John Blanke: Brass in the Belly of the Beast

Warmed by the kiss of taut lips; animated by ancestral secrets held in puffed cheeks; pushed to its limits by determined tongues, the trumpet is one of Black history's most reliable conduits. Through warnings, jubilation, decrees, and celebration, from royal regalia in Buganda, to mediaeval courts in Tudor Britain, plantations across Caribbean, second lines in New Orleans, and carnivals in Brazil, the trumpet has been trusted with our most intimate tales, by our most innovative minds. 
 
John Blanke and his immortalised image - one hand on steed, eyes gazing up towards the sky, head covered in a turban, cheeks stretched thin - is an important part of this lineage. 
 
Dear John,

We know that your trumpet was an instrument of the British institution - a work tool. And work you did. Every day. A record of the first payment to you says as much. In it, you are defined by your race and your occupation 'the blacke trumpet'. A few decades after our last record of you, Henry VIII scratched a burgeoning imperial itch in the Boulonnais, developing an exclusively ethnically English colony there. In the centuries to follow, those who bore the likeness of John Blanke, on British plantations across the New World, would be listed by name, sex, race, occupation. Would any of them be black trumpets too?
 
John, what did you speak through your trumpet’s tantara? Which whispered wants vibrated in its chambers? Which memories were welded to the metal? Which secrets swelled in your sighs? Did you ever trust the brass with your real name? 
 
This, of course, we will never know. What we do know is that our brass-tinged history, across the diaspora, has echoed for longer than we may have thought. Those stories still whistle through our streets. We’ll listen out for yours, John

Adèle Oliver 
Writer, Artist, Researcher