The publication of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee in 1966 defined a subject of representation that would come to predominate in the African American novel for the rest of the twentieth century. Literally dozens of novels about slaves and slavery appeared in the wake of Jubilee. Although it would take five more years for the second novel in this tradition to appear (Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman), and four more for the third (Gayl Jones’s Corregidora), an African American novel about slavery would become almost annual fare thereafter. Given the paucity of novels about slavery before Jubilee and the enduring pervasiveness since, it is natural to inquire about the reasons for this development. What historical or social or cultural events permitted and sustained this new impetus in African American fiction? Since these contemporary narratives of slavery are both formally diverse and yet intellectually indebted to the first form of representation for people of African descent in the New World, the slave narrative itself, it is also worth asking questions about the formal features of this body of work. What is the meaning of the particular aesthetic choices made by authors who were mediating between a nineteenth-century Ur-textual form and a late-twentieth-century period of textual and formal play in American writing? Finally, we must ask, what is the political significance of this body of American fiction? What are we to make of this novel development in American culture at the end of the twentieth century?
The neo-slave narrative may be seen not as an abrupt appearance but rather as a logical continuity in African American writing. Like the first novel published by an African American, William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Walker’s Jubilee also draws on the actual life experiences of enslaved Americans and marks its indebtedness to the oral tales of slave life told to its author. Clotel marked its lineage from and indebtedness to the earliest form of black American writing by beginning with a slave narrative, Brown’s own, and concluded with a statement that many of the episodes recorded in the novel came from interviews with former slaves. Like Brown, who composed his novel by drawing on stories told from the “lips of those who, like [him]self, [had] run away from the land of bondage,” Walker bases her novel on what she calls “the most valuable slave narrative of all, the living account of my great-grandmother, which had been transmitted to me by her own daughter.”1 The first neo-slave narrative, then, appears in 1966, but its roots can be traced back a century – to the novel Walker began writing in the 1930s, based on the oral stories she heard in the 1920s, which recounted the experiences of an ancestor and former slave during the 1860s. Seen in this way, Jubilee certainly marks a generational continuity with an earlier African American oral and literary tradition.
Walker and her novel, however, are also somewhat anomalous in terms of the contemporary narratives of slavery. For one thing, Walker, born in 1915, belonged to an earlier generation of black writers than the other authors of neo-slave narratives. Their impetus is not so directly connected to the people or the institution they were writing about in their novels. A more reasonable way to understand the emergence of this considerable body of African American writing about slavery is by referring to the social, intellectual, and institutional transformations in American life during and since the mid-1960s.
The most significant social changes, obviously, were connected to and a result of the Civil Rights Movement. Although the full story is much more nuanced and detailed, we can say that the Civil Rights Movement in many ways forced historians undertaking studies of the American slave past to revise their views. Amidst the events of the Civil Rights Movement, the present provided a perspective on the past which historians could use to gauge their assumptions about how oppressed people behaved. When a younger generation of graduate students took to the streets during the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, they learned something new about the dynamics of social agency for change. Seeing that the relatively powerless people in these social movements could actually make history “happen from the bottom up,” historians began to re-imagine the possibility of revising their vision of the past and write history “from the bottom up.” One very positive result of the Civil Rights Movement on the American academy, then, is that it promoted this revision. As one historian noted, the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery not only made a statement for voter registration and the pending Voting Rights Act, but it also “linked the academic community to the nation, the past to the present, the professors who were writing our history to the men who were making it.”2 Partly as a result of that cross-fertilization between the streets and the ivory tower, there emerged a new body of historical studies of slavery that took seriously the agency and self-representation of the slaves, their community- and culture-building energies, and the forms of resistance they exhibited.
The Black Power Movement that came about in the mid-1960s augmented that body of writing by producing Black Power intellectuals who contested representations of slavery they found demeaning and uninformed by the new revisionist energies. The work of such notable historians as Eugene Genovese and Martin Duberman was dramatically altered by the interactions and debates they had with Black Power intellectuals like Sterling Stuckey, Michael Thelwell, Vincent Harding, and John Henrik Clarke. As Genovese noted in an essay tellingly entitled “The Influence of the Black Power Movement on Historical Scholarship,” the “recent upsurge of political awareness and participation has had an undeniable impact on historians.” The Black Power-era debate over William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and the Clarke-edited volume William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Critics Respond (1968) again focused attention on the representation of slaves. Finally, it is important to point out that the Black Power Movement was a movement that empowered people of African descent, and in this case empowered some to undertake new historical and fictional explorations into the slave past. Sherley Anne Williams recalled that, while the Civil Rights Movement “gave would-be writers of new African-American histories and fictions the opportunity to earn financial security and thus the time to write,” the Black Power Movement “provided the pride and perspective necessary to pierce the myths and lies that have grown up around the antebellum period.” Black Power, she concluded, gave these black writers “the authority to tell it as we felt it.”3
The Black Power Movement affected the American academy in more direct ways in 1968 and 1969, when African American students at predominantly white institutions began to agitate and demand Black Studies programs. The inauguration of these programs immediately created a new set of curricula, requiring new books and textbooks, which publishers were then quick to capitalize on. A Newsweek story entitled “The Black Novelists: Our Turn” revealed what the article referred to as a “black revolution” in literature and described how publishers were “scrambling to add black writers to their lists.”4 Many black-authored texts immediately began to appear. In 1969, at least six anthologies of slave narratives and interviews were released. In 1970, something like twenty-five black novels were published.
We can sum up the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that directly and indirectly affected the neo-slave narrative in the following way, then. As a result of the Civil Rights Movement, historians began to produce studies of slave life that were newly attentive to the culture and community and resistance of slaves, giving a portrait both closer to the experience of slaves that lent itself more to a rich fictional treatment. The Black Power Movement created a substantial change in American colleges and in African American writers by producing Black Studies programs in the former and giving direction and impetus to the latter. The American publishing industry responded to these changes by commissioning new books, series, anthologies, collections, and seeking out new and promising writers. These are the transformations in American life, I would argue, that enabled those artists who would produce a body of fictional work on slavery that had hitherto not been imagined and has since not been stalled.
The body of work that emerges from so disparate a complex of social and cultural origins, and deals with so varied and complicated an historical experience as American chattel slavery, contains a rich set of formal innovations for conveying that story. One of the remarkable things about contemporary African American narratives of slavery is how experimental the authors have been in developing diverse forms to tell a story that many acknowledge as the most difficult in their careers – what Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987) calls “unspeakable things unspoken” and “not a story to pass on.”5 An examination of the first three novels in this tradition will reveal the logic and purpose of the three major forms that these novelists employ: the historical novel, the pseudo-autobiographical slave narrative, and the novel of remembered generations.
In Jubilee, Walker set out to produce a narrative that married the “historical novel” (as described by Georg Lukacs) to the “Negro folk literature” she herself was striving to sustain through her own work. Wishing to write a book in which the folk predominate, she was able to produce a world vision in which “characters looking up from the bottom rather than down from the top” are the important ones by which the reader can gauge what is significant. She realizes this political impetus and artistic hope in the novel by primarily focusing on how slaves themselves felt and responded to the world they inhabited. In both the scene of Jubilee and in the slaves’ discussion of Abraham Lincoln as “emancipator,” Walker reveals in her writing what she had described in her theorizing – the importance of having a “world historical figure” like Lincoln become a “minor character seen through the mind of the major characters,” who in this novel are the slaves themselves (279–280, 246).6
This shift in focus not only allows Walker to describe the brutality of slavery, but it also allows her to show us life from the viewpoint of the slaves who suffered and also fomented insurrections, fled plantations, and created vibrant cultural and religious traditions. In this way, Walker anticipated the wave of historical studies that would emphasize the rebelliousness and survival strategies of American slaves. She also anticipated many of the themes that later novelists would find important. Two are especially worth noting. First, like the authors of so many slave narratives, and subsequently the writers of the early African American novels from Brown’s Clotel to Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901), Walker attends to the idea of what the black and commodified body of the slave meant to American culture. Walker muses on the ironies of a slave’s being “linked by blood” to the master class but “tied to slavery by a black mother” (93). This theme of how miscegenation reveals the hidden desires of despotic white men and exposes the hidden familial bonds of black and white Americans, a theme that can also be traced to the origins of the African American novel, would continue to haunt later writers of contemporary narratives of slavery. The second related theme involves the question of how one reconciles an oppressive past. Walker concludes Jubilee by meditating on the forgiveness necessary to forge a viable national future out of the ruins of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction. At the end of the powerful scene where Vyry rips off her clothing to reveal the webbed and ridged scars on her back, she forgives the man who had whipped her and testifies that she “ain’t got no hate in [her] heart for nobody” (485). Vyry’s religious beliefs, which Walker poetically describes as “a spiritual wholeness that had been forged in a crucible of suffering,” are held up both as a hope for a nation that would heal as crookedly as the scars on Vyry’s body and as “the best true example of the motherhood of her race, an ever present assurance that nothing could destroy a people whose sons had come from her loins” (486).
Walker’s remarkable success, then, is that in Jubilee she manages magnificently to produce a historical novel, with a third-person narrator, that reveals the dynamics and inner life of a group actively engaged in and responding both to the massive upheaval and turmoil of slavery and Civil War and to the numbing reality of a life that for the slave was “the same as always, drab and hopeless, with always a slender undercurrent of a nameless fear” (150). Later novelists such as Barbara Chase-Riboud in Sally Hemings (1979), Louise Meriwether in Fragments of the Ark (1994), and J. California Cooper in The Wake of the Wind (1998) would also produce historical novels in third-person voices, the first two of which have historical figures as their subjects (Sally Hemings and Robert Smalls). Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993), which has both third- and first-person narration and fluctuates between 1920 and 1858, also takes a historical figure as one of its main characters (Mary Ellen Pleasant).
In a 1972 essay, Walker notes that she undertook rigorous archival research amongst the papers and books about slavery in order to “substantiate” her material, to “authenticate” the story she had received from her grandmother’s lips, and to use “literary documents to undergird the oral tradition.” In a 1973 essay, describing his work on a novel that would appear ten years after Jubilee was published, Alex Haley claimed at the end of his research for Roots, which led him on a similar archival hunt, that he “trusted oral history now better than [he] trusted the printed page.”7 Appearing five years after Jubilee and five years before Roots, Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) represents in the novel itself this tension between the oral and the literate traditions, between the authority of the archives and the authenticity of the slaves’ voices and memories. Like Walker and Haley, Gaines was also ambivalent about the relationship between “what Miss Jane and folks like her have to say” and the “other sources, the newspapers, magazines, the books in the libraries.” In an interview conducted a few years after the novel had been published, he noted that he wished the book itself could have transcended the necessarily written form it had to take in the world of American publishing. “I wish I didn’t have to write it; I wish no one had to write it, because I think telling a story and talking is so much better. It’s too bad that we don’t have tapes of those older people talking, so we could listen to this without ever having to read it. That is one of my aims – for them, in their folk way, to tell what happened.”8 In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the history teacher who interviews Miss Jane feels that what was “wrong with them books” he uses to teach African American history is that “Miss Jane is not in them.”9
Gaines, like Walker, fits the narrative he offers to the form in which he offers it. A story about the century between the end of slavery and the beginning of formal legal equality is told by a woman who had lived that century. A story about the importance of affirming one’s own voice, about responding to the voices and books in the library that denied her existence and her humanity, is told in the voice of a former slave, in “Miss Jane’s language,” in her “selection of words,” in the “rhythms of her speech” (vii). And a novel that concludes on the importance of a civil and communal redemption instead of a symbolic one is aptly told by a community of voices that support and reinforce Miss Jane’s. “Miss Jane’s story,” the editor notes, “is all of their stories, and their stories are Miss Jane’s” (viii). Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is the first of the contemporary narratives of slavery to adopt the first-person voice of the former slave herself. Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) would also later experiment with the use of the slave’s voice, casting their novels in the form of what I have elsewhere called “neo-slave narratives,” that is, those novels that literally assume the voice of the fugitive slave and employ while deviating from the formal conventions of the antebellum slave narrative.10
Like both Walker and Gaines, Gayl Jones is also interested in the interplay between literate sources and oral tales in her novel, Corregidora (1975). The narrator Ursa is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Brazilian slave women who pass on the story of their incestuous raping at the hands of their master to each generation so that “we’d never forget.”11 They reproduce their stories in oral form not to supplement the written records, as had been the case in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, but to contest the effects of the absence of written records. In Brazil, as Ursa puts it, “when they did away with slavery down there they burned all the slavery papers so it would be like they never had it” (9). Also, like Gaines, Jones is interested in the dilemma of a group whose historical woundedness is both testimony to the evils of the past and yet inhibiting a healthier future. Ursa’s grandmother most forcefully expresses this ambivalent situation: “They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn’t burn what they put in their minds. We got to burn out what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood” (72). These, then, are the concerns Jones shares with Walker and Gaines. Unlike them, however, Jones also casts her novel almost wholly in twentieth-century America. As we saw, Walker had produced a historical novel set in the nineteenth century, while Gaines had given us the autobiography of a woman whose journey began in the nineteenth and was coming to an end in the twentieth century.
Jones gives us instead a story in which the major action takes place between 1947 and 1969, between the time Ursa undergoes a hysterectomy after her first husband Mutt pushes her down the stairs and the time when they are reconciled twenty-two years later. At the heart of the story, however, is the generational tale of the Corregidora women’s sufferings, and what Ursa attempts to do in her own narration is to discover to what extent her life is governed by what happened to these enslaved women in the past and to what extent she is able to transcend their suffering while nonetheless finding a means of passing their story on so it would not be forgotten. Ursa’s struggle, in other words, is to find a way to bear witness without losing the integrity of her own life, to have a scar testify to the horrors of the past and not the wound itself in her body or in her mind. The answer, in the end, is for Ursa to produce a blues song – a “song that would touch me, touch my life and theirs . . . A new world song. A song branded with the new world” (59) – to do the performative work that the next generation she now can’t birth would have done.
The narrative strategy Jones chooses for telling the story of Corregidora – in which slavery acts as the historical episode that inhabits and sometimes haunts the present – is innovative and yet also has a long history in African American writing. In some ways, this is the narrative strategy employed by writers in the 1890s, who used slavery to remark on the possible futures facing the nation a generation after the formal end of slavery. In Harper’s Iola Leroy, slavery is referred to as a “fearful cancer eating into the nation’s heart” which, removed by the surgery of war, continues to have “effects” on the nation. It is these effects, the ramifications of the peculiar institution on American racial mores and habits, that form the subject of these novels which trace the lineaments of American racial violence to their origins in slavery. In the words of the eponymous heroine’s mother, “Slavery . . . is dead, but the spirit which animated it still lives.” In Contending Forces (1900), Hopkins uses a narrative of slavery to comment on the blood-ties that link whites and blacks, British and American, as well as revealing the historical source of the contemporary practice of raping black women and lynching black men. The “atrocity of the acts committed one hundred years ago are duplicated today,” she writes, “when slavery is supposed no longer to exist.” In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt exposes the historical roots of the 1898 massacre of black people in Wilmington, North Carolina. At one level, his critique is of humanity itself, of the vaunted patina of society that covers a far more dangerous and lurking element. At the end of the riot, the narrator comments caustically that “our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first impact of primal passion.” But, at another level, Chesnutt notes that it is not simply human nature but a particular kind of human nature wrought out of centuries of oppressive practices that is, in fact, the “marrow” of the tradition of violence he traces in his novel. Slavery, he writes, is a “weed [that] had been cut down, but its roots remained, deeply imbedded in the soil, to spring up and trouble a new generation.”12
Corregidora, too, is in this same tradition. Slavery is the historical force that continues to dictate contemporary racial politics. What makes Jones’s novel innovative, though, is that she is concerned more with the ways slavery’s effects can be traced through the generational and familial patterns than through the larger social ones. Slavery is the pre-text in Corregidora because the slave ancestors who lived through it are the historical actors who give scope and depth to the lives of those familial members who are their progeny. It is not wholly innovative with Corregidora, since the main characters of both Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) have slave grandparents who act as either goads or guides to the grandchildren they try to protect with dreams or wily advice. Jones, like the later writers who employ this form, focuses more on ancestors than the earlier novelists, and sees more clearly the ways that a familial secret locked in the slave past continues to haunt and thereby limit the possibilities for the life of the contemporary narrator. Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981) essentially follow the same pattern of having a lurking family secret in slavery whose solution aids the narrator in moving forward with her or his social and romantic lives.
There are numerous variations on this formal innovation. Borrowing from science fiction, Butler uses time travel to transport her narrator literally from bicentennial Los Angeles back to antebellum Maryland to discover her family secret and origins. In Crossing over Jordan (1994), Linda Beatrice Brown sets her novel in the future where the characters resolve the family pain, that began in slavery, from the perspective of 2012. That pain flourished in the mid-twentieth century, and could be healed only by remembering that “there was a life before slavery, a time when we weren’t chained by sorrow.” Cyrus Colter’s Night Studies (1979) has a third-person narrator, but is otherwise involved in the same narrative quest in which the main character, the Black Power leader John Calvin Knight, recuperates from an assassination attempt and reconciles himself to the knowledge that he is the last of his “lineal line.” Knight unravels the history of his family from its African origins through its experience in America, that “new slave-importing nation of freedom zealots” in order to understand “that vast mystery: the mystery of Blackness.”13
Although some of the later contemporary narratives of slavery would experiment with and revise these forms, the first three novels in this tradition pretty well defined the three major forms that the latter works would assume or attempt to expand. Jubilee set the standard for the third-person historical novel of slavery that took as its subject the personal and political transition from slavery to freedom. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman renders the life story of a slave in her own words, replaying the motifs of the antebellum slave narrative and freeing the voice of the former slave to tell her own story. Corregidora takes as its subject the continuing traumatic legacy of slavery on later generations by telling the story of how late-twentieth-century African American subjects are tormented by family secrets lodged in the straitened lives of their enslaved ancestors.
Some of the narratives that are less easy to characterize, and fall somewhere amongst these three major forms, are those genealogies or epics of location that also appeared in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. As a genealogy, or, in the terms of its subtitle, “the saga of an American family,” Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) tells the story of the slave experience as part of the overall trajectory of his American family. In another genealogical narrative, Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s The River Where Blood Is Born (1998), the narrative is framed by two competing narrators in the afterlife (a gatekeeper who does beadwork and Kwaku Ananse, the spider who does webwork). The narrators trace several generations of black women from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States over the course of two centuries. Two multi-volume epics that explore the meaning of place – Leon Forrest’s “Forrest County” trilogy (1973–1983) and Raymond Andrews’s Muskhogean County trilogy (1978–1983) – also make slavery something akin to a pre-text in their fictions. For Andrews, this pre-text is almost nonexistent in the first novel, Appalachee Red (1978) and barely registers any more in the second, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee (1980). The latter mentions one character who was “born a slave,” and has a passing reference to how a road came to acquire its name because of the howling sound of whip-scarred slaves that continues to rustle through the pine trees. The final volume, Baby Sweet’s (1983), gives slightly more attention to the slave past of Muskhogean County because it contains the most explicit narratives about the origins of the settling of the County, which includes the displacement of the original Indians by the Europeans who came with “their Old World furniture and manners . . . and their New World slaves.”14
Forrest evokes and invokes slavery much more powerfully in his trilogy. The major character in the first and third volumes (There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, 1973; Two Wings to Veil My Face, 1983), Nathaniel (Turner) Witherspoon, is revolutionary, as his name suggests, but also repentant because his ancestors had gained their wealth from owning and selling slaves (and creating “special white lightning bleaching creme”). The trilogy as a whole meditates on the dangers of “amnesia” and the necessity of “memory-history.” But memory itself is also dangerous, as the second volume attests (The Bloodworth Orphans, 1977), since it “destroys as it heals.” Part of the danger of memory, as it is in the case of those narratives like Corregidora, is that there are “dark secrets of your family, and that past, generation unto generation.” The dark secret for one character, like that of Witherspoon, is that his fortune is “blood money at the root,” because it is a fortune built on the sale and enslavement of humans. As with Andrews’s trilogy, the third volume of Forrest’s is also the one where slavery appears most persistently, primarily because in that volume the dying Sweetie Reed tells her grandson the full story of their family’s legacy. Revisiting the theme of the dialectic of writing and orality, Forrest has Sweetie Reed recognize that her only hope for salvation was in telling “the whole story out loud,” while having Nathaniel write out the tale in longhand. Her advice to her grandson is to try to understand the past with a more sympathetic but still incisive perspective. Her mildly confusing advice is: “Don’t know too much about what you haven’t seen. Get the order of learning your grandfather was always talking about, troubling, remembering, and then revealing.”15
I have dwelt at some length on the formal features of the neo-slave narratives because form itself is so deeply important to all artists, and also because the second half of the twentieth century was a fecund period of formal experimentation in American fiction. More importantly, though, I have attended to the forms employed by these authors of contemporary narratives of slavery because they themselves draw attention to their struggle to find a respectful way to give voice to the historically muted subjects of slavery. Often this struggle manifests itself in the forms they chose to adopt and adapt. Form, as Charles Johnson indicated in one of his neo-slave narratives, is itself a site where deep meaning resides. No form “loses its ancestry,” he writes; “rather these meanings accumulate in layers of tissue as the form evolves.” Changing metaphors, he says that the form will surrender its “diverse secrets” if the modern writer is willing to “dig, dig, dig – call it spadework,” he puns.16 Form, for the others as much as for Johnson, is a matter of grave importance. Walker felt she was revising and emphasizing the popular character of the traditional nineteenth-century historical novel. Gaines wished his readers to have so unmediated an access to the voice of the elders who survived slavery that he wished Miss Jane’s voice could be heard directly and not read in his own text. And Jones drew her inspiration from that tradition of African American women’s writing from Harper to Hurston in order to carry forward that form of writing which renders the present more meaningful for its visitations to and understanding of the American slave past.
Form, I would also argue, is a site where the politics of representing slaves, slave voices, and slavery is manifestly at stake. We have already examined the social and cultural origins that gave impetus to the authors to produce novels that took up and addressed this episode of the American past. Now we need to explore the significance of what they have done, and continue to do. We need to appreciate how the neo-slave narratives are part of a grander post-Civil Rights-era trajectory involving African American intellectual and social life. We can start that meditation by first turning to the ways one subset of these authors used form itself as a way of raising particular questions about authenticity, control, and appropriation.
In an essay on canon formation, Cornel West comments that “issues of power, political struggle and cultural identity are inscribed within the formal structures of texts.” The form where such contestation most clearly evidenced itself was the one I have defined as “neo-slave narrative,” that is, those novels written by Gaines, Reed, Johnson, and Williams that assume the voice of the slave and revise the conventions of the slave narrative. These novelists, directly and indirectly, were involved in a heated debate about authenticity and appropriation. Appearing in the wake of the important cultural debate over Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), these authors realized and again raised the question of what was at stake in adopting the voice of the slave in a contemporary novel. Williams stated that she immediately began writing Dessa Rose in 1968 as a response to Styron, and the first section of the novel is a direct parody of the jailhouse interview that Styron had borrowed from the original Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) by Thomas Gray. Ishmael Reed mocked Styron (and his intellectual forebears) for their inability to comprehend what was at stake in the religious lives of slaves, and he used the analogous case of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “theft” of Josiah Henson’s story as an indirect method of raising the question of appropriation. In Oxherding Tale, Johnson attempted to situate himself philosophically between those who believed that only an African American author could produce a text that accurately captured the voice of the slave and those who believed in what he insisted on upholding as “universals.” In Middle Passage, he seemed to have resolved the issue in favor of the former, as he produced a narrative that was transformed from the slave ship’s manifest log into a slave narrative – in other words, a book meant to imply mastery over chattel became a text proclaiming the slave’s freedom. And Gaines, whose Autobiography can likewise be read as a critique of Styron’s Confessions, has stated that his “criticism of [Styron’s] book was with its form.”17
This contemporary debate over that particular form of writing involving the first-person voice of the American slave hauntingly echoes the nineteenth-century debate over the political truth contained in antebellum slave narratives and the early-twentieth-century debate over the documentary truth value of the autobiographies of slaves for the American historical profession. The voice of the slave, it seems, is doomed to be doubted where it is not absolutely proscribed. It is all the more heartening, then, to see the ways that Gaines, Reed, Williams, and Johnson appreciatively and respectfully attempt to recuperate those voices. The strategy they all share is that of producing a voice that is discontinuous and part of a larger communal voice. We saw how Gaines has others’ voices supplement Miss Jane’s, as he declares this story to be theirs as theirs, hers. In Flight to Canada, Reed gives us a narrator who, in an act of Voudon possession, tells his own life story and the life story of the slave who has commissioned him as a writer. In Dessa Rose, Williams produces a chorus of texts – the writing of the white “expert” on slave behavior, the stories of the white plantation mistress, and the recorded memories and voice of the slave Dessa – all of which we discover, only at the end of the novel, to have been the oral rendition of Dessa written down by her son. In Oxherding Tale, the story is interrupted by metafictional digressions on the form of the book, and in Middle Passage the text is both a record of commercial traffic in slaves and a statement of the slaves’ resistance to being commodified. These are all texts that, I think, can be accurately described as ambiguously first-person, suspicious of the coherent subject of narration, and inviting of others’ voices. In contrast, it is worth noting that Styron’s narrator is both disdainful of any voice other than his own and quite self-consciously absolutist in his individualism. “I shiver feverishly in the glory of self,” he proclaims at one point.18 Against this kind of arrogance, and in respect to the importance of the historical task they are undertaking, Gaines, Reed, Williams, and Johnson produce choral and communal voices in an effort to capture the kind of spirit also evinced in those antebellum slave narratives where the authors realized that they spoke not only for themselves but for a captive community whose voices they represented.
Related to the question of voice, and raising the issue of appropriation in a somewhat different way, is the question of the relationship between orality and textuality, between the spoken word that enlivens and the written one that captivates. We have seen how artists like Walker, Haley, and Gaines found themselves in libraries and archives attempting to supplement the spoken words they heard in their living rooms and on their porches from their grandparents. This tension between the spoken and the written is, of course, an important feature in much African American fiction. While attaining the prohibited literacy is often cast as one of the crucial stages in the progress to freedom in slave narratives and later African American Bildungsromane, the written word is also a potent weapon against people of African descent. As Williams puts it in her preface to Dessa Rose, “Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth – and made of that process a high art – remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often, these have betrayed us.” This ambivalent relationship with the written word has produced a kind of double consciousness which Robert Stepto describes as African American culture’s simultaneous “distrust of literacy” and “abiding faith in it.”19 In general, in the neo-slave narratives there is much more of the distrust than the faith.
Some of the writers discussed here do genuinely express that ambivalence. Probably Reed’s Flight to Canada most fully captures the tension. The fugitive slave Raven Quickskill escapes slavery because of his writing – “it was his writing that got him to Canada . . . for him, freedom was his writing” – but he also finds himself endangered because he cannot control the circulation of what he has written. Later, after his poem has revealed to his former master where he is, he wonders whether that made his writing “a squealer? A tattler?” The whole book is framed around the question of how to protect writing so that it is not vulnerable to theft. Employing a Voudon practice, Reed’s narrator produces a book in which he “put witchery on the word” so that for any would-be appropriator “to lay hands on the story would be lethal to the thief.”20
For other authors, writing was a mode that was problematic because it was inefficient. Gaines had wished to be free of the constraints of writing because it was a mode that was inherently limited for capturing the nuances and rhythms of the spoken word. In The Chaneysville Incident, Bradley’s narrator John Washington finds writing (in the form of the cards on which he has transcribed historical dates and events) to be a constraint on the kind of imagination that will allow him to transport himself fully back into the past. He concludes the novel by setting fire to his written cards. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, two professional writers, Dana Franklin and her white husband Kevin, discover that written words can never capture the experience of slavery, even as they realize that it is the only medium they have to reveal what they know. For others, writing was an absence that had to be answered with oral productions. In Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, the written records of Brazilian slavery are destroyed and therefore the Corregidora women have to produce generational tales and blues songs to ensure the survival of their story.
Finally, there are a set of authors of neo-slave narratives who emphatically point out the dangers of writing for the integrity of the slave. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings begins with the census taker for Albemarle County misrecording Sally Hemings as “white” in order to save the reputation of Thomas Jefferson. Writing – in this case, official writing sanctioned by the government – is a metaphor for who gets to control definitions of identity and who gets ascribed the authority to report on the American past. Against the official records of the census taker and the writings of the third president of the United States interspersed in the text of the novel, the ex-slave Sally Hemings reports her own memories and inserts her own oral tale. Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose likewise begins with an episode in which a white writer attempts to control the voice of a slave, only to find himself thwarted because her voice exceeds the capacity of his mind and text. In the end, we discover that his written words had been subsumed in Dessa’s own oral rendition. Writing, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is a danger in every form in which it appears. The newspaper article that Stamp Paid shows to Paul D reveals the infanticide Sethe had committed, but it is unable to report or even to comprehend the motives that made the fugitive slave take the life of her daughter. One of the reasons Sethe escapes slavery is that Schoolteacher, the white man in charge of the plantation, writes a pseudo-anthropological document in which he lists the “human characteristics” of the slaves alongside the “animal ones” (193). No one, “nobody on this earth,” Sethe declares, “would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper” (251). Later, Sethe would take upon herself a measure of responsibility for Schoolteacher’s racism because she feels that she was complicit in helping him produce the materials for his writing. “I made the ink,” she tells an uncomprehending Paul D at the end of the novel. “He couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made the ink” (271). Writing, for this former slave, is so much associated with misrepresentation that even the physical properties involved in it are tainted.
The answer for many of these authors and characters who are skeptical of writing or believe it positively detrimental is to subvert writing with oral performances. The slaves in all these novels respond by positing their memory as a crucial documentary force in history, their voice as a power equal to the written texts they contest. In the words of the schoolmistress Miss Carey in Cliff’s Free Enterprise, “Books are fragile things” whose contents “can easily be lost. We must become talking books,” she concludes, in order to ensure the safety, the integrity, and the authenticity of the tale told.21
Another means by which the writers of contemporary narratives of slavery talk about cultural appropriation is by focusing on the physical appropriation of the slave’s body. In Jubilee, Walker represents scenes where we see the slave’s body abused (at the whipping stand) and commodified (on the auction block). In a scene that would be repeated with variations in later novels, particularly those written by women, Walker shows us the ways that slave women’s bodies were subject to and marked by the torture of enslavement. A brutal whipping applied to her body after Vyry attempted to run away “left a loose flap of flesh over her breast like a tuck in a dress.” Walker concludes the scene and the section on slavery by noting: “It healed that way” (174). In Butler’s Kindred, the narrator is physically beaten, whipped, and finally loses her left arm between her 1976 Los Angeles home and her white slave-owning great-grandfather’s hold on her in nineteenth-century Maryland. In Williams’s Dessa Rose, the scar tissue that “plowed through [Dessa’s] pubic region” so that her “loins looked like a mutilated cat face,” the result of an especially sadistic whipping, is both a marker of how she had been sexually abused by slavery and a sign that the plantation mistress insists on seeing to ensure the validity of the story of the slave’s suffering (154). The body of the slave, in Dessa Rose, is always on display, always the final determinant of the truth value of her words. The scar that heals on Sethe’s back in Morrison’s Beloved takes the form of a “chokeberry tree,” which acts as a sign of others’ perceptual distance (16). When Paul D is unable to see the beauty in Sethe, in post-coital triste, for instance, he sees nothing but a “revolting clump of scars” (21). When he is able to love this woman, when she becomes truly a “friend of [his] mind” (273), he is better able to appreciate that her body has healed artfully, and he instead sees “the sculpture her back had become,” and he cannot rest until “he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth” (17–18), in the same way that Harker in Dessa Rose redeems by kissing Dessa’s scars and tells her that they do not “impair” but rather “increase your value” (191).
Turning the language of commodification against itself (from the value of a slave to human value), turning scar tissue into flesh recovered by intimacy, are a few of the ways that these artists show that the body is not only brutalized but reclaimed. Baby Suggs, the grandmother in Beloved, who “limps like a three-legged dog when she walked” because of a hip injured in slavery (139), and whose “heart . . . started beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River” into freedom (147), expresses most beautifully the primary lesson of recovery: “Here . . . in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard” (88). In various ways and with differing emphases, these artists all show in painful detail the ways that black women’s bodies were scarred and dismembered by slavery, and then salvaged and remembered in the acts of free love.
So far, we have seen how the writers of the contemporary narratives of slavery recuperate voice and body, challenge appropriation and commodification, and experiment with the tension between a literacy that captures and an orality that liberates. A final point about the politics of representing slavery in the neo-slave narratives concerns what these artists say about contemporary black subjectivity. Why have so many chosen to represent slavery as the subject from which to make those statements? It would of course be presumptuous to attempt to provide any kind of satisfactory answer that would encompass or even touch on so large and diverse a body of writing. Yet these questions demand some kind of response, some hint of what impelled so many to undertake a task that all acknowledge as daunting and forbidding. I would like to end by briefly making two broad points about the work these novels do.
The first is about contemporary African American subjectivity, about the identity that emerged at the same time as did the neo-slave narratives, in the mid-1960s. In some ways, the Black Power Movement spurred many of these writers to begin their projects. And, although many cultural nationalists and Black Aesthetic intellectuals frowned on such returns to the past, the reclamation of “blackness” as a political category and an ethnic identity necessitated such an archeological project, as it were. To know what the post-Civil Rights “black” subject would be, it was essential to recall the complexity of what the first black American subject had been, not merely to use names inherited from slavery as terms of abuse for those who appeared unresistant to the social order, but to discover the covert and overt acts of resistance that permitted those earlier generations to ensure the survival and birth of this one. In the works of the writers closest in time to the Black Power Movement, Jones, Reed, Butler, Colter, and Williams, their project was one of reclamation of those historical subjects who had suffered first at the hands of owners and then in the intellectual programs of revolutionaries. Reed wished to salvage the “Uncle Tom,” as Butler and Williams did the “Mammy,” not to celebrate quiescence in the face of suffering but to be just in their assessment of what those who lived through it experienced, and what we, “who never was there,” as Morrison puts it (31), did not. It is, yet again, another act of respect, in addition to being an act of historical recovery for the task of providing continuity and parallels for the contemporary African American subject, whose struggles against the inequities of the present would be part of a tradition and mirror the acts of those who struggled in the past.
The second and last point is about the means of recovery, in each sense of that term. Memory is how the past is recalled; memory is also how we heal from that past. Insistently, the artists who produce neo-slave narratives return to what Leon Forrest calls “memory-history,” most with an understandable ambivalence toward a force that they, like him, believe “destroys as it heals.” What Morrison defines as “re-memory” is, after all, a “place in which things so bad had happened that when you went near them it would happen again” (35–36). This is what makes the story of slavery so utterly difficult a one to tell, what makes it a story one would prefer to pass on rather than to pass on to others. Yet is is also the only way to heal, as so many characters in so many of these novels discover again and again. At the end of Jubilee, Vyry strips in the moonlight and asserts her freedom from slavery and hatred, showing that her heart is as healed as the torn flesh above it. At the end of Jones’s Corregidora, Ursa sings a blues duet with her husband in which each asserts the desire to recover from the “hurt” of the past. It is by sharing memories that recovery is made possible. Beloved ends with Paul D wanting to “put his story next to” Sethe’s (273), Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage with Rutherford and Isadora wishing to have their “histories perfectly twined for all time.”22 And it is by sharing those stories and that history with their readers that the neo-slave narrative authors perhaps hope to heal a nation that in many ways still denies its original wound.
What the body of fiction that began with Jubilee and continues past this chapter does, at the simplest level, is recover for us a period long-neglected, an institution oft forgotten, and a population of brave souls too frequently denigrated. Ralph Ellison’s invisible man begins his meditations on his invisibility by tracing it to the slaves in his family: “I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.”23 The contemporary narratives of slavery have helped create a similar sentiment for this generation by so manifestly claiming an important space in American fiction for acts of courage, expressions of love, and endless demonstrations of cultural ingenuity by those people whose enslavement did not cause them to lose sight of their humanity.
1. Williams Wells Brown, Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (London, 1853), pp. 17–55, 245. Margaret Walker, Jubilee (1966; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. iii. Hereafter all quotations from all the neo-slave narratives will be taken from the cited edition and noted parenthetically in the body of the chapter.
2. Jonathan Weiner, “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959–1980,” Professors, Politics, and Pop (New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 175, 192, 200; A. S. Eisenstadt, “The Perennial Myth – Writing American History Today,” Massachusetts Review 7 (1966): 773, 757.
3. Eugene Genovese, In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 231. Sherley Anne Williams, “The Lion’s History: The Ghetto Writes B[l]ack,” Soundings 76.2–3 (1993): 248.
4. Robert A. Gross, “The Black Novelists: Our Turn,” Newsweek (June 16, 1969): 94–98.
5. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), pp. 199, 274.
6. Walker, “How I Wrote Jubilee,” How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), p. 64.
7. Walker, “How I Wrote Jubilee,” p. 56. Alex Haley, “Black History, Oral History, and Genealogy,” Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, eds. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1984), p. 286.
8. Ernest Gaines, “Miss Jane and I,” Callaloo 1.3 (May, 1978): 37–38. Jerome Tarshis, “The Other 300 Years: A Conversation with Ernest Gaines,” Conversations with Ernest Gaines, ed. John Lowe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 74.
9. Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971; New York: Bantam, 1989), p. vi.
10. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
11. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975; Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 9.
12. Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy Or Shadows Uplifted (1892; Boston: Beacon, 1992), pp. 216, 217. Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Boston: The Colored Cooperative Publishing Co., 1900), p. 15. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), pp. 310, 269.
13. Linda Beatrice Brown, Crossing Over Jordan (1995; New York: Ballantine, 1996), p. 285. Cyrus Colter, Night Studies (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979), pp. 196, 772–773.
14. Raymond Andrews, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee (1980; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 199, 60. Andrews, Baby Sweet’s (1983; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 4, 71.
15. Leon Forrest, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973; Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 3–10, 109, 107. Forrest, The Bloodworth Orphans (1977; Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 41, 340, 218, 174. Forrest, Two Wings to Veil My Face (1983; Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 139, 276.
16. Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale (1982; New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 119.
17. Cornel West, “Black Critics and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 41. William Parrill, “An Interview with Ernest Gaines,” in Conversations with Ernest Gaines, p. 178.
18. William Styron, Confessions of Nat Turner (1967; New York: Vantage International Editions, 1992), p. 125.
19. Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: William Morrow, 1986), p. 5. Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979; 2nd edn.; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 196.
20. Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976; New York: Atheneum, 1989), pp. 88, 85, 13, 11.
21. Michele Cliff, Free Enterprise (New York: Dutton, 1993), p. 211.
22. Johnson, Middle Passage (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 209.
23. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Vantage International Edition, 1990), p. 15.