Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America

Owens, an English professor at McGill University, debuts with a stimulating examination of how the stories of talented Black children from American history reflect the complicated intersection of race and childhood. She focuses on the tension between the extraordinary abilities of her subjects and the infantilization of Black people of all ages as “lacking capacities of reason.” For instance, she points out that soon after the Civil War ended, the neurodivergent teenage piano prodigy Tom Wiggins was legally indentured to his former enslavers for the rest of his life because a judge deemed him of “unsound mind” and “childlike.” White supremacists trivialized the talents of young Black individuals to preserve the lie of Black infantilism, Owens argues, noting that an 1834 biography of Phillis Wheatley, who began writing poetry at age 11, credited her artistry to the fleeting impressions of a “peculiar” mind, rather than deliberate study. Elsewhere, Owens digs into the early lives of Oscar Moore, who was only three when he began performing “feats of memorization and mathematics” in the late 1880s, and Philippa Schuyler, whose virtuosic piano performances in the 1930s and ’40s earned her a reputation as “the Shirley Temple of American Negroes.” The meticulously researched case studies reveal how white people sought to control or explain away Black prodigies’ abilities, but scholarly discussions of “literary anagrammars” and the “episteme of humanism” are a bit stuffy. Still, historians will find much to ponder. (July)