SOURCE: “African-American Writers,” in American Literature 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years, edited by Everett Emerson, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1977, pp. 171-93.

In the following essay, Bell discusses the careers of ex-slaves Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano, which he claims demonstrate how a hostile white literate society fostered the “twoness” of early black identity in the United States.

Because of the distinctive history and acculturation of Africans in the English colonies during the revolutionary period, their literary gifts are most meaningfully assessed when viewed in the context of the tension between African-American attitudes toward integration and separatism on the one hand and the oral and literate cultural heritages on the other. Most modern historians accept the fact that American slaves were the descendants of peoples with a history and culture. Since culture is basically the symbolic and material resources developed in the process of interaction between the...