[The following paper was written for presentation at the AAAHRP Black History Conference in Seattle, Washington, February 2006. { www.aaahrp.org }  “Cipher” is an introduction to Arthur Graham’s next major work in progress, and it points to the dilemma of fake literary ancestors and how to combat hoaxes with original and convincing scholarship.]

  

                                    “ … Ah been a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life.

                                    Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin’

                                    is just where Ah been dis year and a half y’all

                                    ain’t seen me.”

                                                            Zora Neale Hurston, Eyes  (p. 6)

 

 This is a grand tour of all things seen and unseen, “de big convention,” the mystical association of ideas leading to the inventions of African American literary ancestors—Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, Samuel Eli Cornish, John Russwurm, Footah Jallo and David Walker.

 

This is about self-negation and self-revelation, sympathy and generation, spirit and water—Sankofa and Oshun and Mary, too.  It stands to transcend the yoke of “mystical theology” and the myth of white supremacy.  This is a “living” struggle and Death’s-Head shall not prevail!  Welcome to Maat—the judgment scene.

 

The initial “letters” of omni ciphers mentioned just now, from Jupiter Hammon to David Walker, constitute and convey the encryption of “jhpwgmhsecjrfjdw.”

 

This presentation offers the most plausible and conclusive explanations of the mystery of what we may call, omni ciphers.   Ironically, these omni ciphers are both part of the problem and part of the solution because by unraveling their significations we come to the fountainhead of the Grand Tour Lie of white supremacy while removing the veil from justice.  Let us cast our eyes toward the judgment.

 

 HISTORY

 

For the past year and a half, I’ve been wrapped up, so to speak, in a quilt of omni ciphers, that of my own imagination and that of others, such as “The Jefferson Wheel Cipher,” reportedly used as a military tool; and the “Atbash Cipher,” a Hebrew code reportedly employed by scribes in the time of Jeremiah, an epoch wherein a certain manuscript was found in the tabernacle, hitherto unknown to everyone living except the finder. So here I am seeker and finder, in the uncanny position of rendering some “proof” to my claim.

 

A big book, similar to The Manichean Leitmotif, on this topic of omni ciphers is in the making.  Subliminal Racism (2005) led directly to this presentation. These works then give substance to the task at hand and place our undertaking on a profound and sublime path.

OMNI CIPHERS

 

Notwithstanding Albert Murray’s contention in his book, The Omni Americans (1970), that his “conception makes Americans identify with all their ancestors,” we must first determine the veracity and authenticity of our ancestors—especially our received heritage in the form of “African American Literary Ancestors.”

 

In an afterword to Hurston’s Eyes, Henry Louis Gates sees in Murray’s “Social Science Fiction Monster” a devouring “beast,” a “received heritage” that conveys

 

                        … the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers,

                        to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose

                        culture is “deprived” where different, and whose psyches are in the

                        main “pathological.” (p. 199)

 

In Subliminal Racism (2005), Graham celebrates Holly Jackson’s article, “Mistaken Identity,” appearing in The Boston Globe, February 20, 2005.  Jackson discovered that the novel, Four Girls at Cottage City (1895), was written by a “white” ancestor once thought to be “black,” “high yellow,” or “mulatto,” Emma Dunham Kelly-Hawkins.  Jackson surmised that Hawkins is a “complete historical cipher.”

 

Conversely, doubt became the “examiner,” and Holly Jackson found not “hope” in Hawkins’ white drawn characters but “reflections of white racial anxiety.”  (p. 78 SRE)

 

Jackson’s discovery marks a significant departure in our willingness to accept—carte blank—certain celebrated ancestors without corroborating data on their authenticity.

  

JAYSON-BLAIR CIRCUS:  THE GRAND TOUR LIE

 

Presently, we shall unravel the unifying signification underlying the metaphor, “omni ciphers,” by a brief examination of the mythic, aesthetic, historic, and ideologically-forged events and persons that comprise the identity formation of the “other.”

 

Our approach is based upon Graham’s notion of “Mystical Theology and Identity Formation,” a section taken from Subliminal Racism (66-67).  In general, Graham proclaims that

 

                        Race-based mystical theology leads to identity formation of

                        Negro ciphers in history and literature, and may be envisioned

                        through four divisions of perception and manifestation.  (p.66)

 

1.)  Prophets:  The first among those chosen is Phillis Wheatley.  Here is the “Divine Cipher”—drawn first from “Phillis and Brunetta,” a “witty” story appearing in The Spectator, June 1, 1711; and second—after 1801 and 1977—from the Grand Tour Alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the gloriously predicted, highly hailed, Blue Planet.

 

Within the parameter of these earthly and astrological co-ordinances, conveyances, and conjunctions, then, Phillis becomes the fountainhead of Negating Mystical Theology—the once “fetish” pagan illuminated into a single cause.

 

When properly questioned, Phillis “speaks Light” as an agent of Christian Conversion.  She is now seen as a by-product of a “mythomanical” epoch, as well as of “individuals” such as Governor Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780) and Reverend Mather Byles (1707-1788)—two of her “1772 craft examiners” with an intrepid passion for lying.

 

Phenomenally, her case or “trial” closed and has entered the dust bin of pseudo-historical events.  In The Historian’s Craft (1953),   Marc Bloch records similar related phenomena: (p. 156)

 

                        There were the pseudo-Celtic poems attributed to Ossian,

                        the epic poems and ballads written in what Chatterton believed

                        was Old English, the allegedly medieval poetry of Clothilde of

                        Surville, the Breton songs devised by Villemarqué, songs said

                        to have been translated from Croatian by Mérimée, the heroic

                        Czech songs from the manuscript of Kravoli-Dvor, and others

                        too numerous to mention.  During these decades, it was as if

                        a vast symphony of deception resounded from one end of

                        Europe to the other.  (p. 94)

 

 2.)  Poetry:  The First Negro Syndrome among those elevated to “literary ancestors” is the “I god” Jupiter Hammon, an embodiment of the planet Jupiter.  In the pantheon of omni ciphers, he emerges as both father and son of the “Divine Wheatley.”

 

All works and timely publications attributed to him are predicated upon association of ideas, individuals, historic events, place names and landmarks.  Hammon’s chief chore is the veneration of Phillis Wheatley by the invention of “self” as the white man’s obedient and faithful “other.”

 

3.)  History:  Acrostican George Moses Horton, in tertium quid, becomes the spoken “Light-Word” of Wisdom Palms 119.  First and foremost, Horton fits well into this historical division that constitutes organized “activities of thought” [i.e., racist culture] within repositories for cultural, political and economic dominance or self-preservation.  Chief among these repositories is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Catch 22 institution that gave birth to Big George and has sustained his existence down to this day.

 

Functionally, as the perennial “Professional Spouter” along the Grand Tour Lie for all times, his coded voice echoes the white masters’ “Double-Speak,” disguised propaganda.  “Orators” Samuel Eli Cornish, John Russwurm, the “Prince” from Footah Jallo, and their devised machinery of deception, Freedom’s Journal, fit into this division, also, as historical pawns.

 

4.)  Law:  Edmund Burke’s dictates of the “rule of law” and “entailed inheritance” inform the Master-Slave Rule of Law that is embedded in the “identity formation” of Leviathan Cipher David Walker—the sign and symbol of  Absolute Evil.

 

Subliminal Racism declares that Walker’s Appeal is the masterpiece of anti-insurrection propaganda stemming from covert and subversive activities and from secret societies—the chief forerunners being a pack of ex-Confederate generals that later transmuted into the KKK.

 

Theoretically, how these ciphers were constructed and brought to “paper” is further demonstrated in Subliminal Racism.  For now, by way of introduction, we need to consider them in terms of absolute pairs:  Good/Evil.  White/Black.  Divine/Pagan.  Master/Slave.  Real/Imaginary—or doublespeak.

  

All in all, these omni ciphers enter the convention of the association of ideas within the Grand Lodge or Grand Tour Lie.  That is, they are perceived, invented, mythologized, and deliberately juxtaposed to real historic figures and key events to render the impression that they did in fact “exist” among all notable ancestors, black and white alike.

  

RUDE BEGINNINGS AND AFTER ADVANCES

 

Further close investigation of the received sources and origins of African American original literature stands to expose the forgeries of facts and events encasing these omni ciphers.

 

The key to this new approach and paradigmatic reframing of our rude beginnings and after advances as “literate” folks must be re-established by vigorous analysis and interpretation of the entire canvas of historic events and real people—not omnipresent ciphers imposed on us for psycho-social control.

 

This amounts to a profound paradigm shift that began in 1972 with Graham’s Manichean Leitmotif, and with his recently published Subliminal Racism Essays.

 

Perhaps our innocence and naivety will abate with an awareness of Unitarian Minister Samuel Gilman (1791-1858) and his influential theory of original literature based on his concept of “felt relation” to the exclusion of slaves and pagans. 

 

In documents uncovered by Graham, Gilman contends that slavery must exist in America as it did in Athens, a society that was “neither the freest nor the quietest of Grecian republics.”  What is more, liberty, which is a certain “freedom founded on law,” is the result of “military glory,” which, ultimately, is the source of letters that follows.

 

Historically, according to Samuel Gilmam, in the course of all literature, then, from its “rude beginnings” to its “after advances,” nothing was “necessary, as to freedom, except the absence of such utter control, as extinguishes all will or thought, except its own.” (69)

 

Today, the big question still looms over us:  Can slaves originate a literature based upon conquered defeat and not “military glory,” forged events, and psychological warfare along the white supremacist, Grand Tour Lie—to keep the nigger running?

 

In the names of all ancestors, ourselves, and our children’s children, let us enter the historical process of regaining a language, history, and literature based on genuine “freedom” of our own makings and not one predicated on mystical theology designed to confuse and deceive us.  According to Graham,

 

                        Phillis Wheatley never left the company and care of the Boston

                        examiners who gave her as inheritance to modern day racists who

                        play on the subliminal mind through mystical theology, to baffle

                        black females into submission to a white God, and to contain and

                        relegate vainglorious and presumptive Black males—begging

                        perpetually and blindly, by way of fake “literary ancestors,”

                        for “human” and “civil rights.”  (SRE, p. 98)

 

Please, join Holly Jackson, Arthur Graham, and a growing number of “us” doubting examiners, by casting aside these omni ciphers set before us all as sign and symbol of Death’s-Head.  Like a psychologically fragmented serpent in the grass, we must be made wise of subliminal racism and skin color symbolism at the deepest levels.

 

Most important, we must join in this struggle to end the jinks of all jinks—forged literary ancestors.  Two prominent “public” dunces of this brand of tricknology are Louis Farrakhan and his Willie Lynch Letter (1712), and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his $8,500-“incog-negro” Bondwoman’s Narrative (1850).