Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Ivy G. Wilson, ed. Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xx + 210 pp.Halfway through Ivy G. Wilson's Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, Christopher Freeburg writes: "Whitman was a racist, and he did subscribe to white supremacist ideas and attitudes" (90). Freeburg's assessment here intuits, I think, the contradiction that sometimes complicates this necessary and often thrilling collection of essays. For many, Whitman remains the democratic poet of America, and so confusion easily abounds when Whitman's racist politics are unearthed. This is a pertinent issue that cropped up last year at Northwestern University-where Wilson works-when M.A. music student Timothy McNair protested the vaunting of Whitman as a democrat by refusing to perform a musical setting of his poetry, which led to a failing course grade. Instead of definitively sorting out Whitman's attitudes toward Afro Americans, Whitman Noir productively engages his conflicted inheritance, paying homage to an underappreciated and longstanding tradition of black authors embracing rather than rejecting Whitman's poetry. Natasha Trethewey exemplifies this collection's wide-ranging engagement with Whitman on race when she writes, "From where I stand, it's easy to feel the kinds of contradictions evident in Whitman's work, those things he revealed both intentionally and inadvertently" (171). Indeed, Whitman's specters of blackness, and our own haunting by his white supremacy, offer another valence to the noir of this collection's title, all the more striking for its understatement.Whitman Noir is divided into two parts, the first comprised of scholarly essays on the relation of Whitman to blackness and of subsequent black writers to Whitman by-aside from Wilson and Freeburg-Ed Folsom, Amina Gautier, Matt Sandler, and Jacob Wilkenfeld. The second part of the book reprints previously published personal and political reflections on Whitman by Trethewey and June Jordan, as well as publishes for the first time short pieces by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (on Garcia Lorca and Whitman) and George Hutchinson (on visiting Whitman's home and grave in Camden). C. L. R. James, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with many of the book's own contributors, provide testament to the diverse ways black writers have invoked Whitman. This is a reckoning that is consistently laudatory and skeptical, if not downright aghast, of Whitman. One can appreciate, for instance, Jordan's deep alienation from her New Critical schooling while being confounded by her lament over "the peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman"-which, thankfully, seems dated today (157). It is hard not to love, though, her earnest and playful pronouncement: "Listen to this white father; he is so weird" (158).The first three essays of this collection-by Folsom, Gautier, and Sandler-are the most striking. Folsom shows how Whitman's temporary persona as the "mash'd fireman" in "Song of Myself" is based upon-both historically and in the poet's drafts-a black fireman (unmentioned in the published poem) for whom white faces become visible: "White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps" (5). Whitman, we learn, erases blackness in legible ways, inscribing through the development of his corpus the formative presence as well as the increasing absence of slaves and freedmen. In the following essay, Gautier mines Whitman's 1842 temperance novel Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate with dogged singularity, emerging with the sterling conclusion that Evans' storied self-possession is only won through his ownership of Louis-the brother of the creole slave Margaret to whom Evans is briefly married. "Whitman shows," writes Gautier, "that Evans' own self-mastership is ultimately dependent upon his ownership of Louis" (47). Whitman thereby unravels the intemperance is slavery metaphor that animated the Washingtonian temperance reformers of the time, showing how temperance here literally means mastery over another. …