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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. What does it mean to resist oppression? Now we're able to recognize the direct forms of resistance, the ordinary people who rise up in rebellion, the workers who refuse to labor in brutal conditions, the enslaved who steal away in the night, risking everything to seek freedom. When we look back in our history searching for these forms of overt resistance, we sometimes miss the more subtle, hidden ones.

The decision to love, to laugh, to create, and in doing so, to claim a right to the fullness of humanity, even when systems and structures are built to strip that humanity away. Being fully human with an interior life all your own, that too is resistance to oppression, and it is the interior life of the enslaved, which our next guest went searching for in her new scholarly book.

Prof. Tara Bynum: My name is Tara Bynum, and I'm an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: In her book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, Professor Bynum pushes us towards a deeper understanding of the everyday lives of Black Americans. People like Phyllis Wheatley, Minister John Merritt, and pamphleteer David Walker. She pulls us into their internal worlds and demands we recognize the pleasures our ancestors enjoyed as they lived, even in the context of oppression.

Prof. Tara Bynum: I read this interiority as an invitation into a different story of selfhood, literacy, and community that pursues a kind of genealogy and ways of reading that privilege matters of feeling. I read for this interiority because it helps determine just what matters more. It demands the kinds of close reading that accept as fact interiority as a sight of subjectivity and the making of meaning.

It privileges those feelings that lead the reader to community, friendship, and a sense of providential mission. The lesson of interiority and this pursuit of good feeling is that reading pleasures are possible if only we take seriously a simple premise--Black lives do, in fact, matter.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Professor Bynum's life influences her scholarship. Give me a sense of what I do and don't know about you by knowing that you're from Baltimore.

Prof. Tara Bynum: Oh, I think that that's a really interesting question, especially because Baltimore has such a public image at this point that on the one hand feels very familiar to me as a resident, but also doesn't necessarily speak to my actual life story. I think the thing that might not be most obvious is that my mother's family has a long history in Baltimore City in particular, multi-generational, over a century or longer in Baltimore City.

I think that there's also not nearly as much conversation about the Black culture of Baltimore and the richness of that history and its creativity. There's so much richness that is here and that ultimately informs how I understand myself and how I understand my work. I'm Baltimore through and through.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Now cast back to the 19th century, and tell me what I do and don't know about some of these Black authors by simply knowing that they are enslaved about who they are, what they care about, what they're writing, what their lives are versus what you come to discover about them.

Prof. Tara Bynum: I'm going to push it back even further if I can into the 18th century. You don't know about them, of course, simply by knowing that they're enslaved is the story that they bring themselves to the table. That's largely what got me into this research was realizing as a graduate student that I had missed so much of their stories looking for what I needed, looking for the resistance that felt familiar to me.

Now, at some point, reading the work of Katherine Clay Bassard, learning that Phyllis Wheatley, for example, writes letters to her friend who's also an enslaved Black woman named Obour Tanner. At this moment, as I'm reading both Katherine Clay Bassard's article, as well as her book, where are these letters? They were right there in the back of the Penguin edition of the book that I had next to me.

Because of my own assumptions about Phyllis Wheatley and the poems that I was reading, I had missed just going to the appendix of the book. I didn't have to travel anywhere. I just had to look deeper and read better. I think that the thing that I find most compelling about these stories is that the ones that I read anyway are present. I didn't have to look or read hard for them. I just had to get out from under my own set of assumptions.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Perhaps this is in part the genesis of this title of Reading Pleasures. Talk to us a bit more about what you did find about the interiority of the lives of those you studied.

Prof. Tara Bynum: The four authors that show up in my book, there's Phyllis Wheatley, there's John Marrant, James Albert, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and David Walker. David Walker, I like to say is my 19th century interloper. Each of them I think speaks about what I call pleasure in a different way. Phyllis Wheatley has these letters to Obour Tanner, and I think that it's very clear that their friendship is very important.

There are also several of her poems that speak to her own set of desires and pleasures as well. Then Gronniosaw and Marrant are both writing spiritual narratives, conversion narratives. They've been also called proto-slave narratives, except that that doesn't quite tell the story right. Someone like John Marrant is born free, and what they both have in common is a very clear and real sense of their Christian faith and the pleasure that is derived from being a believer of Christianity and a believer in the salvation that comes with that faith.

Then there's David Walker who is known so much for his anger, and I think his anger is apparent. I'm not here to deny his anger, but instead say that the anger is meant to mobilize the action that will change this country, the United States, for the better, and that better will allow for a happiness that he is very invested in, and a happiness that will be, I think, very specifically for the Black communities that he's talking about.

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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Quick break and then we're back with more with Tara Bynum from the University of Iowa. It's The Takeaway.

This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and I'm still with Tara Bynum, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, and author of Reading Pleasures. What is it you thought you were going to find? What were you hoping for your own interior experience perhaps?

Prof. Tara Bynum: Here I am a Black woman. I've already said that I'm from Baltimore. If I think about my elders, the ones that I know, but the ones that I could not have met because they died before I was born, I think that there's one way to tell my decidedly US story that is centered largely in the state of Maryland and North Carolina. I didn't quite understand how I got here because the story was so tragic, or I think the story at times felt very too dimensional.

Because I don't necessarily think tragedy is the defining feature that then allows folks to create and produce generations. I don't know that that's how I would talk about my grandparents' life, even though we can have a conversation about all of the isms, the realities of the difficulties of living in the US or even just growing older. I think that there's something else that helps to account for my literal presence. That's what I was looking for as I read the letters and poems, the narratives, and the appeals as well.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's dig in on that a little bit. I want to go inside Phyllis Wheatley a little bit more, perhaps because as you talk about the intersecting isms, perhaps our thought of an enslaved Black woman would suggest that what else could she produce, but work that is tragic, sorrowful, and focused primarily on her experience of enslavement. What is it that Phyllis Wheatley writes about?

Prof. Tara Bynum: The letters are my favorite. The 250th anniversary of her poetry collection. There's a lot of talk about the poems right now. The letters, there's something that I really enjoy about the letters, and I think it's really that "I" voice. The "I" voice that is meant to be not a poetic voice but Phyllis Wheatley speaking.

In the correspondence between Obour Tanner and Phyllis Wheatley, I think that there's familiarity. I don't necessarily find the answers to the questions that I'm looking for because they're friends who don't need to restate how they met each other. They're friends who don't need to explain to each other what's important to them. I think there are a couple of places where there are hints of that. Their Bible quotations littered throughout their letters. There's certainly mentions of Wheatley's feelings about a variety of topics, including the sale of her books. She's very emphatic about selling her books and also receiving money for those books as well.

I think that there's clearly an intimacy between the two of them. That's apparent in how Wheatley greets Tanner with a dear sister, and also in what she reveals or doesn't reveal, I would say, in the letters themselves.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: As you're talking about what it means for friends to just write to one another, I'm also just wondering about the ways that historians have maybe or literary scholars have received Wheatley's interiority, her friendship, her joy, whether or not she's been taken out her word, or the ways that maybe we've presumed she's masking something.

Prof. Tara Bynum: I guess I wanted, as you said, to take her at her word, because I recognize that something like interiority is not ever going to be fully available to the researcher. I think that there's something that's meant to be private about that. It's not all for public consumption. Yet, I think that tension is part of the power of looking at Wheatley's work a bit more deeply than what has historically been done. I think, what I can appreciate about this, yet another resurgence of interest in Wheatley, is that I think people have begun to get more curious about that interiority and trying to find more of Wheatley's story, and asking questions that maybe seek to find Wheatley in places that we don't expect to.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Can a slaved person feel joy without saying that slavery is okay?

Prof. Tara Bynum: This is the thing. I think that I would argue, yes. I also fully understand the risk that I take in making this argument because I think the fear has been that if we acknowledge the possibility of joy or pleasure during enslavement, that then proves true the idea of the happy slave.

I would argue there's a way to not do that. My hope is that my work is a model for one way of doing that. What I came to realize looking at these four writers is that I think it's always been true that the specter of whiteness, the specter of oppression, doesn't have to define every single moment of Black living all of the time across centuries. I think that it's a part of the story, of course, but it doesn't have to be the defining feature. I think Black people have the full gamut of emotions available to them and always have.

I think that part of our responsibility as scholars, includes doing the hard historical work and research but also finding those moments that don't quite fit into what we understand is hardship. There's something else happening here, and it might be multi-veiled, of course. Maybe we can read these letters literally and also maybe we can imagine her offering coded language to Obour Tanner as well in order to protect those letters, as they are carried between them by various persons known and unknown. I'm just taking a peek at it one piece of that story, not in order to replace the larger story but to also say that, while there's enslavement, there's also moments when Black people have figured out how to gather and enjoy themselves and love one another and think about building a community and building a community.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you tell me how Christianity and Wheatley's understanding of her own Christian faith plays into your understanding of her interior life?

Prof. Tara Bynum: The language of Christianity is the language through which she and Obour Tanner are talk to one another. To make sense of Wheatley's letters, you have to have the Bible next to you. You have to know that she is quoting but not necessarily citing the Bible verse that she's using. I presume that that's because Obour Tanner also knows to recognize that verse of Scripture, too.

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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Tara Bynum, Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa and author of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America. Tara, thank you for being here.

Prof. Tara Bynum: Thanks so much for having me. This has been a wonderful conversation.

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