Abstract
Lucy Terry (c. 1724–1821) is the first recorded African American poet in the United States. While her ballad “Bars Fight” was created to commemorate a battle in Deerfield, Massachusetts, during King George’s War of 1744 to 1746, it should be read within multiple cultural contexts, including its place within African and American cultural traditions, its relation to Terry’s longstanding engagement with colonial legal systems, and the popularity of political satire. By satirizing one of Euro-America’s most popular genres—the Indian captivity narra five—Terry’s poem stands at the forefront of a significant tradition in African American literary history, and it reveals one of the many ways in which enslaved peoples used coded language to challenge the system that enslaved them. To comprehend the complexities of “Bars Fight” in this context, we must examine the life that gave rise to the power to be one who critiques—to be one who, through bicultural play, turns the observers’ gaze back on themselves—to be, perhaps, the subaltern who speaks.1 As bell hooks has observed, the prevailing image of early African American female bodies is one of bondage and a lack of agency: “Rarely do we articulate a vision of resistance, of decolonizing that provides strategies for the construction of a liberatory black female body politics … Who among us when remembering 18th and 19th century representations of African American females can call to mind any visual representation of the body of a free black woman.”2 While Lucy Terry’s physical likeness per se is unknown to us, her lifelong resistance to oppression may be a significant step toward reconfiguring our vision of black women’s resistance.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Brooks, James F. “This Evil Extends Especially... To the Feminine Sex.” Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 279–309.
Calloway, Colin G. North Country Captives: Narratives of Indian Captivity from Vermont, and New Hampshire. Hanover, MA: University Press of New England, 1992.
Cheyfitz, Eric. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, and James Arthur Levernier. The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Harris, Sharon M. Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005.
Hemenway, Abby Maria, collator. Vermont Historical Gazetteer. Vol. 5. Brandon, VT: Mrs. Carrie E.H. Page, 1891.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writers Literary Tradition.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, 116–42. New York: Meridian, 1990.
Herndon, Ruth Wallis. “Women of’No Particular Home’: Town Leaders and Female Transients in Rhode Island, 1750–1800.” In Women and Freedom in Early America, edited by Larry D. Eldridge, 269–89. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Holland, Josiah Gilbert. History of Massachusetts. 2 vols. Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles, 1855.
hooks, bell. “Beyond a Politics of Shape: White Supremacy and the Black Female Body.” Z Magazine (September 1995): 26–28.
Kaplan, Sidney. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution 1770–1800. Washington, DC: New York Graphic Society, 1973.
Katz, William Loren. The Black West. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
Kolodny, Annette. “Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity.” New York Times Book Review, January 2, 1993.
Lucy Terry Papers. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library, Deerfield, Massachusetts.
“Lucy Terry Prince.” Vermont Gazette Weekly, August 1, 1821
Melvoin, Richard I. “New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Frontier Deerfield, Massachusetts.” Dissertation thesis, University of Michigan, 1983.
Moon, Jennifer. “Master and Servant.” Lucy Terry Papers.
O’Toole, Thomas, and Ibrahima Bah-Lalya. Historical Dictionary of Guinea. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1995.
Potash, P. Jeffrey, and Samuel B. Hand. Litigious Vermonters: Court Records to 1825. Burlington: Center for Research on Vermont, 1979.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Proper, David. “Lucy Terry Prince:’ singer of History.’” Contributions in Black Studies 9 (1990–92): 187–214.
Salliant, John. “Slavery and Divine Providence in New England Calvinism: The New Divinity and a Black Protest, 1775–1805.” New England Quarterly 68, no. 1 (March 1995): 584–608.
Sekora, John. “Red, White, and Black: Indian Captivities, Colonial Printers, and the Early African-American Narrative.” In A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America., edited by Frank Shuffleton, 92–104. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Sheldon, George. A History of Deerfteld, Massachusetts. 2 vols. Deerfield, MA: E. A. Hall, 1895.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: Norton, 1971.
Wesley, Charles. In Freedom’s Footsteps: From the African Background to the Civil War. New York: Publishers Co., 1969.
Wideman, John Edgar. “Introduction.” In Life from Death Row, edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
Wilbur, James Benjamin. Ira Allen: Founder of Vermont. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.
Williams, John. The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion: A Faithful History of Remarkable Occurrences in the Captivity and Deliverance of Mr. John Williams. Edited by Edward W. Clark. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976.
Wright, Martha. “Bijah’s Luce of Guilford, Vermont” Negro History Bulletin 28 (April 1965): 152–56.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2009 Lovalerie King and Richard Schur
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harris, S.M. (2009). Lucy Terry. In: King, L., Schur, R. (eds) African American Culture and Legal Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101722_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101722_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38243-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10172-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)