10 Bound and Unbound: Figurations of Time-Space in African American Authorship
ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the distinctive imagining of time and space in a continuum of African American authorship. Taking its coordinates from Robert Hayden’s benchmark poem ‘Middle Passage’, it spans both a selective gallery of key literary writings and cognate arts from jazz to film and photography. The point of departure is slave-narrative with its witness to the denial of rights of time and mobility, especially as encountered in a text like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). This focus is then widened to embrace the ways Afro-America and the writings in its name has fashioned its own sense of time and space, whether against a background of slave-shadowed Dixie or the cellular northern city, historic black war-zone or fantastical alternate-reality. The writers invoked include Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Weldon Johnson, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed.
Middle passage:
voyage through death
to life upon these shores.
—Robert Hayden, ‘Middle Passage’ (1962)1 ← 225 | 226 →
These lines, several times repeated in one of the most powerful memorial poems of Atlantic slavery, supply points of departure, a contour. Hayden’s ‘Middle Passage’ summons black bodies rendered fetid in the slave ship’s hold (‘charnel stench, effluvium of living death’ (1504)) even as captain and crew pray to their Christian god for safe passage on from Cuba. Mention is made of sexual exploitation of female slaves (‘kept naked in the cabins’ (1502)). A white crewman gives voice to his side of the celebrated mutiny aboard the Spanish slaver Amistad in 1839 (‘Our men went down/before the murderous Africans’ (1504)). The poem’s ensuing account of the thrust for liberty by the ship’s human cargo, the murder of captain and most of the crew, and the ship’s drift to Long Island, makes for both specific and iconic remembrance. In this respect lines like ‘Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,/the dark ships move, the dark ships move’ (1503) invoke slave transportation as both one time-and-place and yet the index of wholly more encompassing race history and its repetitions.
In his imaginative fashioning of these ‘dark ships’ (1503) and their African cargo Hayden deploys a rare gallery of voice, not to say dexterity of image. ‘Middle Passage’ quite especially envisages slavery as denial to the enslaved of their own rights of time or their own command of mobility, its overthrow the necessary reclamation of both. The remembered protest of slaveholders against ‘the right/of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters’ (1505) in turn connects directly to the US Supreme Court case of 1841 where John Quincy Adams successfully argued for release of the thirty-seven insurrectionists back to Sierra Leone. Necessarily Joseph Cinqué, his Sierra Leone-Mende name Sengbe Pieh, features. It is under his leadership that fellow slaves are unshackled, freed not only of immediate bondage but in due course to achieve re-possession of their own time and space.2
The implications of slave transport for Afro-America’s rite-of-passage at large invite every kind of note. They encompass slave-ports in Africa, the Antilles, and the Atlantic seaboard, seizure and ocean crossing, landfall, plantation labour, Christianization, post-Civil War segregation, the Great ← 226 | 227 → Migration across several generations from cotton or tobacco Dixie to the north’s cities and enclaves, and each Jim Crow working of color-line or mainstream-minority divide. It is history, period for period, location for location, that has inspired key allusions to ancient and bible god, Mississippi backcountry and Harlem night, and can be heard in the spoken languages of sermon, trickster tales as in Brer Rabbit and Jack the Bear, signifying, and wordplay like joshing and the dozens.
Each turn of clock or transition of place, to shared effect, likewise also enters the written page. The span stretches from the nineteenth-century slave narrative of Frederick Douglass and his compeers to the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s led by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, and from Malcolm X and the Black Power writings of the 1960s to Beloved (1987) and the other Nobel Prize fiction of Toni Morrison. Throughout, as in ‘Middle Passage’, these writings make the withholding but also Afro-America’s re-cooption of its own timeline or space a presiding focus.
Put again tangibly, and to cite another departure-point, the landing of a cargo of African slaves from a Dutch man-of-war in 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia, reaches forwards through time to, and now well beyond, Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights oration (‘Free at Last’), given at the major locus of DC’s Lincoln Memorial in August 1963.3 The echo is of slave labour, field or house, and of Emancipation however flawed. Other echoes connect to the citied north, the struggle to get beyond sub-standard tenement housing (in Chicago ‘The Projects’), the spirals of prison cell, drugs, gang death. None of which is to talk mere victimhood. A whole spectrum of creativity helps shape the equation, self or community, sport or language. Nor does this suggest some hermetic African American literary tradition. The imaginative cross-influences have been many, from Classical antecedent in the verse and homilies of the Boston slave-servant poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–84) to the role of Dante or Poe in Ralph Ellison’s landmark Invisible Man (1952). But an African American literature suffused in its own ← 227 | 228 → discrete ‘black’ workings of time and space, and in which whole corridors of remembrance lie embedded, is equally not to be doubted.
In one sense this is writing centered in individual lives, but it again points to a yet more inclusive set of implications. What access to the US national timeline is Afro-America to occupy? How is Afro-America best to be situated in the national space? Latterly can it be said definitively that the Obama presidency signals a species of redemption, Afro-America finally and truly ‘up from slavery’ into full tenure in the nation? Black history, its evolving shelves of time and place, builds into a species of memorial archive, an acoustic corridor lodged in the African American cultural psyche. The longstanding power-politics of color, the play of separatism and assimilation, stalk everywhere, with gains in some respects, losses in others as the new century’s Black Lives Matter movement underscores. Collective remembrance along these latitudes and longitudes understandably has found its way into black literary idiom.
It has done so also in an accompanying diversity of expression. Rarely has that more been the case than in African American music. Whether slave ring-shouts, cotton and other work songs, spirituals as affecting as ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, Dixieland stomp, or blues from Bessie Smith to James Brown, the will to creative self-owning of time and space is unmistakable. One readily invokes church choiring and Civil Rights anthems, but also magisterial jazz classics like Ellington’s ‘Take the A Train’, and John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’. The rap generation of Kanye West or Sean Combs gives yet another bearing, musical incantation as witness or hex, but above all liberation.
Visual arts have equally been implicated, whether Romare Bearden’s bravura collage and bricoleur canvases, the block-styled Jacob Lawrence Migration Series, Elizabeth Catlett’s sculptures, or the spectrum of photo-imagery from James Van der Zee to Gordon Parks. Nor would it be possible to overlook the line of cinema from Oscar Micheaux’s silent portraits of racial lineage like The Homesteader (1918) through to Spike Lee’s debut film She’s Gotta Have It (1986) with its concentration on un-coerced female sexual autonomy. The rich satiric graphics of Ollie Harrington add their weight, line-drawn shies at modern-era encirclements of racism from Dixie to urban America. Each of these different creativities help determine the ← 228 | 229 → working imagery of black time and space, a past into present from slave trade to Civil Rights, a transition of locale from the quarters to the metropolitan city.
Despite prohibitions against slave literacy the African American written record begins early, whether the almanacs of Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the Narrative of the Igbo-born author Olaudah Equiano (1745–1801), or the fierce abolitionist Appeal of David Walker (1785–1830). The legacy has hugely widened across a multiplicity of genres, story and autobiography, poetry and drama, and even if given over to serious business not infrequently willing to engage in seams of dark irony and laughter. No one voice holds, no one overall version of time as space, space as time. Moreover, as much as the writing may address any explicit liberation theme, its variety, not to say virtuosity, of styling signals the yet further un-bounding of boundary. An abbreviated selection of exemplary texts, even if well enough known, and dare it be said canonical, does duty.4
Slave narrative of essence enters the inaugural reckoning, a roster of now classic touchstones indeed to include Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845) with its dark-to-light account of ‘stolen’ literacy and escape from Maryland servitude to New England freedom. The very titling of fellow slave, more properly ex-slave, accounts give symptomatic insignia. Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847) points up the presiding iconography of capture and flight, the slave self’s de-enslavement and taking possession of new time, new space. Henry ‘Box’ Bibb’s Narrative (1849) borders on surreal historical riddle, bondage in Kentucky, escape in the vaunted box, and life in Canada where he founds the abolitionist journal The Voice of the Fugitive. The 2013 Steve McQueen screen adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), with its New York to ← 229 | 230 → Louisiana highjack, could not more precisely remind the reader of the self arbitrarily pinioned to un-chosen chronology, un-chosen space.5
Few texts, however, settle more upon slavery’s incarcerating time-space than Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Its gendered, fact-fiction story of Linda Brent as black slave-woman surrounded by sexual risk from her plantation owner / white pursuer Dr Flint adds further terms of reference. The plotline, which scholarship has established as largely actual, turns centrally on Brent’s recourse to hiding-out in her grandmother’s garret for seven years, the alternative being the unwilling surrender of her body or likely rape and murder. Her literal ‘retreat’ (114), boarded up in a cabin except for the trapdoor, and relieved from ‘darkness total’ (114) and airlessness only by three rows of loophole made with a gimlet, is emphatic enough. But before finagling her escape to Boston she will observe her children with fugitive eyes, spy resentfully upon Flint, suffer benumbed limbs and attack from insects, and mark each Christmas Day as non-festive, neither ceremonial date nor round-the-table family gathering. From start to finish Jacobs/Brent opts to delineate slavery as time put in abeyance (‘the dreary years I passed in bondage’ (201)) or as ‘rightful’ (200) space preemptively sealed. This curtailing of individual agency within slave parameters might almost be a geometric, squared enclosure.
Slave texts, even so – to include neo-slave storying like Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), with its gynocentric chronicle of the slave-woman Vyry Brown, or Leon Forrest’s The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), with its epic genealogy of racially inter-ravelled lives begun in slaveholding – offer but one kind of expression of the temporal-spatial axis evident across African American literary production. The sense of chronological dimension, as of locationality, has been insistent. A roster underscores the point, writing by way of example given over the south, to the city, to underground-ness, and to perspectives of ‘passing’ and of the postmodern. ← 230 | 231 →
As to the south and the city, the sense of the era is important. Within the former Confederate states that has notably meant Reconstruction (1863–77), and a century later, the Martin Luther King years as they led into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. North of the Mason-Dixon Line it has been variously the Jazz Age 1920s, the Depression 1930s, and the Black Power 1960s. Likewise spatial status enters the reckoning. Segregation and its footfalls, whether Birmingham, Alabama or Little Rock, Arkansas, backcountry or township, has apportioned great swathes of the black south. The black north looks to Afro-cities like Harlem or Chicago as mecca yet ghetto, pleasure palace yet labour source, church respectability yet street turf. Literary narrative strikingly refracts these different, often enough contrary, cross-widths.
The south can invoke fictions by Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Gaines to give, precisely, contrasting dimensions of black time-space. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), famously all but ignored on publication yet under the advocacy of Alice Walker and others installed as seminal ‘womanist’ text, offers in its protagonist Janie Mae Crawford the portrait of a quite special style of black autonomy. This bears on a world beyond white coordinates, a wholly black-cultural Dixie full of its own chronology and living space. The novel offers a dense menu of habit, household, foodway, dress, and always family memory. Its very language, down-home, folkloric, as much to be heard as read, even at times almost that of ballad, draws coevally from southern black timeline and from powers of site be it township South Carolina or rural Georgia. Un-boundering as motif runs through the novel.
A black Dixie lived in and for itself does not free Janie’s world of other boundaries, above all those of gender. Her progress through different liaisons – the mean older sharecropper Logan Killicks, the mayor of Eatonville Joe Starks, and the gambler-poet Tea Cake – tells a coming into her own: un-compliant black womanhood beyond women’s ‘mule’ standing spoken of by her country grandmother. The grandmother herself speaks of wanting to ‘preach a great sermon about colored women sitting on high’ (32). Joe Starks is drawn to a town made ‘all outa colored folks’ (48). But the principal register is reserved for Janie, whom as their marriage wanes Joe calls ‘too moufy’ (116). His death releases her, as she tells her friend Pheoby, to ← 231 | 232 → ‘dis freedom’ (116). Life with Tea Cake, in consequence, intimate, sexual, un-coerced, and its remembrance after the Lake Okechobee hurricane and the dog-bite rabies that kills him, bespeaks her moving on into yet newer orders of time and space:
Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled in from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life was in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see … (286)
Janie’s ‘horizon’ in its plenary sense of possibility is both temporal and spatial, a self in prospect for time ahead yet un-forgetful of Tea Cake’s death, a self in the one America yet open to further American parameters.
Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), in the sequence of The War Years, Reconstruction, The Plantation and The Quarters, would seem to render the south more in terms of longitudinal time-space. That, however, can flatter to deceive. Voiced by Jane, one-time Louisiana slave under the name Ticey and now the centenarian dictating her story into a tape-recorder, to be sure covers a span from 1860s Secession to 1960s Civil Rights. But the novel adroitly also transposes its circumstantial detail of time and space into forms of associative meta data, the given era or location steeped in skeins of memory, feeling, inward iconography. The instances are many; the novel for all its realist-naturalist surface borders on a gallery of images.
As Yankee troops enter the plantation, Ticey’s white mistress speaks of the ‘precious blood of the South’ (5), the very romance of a magnolia-flavoured white Dixie. The would-be flight of Jane and her fellow slaves to Ohio, and avoidance of the well-named ‘patrollers’, leads into a major ritual of self-decolonization (‘Nobody was keeping the same name Old Master gived them’ (18)). Reconstruction bears its own contradiction (‘And that was the deal: the Secesh get their land, but the Yankees lend the money’ (69)). The blood of Ned, the Frederick Douglass figure killed for his refusal to agree to restored white hegemony, becomes stigmata, sedimented into the very soil of the south. In having Jane give witness to the ‘tragic mulatto’ story of Mary Agnes Lefabre, Gaines subtly reworks one of the most ancient ← 232 | 233 → of racial taboos, the taint of ‘black blood’. The Cajun Jules Raynard observes for good reason that ‘The past and the present got all mixed up’ (192). The novel’s final sequence in which the young Civil Rights activist Jimmy Washington is killed by Klan thugs for using a whites-only water tap, and Jane, in her great age, marches by Robert Samson, the latter-day liberal scion of the plantation dynasty, leaves history still dynamically in motion. The novel again shows the one successive phase or site of racial-historical business, in this instance the last in time, reflexively folding back into all those that have preceded.
Step north from Dixie to the black city and another pair of novels do service. Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Jazz Age milestone, images this premier metropolis as a beckoning concourse of on-the-pulse black life. The story at hand, that of Jake Brown as l’homme moyen sensuel, variously World War I army enlistee who deserts in Marseilles, stoker, dock worker, kitchen cook on the trains, gambler, and whose alter ego is the intellectual Haitian porter Ray and who will find, lose, and then re-find his lover Felice, takes place against not one but two black cityscapes. Principally that means Harlem, with Philadelphia a lesser enclave. For in his depiction of Harlem, the brownstones and cabaret, chippies and pimps, shiv and bar fights, money-lenders and police raids, eateries and ragtime, and not least the ready sexuality, McKay gives fond but not unsparing portraiture to his city of blackness as a Jazz Age realm of the senses.
Time and place again are consciously brought into juncture, a Harlem full of its own day and night yet the aggregation of past timelines, a Harlem incontrovertibly black Manhattan yet seamed in the footfalls of Dixie as earlier down-home. Jake’s sense of the city within-a-city as he crosses the Atlantic from France captures these dimensions in a language of working affection:
Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and ‘blues’ playing somewhere … singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem … Turning now in Jake’s sweet blood … (15) ← 233 | 234 →
There may well be saccharin in this version of Harlem. But McKay astutely also has his eye to the contraries built into its race-history. That can be the slavery-bequeathed colour hierarchy of yellows, browns and blacks, irreverence towards Booker T. Washington, even the soul food diet of chitlins and collard greens with their reminder of subsistence in the black rural south. It can be the glamour of Jake’s ‘promenade’ along Lenox Avenue and 125th to 140th Street yet also, as in the fight with Zeddy, the Black Belt as war-ground. Harlem, in the novel’s rendering, is so offered as absorbing the very timescale that made it and as being still in the process of making itself as location.
No undue warmth underwrites the Chicago of Richard Wright’s Native Son. The calendar is the Depression, not the 1920s. The city’s black South Side may have saloon or pool hall or storefront church, but Wright makes over the city of Bigger Thomas and his family into labyrinth, corridor, tenement rat-maze. Rodent imagery opens the novel, the metallic clang of death-row cell door brings it to a close. Bigger, violent, fissured, the near unwitting murderer of white Mary Dalton and then his girl Bessie, and finally the fugitive caught in police cross-lights and brought to trial, actually internalizes his own predatory city. In other words, much as the novel has been heralded as Dreiserian or Zola-esque naturalism, it carries the altogether more interior signification of Bigger as figure of live dream. If he bullies, kills, finds himself burning Mary’s body in the Dalton furnace watched surreally by a white cat, and is explained in court through the Marxist terms of his lawyer Mr Max, he also inhabits the hypnagogic world Wright calls in ‘How “Bigger” Was Born’ – ‘the whole dark inner landscape of Bigger’s mind’ (xix). Bigger himself, as if to echo Harriet Jacobs, alleges ‘I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole in the fence’ (23). Bigger’s Chicago could not be more literally circumstantial, yet is at the same time immaterial and allegorical: both lived in the body and in the fault-lines of consciousness.
Slave-ship cargo hold and chains, the Underground Railroad (if actually above-ground) as escape network, the Manhattan subway: all point to black time suspended and yet released, place as fixture yet translated into movement. They repeat as patterns in a range of African American texts, from The Life of Josiah Henson (1849) with its Maryland to Ontario ← 234 | 235 → slave-story, and from which Harriet Beecher Stowe would borrow for Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), to Charles Wright’s bitter-comical Manhattan fantasia The Wig (1966). But few have taken on greater benchmark standing than Richard Wright’s ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’ (1942), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), each a canny palimpsest, boldly reflexive in the inter-layering of prior black history into ostensible time-and-place now.
‘The Man Who Lived Underground’, one of Wright’s strongest stories in the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961), makes the very notion of subterranean both fact and figure. If the Underground Railroad supplies one source of metaphor so, too, does Dostoevski’s Notes from Underground (1864). The underground odyssey of Fred Daniels may well entail wrongful accusation, latter-day manhunt, flight along the city’s sewers, and fatal police chase. But it also functions as viewing gallery whereby Daniels can peer into America as elaborate historical pageant. In his journey he glimpses a Blakean dead baby, innocence traduced; an embalmer whose ice-cold work on a white corpse points to whiteness as hell; a coal-bin that might be the very fire of blackness; a movie whose flickers give glimpses of escapist America full of good times wealth and radio snippets with reports of war; acts of murder and real diamond and jewel theft; and a hallelujah black church service. Finally the stolen bank notes he pastes on the sewer walls suggest a grotesque Aladdin’s Cave, Gatsbyism actually withheld from him and his. He scrawls his name freddaniels (55) as though a first ever inscription of self-identity. His death by police gun as he removes the manhole cover, and resurfaces, comes about more on account of insights into the racial power-structure than supposed thievery and so intolerable to the pursuing cops. The story, realism undoubtedly, nevertheless veers tactically towards historic parable under the sway both of suspended time (‘Was it day or night now?’ (43)) and of dislocated space (‘underground blackness’ (77)).
Invisible Man assumes vintage south-to-north itinerary, Ellison’s anonymous first-person journeyer himself a virtual paradigm of the making of Afro-America as he ingeniously jazz-riffs his way through the story. Timelines reverberate, place assumes iconography. Sight and blindness, naming and unnaming serve as the book’s dialectical levers. False papers, whether scholarship diploma, letters of recommendation, or political ← 235 | 236 → membership card, tease and mislead as to his identity. In his Dixie years the narrator fights for prize money as though to reenact the slave-pen’s Battle Royal. The scholarship to the Tuskegee-like college brings him full-face into Bledsoe as treacherous latter-day Booker T. Washington. The Golden Day brothel, with its visit by psychologically damaged lawyers, doctors and teachers from the local asylum, mocks his own black-bourgeois pretensions. It also implies a site, a space, that can refract the narrator’s own ‘mad’ illusions.
In the north, he works his way through each figurative station of the cross: a worker at the Liberty Paints factory in which whiteness is all. He takes his place in the supposedly raceless Brotherhood under Communist-style rules. He becomes the lover-stud in accordance with sexual myth. He is witness to Ras as reincarnated Marcus Garvey. After the death of the youth leader Tod he finds himself a participant in the apocalypse of the Harlem riot. His final metamorphosis is that of Rinehart, any-and-all confidence-man supreme. In the Prologue and Epilogue he is to be heard speaking from the basement retreat ‘that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth-century’ (9) and announcing that ‘the hibernation is over’ (502). This is to step out from underground to above, papers burned, past identities discarded, eyes open to the contra-flows of history across time and place that have been the making of Harlem, Afro-America, indeed America itself.
Dutchman (1964) saw publication with stage instructions setting it ‘in the flying underbelly of the city … Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth’ (3). No prizes were to be awarded for identifying the Flying Dutchman allusion or indeed hints of Dante or Poe. But this was Jones/Baraka’s Black Power drama, fists clenched, a savage below-surface deconstruction of middle-class blackness and bitch seductress whiteness in the Adam-and-Eve persons of Clay and Lula (who carries an apple) as they circle aboard their myth-train. The Uncle Tom taunt of Clay by Lula (‘You are a well-known type’ (12) and ‘You middle-class black bastard’ (31)) and Clay’s counter-accusation steeped in historical memory (‘If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed that music’ (35)) could not be keener. The two-acter, for all its 1960s aura and Manhattan ← 236 | 237 → setting, uncompromisingly adjudges ‘race’ a round-trip of love-hate and death, time and place repetition.
A number of threads help indicate the yet more inclusive perspective. If ‘passing’ has long found notable expression in African American authorship it holds an especial pertinence in the rendering of time-space as imaginative environment. The harlequin ability to play both white and black (and in one case bisexual) allows for the unique vantage-point, the parallel or two-way vision in a manner of speaking. Protagonists thereby can enter different cultural timelines, inhabit different styles of place. Three narratives give due bearings.
James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) lays down a necessary marker, the saga of its mixed-race narrator a veritable Pilgrim’s Progress. His Georgia birth he comes to think of as a dream. Subsequent life hovers at the edge of improbability, whether rich absentee white father, mis-cues at Atlanta University, flight in a linen basket on board a Pullman, Cuban cigar maker, gambler clad in a sheet after losses at the table, and touring ragtime pianist with his white mentor. Black or white, black and white, his straddling of the race-divide opens him to both evolving time-schema and site. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) treads another time-space, the Manhattan pairing of Irene Redfield and Clare Hendry as affluent mulatto women not only living at the edge of ‘color’ but also white and black public-private sexuality. Their mutual attraction, which turns fatal in the light of Clare’s death, adds its own convex mirror as the sites of passing. Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982), as befits the novel of a professional philosopher, pitches itself as mock slave narrative, a birth-swap in which ‘black’ Andrew Hawkins almost arbitrarily becomes ‘white’ William Harris. In its forays into the ontology of self and the making of ethnic and other human categories in time and space, Wright has his novel predicate a unique vantage-point: ‘The Negro (…) is the finest student of the White World, the one pupil in the class who watches himself watching the others’ (128). ← 237 | 238 → 6
Timeline and space as imagined in the African American literary tradition could not but embrace a broad trajectory across generations and genres. One last pairing must do service for the more comprehensive reach. John A. Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), told as the serial hallucination of Captain Abraham Blackman about to be shot by a Viet Cong bullet, offers a striking pointer. The seminar Blackman has earlier given to the black soldiery in his company, some emblematically named like Griot, summons military lineage:
He’d gone back to the American Revolution, to Prince Estabrook, Peter Salem, Crispus Atticus and all the unnamed rest; from there to the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Plains Wars, the Spanish-American War – all the wars. (14)
World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam add to the litany as the novel moves speculatively towards a denouement which, in revenge for all the damage of the color-line to include a long segregated army embodied in General Ishmael Whittman, can be envisaged as the black take-over of America’s nuclear facilities. Each increment of memory plays into a deft paradigm of both black warrior past-into-present and the different black sites of arms and the man.
To conclude with Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) is to broach the postmodern turn – slavery to the 1960s as time and site reflexively and with wittiest sleight of hand cross-hatched. Alternative reality guys historical reality. The novel’s verve shows throughout as, tongue-in-cheek, Reed fuses time-periods, gives location as actual but also digital. His alter-ego, Raven Quickskill, thereby, can give both in and out of time witness to the 1860s comic-gothic slave plantation ‘Camelot’ of Arthur Swille, update escape to Canada by yacht, and hypothesize America as a new but equally meretricious American property order presided over by the figure of Yankee Jack. Lincoln’s murder is to be watched on TV, his bargain with Swille that of a temporizing politician. Helicopters hover over the quarters. Phones ring across the Confederacy. Harriet Beecher Stowe dictates Uncle Tom’s Cabin into a cassette. Swille’s sister reveals their incest as though in a faux House of Usher even as the Swille son personifies a Dixie ghost as though ← 238 | 239 → out of Hamlet. Reed has made no bones about writing what he calls Hoodoo fiction, the Civil Era captured through the lens of modernity, a bucolic if in fact poisoned south and a freedom trail if in fact all-for-the-market north tricked out as America’s dark comedy.
Flight to Canada offers grounds, not least on account of its fierce but always congenial wit, to be thought of as a wholly appropriate albeit antic apotheosis of time and space under African American literary auspices. In this, too, it reminds us of how the wider trajectories of time-space, past and ongoing, have elicited their imaginative reckoning in the overall span of US black authorship.
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1 ‘Middle Passage’ would go through several revisions after its first appearance in the journal Phylon in 1941. Its final form appears in A Ballad of Remembrance (London: Paul Bremen, 1962). References are to Henry Louis Gates Jr and Nellie Y. McKay, (eds), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 1501.
2 For historical analysis of the Amistad episode, see William A. Owens, Black Mutiny: The Revolt of the Schooner Amistad (New York: Plume, 1997) and Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery (New York: Viking, 2012).
3 A useful sense of context is to be found in Warren M. Billings (ed.), The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
4 I have given more extensive accounts of several of the texts invoked in this chapter in Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998). See also A. Robert Lee (ed.), African American Writing, 5 vols (New York and Tokyo: Routledge/Editions Synapse, 2012).
5 Selective studies of slave narrative include Rebecca Chambers, Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948); Sidonie Smith, Where I’m Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974); and Carl Plasa and Betty J. Rings (eds), The Discourse of Slavery (New York: Routledge, 1994).
6 His philosophical take on these issues of ontology is given in Charles Johnson, Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1972 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987).