And he will then love me

The Little Black Boy, William Blake

I’ve yet to find a modern Blake scholar or critic who doesn’t take him to be deeply interested in the political. Even Northrop Frye takes occasional breaks from teasing out Blake’s mysticism to gesture at the necessary social implications of his radical theology. Unfortunately, many of these attempts seem preoccupied with uncovering the legible circa-1800 political camp hidden within Blake’s symbolic forests. Blake becomes an overseas Jacobin, an anti-Enlightenment communalist, or an anti-Lockean liberal, depending on who you ask. Any such demarcation can never do justice to just how radical his politics, if they can be called that, must have been. I’d like to gesture in that direction through a short reading of a poem whose reception history has been disappointingly shallow. “The Little Black Boy” appeared in Blake’s 1789 Songs of Innocence and Experience, and as such lacks the density of Blakean mythos that takes up his later works. That’s not to say that I’ll be able to give anything close to a full treatment here; the Songs clearly possess a wealth of internal patterns and superstructures that I’m far from grasping, none of which I’ll talk about. I hope, though, that the relative textual simplicity will make this legible even if one hasn’t read much Blake.

First, here’s the poem. Sorry about the formatting. Might fix later.

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O! my soul is white;

White as an angel is the English child:

But I am black as if bereav’d of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree

And sitting down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissed me,

And pointing to the east began to say.

Look on the rising sun: there God does live

And gives his light, and gives his heat away.

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love,

And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face

Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear

The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.

Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,

And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

Thus did my mother say and kissed me,

And thus I say to little English boy.

When I from black and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:

Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,

To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.

And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him and he will then love me.

The readings of this poem which I’ve encountered (a far from exhaustive set, to be clear) are unanimous in reading it as an anti-slavery poem. Blake’s biography supports this, if admitted as evidence. We know that he was personally involved in the abolition movement at various points and was a personal acquaintance of (e.g.) William Wilberforce. Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire contains much more information on this question (and many others). All of them, however, identify the poem to some degree as problematic. Many point to the first stanza’s association of whiteness with holiness and blackness with privation, or the fourth stanza’s identification of blackness as a result of sun exposure, a feature present in quite a few of the foundation-myths of European anti-African racism. In this light, the last two stanzas are generally read as affirming a spiritual equality between races, springing forth from the kind black boy’s service to the white (“Ill shade him from the heat”). Blake thus appears in many of these readings to enact a sort of eschatological All Lives Matter, pushing off equality to a spiritual oneness with God. This leads, for instance, to David Bindman’s contention that the poem is “inflected by theological traditions that assume Africans to be spiritually disadvantaged.” The consensus in general seems to be that The Little Black Boy is an attempt at anti-racism made sadly flawed by various universalist assumptions and the importing of racist characterizations of Africans. While I’ll freely admit that my relatively shallow engagement with both Blake’s corpus and his historical moment prevent me from suggesting otherwise about Blake’s personal beliefs, I think that a reading like Bindman’s brutally undersells the poem considered as such. Hope I can show as much!

So, let’s start with the first stanza. Here, we get a pretty conventional setup: black and white are opposed, with whiteness associated with the good (the black boy’s body hides a “white soul”, the English child is white “like an angel”) and blackness explicitly equated with bereavement. As I said earlier, lots of readers of the poem seem to take Blake as endorsing the views expressed in this first stanza, which I find rather puzzling. Almost everything presented in this first stanza is destabilized by the end of the poem. While blackness is identified here with the lack of light, by the fourth stanza blackness becomes a sign of too much light (what that means, I’ll come back to). While souls are colored in the first stanza, by the second-to-last colors appear, both black and white, as “clouds” that implicitly hold us back from more direct communion with God by obstructing the sunbeams of His love. I think, then, that we should read the first stanza as a recapitulation of what Blake saw as contemporary prejudices, as internalized by the black child speaking. The mother’s introduction makes more sense this way: the child presents a view (or set of views), the mother steps in and corrects those views, and the boy speaks in the last two stanzas with the knowledge he has gained. Far from endorsing the naive picture of race in the first stanza, I take Blake to be presenting it as precisely that which must be dispelled. (It’s also worth noting here, although Blake’s positions change over time, that several parts of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell seem to distance Blake from this stanza. There, he comes out quite strongly against the opposition between body and soul and repeatedly troubles the dichotomy of angel and devil. I don’t want to go outside the poem at hand very much, but the relevance is striking.)

Then, the most explicit of the poem’s symbolic equivocations: God = Sun. Right away, we should note that the sunbeams here are not the crushing heat of noon in midsummer, but “comfort” and “joy.” Receiving God’s love doesn’t hurt! In the fourth stanza, then, we get another point that scholars have identified as problematic in the poem, where the boy’s face is described as sun-burnt, seemingly importing the theory of race mentioned above. The claim that the sun-burnt face is “but a shady grove” has led some to see Blake as offering an apologia for the suffering of slaves. On that reading, Blake is attempting to justify the obvious earthly suffering of African slaves by associating it with some heavenly reward: don’t worry, your suffering better prepares you for the kingdom of heaven! This suffering, then, would be what allows the black boy to later “shade [the English boy] from the heat till he can bear”. A slightly more nuanced reading suggests that Blake is attempting an inversion of the old narrative by assenting to it while simultaneously noting that the beams which burn the boy’s face black are, in fact God’s love, and thus a good thing to receive. The black boy, having received more of them, is thus placed in a morally superior position re: the English boy. As a quick look at “noble savage” discourses tells us, inverting a racist hierarchy is hardly a guarantee of anti-racism when this inversion is conducted by a member of the oppressing group. Thus, on this reading, Blake is hardly doing much better.

I think we can start moving beyond these readings by thinking about what exactly it would mean to “bear” God’s love. As we noted earlier, God’s love is here cast as an explicit good for those who receive it; this is not (primarily) the “awful and terrible” love or grace that appears in various Christian contexts. This suggests to me that one would primarily not be able to bear God’s love because one has, in some way, strayed from God’s set path for them (to use an idiom at which Blake would no doubt take umbrage). While we can’t directly replace “bear” with “be worthy of”, I think Blake is aiming for something close to the latter. Thus, he is suggesting that when our souls have become capable of receiving the fullness of God’s love, our bodies will no longer be relevant. We will then be joyful in the direct presence of God (associated, interestingly, with hearing his voice). The mother ends her lesson there, and Blake can present the black boy’s updated perspective.

I’ve come across readings that see the first line of the last stanza, “I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear”, as relying on the idea of black skin as sun-protection suggested earlier in the poem. We should notice, however, that the scene there described only occurs after both boys are free of the “clouds” of their racialized bodies. This seems at first to contradict what we concluded above: don’t the clouds only vanish “when our souls have learned the heat to bear”? Why, then, is the black boy shading the English boy from the heat? The suggestion, I think, is that there is some kind of work required on the part of the black boy in order for the English boy to be fully receptive of God’s love. The associated print supports this reading, showing the black boy as presenting the English boy, who kneels in supplication, before Christ-as-Shepherd. The white child, as several critics have noted, seems to be echoing the pose of Josiah Wedgwood’s “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” abolitionist design, in which a black slave appears to be pleading for mercy from his oppressors. Here, of course, Blake inverts the image, having a white child seemingly plea for forgiveness from his God. Christ’s face appears impassive compared to the downturned eyes of the pleading child, and his hands rest on his knees rather than comforting or embracing the child. While on the subject of the prints, the panel on which the first half of this poem appears shows the black boy with either a single raised finger in School of Athens-esque declamation or with the two raised fingers that form a sign of benediction.

All this, I think, places me in a position to give my reading of the poem’s end. Those who enslave others, as represented by the English boy, are unconditionally dependent on those whom they have enslaved. Even in the eschatological moment, once the bodies have dissolved and the two children stand before God in all his beauty and glory, it is only once the black boy has chosen to shield the English boy that God’s love can become accessible to the latter. Equally important, I think, is that this act of kindness is unambiguously undeserved. The final line of the poem is striking in this light: “And be like him and he will then love me.” Blake’s “then” makes clear the asymmetry: the English child, even following the dissolution of their cloud-bodies, is still only capable of loving the black boy if he sees the black boy as “like him.” Until that point, he is shut off even from the love of God. If we recall the connection we saw earlier between “bearing” and “deserving”, the implication is clearly that the English boy remains in a state of moral rot unless he receives the completely voluntary and completely unearned love of the black boy. The Christian tradition has a word for such love: grace.

To Blake, the evil of slavery produces an irreparable gash in the souls of the enslavers. These are coals from which God will not pluck you. The only possible road to salvation for those so afflicted is through the entirely undeserved grace of those who have been enslaved. Blake is not suggesting that this forgiveness ought to be provided. Doing so would, in this structure, be as nonsensical as suggesting that God ought to save all sinners. Grace is only made legible as such by the fact that the recipient has done nothing whatsoever that could justify the magnitude of that which is being offered to them. Despite what many have written, Blake is far from erasing the horror of slavery through an egalitarian eschaton. That horror instead overwhelms him so completely that it can only be expressed through equating it, via the figure of grace, to the Fall of Man. No stronger theological condemnation of slavery could be made.