W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folks, 1903.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Mass., and by the time he died in 1963 had become one of the most influential black writers ever in America, due largely to the work he is known best for, The Souls of Black Folks.

The collection of essays in the book is both a seminal work in the field of sociology and in the study of African-American culture. In it, Du Bois coins the term “double-consciousness”

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

The complete text of this book is available for free from such sources as Project Gutenburg and Bartleby.com.

Special thanks goes to Barbara Smith, author and member of the Albany Common Council, for her suggestion.

Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography, “Twelve Years A Slave.”

In Saratoga Springs, a plaque near the corner of Congress Street and Broadway memorializes the kidnapping of Solomon Northup. In 1841, the Saratoga County man was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. A delegation from New York some of them affiliated with Union College in Schenectady was eventually able to get Northup released. He returned to the Capital Region and wrote of his experiences in the book “Twelve Years a Slave.”

The first chapter of the book speaks of his family’s history, which he traces back to a Northup slave-owner in Rhode Island.

The second chapter begins innocently enough:

ONE morning, towards the latter part of the month of March, 1841, having at that time no particular business to engage my attention, I was walking about the village of Saratoga Springs, thinking to myself where I might obtain some present employment, until the busy season should arrive

Then he relates his abduction and being sold into slavery in New Orleans.

The full text is available online here.

Northup’s story was also made into a movie.

The film starred Avery Brooks and was directed by Gordon Parks.

Our Nig; Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There By “Our Nig.” This autobiographical novel was published in 1859 and was written by Harriet E. Wilson.

Though published in the 19th century, the novel didn’t gain wide recognition until it was rediscovered, authenticated and published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Gates suggests in his introduction to the book that it can be read as a response, and a critique, of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The text of the book, which is available online at the University of Virginia, is introduced on that site this way:

It some respects it evokes the story Stowe’s novel chose not to narrate: the experiences and opinions of Topsy in New England. As a victim of racism and abuse at the hands of a white woman, Frado (or “Nig”) poses a direct challenge to Stowe’s valorizations of the domestic and the feminine. Although in her Preface Wilson denies any desire to “palliate slavery at the South,” her emphasis on the sufferings of a nominally “free black” in the North was a theme repeatedly developed by the white pro-slavery authors of the ANTI-TOM NOVELS that also contested Stowe’s ideological assumptions. Some of those novels were popular. This novel, on the other hand, was apparently ignored when it first appeared, and remained invisible until 1982.

“Our Nig” isn’t without controversy. Most notably, an Oct. 28, 2006, NYTimes article talks about the publication of another “rediscovered” novel that claims to be the first novel written by an African-American woman:

“The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride,” is believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever published by an African-American woman.

Julia C. Collins, a free black woman who lived in Williamsport, Pa., serialized “The Curse of Caste” in 1865 in The Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. This month it is being published for the first time in book form by Oxford University Press.

But the republication has stirred a dispute between its editors — William L. Andrews, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Mitch Kachun, a history professor at Western Michigan University — and the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who says that “The Curse of Caste” is not, as stated on the jacket, the first novel by an African-American woman.

Mr. Gates says that honor belongs to “Our Nig” (1859), by Harriet E. Wilson, which he himself brought to light in 1982.

Moreover, the book jacket of “The Curse of Caste” proclaims that it has been “rediscovered.” Mr. Gates said that he published it in microfiche form in 1989 as part of “The Black Periodical Fiction Project.” At Mr. Gates’s request, Mr. Andrews and Mr. Kachun added a footnote to the book acknowledging this.

(In 2001, Mr. Gates also announced the discovery of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” written sometime before the Civil War and said to be by a former slave, Hannah Crafts, though Ms. Crafts’s identity has never been established. The first known novel by any African-American is “Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter,” by William Wells Brown, in 1853.)

The dispute between the scholars centers on competing definitions of what constitutes a novel.

I bring up this dispute to show that the notion of history is not fixed. Disputes arise that force people to question assumptions or past knowledge. Just as Gates’ republication of “Our Nig” added to the notion of what constitutes the African-American literary tradition, so, too, does “The Curse of the Caste.”

This book was also part of the slave narrative course I took at the University of Pittsburgh with professor Ronald Judy.

In addition to the links above, another interesting link is the Harriet Wilson Project in New Hampshire.

Is there a book, play or essay you think is a vital part of the African-American literary tradition, especially something that has touched you personally? E-mail your idea to me at mjanairo@timesunion.com.