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If your birth denied you wealth,
Lofty state and power;
Honest fame and hardy health
Are a better dower.
But if these will not suffice,
Golden gain pursue;
And, to win the glittering prize,
Paddle your own canoe.
-Sarah T. Bolton
"Now to gain the social prize / Paddle your own canoe." So William Wells Brown quotes-or misquotes-the widely circulating 1865 poem then song of Indiana writer Sarah T. Bolton. His reference to the song appears in his 1880 compilation of southern memories and commentary, My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People. The rewards of Reconstruction having done a quick about-face and the "hue and cry about Negro Equality" racing on unchecked, Brown here makes a moderate argument. It is not, he says, as if
the liberating of a race, and securing to them personal, political, social and religious rights, made it incumbent upon us to take these people into our houses, and give them seats in our social circle, beyond what we would accord to other total strangers. No advocate of Negro Equality ever demanded for the race that they should be made pets. . .. Then away with this talk, which is founded in hatred to an injured people. Give the colored race in the South equal protection before the law, and then we say to them-
"Now, to gain the social prize,
Paddle your own canoe." (251)
A century later, Eddy L. Harris, another young, African American man from St. Louis, takes up this challenge-literally. He decides to pursue his childhood dream "to be somehow part of the river" (2) and "paddle his own canoe." "Putting a canoe into the headwaters of the Mississippi and aiming it for New Orleans is not something a man is supposed to do," he writes (3). He does it, just the same, though he is "no expert canoeist" (6) and owns no canoe. When his friends' ridicule of his idea gives way to celebration, one, a woman, offers to drive him to Lake Itasca and "wonder of wonders, she knows where I can borrow a canoe" (10). If Harris knows the song fellow-St. Louisan Brown cites or Brown's citation of it, he doesn't say so. And yet, in paddling not his own but someone...