Black Matter(s)
Toni Morrison

   
   

I have been thinking for some time now about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This “knowledge” holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed by, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, it assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are removed from and without relationship to the presence of black people in the United States—a population that antedated every American writer of renown and was perhaps the most furtively radical, impinging force on the country’s literature.

I am convinced that the contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be relegated to the margins of the literary imagination. Furthermore, American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity because of and in reference to this unsettled and unsettling population. I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation, an acute and ambiguous moral problematics, the juxtaposition of innocence with figures representing death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanistic presence. The coded language and purposeful restriction by which the newly formed nation dealt with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart are maintained in its literature, even through the twentieth century. A real or fabricated Africanistic presence has been crucial to writers’ sense of their Americanness. And it shows: through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, and the way their work is peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence.

My curiosity has developed into a still-informal study of what I am calling American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a non-white, Africanistic presence was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term “Africanism” as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes. It is important to recognize the lack of restraint attached to the uses of this trope. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition favored by American education, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license and repression, the formation and exercise of power, ethics, and accountability.

What Africanism became and how it functioned in the literary imagination are of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature and even the source of literary “whiteness.” What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of “whiteness” play in the construction of what is described as an “American”? If this inquiry of mine ever comes to maturity, it may provide me access to a coherent reading of American literature, a reading that is not completely available to me now—not least, I suspect, because of the studied indifference of literary criticism to these matters.

One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded and made unavailable for open debate. The situation is aggravated by the anxiety that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, liberal, even generous habit. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference; to maintain its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. Following this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. It is just this concept of literary and scholarly moeurs (which functions smoothly in literary criticism, but neither makes nor receives credible claims in other disciplines) that has terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded American authors and blocked access to the remarkable insights some of their works contain.

Another reason for this ornamental vacuum in literary dis-course is the pattern of thinking about racialism asymmetrically, in terms of its consequences on its victims alone. A good deal of time and intelligence have been invested in exposing racialism and its horrific effects on its objects. The result has been con-stant, if erratic, efforts to legislate preventive regulations. There have also been powerful and persuasive attempts to analyze the origin of racialism itself, contesting the assumption that it is an inevitable and permanent part of all social landscapes. I do not wish to disparage these inquiries in any way. It is precisely be-cause of them that any progress has been accomplished in mat-ters of racial discourse. But I do want to see that well-established study joined by another, equally important: the effect of racial-ism on those who perpetuate it. It seems to me both poignant and striking how the effect of racialism on the subject has been avoided and left unanalyzed. The scholarship that looks into the mind, the imagination, and the behavior of slaves is valuable; equally so is a serious intellectual examination of what racial ide-ology did and does to the mind, the imagination, the behavior of the master.

National literatures, like writers, get along as best they can and with what they can. Yet they do seem to end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind. For the most part, literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man. If I am disenchanted with the indifference of literary criticism toward examining the nature of that concern, I do have a last resort: the writers themselves.

What happens when literature tries to imagine an African-istic Other? What does the inclusion of Africans and African--Americans do to and for the work? As a reader, I had always assumed that nothing “happens.” That Africans and their de-scendants are there in no sense that matters; that when they are there, they are decorative displays of the facile writer’s technical expertise. I assumed that since the author was not Africanistic, the appearance of Africanistic characters or narrative or idiom in his or her work could never be about anything other than the “normal,” unracialized, illusory, white world that provides the backdrop for the work. Certainly no American fiction of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black people, any more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I realized the obvious: that the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanistic persona was reflexive; it was an extraordinary meditation on the self, a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness, an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of mag-nanimity.

Rereading canonical American literature as a writer pro-vided me an access to it unavailable to me before I began to write. It was as though I had been looking at a fishbowl, seeing the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills, the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green, the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tran-quil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl itself, the structure transparently, invisibly, permitting the ordered life it contained to exist in the larger world. In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get writ-ten, how language arrives, on my sense of how and why writ-ers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable, necessary concomitant of the act of creation. What became transparent were the self-evident ways Americans chose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegor-ical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanistic presence.

 

Young America distinguished itself by pressing with full awareness toward a future, a freedom, a kind of human dignity believed to be unprecedented in the world. A whole tradition of “universal” yearnings collapsed into that well--fondled phrase “The American Dream.” While the immigrants’ dream deserves the exhaustive scrutiny it has received in the scholarly disciplines and the arts, it is just as important to know what these people were rushing from as it is to know what they were hastening to. If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them? And how might that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?

The flight from the Old World to the New is generally understood to be a flight from oppression and limitation to freedom and possibility. In fact, for some the escape was a flight from license—from a society perceived to be unacceptably permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined. For those fleeing for reasons other than religious ones, however, constraint and limitation impelled the journey. The Old World offered these emigrants only poverty, prison, social ostracism, and not infrequently death. There was, of course, another group of immigrants who came for the adventures possible in founding a colony for rather than against one or another mother country or fatherland. And of course there were the merchants, who came for the cash.

To all these people, the attraction was of the “clean slate” variety, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again, but to be born again in new clothes, as it were: the new setting would provide new raiments of self. The New World offered the vision of a limitless future that gleamed more brightly against the constraint, dissatisfaction, and turmoil being left behind. A promise genuinely promising. With luck and endurance one could discover freedom, find a way to make God’s law manifest in Man, or end up rich as a prince. The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of man’s license and corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt.

There was much more to make the trip worth the risk. The habit of genuflection would be replaced by the thrill of command. Power—control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and punishment to disciplining and punishing; from being socially ostracized to becoming an arbiter of social rank. One could be released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into a kind of historylessness—a blank page waiting to be inscribed. Much was to be written there: noble impulses were made into law and appropriated for a national tradition, but so were base ones, learned and elaborated in the rejected and rejecting homeland.

The body of literature produced by the young nation is one place it inscribed these fears, forces, and hopes. It is difficult to read the literature of young America without being struck by how antithetical it is to our modern conception of the “American Dream,” how pronounced is the absence of that term’s elusive mixture of hope, realism, materialism, and promise. Coming from a people who made much of their “newness”—their potential, their freedom, their innocence—it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened, and how haunted the early, founding literature truly is.

We have words and labels for this haunting—“gothic,” “romantic,” “sermonic,” “Puritan”—whose sources are, of course, to be found in the literature of the world from which they fled. And the strong affinity between the nineteenth--century American psyche and gothic romance has, rightly, been much remarked upon. It is not surprising that a young country, repelled by Europe’s moral and social disorder and swooning in a fit of desire and rejection, would devote its talents to reproducing in its own literature the typology of diabolism from which its citizens and their fathers had escaped. After all, one way to benefit from the lessons of earlier mistakes and past misfortunes was to record them—an inoculation against their repetition, as it were.

Romance was the form in which this uniquely American prophylaxis was played out. Long after it had faded in Europe, romance remained the cherished expression of young America. What was there in American romanticism that made it so attractive to Americans as a battle plain upon which to fight, to engage, to imagine their demons?

It has been suggested that romance is an evasion of history, and thus perhaps attractive to a people trying to erase the recent past. But I am more persuaded by arguments that find in it the head-on encounter with very real, very pressing historical forces and the contradictions inherent in them, as these come to be experienced by writers. Romance, an exploration of anxiety imported from the shadows of European culture, made possible the embrace—sometimes safe, other times risky—of some quite specific, understandably human, American fears: the fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness; of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; of the absence of so-called civilization; of loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of human freedom—the thing they coveted most of all. Romance offered writers not less but more; not a narrow ahistorical canvas but a wide historical one; not escape but engagement. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertain-ment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror—whose most significant, overweening ingredient was darkness, with all the connotative value it contained.

 

There is no romance free of what Melville called “the power of blackness,” especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could articulate the fears, the dilemmas, the divisions that obsessed it historically, morally, metaphysically, and socially. This slave population seemed to volunteer itself as objects for meditation on the lure and elusiveness of human freedom, on the outcast’s terror and his dread of failure, of powerlessness, Nature without limits, inborn loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed…; in other words, on human freedom in all terms except those of human potential and the rights of man.

And yet the rights of man, an organizing principle upon which the nation was founded, was inevitably, and especially, yoked to Africanism. Its history and origin are permanently allied with another seductive concept—the hierarchy of race. As the sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted, we should not be surprised that the Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised if it could not. The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted—or perhaps, in fact, created—freedom as slavery did.

In that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. And what rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and rationalize external exploitation was an Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire--that is uniquely American. (There also exists a European Africanism with its counterpart in its own colonial literature.)

What I wish to examine is how the image of reined-in, bound, suppressed, and repressed darkness became objectified in American literature as an Africanistic persona. I want to show how the duties of that persona—duties of mirroring and embodying and exorcism—are demanded and displayed throughout much of the national literature and help provide its distinguishing characteristics.

I pointed out that cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation’s literature. What seemed to be on the “mind” of the literature of the United States was the self-conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man. Emerson’s call for that new man, “The American Scholar,” indicates the deliberateness of the construction, the conscious necessity for establishing difference. But the writers who responded to this call, accepting or rejecting it, did not look solely to Europe to establish a reference for difference. There was a very theatrical difference underfoot. Writers were able to celebrate or deplore an identity—already existing or rapidly taking form—that was elaborated through racial difference. That difference provided a huge trove of signs, symbols, and agencies for organizing, separating, and consolidating identity along valuable lines of interest.

The historian Bernard Bailyn has provided us with an extraordinary investigation of European settlers in the act of becoming Americans. Particularly relevant is a description in his Voyagers to the West. One long passage from that book will help to clarify and underscore the salient aspects of this American character I have been describing:

William Dunbar, seen through his letters and diary, appears to be more fictional than real…. He… was a man in his early twenties who appeared suddenly in the Mississippi wilderness to stake out a claim to a large parcel of land, then disappeared to the Caribbean to return leading a battalion of “wild” slaves with whose labor alone he built an estate where before there had been nothing but trees and uncultivated soil. He was…complex…and…part of a violent biracial world whose tensions could lead in strange directions. For this wilderness planter was a scientist, who would later correspond with Jefferson on science and exploration, a Mississippi planter whose contributions to the American Philosophical Society…included linguistics, archeology, hydrostatics, astronomy, and climatology, and whose geographical explorations were reported in widely known publications….An exotic figure in the plantation world of early Mississippi…he imported into that raw, half-savage world the niceties of European culture: not chandeliers and costly rugs, but books, surveyor’s equipment of the finest kind, and the latest instruments of science.

Dunbar was…educated first by tutors at home, then at the university in Aberdeen, where his interest in mathe-matics, astronomy, and belles-lettres took mature shape. What happened to him after his return home and later in London, where he circulated with young intellectuals, what propelled, or led, him out of the metropolis on the first leg of his long voy-age west is not known. But whatever his motivation may have been, in April 1771, aged only twenty-two, Dunbar appeared in Philadelphia….

Ever eager for gentility, this well-educated product of the Scottish enlightenment and of London’s sophistication—this bookish young littérateur and scientist, who, only five years earlier, had been corresponding about scientific problems—about “Dean Swifts beatitudes,” about the “virtuous and happy life,” and about the Lord’s commandment that mankind should “love one another”—was strangely insensitive to the suffering of those who served him. In July 1776 he recorded not the independence of the American colonies from Britain, but the suppression of an alleged conspiracy for freedom by slaves on his own plantation….

Dunbar, the young érudit, the Scottish scientist and man of letters, was no sadist. His plantation regime was, by the standards of the time, mild, he clothed and fed his slaves decently, and frequently relented in his more severe punishments. But 4,000 miles from the sources of culture, alone on the far periphery of British civilization where physical survival was a daily struggle, where ruthless exploitation was a way of life, and where disorder, violence, and human degradation were commonplace, he had triumphed by successful adaptation. Endlessly enterprising and resourceful, his finer sensibilities dulled by the abrasions of frontier life, and feeling within himself a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half--savage world.

In this portrait, this narrative of William Dunbar, some elements, some pairings and interdependencies, are particularly noteworthy. First, the historical connection between the Enlightenment and the institution of slavery—the rights of man and his enslavement. Second, the relationship of Dunbar’s education and his new world enterprise. His education was exceptionally cultivated and included the latest thoughts on theology and science—in an effort perhaps to make them mutually accountable, to make each support the other. He is a product not only of “the Scottish enlightenment” but also of “London’s sophistication.” He reads Swift, discusses the Christian commandment to “love one another,” and is described as “strangely” insensitive to the suffering of his slaves. On July 12, 1776, he records with astonishment and hurt the slave rebellion on his plantation: “Judge my surprise….Of what avail is kindness and good usage when rewarded by such ingratitude.” “Constantly bewildered,” Bailyn goes on, “by his slaves’ behavior…[Dunbar] recovered two runaways and ‘condemned them to receive 500 lashes each at five dif[feren]t times, and to carry a chain & log fixt to the ancle.’” I take this to be a succinct portrait of the process by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted. It is a formation that has several attractive consequences, all of which are referred to in Bailyn’s summation of Dunbar’s character and located in how Dunbar feels “within himself”—“a power, a sense of freedom he had not known before.” But what had he “known before”? Fine education, London sophistication, theological and scientific thought. None of these, one gathers, could provide him with the authority and autonomy Mississippi planter life did. His “sense” is a “force” that “flows”: not a willed domination, a thought-out, calculated choice, but rather a kind of natural resource, already present, a Niagara Falls waiting to spill over as soon as he is in a position to possess “absolute control over the lives of others.” And once he has moved into that position, he is resurrected as a new man, a distinctive man, a different man. Whatever his social status in London, in the New World he is a gentleman. More gentle; more man. Why? Because the site of his transformation is within rawness. He is backgrounded by savagery.

Autonomy, newness, difference, authority, absolute power: these are the major themes and concerns of American literature, and each one is made possible, shaped, and activated by a complex awareness and use of a constituted Africanism that, deployed as rawness and savagery, provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of that quintessential American identity.

Autonomy—freedom—translates into the much champi-oned and revered “individualism”; newness translates into “in-nocence”; distinctiveness becomes difference and strategies for maintaining it; authority becomes a romantic, conquering “hero-ism” and “virility” and raises the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others. These four are made possible, finally, by the fifth: absolute power called forth and acted out against, upon, and within a natural and mental land-scape conceived of as a “raw, half-savage world.”

Why “raw and savage”? Because it is peopled by a non-white indigenous population? Perhaps. But certainly because there is readily at hand a bound and unfree, rebellious but serviceable black population by which Dunbar and all white men are enabled to measure these privileging and privileged differences.
Eventually individualism will lead to a prototype of Ameri-cans as solitary, alienated malcontents. What, one wants to ask, are Americans alienated from? What are Americans always so insistently innocent of? Different from? And over whom is ab-solute power held, from whom withheld, to whom distributed?

Answers to these questions lie in the potent and ego--reinforcing presence of an Africanistic population. The new white male can now persuade himself that savagery is “out there”: that the lashes ordered (five hundred, applied five times, equals twenty-five hundred) are not one’s own savagery; that repeated and dangerous breaks for freedom are “puzzling” confirmations of black irrationality; that the combination of Dean Swift’s beatitudes and a life of regularized violence is civilized; that, if sensibilities are dulled enough, the rawness remains external.

The imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journey is in very large measure shaped and determined by the presence of the racial Other. Statements to the contrary insisting upon the meaninglessness of race to American identity are themselves full of meaning. The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens, in that violent, self-serving act of erasure, to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.

Explicit or implicit, the Africanistic presence is a deep and abiding one that serves the literary imagination as both a visible and an invisible meditating force. So that even, and especially, when American texts are not “about” Africanistic presences, or characters, or narrative, or idiom, their shadows hover there, implied, signified, as boundaries. It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant literature) understood their “Americanness” as an opposition to the resident population. Race, in fact, now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the construction of “Americanness” that it rivals the old pseudoscientific and class-informed racialisms whose dynamics we are more used to deciphering.

As a means of transacting the whole process of Americaniza-tion while burying its particular racial ingredients, this African-istic presence may be something the United States cannot do without. For in this part of the twentieth century, the word American contains its profound association with race. This is not true of Canadian or English. To identify someone as South African is to say very little; we need the adjective “white” or “black” or “colored” to make our meaning clear. In the United States it is quite the reverse. American means white, and African-istic people struggle to make the terms applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphens. Americans did not have an imma-nent nobility from which to wrest and against which to define an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury. The American nation negotiated both its dis-dain and its envy in the same way Dunbar did: through a self--reflexive contemplation of fabricated, mythological Africanism. For Dunbar, and for American writers generally, this Africanis-tic Other became the means of thinking about the body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; became the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contem-plation of freedom, of aggression; for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifica-tions of power.

Reading and charting the emergence of an Africanistic persona in the development of a national literature is both a fascinating project and an urgent one, if the history and criticism of our literature are to become coherent. Emerson’s plea for intellectual independence was like the offer of an empty plate that writers could fill with nourishment from an indigenous kitchen. The language was, of course, to be English, but the content of the language, its subject, was to be deliberately, insistently un-English and anti-European, insofar as it rhetorically repudiated an adoration of the Old World and defined the past as corrupt and indefensible.

The necessity for establishing difference stemmed not only from the Old World, but from a difference within the New. What was distinctive in the New was, first of all, its claim to freedom and, second, the presence of the unfree at the heart of the democratic experiment—the critical absence of democracy, its echo, its shadow, its silence, and its silent force in the political and intellectual activity of some not-Americans. The distinguishing features of the not-Americans were their slave status, their social status—and their color. It is conceivable that the first would have self-destructed in a variety of ways had it not been for the last. These slaves, unlike many others in the world’s history, were visible to a fault. And they had inherited, among other things, a long history of the “meaning” of color. It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color “meant” something. This “meaning” had been named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment, in the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the same scholars investigated both the natural history and the inalienable rights of man—that is to say, human freedom.

One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes, or one ear, the significance of that difference from the smaller but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have “meaning.” In any case, the subjective nature of ascribing value and meaning to color cannot be questioned this late in the twentieth century. What matters is the alliance of “visually rendered ideas with linguistic utterances,” which leads us to the social and political nature of received knowledge.

Knowledge, however mundane and utilitarian, creates linguistic images and cultural practices. Responding to culture—clarifying, explicating, valorizing, translating, transforming, critiquing—is what artists everywhere do, and this is especially true of writers involved in the development of a literature at the founding of a new nation. Whatever were their personal and formally “political” responses to the “problem” inherent in the contradiction of a free republic deeply committed to a slave population, nineteenth-century writers were mindful of the presence of these blacks. More importantly, they addressed, in more or less passionate ways, their views on that difficult presence.

Awareness of this slave population did not confine itself to the personal encounters writers may have had. The publication of slave narratives was a nineteenth-century publication boom. The discussion of slavery and freedom filled the press, as well as the campaigns and policies of political parties and elected government. One would have to have been isolated indeed to be unaware of the most explosive issue in the nation. How could one speak of profit, economy, labor, progress, suffragism, Christianity, the frontier, the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, education, transportation (freight and passengers), neighborhoods, quarters, the military—practically anything a country concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse, at the heart of definition, the presence of Africans and their descendants?

It was not possible. And it did not happen. What did happen, frequently, was an effort to talk about these things with a vocabulary designed to disguise the subject. This did not always succeed, and in the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the consequence was a master narrative that spoke for the African and his descendants, or of him. The legislator’s narrative could not coexist with a response from the Africanistic persona.

Whatever popularity the slave narratives had—and they inspired abolitionists and converted anti-abolitionists—the slaves’ own narrative, while freeing the narrator in many ways, did not destroy the master narrative. That latter narrative could accommodate many shifts, could make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact. Silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing nar-rative. I am interested in the strategies for maintaining the silence and for breaking it. How did the founding writers of young America create and employ an Africanistic presence and persona? How does excavating these pathways lead to fresher, more profound analyses of what they contain and how they contain it?

 

Let me take one example: a major American novel that is both an example and a critique of romance as a genre. If we supplement our reading of Huckleberry Finn, expand it, move beyond its clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the fundamental innocence of Americanness; if we incorporate into our reading the novel’s combative critique of antebellum America, thus shedding much light on the problems created by traditional readings too shy to linger over the implications of the Africanistic presence at its center, it seems to be another, somehow fuller novel. We understand that at a certain level, the critique of class and race is there, although disguised or enhanced through a combination of humor, adventure, and the naive.

Twain’s readers are free to dismiss the novel’s combative, contestatory qualities and focus on its celebration of savvy inno-cence, while voicing polite embarrassment at the symptomatic racial attitude it espouses. Early criticism, those reappraisals in the fifties that led to the canonization of Huckleberry Finn as a great novel, missed or dismissed the social quarrel because the work appears to have fully assimilated the ideological assump-tions of its society and culture; because it is narrated in the voice and controlled by the gaze of a child without status—an outsider, marginal and already “othered” by the middle-class society he loathes and seems never to envy; and because the novel masks itself in the comic, the parody and exaggeration of the tall tale.

In this young but street-smart innocent, Huck, who is virginally uncorrupted by bourgeois yearnings, fury, and help-lessness, Mark Twain inscribes the critique of slavery and the pretensions of the would-be middle class, the resistance to the loss of Eden, and the difficulty of becoming that oxymoron, “a social individual.” The agency for Huck’s struggle, however, is the nigger Jim, and it is absolutely necessary that the term nigger be inextricable from Huck’s deliberations about who and what he himself is. Or, more precisely, is not. The major controversies about the greatness or near-greatness of Huckleberry Finn as an American (or even “world”) novel exist as controversies because they forgo a close examination of the interdependence of slavery and freedom, of Huck’s growth and Jim’s serviceability within it, and even of Twain’s inability to continue, to explore the journey into free territory.

The critical controversy focuses on the collapse of the so--called “fatal” ending of the novel. It has been suggested that the ending is a brilliant finesse that returns Tom Sawyer to center stage where he should be. That it is a brilliant play on the dangers and limitations of romance. That it is a valuable learning experience for Jim and for Huck for which we and they should be grateful. That it is a sad and confused ending to a book that the author, after a long blocked period, did not know what to do with and so changed it back to a child’s story out of disgust. What is not stressed is that there is no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim, and therefore that to let Jim go free, to let him not miss the mouth of the Ohio River and passage into free territory, would be to abandon the whole premise of the book.

Neither Huck nor Twain can tolerate in imaginative terms Jim freed. To do so would blast the predilection from its mooring. Thus the “fatal” ending becomes an elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanistic character’s escape, because freedom has no meaning to Huck or the novel without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism, the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another: the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave. The novel addresses at every point in its structural edifice, and lingers over in every fissure, the slave’s body and personality: the way it spoke, what passion, legal or illicit, it was prey to, what pain it could endure, what limits, if any, there were to its suffering, what possibilities there were for forgiveness, for compassion, for love.

Two things strike us in this novel: the apparently limitless store of love and compassion the black man has for his white masters, and his assumptions that the whites are indeed what they say they are—superior and adult. This representation of Jim as the visible Other can be read as white yearning for forgiveness and love, but the yearning is made possible only when it is understood that the black man has recognized his inferiority (not as a slave but as a black) and despised it; that, as Jim is made to, he has permitted his persecutors to torment and humiliate him, and responds to the torment and humiliation with boundless love. The humiliation Huck and Tom subject Jim to is baroque, endless, foolish, mind-softening—and it comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father, and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white ex-convict befriended by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written because it would not have been possible for two children to play so painfully with the life of a white man (regardless of his class, education, or fugitiveness) once he had been revealed to us as a moral adult. Jim’s slave status makes the “play and deferment” possible, and also actualizes, in its style and mode of narration, the significance of slavery to the achievement (in actual terms) of freedom. Jim seems unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate (except for the “talks” he and Huck have, long sweet talks we are not privy to. What did you talk about, Huck?). What should solicit our attention is not what Jim seems, but what Twain, Huck, and especially Tom need from him. Huckleberry Finn is indeed “great,” because in its structure, in what hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.

 

My suggestion that Africanism has come to have a meta-physical necessity should in no way be understood to imply that it has lost its ideological one. There is still much ill-gotten gain to reap from rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of inferiority and the ranking of differences. There is still much national solace in continuing dreams of democratic egalitarianism to be gained by hiding class conflict, rage, and impotence in figurations of race. And there is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminiscences of “individualism” and “freedom” if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite. “Individualism” is foregrounded and believed in when its background is stereotyped, enforced dependency. “Freedom” (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a pow-erful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply cheek by jowl with the bound and the unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced. The ideological de-pendence on racialism is intact.

Surely, it will be said, white Americans have considered questions of morality and ethics, the supremacy of mind and the vulnerability of body, the blessings and liabilities of progress and modernity, without reference to the situation of its black population. Where, it will be asked, does one find the record that such a referent was part of these deliberations?

My answer to this question is another one: In what public discourse can the reference to black people be said not to exist? It is there in every moment of the nation’s mightiest struggles. The presence of black people not only lies behind the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, and the illiterate. In the construction of a free and public school system, in the balancing of representation in legislative bodies, in jurisprudence and the legal definitions of justice. In theological discourse, in the memoranda of banking houses, in the concept of Manifest Destiny and the narrative that accompanies the initiation of every immigrant into the community of American citizenship.

The literature of the United States, like its history, illustrates and represents the transformations of biological, ideological, and metaphysical concepts of racial differences. But literature has an additional concern and subject matter: the private imagination interacting with the external world it inhabits. Literature redistributes and mutates in figurative language the social conventions of Africanism. In minstrelsy, a layer of blackness applied to a white face released it from law. Just as entertainers, through blackface, could render permissible topics that would otherwise have been taboo, so American writers have been able to employ an imagined Africanistic persona to articulate and imaginatively act out the forbidden in American culture.

Encoded or implicit, indirect or overt, the linguistic responses to an Africanistic presence complicate the texts, sometimes contradicting them entirely. They can serve as allegorical fodder for the contemplation of Eden, expulsion, and the availability of grace. They provide paradox, ambiguity; they reveal omissions, repetitions, disruptions, polarities, reifications, violence. In other words, they give the texts a deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly presented to us. It would be a pity if criticism of this literature continued to shellac these texts, immobilizing their complexities and power beneath its tight, reflecting surface. It would be a pity if the criticism remained too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.