literary work well. Here, in this short passage from Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, Apess's commentary on the Mashpee Revolt of 183334, one finds many of the characteristics that so distinguish his political and writing presence in Jacksonian America. Its directness and the skillful use of ironically rhetorical questions give some sense of the oratorical power that made him such a famous and controversial public speaker for his brief time in the public eye. His uncompromising indictment of the denial of equality to people of color sounds an especially modern note and comes even before the full emergence of the abolitionist movement (which did not, it should be noted, so dependably link the two peoples). |
| Here, in this passage, Apess also unhesitatingly taunts white Americans for their hypocrisy and their obsession with miscegenation. It is not, after all, he says, Indians or Africans who lust after white women, but white men who traduce women of color. He pushes yet further, in the deliberate titillation of his play on skin, and also in his rejection of white notions of beauty. His most radical move is to base this egalitarianism firmly on a reading of Christianity at odds with virtually all of its institutionalized forms and practices in antebellum United States. |
|
