Francis Williams: An Eighteenth-Century Tertium Quid

At various points in the poem, William displays his training in Latin poetry. Line 19 for example, aurea ... Iris, uses the fleur-de-lis to represent France by metonymy. Line 39 plays with the possibilities of translation. Maurum magis literally means "the Moor the more." Furthermore, the overall shape of the poem depends upon a ring composition. The last line of the poem, florentes populos, terra, Deique locus (46), is clearly related to the fourth, felices populi terraque lege virens (4). As long as Haldane governs, heaven and earth will see the peoples of Jamaica flourishing like happy plants. Through this crescendo from people and earth to people, earth, and heaven, a hierarchy of governance becomes apparent. The people look to Haldane, and Haldane looks to heaven.

With his reference, however, to his very black muse, nigerrima ... Musa (36), Williams breaks new ground and makes a powerful claim to the title of first black poet of the western hemisphere. Within the constraints of the classical paradigm and through this act of mythopoeisis, Williams gives birth to himself. Only Lucy Terry (1730-1821) preceded him with her poem in English about a Massachusetts Indian raid written in 1746, but not published until 1893. While her skin was black, her poem was not. In Williams, the two come together in a manner that not only anticipates certain issues of twentieth century negritude, but I think must be marked out as the actual beginning of Caribbean studies. About Francis Williams, Countee Cullen might have written the final lines of his poem "Yet Do I Marvel":

   Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him
   sing.(32)

ENDNOTES

(1) See for instance T. H. MacDermot, "From a Jamaica Portfolio--Francis Williams," Journal of Negro History, April (1917), 147-59; Locksley Lindo, "Francis Williams--A `Free' Negro in Slave World," Savacou (1970), 75-81; Anthony J. Barker, The African Link (London: Frank Cass, 1978), 163-64; Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, eds. Jean D'Costa and Barbara Lalla, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1989), 9-12. Paul Edwards and James Walvin, Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (London: Macmillan, 1983), 59; James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1551-1945 (London: Penquin Press, 1973), 84; 2 Lindo (n. 1), 72.

(2) Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (London: T. Lownudes, 1774), 2 vols., 2. 476; For information about Edward Long see The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 12. 100-1; W. J. Gardner, The History of Jamaica (New York: Appleton, 1909), 207.

(3) Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967), 95; Gardner (n. 4), 171.

(4) Samuel J, and Edith F. Hurwitz, "A Token of Freedom: Private Bill Legislation for Free Negroes in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," William and Mary Quarterly 1(1967), 423-31; Hurwitz (n. 7), 425.