Four Hundred Souls by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain is an Anthology for the 21st Century

“The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black People. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure.

Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die. 

Ever” (235)

In the century to come, I wonder whether academics will attribute a specific style to the nonfiction of the early 21st century. Modern-day readers can recognize turn-of-the-century Communist propaganda at first glance. We know what an 18th-century pamphlet is supposed to sound like. But we don’t see the literature of our own time the same way; we recognize the stylistic choices of individuals, not generations. Is our current perspective unadulterated by the obfuscating lens of the historian? Or is it merely unrefined?

The solution to this question can only be found by carefully considering a quiver of contemporary writers, such are found in Four Hundred Souls, a recent anthology from historians Ibram X. Kendi (I’ve reviewed his Stamped from the Beginning here) and Keisha N. Blain. Subtitled A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, this collection displays the work of 92 Black academics, journalists and poets. Each author is given a five-year period in American history to cover, starting with the arrival of enslaved people in 1619 and ending with the Black Lives Matter movement. At the end of every 40 years is a poem commemorating the achievement and suffering of African-Americans during that period.

Most of the essays are less than five pages each, so the extraordinary one fly by. Some of my favorite essays are: “The Middle Passage” by Mary E. Hicks, which discusses the lives of West African mariners “on the margins of the infamous [slave] trade” (67), “The Selling of Joseph” by Brandon R. Byrd, “Maroons and Marronage” by Sylviane A. Diouf, “Phillis Wheatley” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Cotton” by Kiese Laymon, a personal recollection, “Atlanta” by Tera W. Hunter, “John Wayne Niles” by William A. Darity, Jr., “The Hip-Hop Generation” by Bakari Kitwana and “Anita Hill” by Salamishah Tillet. My favorite poem was Patricia Smith’s “Coiled and Unleashed,” which reads like a violent and beautiful birth. Before I picked up Four Hundred Souls, Smith and many other brilliant authors in the collection were unfamiliar to me.

“When we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget” (4)

Luckily not every author is a stranger: Angela Davis is here, as are Isabelle Wilkerson and the poet Jericho Brown. I was especially excited to see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who works in the same field as my mother, writing about property ownership and “urban renewal” in 1970s Chicago. The promotion of Black academics like her is a powerful tool against the erasure of Black history, and the sheer number of voices in this anthology creates a very useful source for examining the nuances of contemporary antiracist literature.

Four Hundred Souls is not a monolith, but once you start looking, it’s easy to find commonalities between its 80-odd essays. Some begin with a personal memory or an interview with the descendent of a famous individual. Others quote liberally from Donald Trump and make observations about the state of America between 2016 and 2020. Many essays juxtapose cool, academic detail (“Between 1715 and 1763...only 16 out of 636 British slavers ported in New York”) with earnest imagination (“The shame and humiliation that enslated people suffered remained plainly visible in their tears and in the silent screams of their eyes”) in order to reinforce the urgency of their message (88). This technique isn’t dishonest, exactly, but once you’ve seen it twenty times in the same book it feels more like a rhetorical gimmick than a profound statement of feeling.

Because I only ended up liking some of the essays in Four Hundred Souls, I can’t swear by the whole collection. But that fact only demonstrates how many different voices have contributed to it. Rather than a definitive history, the book should be treated as a reading list. If you encounter a topic that you want to learn more about, look up the author’s other works and start there. In my case, I found the depiction of Reconstruction-era urban life particularly interesting, and can’t wait to see where the next book takes me!

Four Hundred Souls is a two-way gate. It leads the modern reader into a grave and mysterious labyrinth, whose turns are marked with the names of heroes and martyrs. But twenty years from now it will swing the other way, revealing a hall of mirrors and the letters—distinct, hopefully, despite the years—of a country in perpetual crisis.

“Together, despite the odds, we have made it this far. The powerful essays and poetry in Four Hundred Souls are a testament to how much we have overcome, and how we have managed to do it together, despite our differences and diverse perspectives.

Yet. I am not convinced that we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. At least not yet” (391)