Hidden Literacies

struggle over the means

The struggle over the means of preservation of our racist past is not just about the content of a manuscript or statue, or just about who is represented and who is not. It is also about the ways in which people relate to the past and think about it as something that they can access, participate in, become echoes of. Editors are, consequently, implicated in this conflict in many dimensions, linking the detailed reconstitution of a historical moment to the high-visibility, identity-driven emotional attachments to relics today.

So what, then, to do about John Newton Johnson’s letter to Whitman written in the dialect of a Southern infant? You could spend years poring through the archives of nineteenth-century correspondence without finding many letters like this. Physically, there are similar ones: heavily worn, frequently folded, torn, spilled upon, and as a result, difficult to decipher paleographically. In terms of the letter’s racism, once again, you can find plenty of letters that share the same basic tenets. And Whitman received a lot of fan mail; though Johnson and Whitman would end up being correspondents for years, this letter arrived at Whitman’s door while their acquaintance was still in its early stages.  But in other respects, the letter is unusual indeed.
 

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