Chapter 7 - Reading and Building a Nation; or, Everyday Living (while Black) in Early America

Summary

This chapter examines a lesser-known subscription listing in Rev. Samuel Hopkins’s System of Doctrines (1793). It is a list of seventeen free Black women and men from Rhode Island; they are five women and twelve men who have paid to purchase or to support the publication of Hopkins’s treatise on systematic theology. It is their living – as it is presented in this listing – that asks us to read closely for their story and in a way that, as literary scholar Lois Brown asserts, is “nuanced and meditative.” The “Free Blacks” gather in a published list that not only publicizes the purchasing power of those named and their intention to read, but also, and most importantly, publicizes their desire to make a place for themselves on their own terms and outside the limits of Rhode Island.