Neo-Testimonial Practices in Flight to Canada, Dessa Rose, Beloved, Kindred, and the Chaneysville Incident

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2007 A Generation of Witnesses: Neo- Testimonial Practices in Flight to Canada, Dessa Rose, Beloved, Kindred, and the Chaneysville Incident Anita P. Wholuba

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

A GENERATION OF WITNESSES: NEO-TESTIMONIAL PRACTICES IN FLIGHT TO CANADA, DESSA ROSE, BELOVED, KINDRED, AND THE CHANEYSVILLE INCIDENT

By ANITA P. WHOLUBA

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Anita P. Wholuba defended on July 2, 2007.

______Maxine L. Montgomery Professor Directing Dissertation

______Maxine D. Jones Outside Committee Member

______Dennis Moore Committee Member

______Darryl Dickson-Carr Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

To Jehovah To Mom and Dad for everything To Grandma, who never saw me graduate but would’ve been proud

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT vi

INTRODUCTION 1

SECTION I: FUGITIVES OF SLAVERY 1. SLAVES GONE WILD: Radical Revision of Narrative and Stock Characters in Flight to Canada 10

2. SAYING SOMETHING: Multiple Stories, Oral Culture, and Name- Calling in Dessa Rose 26

3. “COMING BACK TO LIFE”: Reviving the Past in Beloved 49

SECTION II: FUGITIVES OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY 4. A WEDDING AND A FAMILY REUNION: Ancestors Abscond with the Blushing Bride in Kindred 69

5. “YOU WANT A STORY, DO YOU?”: The Collective Oral, Written, and Understood (Hi)stories of The Chaneysville Incident 83

CONCLUSION 104

REFERENCES 109

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 117

ABSTRACT

Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observes that “fact and fiction have always exerted a reciprocal effect on each other” (“Authenticity” 29). Authors of neo-slave narratives – postmodern renderings of the slave experience – illustrate this reciprocation as they engage in the inventive (re)telling of historical events from the privileged vantage of the present. This study examines the role imagination plays in reconstructing a marginalized, forgotten past. Additionally, this study discerns the neo-testimonial patterns – the narrative techniques inspired by the languages, experiences, and memories of the African diaspora – that the neo-slave narrative authors employ as they merge history with imagination in the creation of a fictionalized history. Although critics have already noted the existing relationship between history and fiction in these narratives, how authors finesse the line between history and imagination deserves closer examination. This study looks carefully primarily at Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident. By examining the dynamics of the commingling of history and imagination in these narratives, this study contributes to an understanding of the role of rememory and/or embellishment in the neo-slave narrative (sub)genre.

INTRODUCTION

In a key scene in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, John Washington and Judge Scott engage in a discussion about history. While the judge lacks the patience to read between the lines and outside of the margins of the traditional narrative of history, John is drawn to these stifled and marginalized perspectives of the past. ‘I’ve delved into history,’ [the judge] said. ‘I’ve never studied it, but I delved into it. Enough to know that it was not a subject that appealed to me. There were too many differences of opinion, too many gaps, too many hidden motivations, too many coincidences. And no rules. I found it frustrating. Don’t you?’ ‘At times,’ I said. ‘But you keep on.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Searching for truth?’ ‘Trying to find out where the lies are.’ (186) This exchange is telling in terms of understanding the challenging business of revising history. Sitting in the old judge’s chambers, John Washington clarifies his position as an historian. His return to his childhood home rekindles John’s memory of his adolescent determination to solve the mystery of his father’s death. John’s visit to the county courthouse leads the retired judge to believe that the meddlesome historian has come in search of some non-extant, perfect ‘truth.’ Instead, the

protagonist of The Chaneysville Incident states that he is more concerned with uncovering the lies. John’s preoccupation is not with rebutting what has already been said, but with revealing what has not been said in the narrative of history-as-we-know-it. He describes his search for the untold narratives as an excavation, stating that he is merely trying “to find out where they hid the bodies” (186). He operates under the suspicion that there is more to the (hi)story than what has been told, and the determination to expose the hidden facts. While Judge Scott is repelled by the gaps in history, John is fascinated with them. He sees these gaps as points of entry for the narration of previously untold events and unexplored perspectives. The Chaneysville protagonist strikes at the core of the revisionist author’s motivation for revisiting the narrative of history: to re-experience or rewrite the (hi)story1 from the point of view of the marginalized. Much like John, the authors in a growing literary (sub)genre have concerned themselves with exhuming long hidden facts about American history, particularly the history of slavery. They are the writers of neo-slave narratives. Relying upon Ashraf Rushdy’s definition of the neo-slave narrative, I am referring to those “modern or contemporary works substantially concerned with depicting the experience or the effects of New World slavery,” (Oxford Companion). Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. seemingly anticipated the formulation of this category of writings in The Slave’s Narrative. In the introduction to this 1985 study on slave autobiographies, these authors briefly discussed what they called “slave narrative novels” and described as fictional texts centered on slavery and sometimes mimicking the conventions of the slave narratives. In this short discussion, they hit upon a literary trend that has persisted well into the late twentieth century (xxii). Two years after the publication of Davis and Gates’ study, Bernard Bell named these novels about slavery “neoslave narratives,” and since then, this designation has remained. Bell cites “neoslave narratives” as examples of “literary neorealism,” a practice characterized by its candid depiction of a marginalized people or culture, in African American literature.

By 1997, Ashraf Rushdy attempted to more clearly define these writings. He also found that these works generally refute the stereotype of the docile slave common to the plantation romance tradition; usually incorporate fictional slave characters as narrators, subjects, or ancestral presences; and often celebrate oral modes of representation. Perhaps most importantly, Rushdy tracks the development of the (sub)genre from William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), to Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), to more contemporary narratives like J. California Cooper’s In Search of Satisfaction (1997). Moreover, Rushdy published a book on neo-slave narratives in 1999 in which he writes about the zeitgeist that contributed to a new wave of neo- slave narratives in the 1960s. The task of locating the burial grounds is the first step in the process of creating a neo-slave narrative. In Beloved, Sethe describes the present day individual’s encounter with a buried past, telling her daughter that “Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or you see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up…. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else” (36). Sethe states that it is possible to stumble upon a rememory – a remnant of the past – that will allow one to see history from a perspective very seldom explored. She suggests that to bump into a rememory is to uncover a little known event – one missing from the common knowledge of history. Similarly, Toni Morrison stresses the importance of historical remnants. She calls for a re-examination of the official record, a return to old repositories to uncover the people, events, and stories missing from the historical canon, in order to locate fragments of past events that have been omitted from textbooks and overlooked in case studies. In her seminal essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” she writes that “a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum,” emphasizing that just because a person or an incident is missing from the sanctioned record does not mean that he or it did not exist or never happened. She furthermore posits that “certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned that they call attention to themselves” (378). The author suggests that careful scrutiny of these absences will yield new and telling perspectives of history.

Likewise, Jesse Lemisch questions the absence of a record of history as seen “from the bottom up,”2 or through the eyes of the lower class and the oppressed. Author Sherley Anne Williams expresses this same sentiment in her introductory note to Dessa Rose, writing that “I loved history as a child, until some clear-eyed young Negro pointed out, quite rightly, that there was no place in the American past I could go and be free” (5). In truth, the American past did not allow African Americans the right to express and define themselves and their own experiences. Like other neo- slave narrative authors, Williams sets out to locate and claim a free space in history for the African American, declaring at the completion of her novel that “I now own a summer in the 19th century” (6). While a significant number of scholars have established that certain silences exist in the traditional narrative of history, neo-slave narrative authors have committed themselves to the task of identifying and sounding those silences where the representation of the American slavery era is concerned. As they uncover long- hidden incidents of slave resistance, they re-present these stories in their novels about self-sacrifices, mercy killings, and uprisings within slave communities.3 They write about slavery “more from the point of view of the inarticulate than of the articulate,” finally pronouncing the unsaid and publicizing the unheard of (Lemisch 6). This investigative process of re-examining and re-writing canonized history is often termed revisionist historiography. It is postmodern in nature because it interrogates the origins and motives of those lessons we have long-accepted and perpetuated as truth. Over a decade before the publication of her own neo-slave narrative, Toni Morrison foretold the resurgence of the slave narratives. Regarding the appalling stories of violence within and resistance to the peculiar institution, she warns that “all of that will surface, it will surface” (emphasis Morrison’s “Intimate Things” 229). Thirteen years later, the author seemingly recalls this promise as she writes that, in the field of revisionist literature, “silences are being broken, lost things have been found and at least two generations of scholars are disentangling received knowledge from the apparatus of control, most notably those who are engaged in investigations of …American slave narratives…” (“Unspeakable” 375).

While the neo-slave narrative author’s preliminary task is to locate the silences in American History, his or her second and more difficult challenge is to compensate for them in his creative re-presentations of the past. He cannot stop at simply recognizing that something is missing from our common knowledge of the (hi)story. He must go on to discern what that something is and decide how to restore it. In the process of reconstructing a historical event or person from limited information, the neo-slave narrative author must determine how to “shape a silence while breaking it” – how to create an entire and fictionalized body from a modicum of historical fact (“Unspeakable” 388). The Chaneysville protagonist describes this dilemma: Oh, I had seen the facts… but I could not discern the shape that they filled in…. For I simply could not imagine what I should see. Could not imagine what it was I was looking at part of…. And if you cannot imagine, you can discover only cold facts, and more cold facts; you will never know the truth. (146-7) John confesses that the uncovered facts, the rememories, were not enough to reconstruct a forgotten history, and clearly states that imagination is critical to understanding a buried past. I propose that, much like John Washington, authors of neo-slave narratives engage in a re-membering process that involves the amalgamation of rememory and imagination in their creative re-presentations of history. Building from Helen Lock’s assertion that “to ‘re-member’ something is to perform the act of reassembling its members” (203). I submit that authors of neo-slave narratives often engage in an even more radical re-membering process that involves imaginatively combining the “members” or rememories of, sometimes, several different narratives to create one neo-narrative. Signifying upon the role of imagination in the recreation of the slave narrative, this study is a contribution to the understanding of the relationship between memory and embellishment – that is, history and fiction – within the (sub)genre in question. In addition, it explores how neo-slave narrative authors repeatedly cross the line between history and imagination, and trespass the territories of both fact and

fiction in order to form fictionalizations of history or, conversely, historicizations of fiction. Although such scholars as Charles T. Davis, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Bernard Bell, and Ashraf Rushdy have already asked and attempted to answer questions concerning the what, who, and when of the neo-slave narrative (sub)genre – What are the neo-slave narratives?; Who writes them?; and When did this class of writings emerge? – more discussion of the how, that is, how are these postmodern novels constructed, is needed. While these academics have noted the early makings of this new literary type, created a name for it, defined it, identified one of its major thematic concerns, and even traced its development, what remains needed is a more thorough investigation of the common narrative techniques that its writers use in order to formulate these texts. By engaging the “how” aspect, that is, the neo-testimonial qualities, of the neo-slave narratives, this study makes a necessary contribution to critical discourse of the (sub)genre. The purpose of this study is two-fold: first, to reveal the practice in neo-slave narrative texts of reading and writing between the lines. This is the convention of breaking conventions – of discerning and divulging the hidden stories of the American slave experience. Second, this study identifies the tools of embellishment that the writers in this (sub)genre use, including their co-optation of traditional slave narrative techniques. This examination of the authors’ storytelling methods reveals the dynamics of a kind of “neo-testimony” – a process of critically engaging and imaginatively reconstructing historical facts – that is central to this class of writings. In this vein, this study proposes that the art of “neo-testimony” helps to constitute the neo-slave narrative (sub)genre. The primary texts in this project are Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose (1986), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). This project is divided into two sections. “Section I: Fugitives of Slavery” discusses Flight to Canada, Dessa Rose, and Beloved. These are novels whose protagonists are runaway slaves. “Section II: Fugitives of the Memory of Slavery” examines Kindred

and The Chaneysville Incident. The protagonists of these novels are freeborn blacks who soon learn that they have not escaped their ancestral slave past. Chapter One discusses how Ishmael Reed demystifies historical myths in Flight to Canada by exposing the embarrassing and sometimes unconscionable facts about figures and incidents in the American past. In so doing, this chapter examines how a neo-slave narrative author may defy the Massa’s narrative, the sanctioned discourse, not by inserting his own narrative but by dismantling the existing one. This chapter also discusses Reed’s text as a fugitive narrative, one that seeks to escape the constraints of the traditional antebellum slave narrative. Additionally, this chapter identifies the similar storytelling techniques Flight to Canada shares with the other texts in its (sub)genre. Chapter Two examines Williams’ stratification technique, in terms of the author’s incorporation of multiple narrating voices and perspectives – including those of the southern white male, the typical white mistress, and the female slave – in Dessa Rose. In addition, this chapter analyzes the sustained struggle for narrative control between the slave woman Dessa and her interviewer Adam Nehemiah as an illustration of the battle between literacy and orality. In keeping with this discussion of orality, it also addresses the importance of Williams’ incorporation of such folk expression as dialect and impromptu song as a revision of the classic slave narratives’ use of borrowed verse. Additionally, drawing from Patricia Hill Collins’ and Deborah Gray White’s discussions of the controlling images of black women and their gender-specific struggles, this chapter does not overlook Williams’ treatment of the objectified mammy and other slave women. Finally, this chapter draws attention to Williams’ co-optation of the naming ritual in slavery as she places special emphasis on how and/or why the characters (re)name either themselves or each other. Chapter Three investigates Morrison’s co-optation of classic slave narrative techniques in Beloved, including the significance of naming, and the author’s use of recursive, non-linear plot as opposed to the linearity of most slave narratives. In addition, this chapter investigates Morrison’s use of preaching, singing, and moaning – that is, the spoken Word, the sung word, and the non-word – in her invocation of an oral tradition. This section also provides an interesting discussion of how the author,

en fin, challenges the traditionally linear plot by constructing an ending that begins again, so that the narrative’s closing opens up a new world of possibilities for its characters. Finally, in discussing the passages in which Beloved passes from everyone’s memory, this chapter explores the trope of re-membering and dis- remembering. Chapter Four explores middle passage as a trope in Octavia Butler’s Kindred in its discussion of the protagonist’s recurring transportations from her free present to her ancestors’ slave past. In addition, it discusses Butler’s re-reading of slave resistance and slave resilience, as well as the author’s deconstruction of social stereotypes and icons associated with American slavery. This chapter also reflects on Octavia Butler’s treatment of such controversial issues as interracial relationships, and black women’s self-possession and sexual autonomy. Chapter Five is an investigation of The Chaneysville Incident, revisiting the aesthetics of re-membering as it notes Bradley’s integration of historical facts and imagined realities. It also discusses the centrality of African beliefs about the afterlife and the importance of hunting as metaphor within this narrative. Moreover, in its investigation of the protagonist’s sustained efforts to piece together his paternal history only to destroy it in the end, this chapter revisits the trope of re-membering and dis-remembering introduced in the chapter on Beloved. Finally, the concluding chapter synopsizes the overall findings of this study and proposes a new theory of neo-testimony as an essential element of the neo-slave narrative (sub)genre. Furthermore, this section suggests ways in which these observations and this particular theory can be applied to other neo-slave narrative texts, including Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Ernest J. Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, and Gayle Jones’ Corregidora.

1 By using parenthesis here, I wish to emphasize the narrative quality of history, recalling Linda Hutcheon’s discussion of history’s and story’s (the novel’s) “shared conventions: selection, organization, diegesis, anecdote, temporal pacing, and emplotment” (Poetics 111). Likewise, Susan Onega parallels the two genres in the title of her collaborative work, Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995). By suggesting that both the traditional narrative of history and the historical novel employ diegesis, I am asserting that authors of neo-slave narratives are seeking chiefly to restore the facts omitted from the conventional historical

discourse.

2 See Lemisch’s like-titled essay in Towards a New Past.

3 In his foundational work on neo-slave narratives, Ashraf Rushdy points out that, in addition to property and identity, violence is a recurring theme in this (sub)genre (23).

CHAPTER ONE SLAVES GONE WILD: RADICAL REVISION OF STOCK CHARACTERS AND NARRATION IN FLIGHT TO CANADA

A buck, a stud, a mammy, an auntie and uncle, and a pickaninny are living on an old plantation with a sambo and a couple of mulattos. Although this sounds like the profane opening of a tasteless joke, it is the making of a surprisingly humorous and didactic twentieth century tale about nineteenth century slavery and its aftereffects. Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada is the story of the fugitive slave-poet Raven Quickskill, his friends 40s and Stray, the brutal Mammy Barracuda and her dim-witted assistant Bangalang, Uncle Robin and his wife Aunt Judy, a fragile and dying mistress, a murdered master, and the sneaky sambo that may have killed him. Raven Quickskill is an upstart who, believing he is entitled to freedom, writes a poem to his master and heads to Virginia. While in the free North, he finds 40s and Stray, two other runaways from Master Swille’s plantation, and warns them of the pursuing slave-catchers. During Raven’s stay up North, peculiar events take place back on the plantation: President Lincoln visits Master Swille and asks to borrow money to fund the war; Mammy Barracuda beats the mistress within an inch of her life; Master Swille is pushed into the fireplace supposedly by his dead sister’s ghost; and the literate Uncle Robin and his wife Aunt Judy “inherit” the Swille plantation. With much imagination and bravado, Ishmael Reed “merges history, fantasy, political reality, and high comedy” in this revision of the classic slave narrative.1 In so doing, he fashions a new telling of the American slave experience that turns the old telling on its head. This chapter closely examines how Reed “invert[s] some of the

conventions of the traditional narratives” in order to emancipate this form of writing from the irons of narrative traditions (Butler 106). It discusses Reed’s creation of the self-authenticating, non-obliging, fantastic neo-narrative of slavery that has no loyalties to white patrons, venerated History, or even time. This chapter discusses the various ways that the text Flight to Canada is itself fugitive, running from and over narrative, historical, and linear traditions, and searching for the real meaning of freedom. Considered “the archetype of Afro-American fiction,” the typical slave autobiography was built upon the foundation of authenticating documents provided by white patrons (Walsh 58). In these letters and introductory notes, abolitionists and friends of emancipated slaves wrote of their acquaintance with the author, attempting to assure readers that neither the author nor his or her story was fabricated. In the preface to Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, the notable abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison promises that Douglass’ autobiography is “essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination.” Similarly, Lydia Maria Child spoke to “the credentials of [Harriet Jacobs’] character” in the introduction of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She avows that “those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction.” Both Garrison and Childs argue that, if accusation could be made against Douglass and Jacobs, it must be that the authors understate the severity of their experiences and observations during their enslavement. These slave narrators, and others like them, took great pains to make credible their incredible experiences – to tell the horrible truth in a way that does not rebuff or alienate sympathizing readers; to submit humbly what Olaudah Equiano and his many peers call the “genuine narrative” of “an unlettered African” (qtd. in Gates 3). Contrarily, Reed rejects this kind of white paternalism suggested by the letters, testimonials, and even borrowed poetry found in the prefacing materials of the slave narratives, and begins his neo-narrative in the voice of the insubordinate Raven Quickskill who cannot be owned and will not be vouched for by anyone other than himself. The novel begins with the like-titled poem, the only authenticating

document for the novel, eliminating the “mediating voices” of the slaves’ autobiographies (Rushdy 118). In Raven’s poem to Massa Swille, he writes that he has done his “Liza Leap” to freedom and funded his trip to Saskatchewan with cotton money “borrowed” from the master’s safe. He brags about returning on varying occasions to sample Swille’s wine and his prime Quadroon, and to acquire more money from Missus Swille. He confesses that he poisoned the master’s liquor and that Swille may never read this letter if old Sam takes him to “the Deep Six” – that is, if he is killed in the War.2 Most meaningful, Raven dubiously signs his poem “Your boy, Quickskill.” He signifies on the term “boy” since the word both denigrates the black male and ingratiates a peer, comrade or “homeboy.” Herein, Raven makes one of two statements: He recognizes his inferiority but chooses nevertheless to usurp his master’s authority, or he declares himself an equal. Either of these assertions would infuriate a slave owner whose property has taken feet and run away. Raven’s poem sets the tone for the novel. As a contemporary text, Flight to Canada does not need validation from dominant discourse; if anything it intends to trouble it, and the prefacing poem makes this intention clear from the beginning. The narrative operates within a privileged discourse that allows it to flow as it wills and address whatever issues it desires. Unlike slave autobiographers, Reed is minimally if at all concerned with the authenticity and/or believability of his neo-narrative. Former slaves took great pains to produce truthful or “unvarnished” accounts of their bondage. They knew that if their stories seemed remotely fantastic, their readers would likely not believe them. Jacobs even addressed her readers at the beginning of her story, writing “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true” (rptd. in Gates 335). In Reed’s neo-narrative, however, fact and fiction boldly stand shoulder to shoulder; one might even say that the two intertwined, and that it is difficult at times to differentiate truth from tale. Sometimes fiction is presented as fact; at other times the facts seem far- fetched. The author plays simultaneously with fictional characters and historical

figures, oftentimes leaving the reader questioning whether certain people or events in the story are real, fabricated, or parodies of past figures.3 Consider the peculiar relationship between Arthur Swille and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, of course, was the 16th president of the United States, but who is Arthur Swille? Is he simply a fictional character, or is he a parody of another historical figure? It is possible that Swille simply represents the general consensus of the South or, more precisely, of Southern planters during the time of Lincoln’s presidency. Nevertheless, what does the fictional Swille’s relationship with the historical Lincoln signify? A thoughtful reader must ask what Reed intends when he places history and fiction side by side, or, moreover, allows the two to interact. Reed’s technique seems to trivialize such grand narratives of history as that of Honest Abe the Great Emancipator. This method of narration makes such lessons in history-as-we-know-it seem less like grand, sanctioned narratives and more like fairy tales – images swimming around in the master discourse, appearing in random places at any time. Robert Butler describes Reed's technique of picking and choosing characters and incidents from the grand narrative of history as a self-creative process of “discovering and then telling one’s own ‘stories,’ all the while revising or rejecting the fictions others have invented for their own needs” (103). Similarly, John Domini describes this practice in Reed's writings as a "[reshaping] of black history" (qtd in. Dick 128). Reed not only adopts Abraham Lincoln from the master discourse but also casts the former president in a rather unsightly light. He characterizes Lincoln as a man of “general unkempt, hirsute and bungling appearance – bumping into things and carrying on” with his “yokel-dokel” manner of speech (22-23). “Humble-looking [and] imperfect,” he seems quite honest, humane, and trustworthy (22). In Part II of the novel, however, the reader discovers a different side of Lincoln. The president confides in his aide: “I never even gave spooks much thought, but now that they’ve become a subplot in this war, I can’t get these shines off my mind” (46). Herein the reader discovers that Reed is typecasting Lincoln not as the revered “Honest Abe” but as “Lincoln the Player,” the title of the narrative’s second section. Reed creates an arguably more accurate, although quite humorous,

representation of the former president who tries to “play” both political sides and thereby save his position. He writes about a befuddled president caught in the crossfire of opposing parties and pigeonholed by the repercussions of his own political schemes. Research of historical documents yields proof that Lincoln first proposed compensated emancipation to the slave owners to coerce them into freeing their slaves. He believed that he could “kill two birds with one stone” this way. Because his party, the Republicans, was split into two – the Radicals and the Conservatives – he could please the Radicals by making them believe that he really wanted to free the slaves. He could also try to convince the southern statesmen that he was on their side by offering them money for the release of their slaves, hoping also that this would appease them and keep them from seceding from the Union (Franklin). When the South did not accept Lincoln’s proposal for a long-term program of compensated emancipation and joined to form the Confederate States, Lincoln responded with the Emancipation Proclamation which obviously applied to those states wherein he had no jurisdiction. The Proclamation, therefore, could not be enforced. For this reason, upon hearing about Lincoln’s Proclamation, Aunt Judy retorts, “Won’t do us any good. He freed the slaves in the regions of the country he doesn’t have control over, and in those he does have control over, the slaves are still slaves. I’ll never understand politics” (59). Truthfully, Lincoln had no intentions of enforcing this mandate. His real intention was to convince the rebelling states to stay within the Union to keep from losing their slaves. In a letter to Horace Greeley, the former president wrote candidly, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” He further wrote, “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union” (Basler 5: 388). Lincoln’s penning of the Proclamation was a purely political move, not one of concern for the slaves’ well being. It was a weak plan and it backfired. Lincoln had managed to make emancipation an aim of the Civil War, and he could not recant the Proclamation for risk of losing the support of the Radical Republicans in his cabinet.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War inevitably led to the 13th Amendment by which slavery was abolished throughout the states. Thus, the results of the Emancipation Proclamation were unintended. Lincoln’s strategy had gone awry. Perhaps Lincoln himself best encapsulated his quandary when he writes in a letter to Albert G. Hodges, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me” (Basler 7:281). Reed’s satire of the legend of Honest Abe is perhaps most apparent in the conversation between the Union General and Arthur Swille after Lincoln’s death. Of the assassinated president, the General says Toward the end he kept having visions of himself as a statue. Sitting in the chair and staring out over the Potomac. He started to believe it. He began to see himself as the great Emancipator, Mr. Swille. Got hooked by his own line. 130 Here, the author is referring to the Lincoln Memorial that features a statue of the sixteenth president overlooking the Potomac, an inscription of his speech at Gettysburg, and a mural painted by Jules Guerin depicting the angel of truth freeing a slave. The image is that of a stalwart figure who sought to preserve unity, equality and truth. When the General remarks that Lincoln “got hooked on his own line,” he is saying that the former president tricked himself into believing his own rhetoric. Partially exposing Lincoln’s botched plans when he writes about the president’s initial proposal for Compensatory Emancipation, Reed piques the reader’s interest and makes him wonder if such a document or proposal really existed. Suddenly, like Raven in the beginning of the novel, the reader wonders “Who is to say what is fact and what is fiction?” (7). Furthermore, a reader who researches and uncovers Lincoln’s proposal for Compensatory Emancipation might begin to wonder what other details of America’s past are conveniently missing from or perhaps dubiously represented in the grand narrative of American History. Like most postmodernist and revisionist historiographical authors, Reed demonstrates that the distinctions between fact and fiction – between an event and the narration of that event – are not as clear as we think they are. For this reason quite a few postmodernist thinkers emphasize that our mode of knowledge is discourse – that

is, that we understand according to, and learn by, the master narratives in which we are entrenched. Postmodern writers, including authors of neo-slave narratives, are intent on challenging those master discourses. Matthew Davis observes that Reed’s strategy functions “to undermine authorized versions of history, replacing them with a larger realm of historical possibility” (emphases mine 745). Essentially, Reed’s depiction of Abraham Lincoln – one not entirely fabricated – should lead readers to understand that there is no one, ‘true’ narrative of history. Most postmodern writers wish to demonstrate that historical documents are not austere; rather, when examined from varying perspectives, they yield multiple interpretations. Along these lines, various other authors of neo-slave narratives manipulate history-as-we-know-it either to teach some new lesson that history to date has failed to teach, or to provoke readers to question the History they have been taught. In The Chaneysville Incident, David Bradley rescues from the recesses of history the remarkable account of thirteen fugitive slaves’ mass suicide in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. In Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams draws on the account of Dinah, a pregnant runaway slave sentenced to execution upon the delivery of her master’s property, her unborn child. In Beloved, Toni Morrison brings to light the story of the fugitive Margaret Garner, a Kentucky slave mother who opts to kill her own babies rather than relinquish them to the slave catchers. Robert Butler writes that “African American metafictionalists” – that is, black authors who question and manipulate the traditional methods of fiction-writing – “regard their own literary traditions as a potent source of literary creation, since it is bursting with old stories to untell and new stories to tell” (113). While Bradley, Williams and Morrison seek to restore creatively some remarkable yet true accounts of American history, Reed concerns himself with debunking the myth of Abe, the great Emancipator. Nevertheless, the general aim – that is, to borrow from Margaret Walker, “to set the record straight where Black people are concerned in terms of the Civil War, of slavery, segregation and Reconstruction” – is the same (qtd. in McDowell 145). Whereas Bradley and others focus on the telling of new stories, Reed in his revisitation of Abe aims to “untell” a misrepresented history.

Aside from revisiting historical figures, Reed also refers to fictional characters as if they were actual persons from history. His modernized Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy live not too far from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s well known Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe. Simon Legree becomes a ‘real’ southern planter in the world Reed constructs. Mammy Barracuda expresses her contempt for “the way [Stowe] bad-mouth old Simon Legree,” and goes on to say that in actuality “he a good man” (115). In sum, Reed borrows not only from history but from fiction as well. He takes up with not only the sanctioned narrative of History but also the much celebrated and demeaning, although fictional, narrative of the African-American experience represented (or perhaps more accurately identified as misrepresented) in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By treating Honest Abe and Simon Legree equally – not readily making any distinctions between one as a historical figure and the other as a literary construction – he purposefully conflates both as personages, as products of narrative. Moreover, Reed creates characters that are somehow reminiscent of yet remarkably different from Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe. Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy live in the slave quarters just as Stowe’s elderly, doting slave characters do. However, Reed allows Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy luxuries of which Stowe is careful to deprive Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe. While some of these discrepancies in luxuries are readily apparent – Reed exchanges the usual log cabin and sleeping pallet for a “penthouse” and “a giant waterbed” – others are subtler nevertheless very important (56). Whereas Stowe does not afford her characters the luxury of sexuality, desire or even affirming touch, Reed seemingly takes great pains to note the physical, sensual contact between Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy. He writes that “Aunt Judy’s thigh rubbed against [her husband’s],” and “their shoulders touched” while the two lounged in bed together, conversing and sipping champagne (57). The author goes on to relate the following affectionate interaction between Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy as their evening in the nicely furnished penthouse progresses: The bottom of her foot moved across the top of one of his. The top of his right thigh was resting on her hip. He was talking low in her ear. ‘Rub my neck a little, hon.’

He began to rub her neck. She sighed. ‘That’s nice.’ (58) Although this scene does not involve sexual desire as does the opening scene between Dessa and Kaine in Williams’ text, it definitely involves affection and physical affirmation. Reed goes on to write that “Aunt Judy turns to [Uncle Robin] and puts her arms around his neck, their abdomens, thighs, touching, her cheek brushing against his…” (59). In writing about neck massages, whispers in ears, and touching abdomens, thighs, and hips, Reed pays special attention to those body parts that often are considered sensual. The luxury herein is some sense of self-possession. Robin and Judy are able to touch casually. In some ways, their bodies belong only to themselves and to one another. They are not being exploited for slave reproduction or for their owners’ sexual pleasure. In addition, unlike the non-sensual relationship between the exaggeratedly pious Uncle Tom and his wife Chloe, the exchange between Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy is both physically and psychologically reassuring. Essentially, Reed rewrites Stowe’s Aunt and Uncle as self-possessed, sensual beings. What must not be ignored is the peculiarity of so many of the characters in Flight to Canada. At a superficial glance, they simply are slave types common to the antebellum period: the buck, stud, mammy, auntie, uncle, pickaninny, mulatto, and sambo. Nevertheless, behind their thin veils most of them are mutant stock characters. From the beginning, Raven is a buck redefined. A good buck is valued for his strength and ability to perform backbreaking labor. Raven Quickskill refuses to be broken and he “bucks” against an entire established institution. Raven’s friend Stray is the stud revisited. Although he is virile, he refuses to be reserved for breeding on the plantation. He runs away, but later becomes involved in the pornographic circuit up north in order to pay the bills. He poses for risqué pictures to earn money to send back to the plantation to appease Master Swille. In fact, one photo shoot involving Stray, a liberal white woman, and a bloodhound (71) speaks volumes about the Antebellum South’s fascination with the sexuality of the black male, obsession with the purity of the white female, and pride in the southern white male planter’s sense of ownership (symbolized by the “negro dogs”).4 The

irony of Stray’s plight is that he sells himself in order to buy himself. Perhaps the biggest difference between what Stray does in the North and what he would have done on the plantation is that he does not father any children into slavery. Nevertheless, it is another consumer’s assumption about Stray’s “manhood” that defines and circumscribes him. Although the roles of Cato the Graffado and Dingy Moe are very minor, something must be said about their racial ambiguity. They are the tragic mulattos in this story. When Swille calls Cato “son,” he quickly tries to retrieve his slip of the tongue (54). Both characters know that Swille and Cato are father and son, just as they also know that nothing can or should be done about this knowledge. Hence, the most that Swille can do for his illegitimate son with “sandy hair, freckles, [and] ‘aquiline’ nose” is to make him overseer (51). Similarly, although Moe’s skin is almost as white as his master’s, he is still condemned to a lifetime of slavery. These characters’ presence serves as a reminder of the absurdity of certain “laws” (such as those about black blood) that were created and upheld in order to maintain the peculiar institution. Just as equally dynamic in character as Raven is Mammy Barracuda. However, this mammy does not wear the signature ratty head scarf; instead she wears a silk one along with her black velvet dress and the heavy diamond crucifix on her bosom (20). She is far from endearing, kind, or nurturing. She grins with delight at Master Swille’s approval to “handle” the Mistress. Without reservation, she “grabs [Missus Swille] by the hair and yanks her to the floor.” After physically and verbally assaulting her, she puts a razor to her “lily-white neck” and throws her into the bathtub where she “rolls up her sleeves,… gets an old hard brush rich with pine soap,…[and] starts scrubbing away” at the mistress’ frail body and delicate skin (112- 113). Mammy Barracuda’s understudy is Bangalang. She enters Missus Swille’s room with “her pickaninny curls rising up, her hands thrown out at the red palms, her eyes growing big in their sockets” at the sight of the bloody mistress (112). The narrator compares Bangalang’s voice to Topsy’s whom most readers remember as the mischievous pickaninny in Stowe’s novel. Although Bangalang appears to be simple

at this point in the novel, her seeming dimwittedness conveniently works in the favor of all the slaves on the evening of Master Swille’s demise. On the night that Vivian Swille’s ghost pushes her brother into the fireplace, Robin runs to retrieve a bucket of water from the kitchen, where he explains to Bangalang that the master is on fire. Once Bangalang learns that Swille is not dead yet, she “goes to the faucet and turns off the water.” She offers as her reasoning that “Mammy Barracuda says when you turn the faucet on, you’re not suppose to forget to turn it off” (137). After Robin finally manages to fill the bucket with water, Bangalang grabs his arm and asks him when he will take her out. Twice she prevents him from saving the burning Swille. One must question whether Bangalang’s actions are simple or rather quite calculated. Moreover, one must also question what role Pompey plays in this grand fiasco. How is it that he “stood in vigil” and heard nothing just outside the door where a ghost had thrown the mistress across the room, and accosted Master Swille and pushed him into the fire? Ashraf Rushdy proposes that Pompey murdered Swille, and the novel provides just enough evidence to prove that this is true (107). Long after Swille’s death, Uncle Robin confides that Pompey is “so fast that some of the people are talking about seeing him in two places at the same time.” He continues, “He can do impersonations too. He got the whole Swille family down pat. He can do all of the men and women, and the dead ones too” (175). Pompey is a sambo character because he is smarter than he appears. He feigns ignorance, but he is the invisible hand in the master’s undoing. Aside from Reed's amalgamation of history and fiction and his radical revision of stock characters, the author also disregards linear time. People and objects from the past interact with things of the future. Matthew Davis catalogues Reed’s “conscious and deliberate use of anachronisms within his text” as follows: “slaves fleeing on jumbo jets, slave quarters furnished with telephones and cable television, and carriages equipped with ‘climate control air conditioning, vinyl top, AM/FM stereo radio, [and all other sorts of luxuries]…” (743). By telescoping time, Reed, much like several other neo-slave narrative authors, demonstrates the very close relationship between the past, the present and the future – that is, that they are

more closely related than most readers have ever seriously considered. The author identifies his use of anachronism as an aspect neo-hoodooism, or more specifically necromancy. Reed’s adaptation of necromancy is obviously very different from many slave narrator’s or autobiographer’s reliance upon the Christian faith. While many slave autobiographers used the image of Christ as a deliverer to demonstrate the immorality of slavery, Reed operates in an entirely different vein. Unlike Frederick Douglass who dismisses the power of the root his friend Sandy gave him, Reed readily accepts another spiritual phenomenology. While his characters may not practice necromancy, the author evidently adopts this neo-hoodoo aesthetic in his untelling/retelling of the African experience in America from the past to the novel’s present. Reed relates that "Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future. That is prophecy. The black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future" (qtd. in Walsh 60). Reed suggests that the contemporary writer, or any genuinely curious present-day individual, has simultaneous access to the past and the future, pointing out that neo-hoodooism "teaches that past is present" (qtd. in Walsh 60). In like sentiment toward the past, Toni Morrison’s Sethe promises her daughter Denver that "if you go there and stand in the place where it was… it will be there for you waiting for you" (36). Likewise Dana, a modern black woman in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, is easily transported between the novel's present and her ancestors' slave past. Moreover, by a certain point in the novel, she no longer has the power to determine when she will return to the present, because the past’s hold is stronger than her will. Summarily, several neo-slave narratives demonstrate that the past and the present are not two distinct spaces in time. One may traverse them both. History is not lost and long gone, and the present is not independent of the past. Unlike many historical texts that “approach the antebellum South as a discrete and contained moment in time,” such neo-narratives of slavery as Flight to Canada, Kindred, and Beloved illustrate the undeniable interconnectivity between the past and the present (Spaulding 72). Reed’s use of anachronism also revamps the traditionally linear form of the

classic slave narratives. Whereas most slave autobiographies commenced at the earliest known part of the slave’s life (typically beginning with the phrase “I was born”) and ended with his freedom either by escape, manumission, or emancipation, neo-slave narratives like Reed’s disregard the linear plot for a more complex one. “New” narratives of slavery like Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, Williams’ Dessa Rose, Butler’s Kindred, Bradley’s Chaneysville and Morrison’s Beloved are recursive. The protagonists of each of these narratives are involved in the process of re-membering history – either by personal recollection or by compilation/aggregation of several memories, stories, and documents from various sources. The pattern of these narratives is a continual transitioning between past and present. On the other hand, Flight to Canada collapses time altogether allowing what once was and what now is to occur simultaneously. In the sense that they are not running from a haunting past, Reed’s characters are not fugitives of time. Instead, they become a metaphor, true to any given time, for the dilemma of the African- American. Reed collapses the time of American chattel slavery and the African- American literary condition at the time of the novel’s publication (1960s and 70s) in a way that reveals striking similarities between them: that indeed “there are more types of slavery than merely chattel slavery. There’s a cultural slavery” (67). The author not only “untells” and retells the story of American slavery, he also uses it as a metaphor for the conditions of African-Americans during the time he was writing Flight to Canada. Reed allows his readers to see that no matter the century in which he lives, the African-American finds himself combating some form of commodification and/or stifling of his expression. According to Reed, stifling at the height of the Black Arts Movement existed in the form of black intellectuals who positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of acceptable black literary expression. The author parodies such “Apostles of Aesthetics” through his depiction of the character Cato the Graffado (94). Of Raven Quickskill’s poetry, Cato remarks “if you ask me, it don’t have no redeeming qualities, it is bereft of any sort of piéce de résistance, is cute and unexpurgated…” (52). Reed parallels slaves of different classes – the house slave, the white-skinned slave, the educated slave, and the illiterate slave – with black

authors and intellectuals of varying sentiments. The narrator makes Reed’s sentiments very clear, remarking that Slaves judged other slaves like the auctioneer and his clients judged them. Was there no end to slavery? Was a slave condemned to serve another Master as soon as he got rid of one? […] Slaves held each other in bondage; a hostile stare from one slave criticizing the behavior of another slave could be just as painful as a spiked collar – a gesture as fettering as a cage. (144) The narrator’s commentary on contemporary slavery, identical to Reed’s personal sentiments, is a critique of the intellectual elite as well as of the concept of middle class racial uplift. The author provides a more complex reading of the role of literacy in African- American experience and expression. He, like other revisionist historiographical writers of the African-American experience, challenges the old assumption that literacy is a means to absolute freedom. While Raven Quickskill was sometimes able to use literacy as a means of subversion, at other times his written words were like “Swille’s bloodhound[s]” (85).5 While Uncle Robin was skilled and cunning enough to use his literacy to write himself into his master’s will as the sole beneficiary, his plan may never have been executed if it were not for the trickster, Pompey. Ashraf Rushdy suggests that the best way to overcome oppression is by collaboration. One must use trickery and/or literary subversion, physical resistance, violence, and economic strategy (115). Literacy alone is not the answer. If anything, Reed might be suggesting that it has made things more complicated. Finally, unlike many traditional slave narratives that suggested that physical freedom – whether by escape, manumission or emancipation – was the resolution of the plight of the African in America, Flight to Canada teaches that an emancipated body does not equal a free mind or spirit. Richard Walsh makes the important observation that “Material freedom, social equality is fundamental: the point is that it is not enough. If the predicament of the Afro-American people is translated into individual terms, being liberated from material slavery but still existing mentally in its thrall is the condition of the fugitive…” (65). Reed and Morrison alike trouble the concept of freedom. Just as Quickskill

learns that the fugitive slave does not find freedom in Canada but rather in a change of mindset, Morrison’s Sethe learns that psychological bondage and guilt can keep her bound despite her residence outside of slave territory. Like other neo-slave narratives, Flight to Canada suggests that the escaped slave, the freed man, and the contemporary African-American are all fugitives of history. While the fugitive slave ran from patrollers and bloodhounds, and the freed man ran from abductors and angry whites in general, the contemporary African-American struggles to free himself from the controlling images and expectations of black people that stem from centuries of ownership, oppression and domination in the New World. Furthermore, Reed’s text itself may be considered among the company of history’s fugitives. First and most apparent, this narrative collapses time thereby making history the present and vice versa. There is no past to run from, because what was is what is. Second, the narrative conventions (or “unconventions”) of Flight to Canada break away from traditional or historical expectations of black writing as well as from the slave narratives’ usual literary practices. Troubling concepts of time, freedom, sanctioned knowledge or discourse, fact, and fiction, it resists simple categorization and surface reading. Like its literary peers, Flight to Canada rejects old knowledge and narration; it engages in the process of untelling old (his)stories and retelling in new, imaginative and didactic ways the marginalized or muted stories of Africans in America. That this novel can be rightfully identified as another neo-slave narrative undoubtedly has been worth more examination than just passing or minimal observation. Although such literary scholars as Deborah E. McDowell, Arnold Rampersad, Ashraf Rushdy, and A.T. Spaulding have situated Reed’s text in the neo- slave narrative (sub)genre, what they have left under-explored is the kind of storytelling techniques Reed shares with other authors of these contemporary, revisionist re-presentations of the American slavery experience (or vice versa). For this reason, this study has provided more concrete examples of Reed’s version of the postmodern slave narrative and/or the narrative techniques, themes, and tropes Flight to Canada shares with other neo-slave narratives.

1 See the back cover of the 1998 paperback version of Flight to Canada.

2 Old Sam probably references Uncle Sam and the ensuing Civil War. The Deep Six most likely means six feet under: dead and buried.

3 Ernest Gaines practices this same technique in his neo-slave narrative, Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

4 “Negro dogs” were usually bloodhounds, and were bred and trained solely for hunting runaways.

5 Similarly the fugitive Dessa’s written words almost recaptured her and sent her back to slavery.

CHAPTER TWO SAYING SOMETHING: MULTIPLE STORIES, ORAL CULTURE, AND NAME CALLING IN DESSA ROSE

On an early August morning in 1829, and somewhere along the state road from Greenup to Vanceburg, Kentucky, nearly one hundred slaves “suddenly dropped their shackles” and violently attacked the three white men leading their coffle, killing two of them and significantly wounding the third (Aptheker 287). The Kentucky Reporter published that “sixteen of the [N]egroes then took to the woods” (qtd. in Coleman 177). To their misfortune, the entire gang of slaves was recaptured, and six of the rebel leaders were tried for murder, found guilty, and sentenced to public hanging. A slave woman named Dinah was among them. Upon the twelve female jurors’ discovery that Dinah was “pregnant and quick with child,” the circuit court delayed her execution until after the delivery of her baby. On May 25th of the following year, Dinah was hanged in the courthouse yard at Greenupsberg (Coleman 176-78). After reading in Herbert Aptheker’s book the record of this courageous slave woman, and encountering only two pages later the account of an insubordinate white woman who harbored fugitive slaves on her isolated farm in North Carolina, author Sherley Anne Williams concedes, “how sad, I thought, that these two women never met” (Dessa Rose 6). Her novel Dessa Rose – the story of a pregnant slave facing execution upon the delivery of her child, and who discovers unexpected refuge in and develops an extraordinary friendship with a white woman named Rufel – is an amalgamation of these two events and people from history. Building from the noted

incidents in Aptheker’s 1944 publication, Williams not only invokes the past but also creates a medium in the present through which to explore the relationship between black and white women – slave woman and slave mistress – in the antebellum south. Williams’ narrative, a forum allowing both the author and her readers to view the inner workings of slave society from the vantage of the present, presents varying perspectives on a single event; dramatizes a slave woman’s struggle for self determination; interrogates the supremacy of the written word over the spoken word; modifies the significance of naming within the peculiar institution; introduces a strong, black female presence; and explores without inhibition the dynamics of relationships between the races and across gender during the slavery period. This chapter locates the narrative techniques that make many of these exercises possible. In doing so, it also discusses how several of these tools are an appropriation of such classic slave narrative techniques as the slave narrators’ privileging of literacy over orality, borrowing verse from the canon, and participation in the (re)naming ritual. Dessa Rose is a stratified narrative, utilizing the three distinct perspectives of the white male, the southern mistress, and the female slave to relate the story of a hapless slave girl. The novel is divided into three sections – “The Darky,” “The Wench,” and “The Negress” – which present the respective viewpoints of Adam Nehemiah, Ruth Elizabeth, and Dessa Rose. The first two sections are mediated by an unidentified, non-character narrator who often assumes Adam’s and Ruth’s tones, providing insight into their thoughts and biases. Dessa’s narrative, on the other hand, is narrated by Dessa, allowing for the slave woman to speak for and about herself. Saving Dessa’s story for last, Williams opts to expose the reader first to the familiar tone of the white male of the slave South. “The Darky” is narrated from the “whitemale” perspective, the oppressor’s point of view. Coined by Houston Baker, Jr., the term “whitemale” denotes a “collective of human beings who are prismatically white and biologically self- identified as male, and who feel entitled to brand all who are not like them as, in a word, ‘other’” (11-12). Adam Nehemiah, the journalist who attempts to document the story of an unruly slave girl’s participation in a coffle uprising, perceives the world around him through a whitemale gaze that positions himself as the norm and

anyone unlike him as other and therefore inferior. He also subscribes to other such binaries as master versus slave, human versus animal, and consumer versus commodity. Nehemiah sees Dessa – a black female, and thus his complete opposite – as slave, animal, and commodity, and the first section of the novel clearly communicates these convictions. Although not a slave owner himself, Nehemiah endorses the master/slave dynamic. This is most evident in his journal entry on the eighth day of interviewing Dessa. When the young woman tells him about the day the master destroyed Kaine’s banjo, her lover’s only and prized possession, she identifies this as the day that changed her life. Recalling the importance of the instrument to her beau, she says “[Kaine] made that banjo hisself…and when Masa break it, it seem like he break Kaine” (38). Despite her efforts, she could not appease her broken and angry man. Consequently, when another slave girl told her that “Masa done gone upside Kaine head, nelly bout kilt him iff’n he wa’n’t dead already,” Dessa ventured that her lover had confronted the master about destroying his banjo and, as a result, the master beat him to death (17). The pregnant girl tells this story in response to Nehemiah’s question of why she remorselessly attacked the slave trader and tried to kill the other white men leading the coffle. After telling the journalist how her master heedlessly killed Kaine, depriving her and her unborn child of a lover and a father, she answers “I kill white mens cause the same reason Masa kill Kaine. Cause I can” (20). Dessa’s story is meant to show Nehemiah how trivial the slave’s life is to the master, and she daringly conjectures that, if the master can terminate a slave’s life without investigation, then a slave should be able to kill a white man without prosecution. She moralizes that the slave’s life is as valuable as that of the master, and asserts that any white man’s life is as worthless to her as Kaine’s was to his owner. Unfortunately, however, the aspiring writer fails to understand the weight of Dessa’s story and bold rationale. He holds this event in very little esteem, synopsizing the incident in his journal in the following manner: June 26, 1847 These are the facts of the darky’s history as I have thus far uncovered them:

The master smashed the young buck’s banjo. The young buck attacked the master. The master killed the buck. The darky attacked the master – and was sold to the Wilson slave coffle. (39) Nehemiah extracts a different lesson from the account. Unconcerned with Kaine and Dessa as people, he sees them merely as slaves and therefore property, referring to Kaine as “the buck” and Dessa as “the darky.” The significance of love and loyalty, and the symbolism of the banjo are inconsequential. Titles and positions replace names, interpersonal relationships, and personal identities. Because Nehemiah believes that slaves are subhuman and therefore incapable of human emotions and sensibilities, he recognizes only the relationship between master and slave. Of everything that Dessa attempts to communicate to him, the journalist only understands one thing: that both “the darky” and “the buck” usurped the master’s authority. Thus, every punishment they received was undeniably due them. His black-and-white reasoning reveals that Nehemiah supports the master/slave binary. In addition, the ambitious reporter maintains distance between himself and his interviewee by incessantly relegating the slave woman to an inferior status, noting in his journal that “Truly, the female of this species is as deadly as the male” (43). He implies that, though she may be of the same biological classification as a primate mammal, she is not of the same species as the modern human. His classification of Dessa as subhuman affects his perception of the young female’s mannerisms and physical characteristics. As a result, he often ascribes animalistic qualities to her behavior and appearance. Through the narrator, the reader learns that Nehemiah initially reacted with fearful caution towards Dessa, having already been warned that “she had been in a dangerously excitable state … biting, scratching, spitting, a wildcat” on the day of her capture (22). To conduct his first interview, he must go down into the root cellar of the sheriff’s home and peer into the dimness at this “wild and timorous animal finally brought to bay” (23). He catches a glimpse of the captive girl who moves “quickly and clumsily to the farthest reaches of the cellar allowed by her chains,” notices her large belly, and speculates that “the kid she carried [would be] a strong lusty one”

(23). The narrator’s language creates a striking image of an apprehensive reporter descending a dark stairwell to the holding pen of a pregnant animal capable of attack at the slightest provocation. Furthermore, his reference to Dessa’s unborn child as a strong, lusty kid is suggestive of an inhuman fetus. He more overtly calls the mother and child untamed creatures when he informs the reader that the court had stayed the slave girl’s execution until after she “whelped,” a word that typically denotes birthing puppies or cubs (22). Although Nehemiah’s subsequent encounters with his interviewee are conducted outside and in the daylight, and therefore under better-lit and safer conditions, his impression of Dessa as subhuman persists. He notes in his journal that, although once permitted to wash upon her request, Dessa “bathed near the place where the livestock [came] to water” (32). The journalist finds the incident noteworthy because it so demonstratively proves for him the woman’s animal-like nature. The narrator furthermore discloses Nehemiah’s observation of the young woman as they sit on the lawn of the Hughes home: “[Her] woolly hair fitted her head like a nubby cap and for a moment Nehemiah fancied he could smell her, not the rank, feral stink of the cellar, but a pungent, musky odor” (39). For Nehemiah, although the slave girl’s wildness subsides, represented by the abating feral smell that denotes savagery, a hint of primitiveness remains about her. The narrator also observes that this expectant mother moves like an untamed creature, approaching her interviewer “on her knees” and resting “on her haunches” (44-45). The term “haunches” typically refers to animal anatomy. By persistently equating the slave girl’s physical qualities with those of an animal, the narrator reveals Nehemiah’s definitive judgment of Dessa as an inferior being. Lastly, the ambitious reporter sees the young slave woman as commodity. Interviewing her on several occasions in an attempt to procure a confession from the already condemned girl and insight into how the slaves freed themselves from their chains, Adam Nehemiah hopes to glean vital information for the publication of his second book. The writer, whose first book entitled The Master’s Complete Guide to Dealing with Slaves and Other Dependents had earned him a great deal of recognition, hopes that his next publication will win him entrée into high society.

With this in mind, the reader must understand that the journalist is interested in Dessa simply for personal gain. Concerned only with the publication of his book, Adam Nehemiah is unable, or perhaps more appropriately unwilling, to understand the significance of Dessa’s recollections about her family and friends within the slave community, thinking them immaterial to his goal. Nehemiah’s interest is invested not in the slave girl as a person, but in her story as a means for social and economic advancement. Anne E. Goldman aptly summarizes the reporter’s mindset, writing that “as the master anticipates using the child to be born from Dessa’s womb, so the scholar expects to appropriate the words issuing from her mouth for his own profit” (323). Contemplating the effect a second publication would have on his career, the ambitious author admits that “a book on slave uprisings …should be an immediate success, easily surpassing the heart- (and pocket-) warming sales of the Guide. [It] would establish [him] as an important southern author” (25). Nehemiah’s motive for interviewing Dessa is not to find out the whole truth about the slave woman’s story, but to generate a record, truthful or not, that will earn him money and respect in southern society. The journalist’s transcription of Dessa’s stories is representative of the biased amanuensis’ misrepresentation of the slave’s life. Because Adam Nehemiah is adamant about his convictions, his perspective overpowers the majority of this section. It is nearly impossible for a character who believes so strongly about the slave population and white society’s supremacy over it to be a part of this story without his viewpoint coming to light and even manipulating a significant part of the narrative. It is important to note, however, that although his is the principal perspective in “The Darky,” Nehemiah does not officially narrate this section of the novel. It is through the omniscient narrator’s appropriation of the reporter’s tone that the reader becomes well acquainted with Nehemiah’s representative whitemale gaze. Relating the journalist’s thoughts and actions shortly after an interview with Dessa, the narrator reports that Nehemiah replaced the pen in the standish, seeing again the ghostly gleam of the darky’s eyes in the dimness, the bulky outline of her body. Who would think a female that far along in breeding capable of

such savagery? He shook his head, chiding himself; he shouldn’t be surprised. Though the darky had no scars or marks of punishment except on her rump and the inside of her flanks – places only the most careful buyer was likely to inspect – these bespoke a history of misconduct. (21) The words “darky,” “breeding,” “rump,” and “flank” might lead us to believe that they belong to the journalist; however, the narrator has simply assumed Nehemiah’s vocabulary, referring to the girl’s race, physical condition, and body parts in a derogatory manner. The narrator has merely shortened the distance between himself and his subject. In doing so, the scholar’s perspective becomes the narrator’s perspective and thus the predominating narrative for this section. Likewise, this unnamed narrator lays bare the southern mistress’s mode of thinking – the perspective of a white woman who takes great pride in her skin color, and who is extremely naïve about the dynamics of the slave system – in “The Wench.” In this second section of the novel, the reader encounters Ruth Elizabeth, whom the slaves rename Rufel. Recently deserted by her gambling husband, and left to care for her two children alone, Rufel relies upon the voluntary work of the fugitive slaves she harbors on her property, and often spends her days pining over the luxurious life she once enjoyed before her marriage to a squandering spouse.1 She daily suppresses the nagging guilt of her inadequacy in a society that heralds the image of the “true woman” praised for her piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.2 Inside a house whose façade boasts of grandeur, Rufel lives with the secrets of poverty, abandonment, and failure. It is to this woman’s house that Dessa and the group of slaves who rescue her from the sheriff’s cellar flee. In a short time, Dessa’s presence becomes a further threat to the white woman’s already dissipating sense of identity – that is, her declining feeling of belonging to the coterie of “true women.” Rufel, who once believed that her motherhood alone could authorize her as a model of the feminine ideal, must rethink the justification for her privileged status when she encounters the slave woman and her newborn. She begins to wonder, if Dessa is a female and a mother just like herself, what makes her, the southern mistress, better than Dessa or any other slave

mother. Already a social and domestic failure, and now no longer able to maintain her true womanhood simply by virtue of her motherhood, Rufel soon realizes that her white skin alone allows her to maintain her hallowed status. She is, just as Toni Morrison says of Mistress Sapphira in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a white woman of the slave south “whose pedestal rests on the sturdy spine of racial degradation [and] whose privileged gender has nothing that elevates it except color” (Playing 26). For this reason, throughout this section of the novel, the narrator repeatedly glorifies Rufel’s whiteness, her saving grace, and often in contrast to the slave woman’s blackness. Dessa’s first sight of Rufel illustrates how important the absence of color is to the plantation mistress. Awakening from her much-needed rest after delivering her child while in flight from the Sheriff’s house, this first-time mother opens her eyes to the stark brightness of Rufel’s room: The raftered ceiling had been whitewashed and recently, the walls, too, and where the sunlight struck them, they gave off a sharp light that hurt her eyes. She closed them, but even behind her lowered lids, she could still see the light striking the white walls and it filled her with terror… her eyes screwed tight against the white walls, against the white face. (emphases mine; 81) Dessa’s immediate impression of Rufel’s room and the white woman’s face allegorizes the glaring difference between the mistress and the enslaved woman in the slave South. The unbearable brightness of Rufel’s chamber is a metaphor for the imperious color barrier that separates the two women, a visible marker that assures the white woman of her supposed inherent virtue, disparages the black woman for her putative degeneracy, and bolsters the hostility between the two of them. For Dessa, the brightness is terrifying because of its onerous and perpetual presence. It is a continual reminder of her non-belonging as a black woman in a white woman’s whitewashed room, and moreover, as symbolically expressed here, as a black woman in the dominating, white society that reveres its weaker sex. Dessa is most overwhelmed by and repeatedly refers to Rufel’s ivory

complexion. Periodically rousing from her rest to study the mistress through half- closed lids that feign sleep, “Dessa watched the white woman…. A white woman moving quietly around her bed…. a white woman white [staring] at her…” (82). This lingering vision of a snowy-skinned woman hovering over her bed greets the slave mother every time she stirs from her fatigue-induced slumber, and Dessa’s multiple references to Rufel’s skin suggests that the white woman’s color is no ordinary white. She makes a mental note of Rufel’s remarkable fairness, hyperbolizing the mistress’s pallid complexion in the phrase “a white woman white.” The reiterated modifier amplifies Rufel’s lily hue, signifying the mistress’s perfection and fragility. In a society where a young maiden’s beauty is “measured on a standard of facial pallor,” Rufel’s immaculate skin easily situates her among the most beautiful of southern belles (Clinton 100). In addition, she proudly wears her ivory skin as a badge of membership in the privileged class. Catherine Clinton, in her study of the plantation mistress, notes that “tanned skin… was an unforgivable and unnatural departure for the southern lady. Not only were there unfavorable racial connotations associated with darker skin, but ladies preserved their complexion as testifying to their pampered status within an agrarian society” (100). Rufel’s extremely white complexion is more than just a mark of beauty; it is more importantly an assurance of her racial purity and an indication of her gentility. In contrast, Rufel marks the darker hue of Dessa’s skin beside her own “milky paleness” (88). The narrator discloses that Rufel watched the “colored girl” as she lay in bed, observing that “the wench was the color of chocolate” (90, 91). Waiting for Dessa to awake fully so that she could explain how she, her newborn, and her rescuers ended up on her farm, Rufel tells herself that “the colored girl would wake and tell her story.” Appropriating the mistress’s language, the narrator goes on to say that “Rufel … watched the colored girl…[and] the colored girl had not stirred” (96). Further exposing the white woman’s thoughts as she inspects the fatigued woman, he remarks that “[Dessa’s] profile was a sooty blur against the whiteness of the pillow” (97). The narrator later talks about Rufel watching the mother and child as they lay together across her white linen, noting that “the girl [was] a vivid chocolate and jet against the whiteness of the sheets, [and] the baby [was] as bright as toast against the

bedding” (139). Furthermore, when Rufel instinctively suckles the brown baby when he cries to be fed, the narrator underscores “the contrast between his mulberry- colored mouth and the pink areola surrounding her nipple, between his caramel- colored fist and the rosy cream of her breast” (102). This recurring imagery of dark against light – soot on white, mulberry against pink, caramel touching cream – further amplifies Rufel’s pale skin, the chief characteristic justifying her superior status. In addition to presenting the importance of skin color (or lack thereof) to the slave mistress, “The Wench” also explores the naïve, white female’s view of the slave system. Rufel is representative of the southern mistress whose primary occupation is to supervise the house slaves and to be pampered by Mammy, and who is also unwitting of the inner-workings of the slave system. She displays the common mistress’s characteristic ignorance or denial of slave abuse. Unable to comprehend such atrocities as the master’s sexual manipulation of slave women and the brutal whippings of field hands, Rufel refuses to believe that such incidents actually occur. When the mulatto woman named Ada tells the mistress that she ran away from “a lecherous master who had lusted with her and then planned the seduction of her daughter Annabelle,” the narrator relates that “Rufel didn’t believe a word of that. She could see nothing attractive in the rawboned, brown-skinned woman or her lanky, half-witted daughter.” Rufel immediately dismisses the mulatta’s statement as “utter nonsense,” but later finds herself battling “her indignation at Ada’s story” (91). Although her initial response was to disregard Ada’s statement as a shamefully fabricated tale, some part of Rufel fears that the young girl’s allegations are true. She is indignant because Ada’s confession forces her to acknowledge the truth about many masters’ ravishment of their female slaves, and perhaps makes her wonder if her own husband had ever exploited any of their former chattel. In order to believe Ada’s story, Rufel would have to admit that white men were prone to debauchery and that many of them found slave women desirable. She finds both of these admissions reprehensible, and prefers to dismiss the young woman’s account as an outright lie. Rufel is also guilty of the naïve assumption that the unseen and the unheard do not exist. Shocked at the slave Nathan’s story about how Dessa’s former owner had

branded her on the insides of her thighs, Rufel recalls that her husband Bertie would sometimes whip their own slaves over such simple things as a broken plowshare or slackened labor due to exhaustion. However, she convinces herself that Bertie had become a more benevolent master. Appeasing her conscience, she reminds herself that, after much coaxing and pleading with her husband to stop beating the slaves, the “peculiar, high-pitched screaming” eventually stopped. She takes comfort in knowing that she was responsible for Bertie’s mellowed disciplinary actions, pointing out that “she couldn’t remember the last time a darky had been whipped at the Glen.” She convinces herself that “certainly she would have heard the screams (unless Bertie had taken to whipping them in the woods).” Suddenly, what Rufel must have already subconsciously known surfaces in her mind: that just because she no longer heard the screams does not mean that her husband had stopped beating the slaves. The severity of Dessa’s punishment forces this plantation mistress to take more seriously the lasting effects, both physical and emotional, of brutality against slaves. Rufel’s prolonged interaction with the fugitives on her land also allows her to see that the slaves formulate families and communities just like the ruling class. This realization prompts her to see slaves more as human beings than as property, and makes her wonder if she had ever destroyed families or communities on her own plantation by selling some of her slaves. Her heated confrontation with Dessa makes Rufel see Mammy, her personal servant, differently. Previously more concerned with who and what Mammy was and did for her, Rufel for a change begins to contemplate who the old woman might have been to others. It is not until Dessa disrupts Rufel’s memories of Mammy, telling her that “you don’t even know mammy…. Mammy live on the Vaugham plantation near Simeon on the Beauford River, McAllen County,” that the white woman begins to think that maybe she did not really know “Mammy” (118). Admittedly, Dessa is being quite facetious with Rufel, because she recognizes that the white woman’s “Mammy” is not the “mammy” about whom she herself speaks. However, her harsh statements – “Wasn’t no ‘mammy’ to it,” “You ain’t got no ‘mammy,’” and “‘Mammy’ ain’t nobody name, not they real one” – forces the bewildered mistress to eventually admit that she did not really know the old woman who selflessly worked

for her and doted on her until the day she died (118). Only after Dessa challenges the mistress’s childlike reveries of Mammy does Rufel begin to think of her dearly departed as a human being with possible loves, children, and hopes of her own. Up until this point, the white woman had failed to recognize that Mammy can be and often is someone’s mammy (mother). In “The Wench,” as in “The Darky,” the narrator frequently assumes the perspective of the white character. In this section, Rufel’s voice is often clearly identifiable. Shortly after Rufel’s confrontation with Dessa about Mammy, chapter four begins as follows: How dare that darky! Seething, Rufel blundered blindly out of the back door, slamming it behind her. She went quickly down the steep steps…without a word. Wench probably don’t know her own name and here she is trying to tell me something about Mammy. She strode across the yard, automatically turning down the path to the stream. Uppity, insolent slut! Ought to be whipped. And if she was mine, I’d do it, too, she thought venomously. (121) This excerpt is very similar to the one examined in our previous discussion of Nehemiah’s voice in “The Darky.” Again, we see that the passage vacillates between free direct thought, simple third person narration, and tagged indirect thought respectively, revealing an interior monologue, narrating a character’s actions, and overtly relating a character’s thoughts.3 In sum, the author again occasionally merges the narrator’s voice with that of a particular character. Williams’ creation of an omniscient narrator who frequently relates the story from Nehemiah’s and Rufel’s perspectives and in their language begs the question of why the author did not simply allow Nehemiah and Rufel to narrate “The Darky” and “The Wench” themselves. If the effect is the same – that is, if the story is still told from the whitemale and “white woman” perspectives with or without the narrator – why complicate the novel by creating an unidentified, non-character narrator to tell the tale?4 The narrator’s presence and purpose in both “The Darky” and “The Wench” is best understood in light of his absence in “The Negress.” Williams remarks that

I could not have a white man telling even part of the story, because I didn’t want to give him that much importance or that much control. Once I had subsumed his voice, it was the most natural thing to subsume Rufel’s also under the omniscient narrator. But when it came to the third section of the novel, which I had always planned would be from Dessa’s point of view, I could really see that something else was needed. (Jordan 288) Herein is the traditional relationship between the slave narrator and the amanuensis reversed. Without a narrator, “The Negress” reads like the slave woman’s uninhibited, unpolished recollection of her life experiences. Dessa Rose frankly relates her story, sharing cherished memories of friends, kin, and loves that a narrator’s telling could not do justice, and candidly critiquing both the white man and the slave mistress without threat of persecution or censorship. In this final section, the slave woman’s story is neither interrupted by non-character commentary, nor mediated by an exacting interviewer, nor misunderstood by a sympathizing yet naïve white woman. On the other hand, the author’s use of a narrator in both Nehemiah’s and Rufel’s stories signifies a controlling presence that dictates just how much of the “whitemale” and “white woman” perspectives are expressed in the novel. Thus, Williams utilizes a narrator in the first sections in order to deny the journalist and the mistress full narrative control, while she conversely eliminates the narrator in the final section to ensure the title character’s unhampered articulation of her own story, in her own words, and from her own perspective. Another question worth asking is, “Why does Williams choose not to have Dessa tell the entire story from beginning to end?” Interestingly enough, Toni Morrison makes this same decision for Beloved. Both Dessa and Sethe refuse to (or refrain from) telling the whole story. What does this signify? It cannot be that the protagonist cannot or does not remember everything about her past. We know that this is not the case for Sethe, since Morrison writes that, despite the slave woman’s continued efforts to “beat back the past,” the memories persisted (73). Even though Sethe wanted to forget, she could not. We also know that Dessa knew the whole

story, because she finally tells it to her children to record/remember.5 It is likely that Williams and Morrison want to underscore the fact that there are many sides to one story, and that each perspective is worth engaging. It is also possible that both authors wish to emphasize their protagonists' power to choose for themselves what part of their life stories get told, what is not worth the telling, and to whom certain aspects of that story are told. It is especially important to note that Dessa withholds some details from Adam Nehemiah that, in all likelihood, she freely disclosed to her children at the narrative’s epilogue. Interestingly enough, we are still deprived of these details. The final section of this text, “The Negress,” is not an appeal to white male sensibilities or white female sensitivities, as was sometimes the case in the antebellum slave narratives.6 Rather, it is the title character’s unabridged expression of her life story for her personal benefit. In this section, the subject speaks. Here, Dessa tells her own story and in her own voice, heavily privileging “black” orality and thereby adopting a less formal address. While the slave author/narrator commonly addressed his or her reader as “dear sir” or “dear reader,” Dessa uses informal speech, referring to the reader as “honey,” and does not apologize for her language. While slave authors like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass often begged their readers’ pardon for their supposedly unpolished tongue or meager command of the English language, Dessa forces her reader/listener to learn her method of communication. This technique creates a more conversational effect, so that the narrative reads/sounds less like a speech. Thus, although a written narrative, this third section of the novel reads more like something spoken and heard rather than written and read. The narrative seemingly transforms from written words for the eyes to spoken words for the ears. Before Dessa ever presents her unabridged testimony at the novel’s conclusion, however, it is important to note that she skillfully maintains some level of say-so in what the white man writes about her in his field notes for his upcoming book. Despite Nehemiah’s staunch beliefs and privileged position as an educated, white male in the antebellum south, the slave girl whom he so aptly surmised as inept

poses substantial opposition for him. The scholar soon finds that his tedious interview of the pregnant slave is in effect a battle of wits, or more precisely a struggle between literacy and vocal empowerment. In this section that should conform chiefly to Nehemiah’s perspective, Dessa’s voice often controls her interviewer’s pen, causing the journalist on some occasions to write frantically stories that he later finds impertinent, and on others never to write a word because of the slave woman’s silence. The result of this relationship between the slave woman’s tongue and the white man’s pen is a subsurface conflict in the interviewer’s written record of Dessa’s articulations. Ashraf Rushdy describes this ongoing contest between interviewer and interviewee as a “battle between Nehemiah’s literacy…and Dessa’s orality” (“Reading Mammy” 365). Much like Reverend Hiram Mattison’s historic interview of the slave woman Louisa Picquet in the 1861 pamphlet Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, both the speaker and the writer vie for narrative control.7 One would assume that this struggle is ineffectual since Nehemiah records the story and thus, according to the traditional tenet that the written word always exerts authority over the spoken word, has final say. Remarkably so, however, Dessa often diverts the reporter’s initial intentions and attentions, fascinating him with stories and songs, and telling what she wills when she desires. Employing what DoVeanna S. Fulton identifies as oral empowerment, the condemned woman asserts some degree of influence over what the journalist writes about her by engaging discussion of only those things she deems important. Of Dessa, Adam Nehemiah writes that She answers questions in a random manner, a loquacious, roundabout fashion – if, indeed, she can be brought to answer them at all. This, to one of my habits, is exasperating to the point of fury. I must constantly remind myself that she is but a darky and a female at that. (23) Underestimating the woman’s intelligence, the reporter fails to recognize that he is being outwitted by a female slave who, by either reticence or garrulousness, determines the topics worthy of discussion. Working the white man’s presumption of the slave’s feeble-mindedness to her advantage, Dessa maneuvers the unwitting journalist away from subjects that do not appeal to her, and toward the memories that

suit her fancy. Thus, after a second unsuccessful day of questioning Dessa about the events on the coffle, a frustrated Nehemiah writes in his journal “Pray God this darky don’t die before I get my book!” (32). The writer begins to question whether he will be able to cull from his multiple interviews any information about the violent skirmish before the arrival of Dessa’s quickly approaching delivery (and execution) date. As the days pass, the reporter grows accustomed to having his questions left unanswered. Grabbing at straws for an explanation of how the slaves broke free of their chains, Nehemiah asks Dessa, “Who had the file you used to break the chains?” (35). Notably, the narrator discloses that “he did not really expect an answer; except for that offensive flicking of the eyes, the darky had responded to none of his overtures” (36). Nehemiah continues his questions: “Where did the file come from?…Was it another darky?…Who were the darkies that got away?” (36). Interestingly, Dessa’s reply is a song, a petition to the Lord above for wings to fly away to her darling Kaine. Although she responds, she in no way answers any of Nehemiah’s questions. Moreover, she entirely disregards the white man’s interests because more meaningful subjects prevail. When Dessa finally talks, she speaks of Kaine. Because her speech catches her interviewer by surprise, “he [writes] quickly, abbreviating with reckless abandon, scribbling almost as he [seeks] to keep up with her flow of words” (37). After recording them for some time, Nehemiah stops writing and “scowl[s], looking at the darky in exasperation,” for her reminiscing about Kaine and her fellow slaves satisfied none of his inquiries (37). If he is not careful, Adam Nehemiah might find himself writing an account entirely different from the one he originally set out to publish. Dessa seems to determine not only the topic of discussion but also the culmination of the interview. The narrator reveals that Nehemiah knew “when she turned her head from him that, for the moment at least, he had gotten all that he would get from her” (41).8 Finally, the tables appear to have completely turned when we learn that, while Nehemiah begrudges his daily interviews, Dessa anticipates them, seeing her rendezvous with the journalist as “a break in the monotony of her

days,” (53) and concluding that “talking with the white man was a game” (60). Denying her interviewer the details he seeks, Dessa impedes Nehemiah’s completion of his hasty and ambitious writing project. Because she knows that death is imminent, she is not compelled to cooperate with the white man who can pose no greater threat than the ultimate punishment that already awaits her. Moreover, that the word of a slave prevails over the white man’s transcription is significant. Nehemiah’s written record fails, not only because it is incomplete, but also because it is incapable of recapturing the fugitive Dessa when the reporter tracks her down in another county after she escapes from the sheriff’s cellar. Holed in a cell and unable to escape the gaze of the white men’s eyes, Dessa fears that the newspaper’s description of her – the white man’s record of the whip scars about her waist and the letter R branded on the insides of her thighs – will seal her fate. Hope arrives, however, when the county sheriff calls in an old, black woman named Aunt Chole to examine Dessa for the noted markings. Secretly accepting a bribe from Dessa as she looks under the frightened girl’s clothes, the elderly woman, with eyes so milky that she was likely blind, turns to the sheriff and declares, “I ain’t seed nothing on this gal’s butt. She ain’t got a scar on her back” (231). On the word of the old black woman, the sheriff releases Dessa and scolds Nehemiah for mishandling an innocent slave girl. Astonished, Nehemiah responds, “You can’t mean this, sheriff. You taking the word of some nearsighted mammy?” (emphasis mine; 231). Ironically, the spoken word of the twice objectified (slave and female) Aunt Chole takes precedence over not only the newspaper advertisement but also everything Nehemiah has recorded in his journal. When his notes fall to the ground, Rufel and the sheriff pick up a few of the papers and examine them. While the sheriff remarks that “ain’t nothing but scribbling on here,” Rufel observes that the pages in her hand are blank (232). In sum, the reporter’s record is illegible, incomplete, and therefore worthless. By allowing Aunt Chole’s word to triumph over Nehemiah’s record, Williams not only overturns the literacy-orality hierarchy, but also introduces a strong, non- compliant female presence not often found in the classic slave narratives. Most accounts of slave resistance to bodily torture or violation usually involved a male

slave who assumed that his physical strength could save him.9 Although William Green’s narrative records the story of one female slave who fought against her oppressor, she froze to death in the end. Hence, unlike her male counterpart, the slave woman’s physical ability could never be her salvation or protection. Williams illustrates that the slave woman’s power must come from elsewhere. Aunt Chole’s resistance is subversive yet effective. Rejecting physical force for cunning, she resists by trickery: by feigning sight or by pretending to not see what really exists. The old woman is very good either at convincing the white men that she can see despite her cloudy eyes, or at making them believe that the obvious and unmistakable markings on Dessa’s thighs are not there. Because of Aunt Chole, all of the women win. Dessa is released, Rufel is reunited with her newfound friend, and the elderly woman gains a little money in the process. This scene with Aunt Chole demonstrates that sometimes craftiness prevails over the law, formal education, or even brute strength. Aunt Chole is powerful because in her blind, elderly, “weaker sex,” and slave condition, she outmaneuvers the white men. At the novel’s climax, the moment that determines the course of events, in walks Aunt Chole who changes everything with her words.10 Williams gives further space to an oral culture as she incorporates such folk expression as dialect and impromptu song throughout the narrative. While, as previously discussed, Dessa’s “voice” rings clear in the final section of the novel, Kaine’s melodies lace the prologue. His raspy call, “Hey, hey…sweet mamma,” greets us at the story’s commencement. Much like Toni Morrison’s Paul D, Kaine is “a singing man” (Beloved 39). The memory of his voice calling sustains Dessa during her imprisonment in the sheriff’s cellar. Kaine’s singing represents revelry in the small pleasures one finds in a lifetime destined for pain. He sings because, though he may be a slave and a forced breeder, he has Dessa back home. Dessa is his delight and his singing expresses his anticipation for whatever gratifying moment with her he can steal. While some slave autobiographers borrowed lines from the established (white) canon, Williams’ narrative flows from the melodies of the fictional Kaine and the lines and lyrics of black authors, orators, and songwriters. Frederick Douglass’

words “You have seen how a man was made a slave…” are the preamble to “The Darky,” signaling this section’s treatment of the dehumanization of the title character. Sojourner Truth’s claim, “… I have plowed and planted and no man could head me…,” indicates that “The Wench” addresses the plight of the female slave in particular. Lines from grassroots musician and composer Taj Mahal are the proem to “The Negress:” Ma négresse, voulez-vous danser, voulez-vous danser avec moi, ici? (161) In these lines, the speaker invites the Negress to dance with him “here,” in the present. The dancing Negress is symbolic of Dessa’s freedom and triumph as she finally lives outside of the slave states and Adam Nehemiah’s reach.11 Just as Williams revises the classic slave narrative's use of borrowed verse, she modifies the (re)naming tradition within the institution of slavery. While, in the slave narratives, the masters had most of the naming rights (assigning their last name to their chattel), Williams’ neo-narrative deals with the naming process in an unusual manner. In Dessa Rose, the reader does not encounter a naming process that involves slave owners assigning their surname to their chattel, but rather a misnaming process that involves characters calling one another out of their names. Nehemiah calls Dessa out of her name, insisting on addressing her as Odessa or labeling her as “the darky.” Similarly, Rufel frequently refers to Dessa as the “wench” or “slut” when she first meets her. However, what is perhaps most interesting about the misnaming practices within this text is that the black characters call Ruth Elizabeth out of her name. Every one of the black characters’ names for Ruth Elizabeth is either a commentary on her disposition, or an indicator of their relationship with her. Dorcas, Ruth’s Mammy, renamed the white lady “Miz Rufel.” Unlike the title “Miss Ruth Elizabeth” which signals a strict relationship between mistress and slave, “Rufel” is suggestive of a nickname between friends. As a young girl, Ruth allowed Mammy to use this pet name, because she found it endearing. Years later, however, when Annabelle calls her Rufel, the enraged white woman corrects her. The narrator explains that

“Miz Rufel” was a slave-given name, discarded by white people when they reached adulthood. Annabelle had put Rufel almost on the same level as herself by its use now, making Rufel appear a child. Young Missy in tantrum, rather than mistress of the House. Shaking, Rufel screamed, “My name is ‘Mistress’ to you!” and fled before the silent laughter in the young girl’s eyes. (99-100) Annabelle’s act of calling the adult Ruth by her adolescent name reveals the young girl’s opinion of the white woman. She is undaunted by Rufel’s glares and threats, because she is aware that the white woman neither owns her, nor knows how to gain and maintain control of her. Essentially, Ruth’s empty threats remind Annabelle of a histrionic child who mistakenly believes that her fits can bend a parent’s will to her own liking. Behind her back, all of the blacks on Rufel’s farm refer to her as “Miz Lady.” It is evident that “Miz Lady” is not a title of respect or deference, as Dessa relates that “Miz Lady…is what we called her amongst ourselves; to her face it was always Mis’ess or Miz Rufel” (164). This name implies that Rufel is, to use a Gullah term, “sidity.” It also has an ironic undertone because, unbeknown to Rufel, everyone is aware that she pretends to be more than who or what she is. She refuses to accept the fact that she has neither husband nor money worth speaking of, and no family to claim her. In sum, she has none of the trappings of an accomplished southern belle – no money, no prestigious family name, and no refined husband. Of Rufel, Dessa discloses that “everyone…called her Miz Ruint too…. Both names meant about the same to me, though Ruint did fit her. Way she was living up there in them two rooms like they was a mansion, making out like we was all her slaves. For all the world, like we didn’t know who we was or how poor she was” (emphasis Williams’ 164). Rufel is “ruint,” or ruined, not only because she has been abandoned by her husband, but also because she has “taken up with” one of the male slaves on her property. Both her social status and her sexual purity lie in ruins, and the fugitives aptly surmise her neglected or discarded state in the names “Miz Lady” and “Miz Ruint.” In terms of Dessa’s and her peers’ renaming of Ruth, Williams reverses the

tradition of naming within the peculiar institution. For a change, the reader encounters a narrative of slavery that depicts a black person calling a white person out of his or her name rather than only the converse. Moreover, Williams allows the title character to have final say over what she should be called. In the end, Dessa adopts the word “Negress” to describe herself. Recorded as early as 1786, the French term négresse referred specifically to a “female negro” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term denotes a black woman, but is obviously more appropriate than such derogatory terms as “darky” and “wench.” In addition, as opposed to “darky” which emphasizes skin color only, and “wench” which specifies gender, the term “Negress” acknowledges both race and gender. Dessa wisely chooses a word which allows her to speak about and embrace blackness and womanhood together. She engages in the act of what Mae G. Henderson calls “speaking in tongues” as she tells her audience what it means to be black and female during the American slavery era. In retrospect, Dessa Rose foregrounds many issues regarding interracial, cross-gender relationships that were often swept under the rug in past discussions of slavery: the relationships between the plantation mistress and the slave woman; between male slaves and plantation mistresses; and between southern belles and slave owners. Traditionally, the interracial conflict we read about the most is that between the male slave and the male slave owner: a battle between two men for a sense of manhood. The southern planter recognizes that his power is measured not by his physical strength, but by his ability to provide all of the accoutrements of a well- established southern home: this often includes a mammy and a few lusty slaves. On the other hand, the male slave sees his manhood and his humanity as one. To feel like a man, he must not be subject to the inhumanity of enslavement. Hence the battle for manhood is this: the slave owner needs the slave, and the slave needs to free himself of his owner. Williams illustrates that the white woman of the antebellum south has a struggle of her own as well. Although she is set up to be “the most perfect example of womankind yet seen on earth,” and the mythology of her day “assured [her] that she was a belle,” she was often unhappy (Scott 4, 23). With a Mammy in the house and a few slave women in the quarters, what domestic or sexual role can she fulfill?

She frequently feels threatened by the slave woman’s presence. Initially, such is the case with Rufel and Dessa. Nevertheless, the two women come to appreciate one another as the story progresses, especially when they share an enemy in the lecherous Mr. Oscar. When Dessa wakes to find the old man drunk and in Rufel’s bed attempting to overpower her, she saves her and ruminates that “the white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me” (201). Williams also broaches the often ignored subject of relationships between plantation mistresses and their male slaves. Contrary to popular literature, not all white women of the period were afraid of black men. In some instances, they actually fell in love with a male slave, or at least had a child or children with him. Martha Hodes notes that “white southerners constructed laws and taboos against sexual liaisons between white women and black men, in part to avoid augmenting a class of free people of African ancestry residing in a society based upon racial slavery” (121). So when Dessa walks in on Nathan and Rufel in bed together, his “velvety blue-black” skin against the “pearly glow” of hers, the reader must acknowledge that not all interracial sex during slavery was non-consensual and/or between a master and a slave woman (158). In this story that has three sides and multiple layers, the reader is given the opportunity to revisit the American slave experience with different eyes and to learn new disclosures about masters, mistresses, fugitives, love, deception, and struggle. To the person who believes he knows all there is to know of history, Williams urges “look again.” Each new look yields greater insights. Although she admits that “this novel…is fiction,” she also promises that “what is here is as true as if I myself had lived it” (6). The truth lies not in the characters but in the various historical realities that inspire them. In her prefatory note to Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams avows that this narrative is a product of her efforts to apprehend some part of “that other history” that has never been told (6). The author successfully rescues the accounts of two unfamiliar women from the recesses of the past and amalgamates their stories in a way that revises the common narrative of History. Opting to explore varying, representative perspectives of one woman’s life in slavery; to create a space for oral

culture in the re-telling of the past; to question the dynamics of interracial relationships; and to explore the practice of (re)naming within the peculiar institution, Williams creates a novel that allows us to imagine “that other history” not usually found in textbooks.

1 Rufel’s marital dilemma was common among plantation mistresses. Anne Firor Scott points out that most southern belles soon became discontented wives, and Kathryn Lee Seidel writes that the southern woman was “often disappointed by the gentlemen who turned out not to be the cavalier, [and] who married her [for her] dowry. Seidel further writes that the “belle-turned-matron” was frequently “distressed by her change in status from a pampered, sought-after belle to a hardworking but anonymous wife” (7).

2 Barbara Welter introduced the concept of the “true woman,” and enumerated these four tenets of the cult of true womanhood in her 1966 like-titled essay.

3 See Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse. 201

4 “White woman” is one of Rufel’s several appellations given her by the slaves. I am using this term to speak of an arrogant yet embarrassingly naïve perspective common to several white females in the antebellum south.

5 It is possible that, in her telling the children her life story in its entirety, Dessa engages in the act of, to borrow from Gayle Jones, “making generations” (Corregidora). She relates her story so that the children may record it and remember it for the generations that follow.

6 Some scholars have already established that, often used as fodder for the abolitionist movement, many of the antebellum slave narratives appealed to white male reasoning and white female sympathies. While authors like Frederick Douglass sought to prove that slaves were capable of reasoning and feeling and were therefore human, and that no human should be enslaved, Harriet Jacobs often spoke directly to white women, urging them to sympathize with the slave’s plight.

7 DoVeanna S. Fulton provides key discussion on Mrs. Picquet’s use of orality “to resist or subvert [the] domination” of her interviewer (98-99). She observes that Mrs. Picquet gains control of the narrative-interview by inadvertently leaving a question unanswered or refusing to reveal details of certain events.

8 In Beloved, Denver makes a similar observation about her mother’s sparse verbal recollections of her slave past: “[She] knew that her mother was through with [her story] – for now anyway. The single slow blink of her eyes… and then a nostril sigh, like the snuff of a candle flame [were] signs that Sethe had reached the point beyond which she would not go” (Beloved 37).

9 James Olney offers that the narratives of Williams Wells Brown, Charles Ball, Henry Bibb, Josiah Henson and others likewise include an account of a slave who physically resists a beating (158).

10 We will later discuss the strong female presence exemplified in Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs and David Bradley’s Harriet Brewer.

11 Likewise, Michelle Cliff prefaces each section of Abeng with lines or language borrowed from the African diaspora. She incorporates African traditionals, Caribbean vocabulary and play songs, and a Jamaican-authored poem into her neo-narrative of slavery in the Caribbean.

CHAPTER THREE “COMING BACK TO LIFE”: REVIVING THE PAST IN BELOVED

In the early 1970s, while editing The Black Book, a compendium of odd documents pertaining to African American history, Toni Morrison encountered documentation of a fugitive slave mother’s desperate act of infanticide in the face of her and her children’s recapture and return to slavery (Kubitschek 4). Refusing to surrender her babies to Master Gaines, Margaret Garner sliced the throat of her infant girl “from ear to ear,” and would have killed the three others had not the white men “wrested [the knife] from the hand of the excited woman” (May 51). On January 30, 1856, the Cincinnati Gazette reported that “the mother of the dead child acknowledges that she killed it, and that her determination was to have killed all the children, and then destroy herself, rather than return to slavery” (qtd. in May 53). In a 1987 video interview, Toni Morrison described this desperate woman’s act as “the ultimate gesture of a loving mother… [and] also the outrageous claim of a slave” (Toni Morrison). She was so intrigued with Margaret Garner’s story that it eventually became her inspiration for writing Beloved. In this novel, the author dares to imagine the life and psyche of a fugitive slave woman before and after she sacrifices her child. Morrison confides, “I never liked books about slavery. They were always so big and flat, and you could never get close to them. So I thought that if I did something narrow and deep, it would be successful.” Unlike the newspaper documentation of this event, Beloved explores the emotional dynamics of slavery and attempts to add multidimensionality to a “flat” record of escape, threat of recapture, and death.

This chapter studies the ways that Morrison revives one peculiar, historical incident in her retelling of an event that took place just on the Cincinnati side of the Ohio River in January 1856. Building from Missy Dehn Kubitschek’s observation that “Freed from the nineteenth-century problem of controlling white publishers and audiences, Beloved carries on the slave narrative – from a black perspective,” this chapter examines how the author revises classic slave narrative conventions in Beloved as she reconsiders the significance of (re)naming; privileges an oral tradition over the written word; and substitutes the traditionally linear plot with a recursive one (15). In addition, it discusses how the final pages of Morrison’s novel permit the narrative to come full circle, furnishing a new beginning rather than an ending, or a rebirth as opposed to a conclusion. In his essay on common slave narrative conventions, James Olney points out that a few of the ex-slave autobiographers wrote about changing their names upon successful escape from the South. For the fugitive slaves, adopting a new name had its practical purpose of eluding recapture. One fugitive slave who later became a famous abolitionist was born “Frederick August Washington Bailey;” changed his last name to Stanley during his escape; and lived as “Frederick Johnson” during his stay in New York before finally settling on “Frederick Douglass” (Olney 157). Similarly, Morrison emphasizes the importance of a name as she creates a community of ex-slaves who have (re)named either themselves or each other.1 The names of Beloved’s characters are especially significant as they modify the meaning of naming in the classic slave narratives. Although Denver inherits her name from a white person, it signifies friendship and not ownership. Amy Denver acted as a companion to the pregnant Sethe, conveying her to freedom rather than returning her to slavery. Sethe’s daughter Denver takes Amy Denver’s last name as her first to commemorate the companionship between “two throw-away people”: her fugitive mother and a penniless white girl (84). Even Paul D takes on a new identity when he drops his last name. While it is true that he first corrects Denver when she calls him Mr. D, telling her “Garner, baby. Paul D Garner,” he later grows accustomed to the entire community’s truncation of his name (11). As a member of a neighborhood of free

blacks, he no longer needs his old master’s patronymic. His renouncement of his former owner’s last name commemorates his transformation from property to person. Stamp Paid rejected his given name of Joshua for one that more accurately reflected his new mindset. Announcing that he had suffered the greatest of all punishments and that he would endure no more of his owners’ persecutions, he “renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master’s son” (184). Stamp Paid tells Paul D that he relinquished his wife to their young master’s sexual whims for almost a year until she told him one day that the young white man had had his fill. He says, “I looked at the back of her neck… [and] decided to break it.” When Paul D asked him “Did you?” he replies, “Uh uh. I changed my name” (232-3). Stamp neither killed the master nor sacrificed his wife in order to vent his rage. Instead, he simply declared that he no longer owed any man anything. Moreover, “he extended his debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery” (184-5). An old slave woman whose bill of sale documents her name as Jenny Whitlow introduces herself to a neighborhood of freedmen as Baby Suggs. Having always wondered why her old master, Mr. Garner, called her Jenny, she asks him why on the day that he drives her to a new town in which to begin her new life as a manumitted black. He replies, “Cause that what’s on your sales ticket, gal” (142). She responds that she never heard her former master, Mr. Whitlow, call her Jenny; that Suggs was her husband’s name; and that he always called her Baby. Mr. Garner retorts, “If I was you I’d stick to Jenny Whitlow. Mrs. Baby Suggs ain’t no name for a freed Negro” (142). However, Baby believes that the exact opposite is true. She wonders, “how could [her husband] find or hear tell of her if she was calling herself by some bill-of-sale name?” (142). Baby Suggs makes two peculiar claims in this conversation with Mr. Garner: that she never heard her old master call her Jenny; and that, although he also belonged to Mr. Whitlow, her husband went by the name Suggs. Close reading suggests the possibility that Baby Suggs refused to respond to the name Jenny. When Mr. Garner asks her if Mr. Whitlow ever called her by this name, she replies, “If he did I didn’t hear it” (142). Furthermore, it is possible that Suggs was not her husband’s last name

but his first. To Mr. Garner’s statement that the name Whitlow was on her husband’s bill of sale also, Baby simply replies, “Suggs is my name, sir. From my husband” (142). Perhaps “Suggs” was the elderly woman’s term of endearment for her husband just as it appears that “Baby” was his pet name for her. Baby Suggs adopts a new name that links her only to the man she loved, and disconnects her from any man to whom she may have belonged. Furthermore, the free blacks take to calling the old woman Baby Suggs, holy, both in recognition of her centrality to the community and in honor of her sage counsel. The narrator relates that “accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, [Baby Suggs] became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it” (87). Apparently, most of the neighborhood’s inhabitants not only benefited from Baby’s wisdom but also relied upon it. In this way an old woman with a broken hip, and thus useless to the peculiar institution, becomes the cornerstone of this free black community. This rite of (re)naming signifies the characters’ appropriation of human status. Discarding the names they once bore while they were slaves and creating new names as free men and women, the novel’s characters both claim a personal identity and make claims to one another as they (re)name themselves and each other. They become their own definers as they establish new identities and forge new relationships. Emerging from this system wherein “definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined,” their act of naming or self-definition signals an acquisition of both autonomy and relatedness, of self-possession and belonging (Beloved 190). No longer under the thumb of a system that prevented them from owning their own bodies and offspring or establishing and preserving kin and relationships of any kind, they assume the power to define themselves and their community. As slaves, they only “loved small,” but as free men and women they now dare to practice a “thick” kind of love (162, 164). The community’s simple addendum to Baby Suggs’ name is significant because it is not only an example of the (re)naming ritual, but also a marker of the elderly woman’s participation in an oral tradition. Through her alternative type of

preaching, Baby Suggs, holy, invokes the oral tradition as a method of empowerment. She is one among several characters through which Morrison celebrates orality in the place of many slave autobiographers’ veneration of literacy.2 Morrison explores the power of an oral tradition as she creates characters who employ the spoken Word, the sang word, and the non-word. Baby Suggs, holy, an “unchurched” preacher-woman, relies on the power of the spoken Word to minister to the souls of an entire community of free blacks. Seated on a huge rock in the middle of the Clearing, she calls for them to join her in the damp meadow, and to laugh, cry, and dance without restraint. Alas, as they lay wearied from their therapeutic ceremony, she admonishes them to cherish their flesh and, above all, to love their hearts. Baby Suggs, holy, uses the open field as her pulpit and takes as her text the persecuted body to preach about self-love.3 Her message is that the soul’s rejuvenation begins with a fierce love of one’s own body. To her congregation she says, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” She warns them that “Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it….You got to love it, you!” (88). Baby preaches from what Alice Walker calls a womanist perspective – one that deeply appreciates and “loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless” (xii). This wise and elderly woman who left Kentucky as Jenny Whitlow and arrived in Ohio as Baby Suggs is clearly an example of the womanist individual who is “committed to the survival and wholeness of an entire people, male and female” (xi). Moreover she is the strong female presence in the novel, and she teaches that the greatest form of resistance against hatred and denigration is love and acceptance. To become attuned to one’s body and to respect the bodies of others is an act of self-possession and a claim of egalitarianism, the most significant rights of which enslaved blacks were deprived. When Baby Suggs, believing that she had offered the community a false sense of hope, gives up preaching after schoolteacher and the other white men invade her yard, Stamp Paid implores her to “say the Word” in spite of all that has transpired. He tells the old woman that “you got to do it…. Can’t nobody Call like you” (178).

Stamp is well aware that the “Word” that Baby speaks, the “Call” that she makes, is the community’s sustenance. Baby Suggs is the initiator, the caller in a call and response tradition that is vital to the spiritual nourishment of the free blacks in her neighborhood. Through the preached or performed Word of Baby Suggs, holy, Morrison invokes what she identifies as an “aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture [that uses] antiphony, the group nature of art, its functionality, its improvisational nature, [and] its relationship to audience performance” as its modes of expression (qtd. in Sale 41). Together, these constituents formulate an interactive and functional folk practice. It is interactive because it necessitates an exchange between a speaker and an audience, and functional because it is exhortative and not simply performative. In an oral folk tradition, the speaker does not speak for his personal benefit, as merely an exercise in verbal craft, but for the admonition of the hearers. Baby Suggs’ sermons in the Clearing are not rhetorical rehearsals, but rather practical counsel presented through a spiritual medium. Many literary critics who explore Morrison’s use of the oral tradition in Beloved discuss the importance of Baby Suggs, holy, as a community preacher. They discuss the significance of the elderly woman’s command of the spoken word; however, they overlook the importance of this preacher woman’s dependence upon the non-word (some form of melody) when the spoken word is insufficient. Baby Suggs, holy, encourages her community of listeners to create a new sound, a new music that communicates with a deeper part of them that mere words cannot reach. She invokes the non-word, an audible communication without words that employs humming, moaning or any kind of vocal sound with embedded meaning. Before Baby Suggs, holy, ever preaches to her listeners, she first prepares their hearts to hear what she will say, and she does so with the non-word. She urges the children to laugh and the women to cry while the men dance. And to this music of giggles and weeping, laughter and wailing, titters and sniveling the men danced. “It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced…until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and

gasping for breath” (88). Something about the music created by the intermingling of laughter, sobs and moving feet overwhelms the participants. There are no words, only the sound of rejoicing in sorrow and mourning in happiness. And this composition is cathartic. Baby Suggs, holy, ends her address in like manner. When she began to dance in order to communicate the final message of her sermon, the Clearing’s congregants “opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until their four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh” (89). Words could neither adequately accompany the old woman’s dancing, nor wholly express the attendants’ emotions. Only the non-word, some kind of vocal accompaniment without the lyrics, would do. This is not the last demonstration of the power of the non-word. At the novel’s conclusion, we will see how long after the death of Baby Suggs, holy, the neighborhood women again invoke the non-word when they come to the aid of Sethe who is drowning in the guilt and grief of her past. Curious moanings, secretive ditties, striking refrains, and impromptu melodies join the exhortations of the community’s matriarch in celebration of an oral tradition. Baby Suggs’ calls, Paul D’s songs, Sethe’s humming, and the neighborhood women’s purging notes enliven this narrative and help tell this story that is too complicated to simply narrate. These chords in their various forms are the instruments of both oral and aural empowerment because they liberate and fortify not only the singers but also the listeners. Every line Paul D sings weaves the pattern of his life existence (39). Together, his songs tell the story of one man’s unsteady courtship of freedom – how he once yearned for her, then loathed her mockery of him, and finally held her tentatively. At Sweet Home, he relied on slave spirituals and sorrow songs that were “a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains” (Douglass 58). As Mr. Garner’s slave, Paul D was sustained by the spirituals’ assurance of a Great Master who looked with compassion upon his plight and would not leave his oppressors unpunished in the Day of Judgment. However, eighty-six days of toil on a chain gang change his song. Songs that promised eventual deliverance and happiness in the next life could not sustain him

through nearly three months of relentless labor, and physical and emotional abuse. Instead, armed with only a sledgehammer and newfangled songs about love and toil, and hate and death, he beats out his emotional distress. He and the others sang it out and beat it up…. They sang the women they knew… of bosses and masters and misses… of graveyards and sisters long gone…. And they beat…. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. (108-109) Paul D and forty-five other black men chained together, caged in, overworked, and sexually exploited maintained their sanity and humanity with pounding sledgehammers and striking refrains. Their lines about loves known and lost remind them of their humanity – their sense of belonging to someone else, whether a sister, a lover, or a mother. And their verses about killing bosses or Lady Life candidly yet safely vent their frustrations with “whitemen” and with their depraved existence. By “garbling” and “tricking” their words, these men create a new language and thereby generate their own community – a type of brotherhood wherein each one felt connected to the other in a way that, although invisible, is more secure than their leg irons. These are the songs that carry Paul D through eighty-six days in Alfred, Georgia. They are crucial for Georgia, but out of place at 124 Bluestone. After being reunited with Sethe in Ohio, finally Paul D’s body is where his thoughts have always been, but his psyche requires time to readjust. This is evident in the songs he sings while performing the simple task of resetting furniture. Of Sethe’s old friend, the narrator relates that The songs he knew from Georgia were flat-headed nails for pounding and pounding…. But they didn’t fit, these songs. They were too loud, had too much power for the little house chores he was engaged in…. So he contented himself with [humming], throwing in a line if one occurred to him, and what occurred over and over was ‘Bare feet and chamomile sap,/ Took off my shoes; took off my hat’. (40) Paul D’s new lyrics about naked feet and finally a resting place for his hat speak of infatuation rekindled and reunion that fosters a sense of belonging.4 His improvised

song is a signifier. Better than any dialogue or narration, these new lines clearly signal a psychological shift for Sethe’s companion. They mark the making of a new man and the beginning of a liberated life. By far, the “last of the Sweet Home men” is not the only character who enriches this narrative with some form of melody. As a matter of fact, Beloved’s surreptitious humming topples Sethe’s touch-and-go world and finally undoes all of her “serious work of beating back the past” (73). When Beloved shows up at her doorstep, Sethe must look the past squarely in the face; however, it will take much more than a face to make this obstinate mother come to terms with a part of her life that she wants desperately to believe is dead and buried. Markers of Beloved’s true identity are evident from the moment of her arrival, but Sethe refuses to see them. When Beloved first appeared at 124, “Sethe’s bladder filled to capacity” (51). She ran to the outhouse to relieve herself, and “the water she voided was endless…like flooding the boat when Denver was born” (51). While Sethe’s first sight of Beloved and what is reminiscent of her water breaking occur simultaneously, the mother does not realize that she has just rebirthed her dead child. For the duration of her stay at 124, Beloved continually asks Sethe questions about her past that only a family member or close friend would know to ask. She prods Sethe with questions that make her wonder, “How did she know?” (63). Despite Beloved’s inquiries and cajoling, the fearful mother cannot (or will not) face this only remaining fact. Hence, Beloved is pushed to her last resort: humming. The little tune she hums into Sethe’s hearing causes her mind to click – to finally accept that Beloved is her Beloved. …the click came at the very beginning – a beat, almost, before it started; before she heard three notes; before the melody was even clear. Leaning forward a little, Beloved was humming softly. It was then, when Beloved finished humming, that Sethe recalled the click – the settling of pieces into places designed and made especially for them. (175) Turning her head to view Beloved’s profile, the enlightened mother says, “I made that song up. I made it up and sang it to my children. Nobody knows that song

but me and my children.” Beloved simply responds, “I know it,” and all of the pieces slide into place (176). Without this tune, Sethe would still be in denial and the narrative would not progress as it should. Beloved’s humming also recalls for the reader the last event that was accompanied by the vibrating chords of people who saw a lot and thought much more, but said nothing. When the white men escort Sethe, holding her living child in hands drenched in her sister’s blood, into the throng of black faces outside of 124, none of the residents makes a sound. Watching silently as the sheriff and the others take her away, they wait until the cart carrying the audacious mother and the formidable white men was at a safe distance, “and then no words. Humming. No words at all” (152). The onlookers’ humming alone, in the place of a buzz of questions and commentary, signifies their commitment to remember but never speak of what they have seen, heard and already discerned. The humming represents disapproval of Sethe’s actions for some, empathy for her plight for others, and mourning for the loss of a baby’s life for others still. Their emotions are all summed up in a sound. While Beloved’s humming of this secretive mother-to-child ditty opens the floodgate of these memories and forces her finally to face the past, the neighborhood women’s humming frees Sethe from this past that she is too weak to properly acknowledge and respectfully lay to rest. Recognizing that Beloved has overstayed her welcome becoming “unleashed and sassy,” community resident Ella gathers the neighborhood women. Together, they congregate outside of 124 to expel the spiteful ghost incarnate from Sethe’s house and from her life in general. To do so, they resort to an understood sound that meant much more than words. Catching a glimpse of Beloved at the doorway, “they stopped praying and took a step back into the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (259). It is not the women’s prayers, the words they employ, that release Sethe and send Beloved to her rightful place; it is the non-word, the peculiar sound from way back before words existed, that sets things aright. By the novel’s conclusion, it is evident that the soothing spirituals, steadying work chants, life-altering impromptu songs, sly ditties, and peculiar moanings help

make this daring story what it is. While at times the narrative cannot successfully progress without the aid of these folk songs, the songs themselves could stand alone and tell the stories of a few slaves’ and ex-slaves’ life experiences. Embedded in them are the tales of hardships, hope, resistance, and self-regeneration. Morrison’s craft in relating a story through the preached word, the sang word, and the non-word demonstrates that (his)stories and secrets can be divulged and passed down the generations without ever being written. The author deviates from the slave narrative technique of borrowing verse from the sanctioned canon, and employs as the narrative’s vehicle of expressivity the various forms of verse within the black community. In this way, the ex-slaves testify, literally in their own words, of their own experiences both during and after slavery. Another way that Morrison revises traditional slave narrative conventions is by disjointing her neo-narrative. Instead of straightforwardly telling her story as the slave narrators did, she makes her readers struggle to comprehend her narrative. While the slave autobiographers prescribed to their readers’ method of communication, Morrison unapologetically tells her story as she pleases. Beloved is not one, cohesive story clearly related from beginning to end. Instead, it is the non- sequential telling of and allusions to particular events that the reader must piece together in order to discern the true form of this story that “was not a story to pass on” (274). As it is unclear whether the narrator meant that this tale of an ex-slave woman who killed her baby girl is not one to “pass on” or to “pass on,” I submit that it is one that both begs and shuns retelling. Since to tell the tale is both necessary and forbidden, the story in its entirety slowly unfolds like a secret that paradoxically must but should not be told. Morrison creates this nuance by fragmenting the tale, at times keeping the characters and the narrator from fully disclosing the details of Sethe’s past that have for years remained “quiet as it’s kept.”5 Earlier skeletal references to people, objects, and incidents that are eventually fleshed out as the narrative progresses characterizes this halting but complete confession of an ex-slave woman’s terrible history. Stolen milk, a churn, a laughing Sixo, a girl looking for velvet, and a brilliant, white staircase are all pieces of the puzzle – fragments of this weary mother’s haunting past

– that must come together in order to formulate the story that is Beloved. The churn is the first of these oblique references. Setting eyes on the last of the Sweet Home men for the first time in eighteen years, Sethe asks Paul D if he knows anything more about her husband Halle’s disappearance, and he replies “I don’t know any more now than I did then.” The narrator however, divulging the old friend’s thoughts, adds, “except for the churn, he thought, and you don’t need to know that” (8). Paul D is averse to telling Sethe what he knows about Halle’s disappearance in connection with the churn, and at this point in the narrative, the unidentified narrator is also unwilling to say anything more. It is not until much later that we find out what the churn had to do with Halle breaking his promise to meet his wife before the night of their planned escape. Moreover, we can understand what we eventually discover about this churn only because of what we have already learned about Sethe’s near rape. Hiding in the loft of the barn waiting for Sethe to arrive, Halle helplessly looked on as two white boys restrained and stole the milk from his lactating wife. Concealing himself in a place where he believed no one would look, Halle never thought that he would see something so horrid that it would temporarily immobilize him and permanently mar his mind. Paul D tells Sethe that “whatever [Halle] saw go on in the barn that day broke him like a twig” (68). Attempting to explain to her why she never saw her husband again, he says “Last time I saw him he was sitting by the churn. He had butter all over his face” (69). Her mind eagerly devouring this new information, Sethe imagines her husband “squatting by the churn smearing butter as well as clabber all over his face because the milk they took is on his mind” (70). 6 Paul D’s long-kept memory of Halle covered in butter begins to take on a deeper significance only after Sethe confides in him, on the first day of their reunion, that schoolteacher’s nephews “came in there and took my milk…. Held me down and took it” (16). From Sethe’s confession, Paul D finally learns what terrible vision drove his friend to madness. Furthermore, it is not until Paul D tells Sethe that Halle lost his mind that Sethe finally discovers why her husband has been missing for so many years. Each of the characters must relinquish or confide in the other what (s)he

knows – the pieces of the whole story – in order for the entire account of Halle’s disappearance to come to light. Every minor detail, every fragment of the characters’ memories, is essential to the (re)construction of the larger story in its entirety.7 Sethe’s shameful secret of stolen milk and Paul D’s lasting memory of a dear friend bathed in butter are the necessary and missing components of the story of one man’s conspicuous absence. Similarly, the story of Sixo’s first and only laugh slowly emerges the further we read into the text. Remembering the camaraderie between the three Pauls, her husband Halle, and Sixo, Sethe recalls “how they laughed and played and urinated and sang. All but Sixo who laughed once – at the very end” (23). An ingenious young slave whose admittedly bright experiments often yielded botched results, Sixo’s quirky tendencies inspired joy and urged laughter among his companions. Yet, how peculiar that such an animated man who could tell a story so colorfully that it would make his listeners “cry-laugh” would only laugh once himself. What was it, then, that finally made Sixo laugh? This question goes long unanswered until nearly the end of the novel when Sethe reveals that the explosive sound of Sixo’s mirth was initiated by the slaves’ last-minute change in the escape plan. Sethe recalls that their strategy “was a good one, but when it came time, I was big with Denver. So we changed it a little. A little. Just enough to butter Halle’s face, so Paul D tells me, and make Sixo laugh at last” (197). This is all that we learn about Sixo’s laugh until we gain access into Paul D’s memories several pages later. From him, we learn that the slight change in the slaves’ plan foiled the entire escape. Coming from the bushes, the white men seized Paul D and Sixo and tied them up, but not before the Thirty-Mile Woman absconded into the woods with her life and the life of her unborn child intact. Tied to the tree with a fire lit under his feet and a group of angry, white men surrounding him, Sixo finally laughed as he called out “Seven-O! Seven-O!’ because his Thirty-Mile Woman got away with his blossoming seed” (228). Moments before his death, this pure African lets out a laugh that baffles his persecutors and marks a triumph unknown to them. He laughs because, in his death, he has thrice dispossessed the white men, robbing them of the profit they would have gained from his, his lover’s, and their offspring’s labor.

Other examples of fragmented stories are abundant throughout the text. A girl wandering alongside the woods somehow aids in a pregnant Sethe’s eventual escape to freedom. Sethe ponders how unlikely it would have been for her to make it to Ohio without the help of “that girl looking for velvet” (8). Who was this girl? Why was she looking for velvet? How did she help the fugitive slave mother? Each subsequent reference to this mysterious, young female provides new and helpful information about her and her involvement in Sethe’s escape. As the narrative progresses, we learn that she helped deliver Sethe’s baby in an abandoned canoe (29). Much later, we learn the specific details of that cool summer night when “a slave and a barefoot whitewoman,” ushered a little baby girl into the world while crossing the Ohio River (84). Sethe’s youngest daughter, Denver, is named after Amy Denver, this poor, little white girl who stopped to nurse a pregnant fugitive back to health, massaging her feet and tending to her wounds, and to help her deliver a baby. The white staircase, which must be significant since the narrator frequently refers to it, remains an enigma for the greater part of the story. Paul D almost immediately notices it shining “out of the dimness of the room” when he enters 124 for the first time (11). Settling at the foot of the staircase, Denver warns her mother’s visitor that “we have a ghost in here,” but Paul D is more fascinated with “the lightning-white stairs behind her” than with this startling bit of information (13). Some time later, the narrator draws our attention again to these bright steps as Sethe and Paul D make their way to Sethe’s bedroom (20). Despite these continual references to the staircase in the earlier pages of the narrative, the text reveals nothing more about them, only reiterating the fact that they are white. We finally learn, more than one hundred pages later, that Sethe and Baby Suggs had them painted white for Sethe’s third and now deceased child, the “crawling already?” baby (160). Nevertheless, their reason for painting the staircase remains unknown until the departed child returns in the form of Beloved, and Sethe finally realizes that the strange, young woman she has been boarding is the spiteful ghost incarnate. Ready to deal with the past now that her beloved child has returned, Sethe carefully unpacks all of her stored memories. She reminisces about how “Baby Suggs had [the stairs] painted white so [her crawling already? baby] could see [her] way to the top in the

dark where lamplight didn’t reach” (204). At last we learn why it is important to note that the stairs have been painted white, and moreover, why the mysterious sound of someone or something crawling up and down the stairs is significant. Of Morrison, Judith Thurman writes that “She treats the past as if it were one of those luminous old scenes painted on dark glass…and she breaks the glass, and recomposes it in disjointed and puzzling modern form,” leaving the reader to struggle with its fragments and mysteries (qtd. in Plasa 48). Similarly, Philip Page writes that “the principle narrative strategy of the novel is to drop an unexplained fact on the reader, veer away into other matters, then circle back with more information about the initial fact, then veer away again…and so on” (35). While these scholars’ observations are true, it is also important to note that the novel’s characters are themselves struggling with these past experiences. The text takes on a fragmented form largely because of the existing tension between rememory and repression. Sethe and Paul D often fight to free themselves from the past, wanting to pick and choose their memories rather than visa versa. The fact remains, however, that although they sometimes do not want to remember, they cannot help remembering. In Sethe’s case, “she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe” (6). This phrase is peculiar, because it does not mean that Sethe made great efforts to forget everything. Rather, it means that she was careful to remember just enough. “Unfortunately her brain was devious,” wanting to know and remember all (6). She thinks to herself that, if there were any more to discover about the past, “my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you” (71). Paul D does not wish to discard completely his memories either. Like Sethe, he only wishes to control them. The narrator relates that “it was some time before [Paul D] could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper, one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest” (113). If Paul D truly wanted to be free of the past, he would have tried to annihilate the memory of these people, places, objects, and smells. Instead he locked them safely away, or at least he thought he had done so until Beloved came. Offering an intriguing reading of Beloved as a symbol of the past, Missy Dehn Kubitschek writes that “When Paul D has sex with Beloved,

he is symbolically accepting the past” (129). For Paul D, the past, represented by Beloved, is simultaneously unappealing and irresistible – something that he does not want to engage but, at the same time, cannot help acknowledging.8 Something that pursues him. Kubitschek goes on to write that Paul D’s intercourse with Beloved should not be read as a betrayal of Sethe (since Beloved is not a person but history made flesh), but rather as an acceptance of the past. Paul D’s tobacco tin explodes, spilling its contents when he succumbs to Beloved’s beckoning to “touch me on the inside part and call me my name” (116), and the rusted shut can is replaced by a “red heart” (117). If the heart represents both love and life in its fullness, then Paul D has long existed without experiencing either. In the place where a full life should be, he has stored bitter memories. Only after these memories explode and escape from their rusted urn is Paul D able to acquire a whole life. He has to choose to acknowledge the memories and release them before he can replace the old rusted thing with a vibrant, red heart. The novel’s structure is recursive, leaving fragments of smaller stories along the wayside and later returning to pick them up and piecemeal them, mainly because it mimics the characters’ struggle to both remember and at the same time lock away all of their psychological keepsakes. “Thus,” according to Marilyn Sanders Mobley, “while the slave narrative characteristically moves in a chronological, linear narrative fashion, Beloved meanders through time, sometimes circling back, other times moving vertically, spirally out of time and down into space” (qtd. in Plasa 51). Vestiges of Sweet Home, the chain gang, and those first twenty-eight days in Ohio often escape mental censorship and find their way into the characters’ rolling memories, as well as onto the page.9 Just as the narrative sometimes goes back to the past and other times moves away from it, so do the characters grapple with rememory and progression toward the future. This interplay between the novel’s present and the past helps the reader understand the ways the past impinges upon the present.10 Carefully and eventually, all of the shattered pieces are reconnected – whether by the characters’ compliance with rememory, or by the narrator’s divulgence – and both Sethe and Paul D finally learn the necessity of acknowledging the past in order to live wholly in the present.11

Unlike several slave narratives that suggest that freedom from physical chains shuts on all levels the door of slavery, neo-narratives like Beloved demonstrate that freedom from slavery is not equivalent to freedom from the memory of slavery. Emancipation is just as much psychological as it is physical. Finally, it is important to note that, although Beloved repeatedly takes the reader backwards and forwards and through twists and turns, the narrative comes full circle in the end. The novel ends (or begins again) in a manner similar to its beginning, so that its conclusion is not an end but a new beginning. In the final pages of the story, the narrative “does [its] first works” again, affording the characters an opportunity to set aright their previous decisions and actions (Revelation 2:5). Little phrases and/or simple actions that recall earlier incidents mark this circular path. At the beginning of the novel when Sethe and Denver decide to invoke the presence of the spiteful ghost, they urge the spirit to manifest itself in the flesh, saying, “you may as well just come on” (4). However, Paul D soon arrives and expels the ghost altogether. Later in the narrative, as Beloved beckons Denver to join her in dancing, she tells her to “Come on. You may as well just come on” (74). This is a sign that the spirit of Sethe’s baby has returned, but this time in the flesh. It suggests that both Denver and Sethe have been given another chance to properly deal with the ghost of their deceased sister and daughter. In the final pages of the narrative, Sethe once again leaves Beloved alone. In a sort of mental exchange between Sethe and Beloved, Sethe tells her precious daughter “you came back to me,” and Beloved responds “you left me” (217). In this passage, Sethe is glad that her daughter has returned and promises never to leave her again. However, she leaves her standing alone on the porch when she sees a white man approaching her house. Trying to run back to the stream – the water from whence she emerged as a fully dressed woman – she literally falls apart before she can make it there. This time, Beloved has to stay left behind. The repeated statement that “[Paul D’s] coming is the reverse of his going” marks a literal rewind to the first moments when the last of the Sweet Home men gradually began to leave 124 (263, 270). When Beloved came, “she moved him,” little by little, from Sethe’s bedroom to the rocker in the kitchen, to Baby Suggs’

room, to the storeroom, until he was completely out of the house and off of the property (114). When the neighborhood women expel Beloved, Paul D returns in reverse, “first the cold house, the storeroom, then the kitchen before he tackles the beds” (263). Finally, Paul D makes it back to Sethe’s bedroom. He, like the ghost of the dead child, makes his journey to where he is meant to be. Likewise, the lyrics about “bare feet and chamomile sap” and going “stone blind” revisit Paul D’s mind upon his settling in at 124 once again. This time Paul D changes the lyrics, and the second rendition of this song is an answer to his inner turmoil. While he originally sang about retrieving his shoes and hat from the woman with bare feet and sap covered legs, he now sings that the “Sweet Home gal [will] make you lose your mind” (263). He learns the lesson that Baby Suggs had been trying to teach all along: that one must love through the pain. The message of his lyrics changes from intense resentment to resolute love, so that the line “whip my captain till he went stone blind” (40) becomes “love that woman till you become stone blind” (263). Paul D’s answer is to overcome fear with love. The “too thick” love for which he formerly rebuked Sethe is now his saving grace (164). 124 returns to one of its earlier states: the ghost is gone, and a man takes its place. From this point, the characters, afforded an opportunity to begin life again after slavery, must learn to progress toward the future after having already survived their much-needed confrontation of the past. While it is true that “anything dead coming back to life hurts,” Morrison illustrates that sometimes resurrection is necessary (35). As much as one may want to believe that “the future [is] a matter of keeping the past at bay,” the truth is that an unacknowledged past often creates an unhappy present (42). Toni Morrison’s brave and imaginative venture into the psyche of two fugitives – not just of slavery, but also of the memory of slavery – creates a “new” narrative that not only revives a buried history but also revises the telling of it. Her co-optation of classic slave narrative conventions – that is, her emphasis on (re)naming; her substitution of an oral tradition; her inclusion of a strong female presence; and her use of narrative recursion – is what makes Beloved strangely reminiscent of, yet quite different from, classic slave autobiographies.

1 As discussed in the previous chapter, the practice of naming is also significant in Dessa Rose. Likewise, one of Chaneysville’s characters renames himself, rejecting “Brobdingnag,” the name his master gave him, for “C.K.,” derived from his biological, slave father’s name. His new name signals a resistance to white paternalism and a pursuit of an established black paternity, as it disassociates him from a white patriarch and connects him to a black father.

2 Several of the slave narratives involve a protagonist who strongly believes that the acquisition of literacy will help him obtain freedom. Frederick Douglass believed that, if he could only learn to read and write, he “might have occasion to write [his] own pass” to freedom (280).

3 For another example of the alternative preacher type, see Ernest Gaines’s Ned in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

4 Paul D’s singing is much like that of Dessa’s beau whose voice came “clear as running water over a settled stream bed, swooping to her, through her…” (11)

5 This is the introductory clause in the prologue of The Bluest Eye. Morrison explains that this phrase has a “back fence connotation… [of] illicit gossip, of thrilling revelation.” It suggests “that the teller is on the inside, knows something others do not, and is going to be generous with this privileged information” (“Unspeakable” 386). I am suggesting that, like Morrison says of the phrase “quiet as it’s kept,” the admonition that Beloved is “not a story to pass on” both prohibits and solicits its retelling.

6 Halle’s act of smearing butter on himself can be read either as an attempt to exorcise from his mind the image of the two malicious, juvenile faces covered with his wife’s maternal milk, or as an attempt to communicate to Paul D the terrible, speech-robbing incident he had just witnessed.

7 Maggie Sale observes that “Beloved presents a new way of conceiving of history, one that refutes master versions of history. Such master versions value certainty and exactitude…[and] collapse the multiplicity of voices at any given historical moment into [one] artificial and repressive [voice]” (42). Essentially, Morrison imaginatively reconverts the single, detached voice of History to the multiple narratives of each character’s personal histories. In doing so, she illustrates how each character’s individual perspective and knowledge is necessary to a more dimensional (and thereby more realistic) understanding of the past.

8 In this manner, Beloved is to Paul D what the foraying dust is to Chaneysville’s John Washington. In the next chapter, we will read how, “Symbolic of old memories hidden away, the dust is both offensive and inviting” to John. The same could be said of Beloved who, once he surrenders to her, resurrects the memories that Paul D both longs to forget and yearns to safely remember.

9 By rolling memories, I mean those recollections that invade the characters’ thoughts. The narrator describes their unannounced visitation as an image “rolling out” before an unsuspecting character’s very eyes (6).

10 Several of the slave autobiographies like Frederick Douglass’ Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents utilized a linear, progressive plot, following the author’s movement from slavery to freedom, from south to north, or from an oppressive past to a liberated present. In contrast, Beloved employs a non-linear, recursive plot that often vacillates between past experiences and present events, and thereby illustrates that the journey from slavery to freedom is not always as straightforward as the classic slave narratives might have led its readers to believe. While the slave narratives primarily related the physical trek from oppression to emancipation, Beloved and like neo-slave narratives map the psychological pilgrimage from bondage to freedom.

11 There is a fine line between yielding to the past and surrendering to it. Sethe makes the serious mistake of surrendering her entire life to the memory of her deceased child when she submits herself to Beloved’s every whim near the end of the novel. In doing so, she almost dies. If not for the help of the neighborhood women, she might have been lost forever in the guilt of her past. Ella understands this fine line between temporary submission and permanent surrender, as the narrator discloses that “Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present,” and “She didn’t mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion” (256, 257).

CHAPTER FOUR A WEDDING AND A FAMILY REUNION: ANCESTORS ABSCOND WITH THE BLUSHING BRIDE IN OCTAVIA BUTLER’S KINDRED

Set initially in 1976, Octavia Butler’s Kindred is the story of newlyweds Kevin and Dana Franklin who anticipate a life of wedded bliss, despite their families’ objections to their interracial marriage. While unpacking her belongings, Dana is suddenly snatched from the comfort of her new California home and dropped on a Maryland riverbank in 1815: a lone black woman in slave territory. She has been summoned through time to save little Rufus Weylin, the son of a plantation owner, from drowning. This is the first of many abductions Dana will experience over the next few days. Each time, history steals her away to the same life of enslavement, degradation, and physical abuse, and always to save the same young man. Over the next few years in the early nineteenth century, the equivalent of less than one month in 1976, Dana saves Rufus from death by fire, drowning, severe beating, and malaria. Repeatedly endangering her own life, Dana must discover and meet the demands of this slave past before she can reclaim her present life once and for all. Once she learns that Rufus Weylin is a distant ancestor – the slave owner who rapes her great-great-great grandmother Alice and fathers her children– she understands that her duty is to ensure that Rufus lives long enough to father Hagar, the beginning of Dana’s family tree. The protagonist soon learns that tucked away in everyone’s family history is at least one relative we wish we could disown – that though some people are incorrigible, shameful, and unwanted, they are still kindred. In this story about “how a [wo]man was made a slave,” 1 Octavia Butler

foregrounds the female slave experience; revisits notions of slave resistance; deconstructs cultural stereotypes and icons associated with slavery; explores the dynamics of self-possession and sexual autonomy; and introduces postmodern readings of both the experience of middle passage and the process of remembering. Although the author evidently references the themes and borrows the narrative tools of the slave autobiographies, she also fleshes out the stories and lessons hidden between their lines and considers how these events have informed contemporary African-American identity and experience. Kindred is not the familiar story of one male slave who announces his humanity when he escapes to freedom. Instead, it is an imaginative look into the experiences of a community of female slaves. Moreover, these women’s humanity is not contingent upon whether they flee north. They are human because they always were human, fully capable of creating bonds, expressing emotions, and differentiating moral right from wrong. Butler significantly “shift[s] the emphasis [of the slave’s story] from the lone male hero to the female heroine enmeshed in a network of communal ties” (Yaszek 1056). In contrast to the male-authored slave narratives which “frequently [were] stories of triumph in a public sphere,” this neo-narrative about the enslaved female focuses more on personal and interpersonal struggles and victories (qtd. in Morgan 88). With such a shift in point of view, Kindred devotes more narrative energy to a depiction of the slave community than to a “blatantly patriarchal” public sphere (Morgan 88). Dana quickly finds her place within this slave community when history seizes her from the safety of 1976 and delivers her to the Weylin plantation. She must gain her bearing and learn to create a new home away from home. She finds refuge in Sarah’s cookhouse where she first becomes acquainted with a few of the slaves: the middle-aged Sarah, her mute daughter Carrie, the trickster Luke, and the young Nigel. Dana observes that, “people came into the cookhouse – always black people – talked to Sarah, lounged around, ate whatever they could put their hands on until Sarah shouted at them and chased them away” (75). Many of the slaves congregate in the warmth of Sarah’s kitchen, eating, talking about Marse Tom and Miss Margaret, and catching a moment of temporary refuge. The cookhouse is where relationships

amongst Weylin’s slaves are forged and maintained. It is where Sarah can safely mutter “Bitch!” under her breath when thinking about Miss Margaret; where Luke advises, “don’t argue with white folks…. Just say ‘yes, sir.’ Then go ‘head and do what you want to do;” and later where the weak and traumatized Alice safely goes into “hysterics…out of the sight of the Weylins” (96, 158). In so many ways, the cookhouse is the center of this slave community. It also becomes Dana’s second home. Herein, Butler demonstrates that oftentimes hidden within the plantation – the site of backbreaking labor, inhumane beatings, and other forms of physical abuse – is a makeshift place of connectedness and momentary safekeeping for the slave. This small space where feelings of togetherness and safety thrive is what complicates running away. A slave who runs away leaves behind not only a brutal master and/or mistress but also a family, and he braves the threat of loneliness, recapture or an even worse fate. Such risks are not as inviting for the female slave, especially one who “define[s] freedom as interdependence within relationships,” and not as autonomy (Morgan 89). Flight, then, becomes very complicated for someone whose life is fulfilled by the children she has birthed and the friendships she has cultivated. Such is the case for Aunt Sarah, Alice, Carrie, Dana, and Tess. These women form a sisterhood that protects each of them to the best of their ability. Aunt Sarah coaches Carrie through her first delivery; Dana takes on the cooking for Aunt Sarah when other duties require the middle-aged woman’s attention; and Tess completes Dana’s work for her while Dana recuperates from a beating. Without the other, each would end up in trouble with the Weylins for work left undone. Each one of these women is vital to her sister, and if one were to leave the group, they all would be affected. This is not to say, however, that the women would refuse to help one who decides to run away. When Alice determines to run with her newborn baby, Joe, Dana wishes that she wouldn’t leave right away. Nevertheless, she agrees to steal the laudanum to quiet the baby while mother and child escape. When Dana attempts to run off in the middle of the night and the jealous Liza tattles, Alice, Tess, and Carrie pummel the woman until she is black and blue. Because Liza thwarts Dana’s escape,

the three women beat her in such a way to insure “she’ll keep her mouth shut next time,” and they continue to threaten her with “quiet meaningful glances” (178-79). Regretfully, it must be noted that although two of the women run, neither has a successful escape. Both are quickly and easily recaptured, physically punished, and put back to work. Their failed escapes are significant because they show the reader that when successful escape is impossible, a slave must find other ways to resist and/or survive. When it comes to slave resistance, Kindred says something very different from other neo-slave narratives. Dessa Rose offers craftiness as a method of resistance, and Beloved proposes self-love and reclamation. Later we will read how The Chaneysville Incident proposes that stealing oneself from the master (by way of suicide) teaches the oppressor that he loses sometimes. On the other hand, Kindred admits that oftentimes overt physical resistance is null, that subversion can get a slave only so far, and that sometimes submission (not to be confused with surrender) is necessary for survival. When Isaac beats young Master Rufus within an inch of his life for raping his wife, Alice, he cannot run away far or fast enough to escape Rufus’ and the other white men’s reach. After a third abduction, Dana arrives in the woods where the “wiry and strong” Isaac is pounding a now older Rufus who has torn Alice’s dress and raped her (117). Rufus is obviously losing this fight, and Dana comes just in time to save him from being beaten to death. Although Dana convinces an enraged Isaac that he has done enough and that he and Alice should run, the couple is soon recaptured. The white men cut off both of Isaac’s ears and sell him further south. They also allow the hunting dogs to maul Alice almost beyond recognition. When the beaten and bruised Rufus learns that the pursuers have found Alice and her husband, he rushes to the jail to purchase the teenage girl who was born to a free mother. Essentially, Isaac’s attempt to dispense justice is inconsequential. As a matter of fact, his revenge (or chivalry) exacerbates an already terrible situation. Since he is sold away from his wife, he can no longer protect her from Rufus’ predatory advances. Consequently, the freeborn Alice becomes the property of a single-minded Rufus. In short, Isaac wins the battle of physical brawn but loses the

greater war for power and control. Just as the men recapture Isaac, the repercussions of Luke’s sly behaviors finally chase him down. Luke, who admits to doing whatever he wanted despite orders, learns too late that one can test the master’s patience only so much. He feigns ignorance until Marse Tom “got tired of it” and sold him to a New Orleans trader (138). Rufus warns Dana, who is “like Luke in so many ways,” that resistance by subversion sometimes yields the same consequences as overt rebellion or physical resistance (138). The lesson here is that sometimes subversion does not prevent punishment but merely delays it. More than other neo-slave narrative authors, Butler points out that submission was sometimes necessary for individual as well as group survival in slavery. In an interview, she recalls being in college during the height of the Black Power Movement and hearing a fellow classmate boldly state, “I’d like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents.” The author’s response was that her colleague “had apparently never made the connection with what his parents did to keep him alive…. He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older generation had to do, without really putting it into the context of being necessary not only for their lives but his as well” (qtd. in Yaszek 1057). An understanding and acceptance of the sacrifices and concessions that some individual slaves made for the safety and advancement of the whole is vital. A person who believes that every slave who stayed on the plantation was weak or docile is mistaken. It requires great psychological and physical fortitude to remain in servitude and bear the inhumanity of it in order to protect a child, accompany a friend incapable of escape, or cover for another runaway. Aunt Sarah stays because she will not leave behind her mute daughter, the only one of her four children Tom Weylin allows her to keep. In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed submits that Uncle Robin, who remains on the Swille plantation and works to protect and advance the other slaves, is just as intelligent and opposed to slavery as Raven who runs to free and advance himself only. So then, survival is not in a simple formula. For some, it requires running; for others, it means staying to bear the burdens that another cannot or will not bear.

While other neo-slave narrative writers were looking in the margins for stories of overt slave resistance in order to counter harmful and longstanding images of docile mammies and uncles, Butler finds slave resilience – a different kind of resistance – in the familiar stories of American slavery. She revisits the old stories and questions what would make a slave stay. Her narrative posits that perhaps instances of slave resilience have been misinterpreted or inaccurately represented as slave docility. Even though Sarah stays and Alice eventually submits to Rufus’ sexual demands, these women are not to be mistaken for conquered prey. Butler “debunk[s] cultural stereotypes of black women as happy mammies or long-suffering victims” (Yazsek 1062) when she makes it clear that behind Aunt Sarah’s sometimes sad eyes is a “quiet almost frightening anger” that should never be tempted . Of Aunt Sarah, Dana observes that “if she ever decided to take her revenge, Weylin would never know what hit him” (76). This same kind of crouching anger can be discerned in the edginess of Alice’s voice when she tells Dana, “My stomach just turns every time [Rufus] puts his hands on me!” (180). Although the young woman decides to go willingly to her owner’s bedroom, she refuses to love or care about him. Instead, “she forgave him nothing, forgot nothing, hated him as deeply as she had loved Isaac” (180). Alice gives Rufus her body, but she denies him the one pleasure he so longs for: her affection. Rufus tells Dana, “You want Kevin the way I want Alice. And you had more luck than I did because …he wanted you too. Maybe I can’t ever have that – both wanting, both loving” (163). No matter how hard Rufus tries, Alice makes sure that he will never experience the satisfaction of her companionship. She gives up the tangible but clings to the intangible when she yields her body but never her soul. While it is true that “the institution of slavery commodifie[d] black female sexuality,” it is also undeniable that this institution could not access black female sensuality against her will (Mitchell 56). For so many slave women, this sensuality was reserved only for the black men they truly loved. Such is the case for Octavia Butler’s Alice and Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose whose lovers moved them in unforgettable and incomparable ways. While Dessa was willing to kill for Kaine, Alice was prepared to

die with Isaac. In the end, the white men who so desperately wanted to possess them – Adam Nehemiah who insisted Dessa expose her branded thighs, and Rufus who took his fill of Alice’s body – were duped and frustrated by these women who slipped from their grasp. The women in Kindred are not simple. They are not grinning, compliant mammies or hopelessly subjugated slave girls. Such popular images of enslaved women are absent from this novel. In their stead are characters who discover the difference between physical ownership and psychological mastery, and who learn to salvage even the tiniest amount of freedom in their power to choose whether to love or to hate, to forgive or to resent. The docile mammy and the tragic mulatta are not the only historical icons Butler re-examines in this text. She also revisits images of the looming Big House and the ever present overseer. Readers soon learn that the Big House isn’t always big, and that those who manage the plantation are not always white. For this reason, Dana is taken aback by her first real perusal of the Weylin plantation, relating that she went through the woods to a road, and along the road past a field of tall golden wheat. In the field, slaves, mostly men, worked steadily swinging scythes…. I looked around for a white overseer and was surprised not to see one. The Weylin house surprised me too when I saw it in daylight. It wasn’t white. It had no columns, no porch to speak of. I was almost disappointed…. It wasn’t big or imposing enough to be called a mansion. (67) The protagonist’s mental image of the Big House, informed by popular culture, is shattered. Because Dana assumes that all of the signs of patriarchy and power are big and white, she anticipates a large white house with impressive columns, and she expects to see a burly white man on horseback, prodding the slaves in the field. Consequently, because the Weylin house is simply “a red-brick Georgian Colonial, boxy but handsome,” she does not readily recognize it as the Big House (67). Additionally, she does not detect the overseer because one of Weylin’s male slaves substitutes for one. She learns much later that her old friend Luke was given the

responsibility of managing the field hands, and that they “work[ed] hard for him – mostly without the cowhide” (138). Only after Tom Weylin tires of Luke’s antics and sells him, does Margaret Weylin’s cousin, the brute Jake Edwards, become overseer. Unlike Luke, Edwards freely wields the cowhide and without discrimination between the male and female slaves. Butler’s depiction of the calloused Edwards in comparison to her characterization of the benign Luke highlights the difference between an overseer and a driver. Overseers were either family members of or white men hired by plantation owners. Drivers, on the other hand, were slaves appointed by the master. Whereas overseers more often than not took full advantage of their power by abusing the slaves, drivers had only requisite authority (Scarborough and Van Deburg). Unlike the overseer who usually instilled fear and utilized violence to guarantee that the work was completed, a driver had to strike a balance between the little power given him by the master and the respect expected of him from his fellow slaves. Here, we see how “commercial modes of memory alienate individuals from history,” fooling them into believing that the popularized and fabricated images of the past are the real deal (Yaszek 1058). “Faction” – an admixture of fact and fiction – is readily accepted as historical accuracy.2 Dana’s familiarity with old films and the basic knowledge she has acquired from the ten books on black history in her personal library do not adequately prepare her for the incredible experience on the Weylin plantation. As a matter of fact, Tom Weylin aptly surmises “Educated nigger don’t mean smart nigger,” and after some time Dana must confess that this is true (175). On the surface, Kindred is a simplified version of the slave narrative, complete with slaves, a cruel master, an impressionable younger master, a jealous mistress, and slave women who are victims of sexual exploitation. Nevertheless, on deeper levels, the novel is iconoclastic and exploratory. Sandra Y. Govan notes that “Kindred is so closely related to the… slave narratives that its plot structure follows the classic patterns with only requisite changes to flesh out character, story, and action” (89). While the text does indeed give homage to the classic slave autobiography, especially with its intertextual references to Douglass’ Narrative, it also makes significant revisions by introducing new themes and exploring older ones

in greater detail. Closer examination reveals that this novel provides more candid analysis and depiction of the slave woman’s struggle for sexual autonomy, and makes startling and markedly postmodern statements about the experience of middle passage and the concept of memory. Perhaps the most apparent difference between the historical slave autobiography and the fictional Kindred is that while the former tells the story of a fugitive of slavery, the latter relates the experience of a fugitive of the memory of slavery.3 Because Dana is born in the twentieth century, she is free-born – neither an emancipated nor a fugitive slave. Her problem, however, is that she has not acknowledged her slave ancestry. She has every intention of entering into her marriage with Kevin without ever seriously addressing the historical friction between black women and white men. She mistakenly believes that what was done in the past remains in the past and does not affect the present or the future. As the novel progresses, Alice Greenwood, a name written at the base of a family tree in on old Bible, will become flesh and blood and significant for the protagonist who has lived ignorant of her family history for far too long. When Dana stands face to face with the slender and youthful version of her great-great-great grandmother, she practically looks into a mirror. She immediately sees Alice not as a stranger, but as her alternate self. When time collapses, Dana’s present and her ancestor’s slave past collide, and the protagonist can no longer run from history. Hence, the novel asks a significant question: how long can a present-day individual live free of or unaffected by his or her past? Indeed, “History is the silence in Kevin and Dana’s marriage,” since the two believe that it has no bearing on their present (McIntosh-Byrd 5). History is offended by the couple’s behavior, and it chooses to disrupt the ignorance that they have mistaken for bliss. It is imperative that Dana remember. Until her birthday, she has mistakenly believed that time undoes history. The truth, however, is that time merely puts an often deceptive distance between the contemporary individual and his or her past. Dana’s future wellbeing is contingent upon her acceptance of things past. Much like Toni Morrison’s Sethe and David Bradley’s John Washington, Dana must learn that an enjoyable present cannot be had without an acknowledged past: that

ignorance is not bliss. Ashraf Rushdy recalls Charles Johnson’s observation that much of black writing between the 1970s and 1980s was “a concerted meditation on remembrance” (qtd. in “Families of Orphans” 74). To remember is simply “to bring to mind or think of again” or “to retain in the memory” (Webster’s Collegiate). The past that is tucked away in the family Bible and collecting dust on the bookshelf must instead find its way to the forefront of Dana’s mind. Remembering this past – that is, acknowledging and commemorating it – can successfully be done without forever living in it. This is the lesson that Butler’s, Morrison’s, and Bradley’s protagonists must learn. Because remembering is crucial at this moment in Dana’s life, she is suddenly transported from the relative safety of the twentieth century to nineteenth century Maryland. This metaphysical arrest is “a violent process that has clear parallels to the seizure and transportation of slaves from Africa” (McIntosh-Byrd 1). With an “uncannily successful blend of fact and fantasy,” Butler draws from historical documentation of the abduction of Africans to create a post-modern rendition of the Middle Passage (Kenan 495). Taken against her will and without warning, Dana experiences a personal middle passage. Her recurring dizziness and fainting spells before her transports should not be ignored as they are symbolic of the physical experiences of Africans stolen from their native land and conveyed across the ocean. The nausea she experiences each time nineteenth century Maryland calls her is comparable to seasickness, and the sudden blackness that engulfs her when she faints is reminiscent of the darkness in the hull of a slave ship. Robert Crossly so rightly notes in his introduction to Kindred that “in her experience of being kidnapped in time and space, Dana recapitulates the dreadful, disorienting, involuntary voyage of her ancestors” (xi). Like so many Africans who endured a harrowing abduction from African shores, she is aggressively and unexpectedly torn from a life of freedom and forced to live in slavery after knowing what freedom is like. Just as the stolen Africans could not yet understand what was happening to them, Dana confesses to her husband, “I don’t have a name for the thing that just happened to me, but I don’t feel safe anymore” (17).

Dana is thrust into slavery on her birthday, and is not officially relinquished to 1976 until the Fourth of July. Essentially, she is born (again) into slavery on her birthday and emancipated on Independence Day. It must be noted, that June 9, 1976, is Dana’s rebirth day. The date signals the beginning of a new life wherein her racial, gender, and sexual identities will be challenged. In less than a month, the protagonist will come to better understand her own identity based not solely upon who or what she chooses to be today, but also upon what others endured simply in order for her to exist. Dana’s involuntary and repeated thrusts into and out of the past take not only an emotional but also a physical toll. One cannot have such violent encounters with the past and not be affected on various levels. Over and over again, Dana is suddenly fused with history and almost as suddenly torn from it, and the result is painful loss. She not only suffers a loss of a sense of safety and an assurance of what is real, but also deals with the loss of physical parts of herself in the nineteenth century: first two teeth, then an arm. When she runs from the plantation in the middle of the night, she does not make it too far before Tom and Rufus Weylin find her in the woods. Although she fights to free herself from the two men, her might is no match for their strength and brutality. While Rufus pins her to the ground, Tom Weylin kicks her in the face, knocking out her teeth and rendering her unconscious. Dana’s loss of her teeth foreshadows one even greater as she parts with an arm at the end of the novel. When Dana gives up two of her teeth in antebellum Maryland, she does not recover them in twentieth century California. They are gone forever. If she were to keep them in 1976, she could deny or forget that she once lived in the 1800s. Then the lessons of the entire metaphysical experience could be learned temporarily and then easily forgotten. At the novel’s commencement, she and Kevin had “settle[d] into their marriage with history purged from everything but the bookshelves” (McIntosh-Byrd 2). At the novel’s conclusion, Dana lives with the space between her teeth as a commemoration of where she came from. Hidden on the side of her mouth, the empty space is a clandestine reminder. The author confides, “I couldn’t really let [Dana] come all the way back…. I couldn’t let her come back whole… [since] Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole” (Kenan 498). By the time of her

final return to California, Dana has gained an understanding of her slave ancestry in exchange for the loss of certain body parts. The loss of her teeth and arm and the unforgettable memory of her experience make it impossible for her to return to the life she once knew. She will never quite be the same. Ashraf Rushdy notes that “what Dana’s physical losses demonstrate is that to flesh out the past means to leave part of one’s being there” (“Families of Orphans” 139). Dana’s confession in the novel’s prologue that “I lost an arm on my last trip home” is not a figurative expression (9). She gives up her arm, leaving it behind in Rufus’ death grip, but finally gains her life back when she draws the line at sexual assault. After Alice hangs herself, permanently removing herself from Rufus’ reach, Rufus attempts to rape the woman who looks so much like her. As long as Alice was alive, Rufus was willing to settle for ownership of Alice’s body and the manipulation of Dana’s mind and emotions. Once the object of his affection is gone, he turns to her double. Pushing Dana onto the pallet, holding her waist with one hand and restraining her with another, he attempts to rape her. Refusing to become his sexual property, she removes the knife from the sheath hidden on her person and stabs him to death. The protagonist informs us from the beginning of the novel that although she suffered whippings, beatings, and humiliation, she would never surrender her sexual autonomy. She already did not like allowing the slaves and the Weylins to believe that she was sleeping with her master. When Dana returned to Maryland once accidentally with Kevin in tow, they all believed that he was her master. Naturally, when she slept in Kevin’s room for protection, Tom Weylin simply “smiled” and “winked” because he assumed that she was her master’s sexual property (97). All the while, she believed that if Rufus or any other white man got the wrong impression and tried to rape her, “it wasn’t likely that either of us would survive” (180). She always had every intention of maintaining control of her own sexuality. Unfortunately, Dana is separated from Kevin for eight days in 1976 (the equivalent of five years in the 1800s) when she returns to California without him. When she is finally called back to Maryland, she still has to live on the Weylin plantation for a few months before she sees him again. Once the two are finally

reunited and arrive safely in California, Dana feels a strong need to seal their reunion with sexual intimacy. Despite the fresh bullwhip lacerations on her back, she calls him to their bedroom. Even though Kevin expresses his concerns for her wounded back, she insists that he come to bed with her. She admits that “he did hurt me, of course. I had known he would, but it didn’t matter” (190). What matters more to Dana is her ability to choose to whom she gives her body. At this moment, she wants more to exercise her sexual agency in the present than to acknowledge the pain resulting from her physical subjugation in the past. On the Weylin plantation, as in the entire institution of slavery, female slaves had no sexual autonomy and were given little to no special consideration for their fragility. Overseer Jake Edwards whips Dana across her breasts just as easily as he does across her back when she glares at him for forcing her to work in the field (212). Additionally, the slave catchers allow the hunting dogs to maul the running Alice and tear away the flesh from her inner thigh. These body parts that should be valued for their sensual nature are completely disregarded. This blatant disregard for and humiliation of the female slave body is also evident when the lecherous patrollers snatch the blanket from the naked free-born woman who had been dragged, along with her husband, from her bed into the dark woods. The white men jeer at the diffident woman, asking her “who the hell do you think you are anyway?... What do you think you’ve got that we haven’t seen before?... Seen more and better” (36). This lack of respect for the black woman’s sexual identity as well as her sensual self is precisely what Dana wishes to undo when she summons her husband to their bed. Diana Paulin notes that “Dana recognizes that black women have little or no power in relation to white men” in the antebellum south (185). In her bedroom, however, she takes pleasure in the exchange of mutual respect, affection, and desire between herself and Kevin. When Dana protects her sexual autonomy by killing Rufus, she cuts not only his flesh but also her ties to him and antebellum Maryland. Her great-great- grandmother, Alice, is dead: free in her own right. Her ancestor, Hagar, is alive and emancipated. Therefore, Dana has no more meaningful ties to Rufus. She has done her duty by keeping Rufus alive long enough to father Hagar; protecting Alice as

much as she could from being beaten; and ensuring that Hagar will not be a slave. As with Sethe in Beloved, the past does not demand that Dana bind herself to it; instead, it requires that she acknowledge it before attempting to move forward. The lesson to be learned is that healing comes not in ignoring, but in remembering. As a science-fiction writer, Octavia Butler does something obviously different but apparently necessary in her writing of Kindred. Since all of her other publications address notions of the alien “other,” one automatically questions who or what is alien or other in this neo-slave narrative. Enslavement, physical abuse, and sexual degradation are alien to Dana. So is her own history. A mirror image of the protagonist, Alice is Dana’s other self – the person she could have been if she had been born a century earlier. Not to be forgotten, Kevin also is alien to the black experience in America. He is relatively unlearned about patrollers, miscegenation, and the overall barbarity of slavery. Therefore, his experiences in Maryland make alive any abbreviated lessons of American slavery he may have been taught in the classroom. Stepping outside of her genre to write Kindred, Butler becomes a participant in this revisionist trend of writing that calls for another look at the multitude of lessons about American slavery that still need to be learned and relearned. Using the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs as her touchstone, she imagines the stories between the lines and the issues beneath the surface of the classic slave narratives. Moreover, like her counterparts writing in this sub-genre, the author takes full advantage of the privileged discourse that allows the contemporary African-American to say what the newly free Negro could not.

1 Here I have revised one of Frederick Douglass’ famous lines, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (294).

2 Sandra Govan uses this term in her essay about Butler’s renovation of the historical novel (91).

3 The same is true of the protagonist in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident. John Washington is ignorant of his slave ancestry until his father’s peculiar death compels him to delve into his family history.

CHAPTER FIVE “YOU WANT A STORY, DO YOU?”: THE COLLECTIVE ORAL, WRITTEN, AND UNDERSTOOD (HI)STORIES OF THE CHANEYSVILLE INCIDENT

In a 1971 publication on the bicentennial history of Bedford County, Pennsylvania, Harriette M. Bradley wrote three sentences around which her son was provoked to create an entire narrative. She reported that On the Lester Imes farm below Chaneysville one can still find the markers for twelve or thirteen runaway slaves. Mr. Imes relates that when the slaves realized their pursuers were closing in on them, they begged to be killed rather than go back to the Southland and more servitude. Someone obliged. (emphasis Bradley’s; Kernel 73) Discomfited by such questions as “Who were these people? Where did they come from? [and] Why did they do this?,” David Bradley set out to locate more information surrounding this conspicuous event in order to reconstruct and re-present it in narrative form (Blake and Miller 25). The result was a regeneration of the historic Chaneysville incident to formulate The Chaneysville Incident. In this narrative the narrator-protagonist, a black historian, discovers after much toil and scrutiny of his late father’s past that he is a fourth-generation descendant of one of the thirteen Chaneysville fugitives, the fictionalized C.K. Washington. Upon returning to his hometown of Bedford County to comfort the dying Old Jack Crawley, his mentor and his father’s closest friend, John Washington becomes reabsorbed in his childhood investigation of his father Moses’ mysterious

death twenty-one years prior. He determines to learn what happened on the day that Moses Washington, an expert woodsman who had long given up hunting for his attic ruminations, suddenly took up his gun, “went hunting and came home dead” (27). While he suspects that his father killed himself, John has not yet uncovered his motive for doing so. John’s last hours with Old Jack summon childhood memories of his father’s idiosyncrasies, specifically Moses’ secretive and obsessive studies in his attic-library. After Old Jack’s death, John returns to his father’s house and ventures up to the makeshift library which he soon learns is “spiked with clues for reconstructing black history.”1 The old books in the attic coupled with the documents in the folio Moses willed him provide John with the evidence necessary to resume his investigation. Recognizing that the clues to the motive for Moses’ suicide are sealed in the portfolio, John pours tirelessly over the documents inside until he realizes that he must learn to use his imagination to piece the facts together. John’s inquiries lead him on a more complicated journey that eventually exposes the circumstances surrounding not only his father’s curious death, but also that of his great-grandfather, C.K. Washington. When John’s white girlfriend Judith panics after she receives his letter implying that he will not return to Virginia, she takes the earliest bus to the County to find him. Together, over the course of seven days, they follow every clue that will lead them to the reason for Moses’ suicide. After literally stumbling upon twelve unmarked graves at the site where Moses took his own life, John realizes that his father’s death is connected to the death of the thirteen whose graves are just below Chaneysville. He combines his knowledge and imagination to deduce that Moses Washington, after discovering that his grandfather C.K. was among the thirteen fugitives, devoted his life to finding C.K.’s grave and there honored his bravery by killing himself also. Thus John’s search into his paternal ancestry, a sort of pilgrimage, reveals the peculiar legacy of the Washington men – one that involves hunting for more than just wildlife. As this summary suggests, the Chaneysville author employs several narrative techniques in order to embellish the short account Mrs. Bradley provides in the County Commission project. David Bradley creates a narrative that not only

commences before Mrs. Bradley’s account begins but also continues after her record ends. He not only creates names and lives for the thirteen defiant souls commemorated only by unmarked graves, but also imagines their forbears and progeny. This chapter identifies several tools of embellishment that the author employs in his imaginative recreation of life before and after that ill-fated day in Chaneysville. By examining vital patterns, techniques, themes, and tropes that give The Chaneysville Incident its shape and continuity, this chapter discusses how Bradley creates an extensive work from such limited information. Fact and fiction are intertwined in this narrative as imagined characters inspired by history are involved with people, places and landmark events taken directly from history. C.K. Washington attends a conference with Henry Highland Garnet; President Buchanan makes Bedford Springs his “summer White House” and there approves the Dred Scott decision; John Crawley and James Graham attempt to convey the noted runaways to freedom; and the reader must discern truth from tale, or more specifically how much of the tale is truth. It becomes increasingly difficult to determine “where documented details taken from archives and general historical knowledge end and where imaginative projection begins” (Ensslen 289). Bradley establishes reciprocity between history and imagination as he not only transposes people and events from the historical record into the narrative but also creates characters and incidents for the narrative based upon historical findings. The author creates a pattern of historicization and fictionalization as historical truths serve as the bases for fictional characters. This pattern is most evident in John’s discoveries about the relevance of general historical facts to his personal family history. Beginning with his great-great grandfather Zack, John establishes that he was executed for his involvement in the 1812 New Orleans slave revolt thwarted by the slave informant Lewis Bolah. John tells Judith that Some of [the blacks] came to [Bolah] and, so he later claimed, offered him a captaincy in a rebellion that they were planning…. He informed the authorities … and they apprehended the leaders of the rebellion and placed them on trial, found them guilty, and executed them. The usual form of execution in these cases was to behead the slaves and

place the heads on stakes along the Mississippi as warnings to other insurrection-minded slaves…. Zack was one of the ones they executed. (328) When Judith questions the severity of the Louisiana authorities, John’s reply is that “there was no way the whites were going to keep all those people in line just with force; they had to use propaganda, and they had to use terror, and putting sixty-six black heads on stakes was a pretty good way to terrorize people” (329). While the character Zack is fictional, both Lewis Bolah and the New Orleans slave rebellion are of historical certainty. In his 1824 petition to the U.S. Senate and the Virginia Commonwealth to reside in the state of Virginia, Lewis Bolah recalls that During the year 1812, the slaves and free persons of colour in the City of New Orleans and the surrounding Country connected with a few abandoned and lawless white persons who were bent on rapin [sic] and plunder mediated and planned a Plot of Treason and Insurrection…. This horrible conspiracy was communicated to [me, and I] was invited to join in it…. Shocked by the proposition … your Petitioner resolved to…prevent the effusion of blood, to bring the ringleaders to trial and punishment and thereby save the lives not only of the whites but the misguided persons of his own colour…. (Aptheker 79-80) In reward for his testimony, the Louisiana Treasury purchased and emancipated Bolah for the sum of eight hundred dollars (80). Eugene D. Genovese notes that the New Orleans revolt, “the biggest in American history,” involved between 180 and 500 slaves “armed with axes and other weapons.” He furthermore writes that it required the joint efforts of slave holders, the free Negro militia, and federal troops under Wade Hampton to subdue the rebels. Genovese states that, as a form of punishment, “the executioners cut off their victims’ heads, put them on spikes, and used them to decorate the road from New Orleans to Major Andre’s plantation, where the revolt had begun” (43). Although both the revolt and the informant are accounted for, no record of the supposed participant Zack Washington exists. Ironically, the seemingly incredible

part of John’s story – that a group of people would kill some sixty-six persons and display their heads on stakes – is true, while the most unobtrusive detail – that one Zack Washington was among those executed – is unfounded. Thus, fact masquerades as fiction and vice versa. John soon learns that after the death of his mother, C.K. forged himself a pass with which he escaped slavery in Louisiana. Determined to avenge his father’s death, he tracked down the man who had bartered the lives of sixty-six men for his own freedom. Finding him in Virginia, C.K “cut [Bolah’s] head off with an ax, and planted it on a stake” (332). He then set out to secure a place for himself in the free world. Since his father was the son of a full-blooded Cherokee and his mother an octoroon, C.K. passed as both Cherokee and white on separate occasions. In one instance, the tribesmen enslaved him on their plantations out of displeasure with his mixed parentage. He later escaped and settled in Philadelphia, where he established himself among the powerful men of the Town as the source of the best moonshine. John tells Judith that even if someone suspected that his great grandfather was a runaway slave, he would never pursue him because “he wouldn’t want to see the source of the best whiskey he’d ever had going south” (350). C.K. also became involved in the antislavery movement, anonymously publishing pamphlets and books, including the 1790 Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens and Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, until he became disenchanted with the civil approach to abolition and consequently initiated an elaborate scheme to steal slaves. His plan ultimately led him to John Crawley, James Graham, and twelve runaways who would eventually take their own life rather than surrender to a band of slave catchers. In response to the question of how much of his novel is researchable history, Bradley states that “the further back you get, and the more objective you get, the more researchable it is. There was never a C.K. Washington. There was never a C.K. Washington’s father, Zack. There was a rebellion in Louisiana at that time, and they did place heads on stakes…. There was a Cherokee nation that had slaves, and experienced difficulties because gold was discovered on their land. There were the things C.K. Washington supposedly wrote. They were usually listed as anonymous”

(Blake and Miller 24). While Bradley interposes the fictional Zack into a historical event, he extracts his son C.K. from several historical incidents and documents. He combines evidence of slavery in Cherokee territory and anonymous publications concerning civil issues to formulate an ex-slave of mixed ancestry who gives up expressing anti-slavery sentiment in writing, and takes to liberating slaves in an extravagant plan to change the economics of the peculiar institution. John imagines the day that his great grandfather and twelve slaves fled to their death. He tells Judith that it all began when “John Crawley…had gotten word that a group of slaves was coming north and had connived to get a local merchant to hire him and Graham to take a load of grain to Iiames’ Mill…and to wait while it was ground, and haul it back, giving them an excuse not only to go to South County but to wait for the slaves, and a place to meet them” (395). Crawley and Graham had planned to meet the slaves at the Mill and convey them to safety in the wagon they were supposedly using to carry grain. When C.K. catches a glimpse of the infamous F.H. Pettis and his band of slave catchers, he attempts to head them off and to warn Crawley, Graham, and the runaways of their impending danger. He reaches the waiting slaves before Crawley and Graham and tells them that they must leave on foot immediately. Unfortunately, fatigued and afraid, they are unable to outrun Pettis and his men. Azacca, the old man in the group, convinces everyone, including C.K., that the only remaining way to elude recapture is self-sacrifice. Again, John’s knowledge of the County’s history proves relevant to his family history. Indeed, both Crawley and Graham were noted “colored agents” of the Underground Railroad in Bedford County. Furthermore, it is recorded that “in Bedford Township, James Graham used his wagon to transport slaves, ostensibly carrying hay to market” (Kernel 74). Similarly, F.H. Pettis was well known throughout the entire South. A former lawyer, Pettis gave up his practice for the more lucrative business of slave-catching. He along with at least four other men formed a kidnapping ring, informally known as the New York Kidnapping Club, in which they recaptured numerous runaways and seized countless free blacks.2 John says that Pettis had been searching for C.K., the man who had stolen several slaves from his territory, for years. C.K. had been a nuisance to many southern slave

holders, considering that “he had, through direct action, deprived the southern economy of two million dollars’ worth of slaves” (366). Thus, “C.K.’s incursion into his territory turned Pettis’ attitude into one of flaming hatred, and he vowed, publicly, that he would not rest, or allow anyone in his employ to rest, until C.K. Washington had been taken” (364). John learns very little about his grandfather Lamen, mainly because Lamen wanted to distance himself from his father’s history. As a matter of fact, John says that his grandfather tried to keep his son Moses from learning anything about C.K. However, at the age of fifteen, “Moses became interested in the history of Negroes, particularly in Philadelphia, and he somehow got a copy of [C.K.’s book] Sketches” (368). When Lamen caught his son reading the book, he “took it away from him and burned it” (369). Perhaps this is why little information on Lamen exists in Moses’ portfolio. Moses idealized his grandfather far more than he did his father. The final person in John’s paternal history is his father Moses. John discovers that, because Moses admired his grandfather, he attempted to follow in his footsteps. He had somehow acquired the journal in which C.K. recorded his life experiences, including his success in the whiskey business along with his special recipes for moonshine. Like his grandfather, Moses gained access to the powerful men of the Town via his moonshine. Bragging to a group of old card playing men, he claims that his whiskey “is a special resippy handed down from ma old granddaddy, an’ what it is, it’s Black Lightnin’.” Moses’ friend Old Jack says he called it that “on accounta it was made by a colored man” (59). As a child, John did not know about Moses’ moonshine until after he died. When he told old Jack that his father never drank whiskey, Jack replied “It’s time you learned the truth about a few things. An’ the first thing you better learn is your daddy drank enough whiskey in his time to float a battleship, an’ he made enough to float the whole damn Navy. And the second thing you better learn is that you’re damn lucky he did” (32). Jack also teaches John that everybody in the Town knew who Moses was. He says “Don’t know ‘xactly when it begun; somebody – an’ didn’t nobody recall who – come into town talkin’ ‘bout some young boy up in the mountains, callin’ hisself Moses Washington an’ makin’ moonshine that was

strongern horse piss an’ smoothern’ a bunny’s butt” (52). Like his grandfather, Moses had managed to establish a place for himself within the Town. Furthermore, when Prohibition became law, he was able to secure a good life for his wife and sons by supplying the power-holding residents with illegal moonshine, thereby guaranteeing their compliance with anything he requested in order to insure his reticence. Logging the names and purchases of every client in his folio, he instilled fear of discovery in his patrons. John reveals that Moses and his friends Old Jack and Josh White “had run through – or perhaps ‘over’ is a better word – Prohibition and…the Volstead Act” (18). Moses Washington had gained power and money through the Eighteenth Amendment. By the time he was thirty, Prohibition was in full effect, making it illegal to manufacture, sell, import, and export intoxicating liquor (“Legislating Temperance” 1). Subsequently, the Volstead Act defined intoxicating liquor as anything containing as much as 0.5 percent alcohol (“Volstead Act” 1). Naturally, Moses’ moonshine, “strongern horse piss,” contained much more than the legal percentage. Even Old Jack is connected to a historical figure. He is the imagined grandson of an ex-slave woman named Mary found in Bedford County records. At the age of two, Mary was one of the forty newly emancipated slaves from the Thomas O.B. Carter plantation in Fauquier County, Virginia, who settled in Bedford. Years later, she married and became a mother. She died at age eighty-nine and was survived by her daughter Ida and granddaughter Mildred (Kernel 77). There is no record of a grandson. When John traces the beginnings of the black population on the Hill to a group of ex-slaves including a little girl named Mary, his information is factual. His assertion, however, that this same Mary “was one of Old Jack’s grandmothers” is beyond historical proof (299). Jack is the fictional grandson of an authentic ex-slave woman. As he continues to make these connections between personal history and his general knowledge of county, state, and even national history, John begins to understand that “the truth is usually in the footnotes, not in the headlines” (345) – that history takes on real significance when one can trace the effect of a national, state, or local event to an individual life. Eventually, the Professor of History becomes a student of history when he exchanges mere textbook knowledge,

the headlines, for a deeper understanding of personal relevance, the footnotes. The truth about John’s past is buried in the “cold facts” of textbooks and articles (146). The author illustrates this concept very well by allowing John to engage in his long, boring, and seemingly unrelated history lectures which ultimately prove central to the narrative. When Judith asks him “how did you get here?”, meaning how did the black population arrive on the Far Side of the Hill in this small Pennsylvania town, John’s response is “That’s a good story. Three stories. Well four…” (294). He begins to talk about Fauquier County and John Marshall who happened to be born there, and then changes the subject to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, and his intolerance of slavery. He goes on to explain how the Church finally enforced its doctrine against slave holding, explaining that by 1820 “any man who was a slave holder and a Methodist who lived in the Upper South had to make a choice between going to heaven later or going into bankruptcy now” (295). He then explains that Thomas O.B. Carter of Fauquier County, Virginia “got religion” and decided to emancipate his slaves. He proceeds to lecture that the average overseer assigned with the task of finding a place for the master’s newly- emancipated slaves to settle tended to either steal the slaves for himself or take them “just across the Mason-Dixon Line and [buy] them the cheapest land available. And what could be cheaper than the northern slope of a hill full of rocks and hollows…?” (299). John’s diatribe traces the effect of one national issue, the Methodist Church’s slave holding policy, on a group of slaves who were freed and situated on a barren hill in a Pennsylvania county, the place that Harriette Bradley denotes as Gravel Hill in Bedford County (Kernel 77). Jesús Benito observes that by borrowing from history to create fiction, Bradley seeks to establish a balanced relationship “between the power of fiction to enrich our memory of the past, and the influence of textualized history to restrain the wilder speculations of fiction” (190). To illustrate the complexity of having to reassemble a fractured past, the author stratifies the tale, employing narrative recursion and incorporating framework stories. He first complicates the narrative by establishing that what happened in the past is not left in the past, suggesting that history can and does impinge upon the present. While the events of the main narrative unfold over the course of ten days in

the winter of 1979, the story often regresses through four generations in order to give an account of the life and times of the previous Washington men. Thus the novel’s present is ten days in March 1979, while the past continues from 1787 to 1958, from the birth of Zack to the death of Moses. As he remembers his own past and re-members (that is, imaginatively reconstructs) the pasts of his forefathers, the narrating historian allows the reader to traverse time. Bradley fosters recursion between the past and the present as he allows present events to trigger the protagonist’s memories of past experiences. The morning that John returns to Old Jack’s shack after being away for several years, he remembers the first time he entered Jack’s home. He recalls the night when, lying in bed after his father’s funeral and thinking about how a drunken Old Jack had entered his mother’s house exclaiming “ Mose tole me…to come for this here boy. An’ I come,” he decided to sneak out of the house to go find the strange old man and “ask him what he wanted” (23, 29). Sliding and toppling down to the other side of the Hill – the Far Side where only Jack lived – the nine year old John made his way to the door of Jack’s cabin. He remembers that “In a sudden burst of courage I got to my feet and moved to the door and reached for the knob, but found instead a latch string. Then the unfamiliarity, the strangeness of it hit me…. I turned to run. And found myself staring at the boogeyman himself, holding a shotgun pointed at my head. ‘God, boy,’ the boogeyman said, ‘you near to got your head blowed off. If you’re gonna sneak, for Ned’s sake sneak!” (29). Viewing the same dilapidated cabin over twenty years later, John relates that “the shack looked much as it always had: an improbably ugly structure leaning defiantly against the pull of gravity and the weight of time.” He goes on to say that “the scene depressed me – it spoke of decay. Of death…. And so I hurried, breaking into a run as soon as I reached level ground, pounding towards the door.… I knocked. And then I waited” (29). Waiting for Jack to open the door, John remembers the first time he entered the shack, carefully taking in the view of the odd slate-topped table and hickory chair standing in the middle of the dirt floor. He goes on to recall his first conversation with Jack on that evening, hearing for the first time that his father not only drank whiskey but also made and sold it. After replaying that

entire evening in his mind, John returns to the present. Still standing at the door waiting, he says “there was no answer” (38). After recognizing that his elderly mentor is too weak to answer the door, John lets himself in, and the story progresses. Just as he recalled his initial visit to Old Jack’s cabin when he returns there after several years of being away, John remembers the first time he set foot in his father’s attic when he revisits the dust-covered chamber after Jack’s funeral. He says that he was thirteen “when I, armed with a flashlight, mounted the steep, folded-down stairway and emerged into the upper darkness.” He describes the experience as “looking at a perfect memory; dusty, but perfect” (140). Recognizing that he would never solve the mystery of Moses’ death without going back to the attic, John dreads having to return to the same dust-infested quarters in which he had failed to unravel the truth in the beginning. In the following chapter, he focuses again on the dust that had accumulated since the last time he had been there, noticing that “it was everywhere. It had sifted into every cranny, drifted into every crack…. It was remorseless; irresistible” (161). Symbolic of old memories hidden away, the dust is both offensive and inviting, simultaneously mocking the protagonist for his childhood failure and luring him to pursue his quest again. Throughout the narrative, John either is pulled into a memory, a recollection of his own past, or stumbles upon a rememory, a clue into a forefather’s past. In either case, he leaves the present to (re)explore times long gone. As the narrator, his continual exchanges between the now and the then creates a recursive, non-linear plot that demonstrates the interconnectivity between the past and the present. Summarily, “as we move forward in the present, we also return to various dimensions of the past” (Gliserman 152). After years of sustained efforts to forget the Hill and the Town in general, evidenced by his resistance to reveal to Judith anything about his growing up in the small Pennsylvania town, John finds himself surrendering to the memories of his childhood and adolescent days. He re-establishes the connection to his past – one that he will soon need in order to piece together his own memories along with the memories of others so that he can decipher the puzzle that Moses left for him. Another aspect of this complex narrative structure is the incorporation of several stories within the story. Recognizing that once a man dies “his story is lost…

[Only] bits and pieces of it remain,” the narrator-historian attempts to preserve those fragments by replaying them in his mind (48). He re-sounds the many stories he had once heard Old Jack tell, and imagines the stories that the men and women before him likely told. He remembers Jack’s tale about his first encounter with Moses: “‘I recall the night I met him,’ he had said. ‘It musta been near fifty years ago now, but I recollect it clear”. Old Jack and his friends were playing cards in the backroom of a store when “‘all the sudden in walks Mose…. [H]adn’t none of us never put eyes to him before. But that ain’t to say we didn’t know who Mose was. Pretty damn near the whole County knowed who he was’” (51-52). Old Jack tells John that, by the time the card game was over, everybody knew that the twenty-year old who appeared out of nowhere with a gunnysack full of money and moonshine was Moses Washington. Jack’s story marks the beginning of John’s understanding of his father’s cunning, managing to have the whole town know of him without having seen him. From another one of Jack’s stories John first learns of the Chaneysville incident. He remembers that on his eleventh birthday when Josh White and Old Jack took him hunting, Jack commenced to tell him the legend. John confesses I knew the tale. He had told me the story twenty times by then, but he had only needed to tell me once, for at that first telling he had said that it was a tale that Moses Washington had liked to tell, over and over again. And so I could sit by the campfire… telling myself the story of a dozen slaves who had come north on the Underground Railroad… and who, when they could no longer elude the men who trailed them with dogs and horses and ropes and chains, had begged to be killed rather than be taken back to bondage. (63) In this instance, Jack passes on a story that had been passed on to him by Moses. Thus, John learns through his surrogate father an important story that his biological father would have wanted him to know and, essentially, needed him to know in order to discern why he took his life. As a child, John did not recognize that Jack was not merely getting old and forgetting that he had told the story several times before. He was teaching his student an important lesson. As he grew older, John came to understand that “the stories were not just stories. They were something else: clues”

that are all a part of the puzzle as well. In keeping with his recognition that stories are significant, John perpetuates the storytelling tradition as he fuses fact and imagination to construct the stories of both Harriette Brewer and the old man Azacca for Judith. Echoing the words of his mentor who always began a story with the same question, the historian asks Judith “You want a story, do you?” (389). John imagines that Harriette, C.K.’s first love and one of the Chaneysville fugitives, told the group of fearful slaves huddling in Iiames’ Mill her life story. He ventures that Harriette told the others about having grown up privileged because of her light skin until she was old enough to realize that her mother earned their money as “a white man’s mistress”, and that she would too (418). She told them how, refusing to be like her mother, she grew to hate all men until she met and fell in love with a man calling himself C.K., and who had dedicated himself to freeing as many slaves as he could. She talked about being kidnapped and sold into slavery while pregnant with C.K.’s child. Explaining how she came to adopt the slaves’ mentality until one day she began to hate the institution again and planned to escape, she told them about how she had carefully chosen them to come with her. John goes on: ‘And then she had taken the final risk; she revealed herself to them. She placed her future in their hands….[S]he had chosen well; she was not betrayed…. And then, she told them, she had taken her children, her son and her daughters, and she had gone into the woods, and met the others, the ones with the strong minds and hearts and wills, and she had led them out of there….’ (423-24) Harriette reminds the now frightened slaves that she chose them because they were brave, and encourages them to continue their journey. Without her story, the reader would not have known what happened to Harriette after she disappeared. He would not have known that she had been captured, enslaved, and sexually exploited. Without her story, the narrative would not be complete. Her account helps to make whole the narrative proper. Similarly, Azacca’s story explains how and why the slaves, when they could not physically elude their pursuers, chose self-sacrifice as the only remaining way of

escape. Crafting the old man’s tale, John says ‘It was an old story, he said, a story his father had told him. A tale of Death, some might say, but not those who knew the tale. Because as it went, the Great Sky God, once in the old days, had looked down to see men were not free, for they feared the Stillness That Comes To All. And so [He] called for Papa Legba… and told him to take the message to men… that Death was not an ending of things, but a passing on of the spirit, a change of shape, and nothing more.’ (428) Azacca continues, explaining that because Papa Legba was too old to carry the message all the way to men, he gave the message to Rabbit who passed it on to “a man with pale skin and straight hair and eyes as gray as winter” who, instead, told the dark men that death was the cessation of life (429). As a result Harriette, C.K., and the others decide that “before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my God, and be free” (430). Singing this song, they each bravely raise their stopgap weapons and take their lives. John continues his own tale, saying that For a chorus or two, or three, the song was loud and strong. And then the song grew weaker, the voices that had raised it falling silent one by one, until at last there was only one voice, a strong soprano voice, carrying the song. And then that voice, too, fell silent. But the song went on. Because the wind shifted again, and was blowing from the west; because the wind now sang. (430) By this point in the narrative, the narrating historian has rejected his original method of reconstructing history, and adopted a revisionist method that involves the amalgamation of the written, the told, and the understood. John coalesces the written, oral, and legendary media to create a “new” narrative of his forefathers’ experiences throughout the past five generations. Jesús Benito describes this process as a rejection of the stereotypes cast in mainstream culture and a “[turn] to the Afro- American vernacular culture, a body of myth, folklore, and musical expression preserved beyond the distorting influence of the master’s discourse” (183). John begins at least to validate and appreciate folk expression, if not privilege the

vernacular culture over the mainstream education he received and now teaches in the university.3 The end of John’s re-membered tale, the story of death as the soul’s passing into the wind, echoes traditional African concepts of afterlife. By John’s inclusion of such beliefs at the end of his story, the reader can infer that the protagonist has finally come to internalize the lesson of death not as the cessation of life but merely the transformation of the soul from one form of existence to another. A careful reexamination of the narrative proper as a whole traces John’s understanding and acceptance of this belief from beginning to the very end. The historian often suggests and sometimes reveals his developing belief about death as more of a passing. In a telephone conversation with John after Old Jack’s passing, Judith senses that the old man has died. Attempting to comfort John, she says “I’m sorry,” and he replies “he was old” (158). After the conversation ends and John hangs up, he says “and then it occurred to me that she did not understand –she thought he was dead” (160). Indeed, Old Jack was gone but he was not dead. Reading further, we encounter another one of John’s diatribes. In this historical lecture, he traces the origin of African beliefs about the afterlife to the cause for most African-Americans’ reluctance to say that a person is “dead.” Observing that, before European invasion and indoctrination of the African continent, “black people did not die” (208), he talks about the customs of the Nigerian, Dahomian, and Sudanese concerning the souls of those who had passed, and how many believed that New Guinea was the home of the departed. He goes on to say that, though he may not know that his aversion to the word “dead” stems from ancestral beliefs, “no matter how light-skinned and Episcopalian a black person is, he or she will never tell you that a person has died. ‘Passed away,’ perhaps. Or ‘gone home.’ But never died” (213). Furthermore, in preparation for his surrogate father’s funeral, John puts items in Jack’s casket that he suggests the departed will need and use. Remarking that his mother wanted to dress Jack in a suit, John says “but I had insisted that he be outfitted properly…[with] a new union suit…new overalls, Big Murphs…wool-cotton blend socks and a woolen watch cap, cotton painter’s gloves, all he would need with the weather turning warmer.” He goes on to say that, although she conceded, his mother

became a little worried when he added “the Mail Pouch chewing tobacco and the mason jar of Georgia Moon corn whiskey…[and] his shotgun along with a couple of boxes of factory loads” inside the casket (214). The items that John places inside the casket are for functional, not aesthetic or decorative, purposes. If this were not the case, he would have no need to include bullets for the shotgun, or old shoes just in case the new ones were uncomfortable. John’s reasoning implies that Old Jack will actually use everything inside the casket. His rationale parallels the custom in many parts of Africa of burying essential belongings with the body. John S. Mbiti, a scholar of African philosophy, notes that it is customary to bury such items as “spears, bows, arrows, stools, snuff, [and] foodstuffs” with the deceased to facilitate his or her safe and well provided for journey to and life in a new dimension (114). At the funeral, John anticipates the sound of wind, signifying Jack’s passing over or away to another place, that is to say his transformation from earthly being to audible ancestral wind. While all the other funeral-goers listened to the preacher’s eulogy, John listened for the wind. He says, “I stood on that hillside and listened to the air. But there was no wind. It would come, though; I believed it would come” (216). This is the same sentiment he later expresses in the story of the thirteen fugitives whose voices were transferred to the wind. Because death is recognized as the point when the spirit leaves the body, John listens for some indication of Old Jack’s soul residing in the wind. Later in the narrative, the protagonist again disputes the concept of death as dying, and not passing. When he and Judith stumble upon a marker in the spot where Moses likely killed himself, Judith says, “Somebody marked his death.” He responds “‘Yeah,’…not wanting to tell her it wasn’t a death that somebody marked, it was only a grave” (381). He later attempts to explain to Judith the complexity of it all, saying that when Moses Washington killed himself, it was not suicide but a hunting trip. He did not die, but rather passed on to the place where C.K. was, to finally find the man he spent the last several decades of his life seeking. He simply “put himself into the mind of the game [target] and headed off after it” (388). John recognizes that, just as death is not dying, the past is not over. He comes

to understand that, by recreating the atmosphere or circumstances surrounding past events, one can re-experience those events, much like Toni Morrison’s Sethe who warns that the past “will be there for you, waiting for you” (36). After collecting all the facts concerning his paternal history and visiting the Chaneysville gravesite, the professor of History turned revisionist historian perceives that he must wait for the right timing. As he and Judith sit in the cabin on the last day of their journey, he finally hears the wind, and it carries the story to him: “‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Listen…because the time is right; the leaves are off the trees and the ground is covered with snow and the west wind is blowing” (394). Recall that it is the west wind that picked up and carried the song all those years ago. As he listens, the story comes to him. Several times, he has to stop and listen again for more of the story to unfold for him. He says, “I closed my eyes then, and listened to the wind singing” (401); “I waited, listening to the singing wind outside, listening eagerly” (402); “I stopped for a moment, sipped the toddy, waiting, while the rest of it took shape in my mind” (425). African philosophy is undoubtedly crucial to this text. Without understanding its importance, one cannot discern the significance of hunting as it parallels African beliefs concerning afterlife. Hunting is a recurring metaphor throughout the narrative, and we are first introduced to its relevance in John’s boyish depiction of his father’s death: that “Moses Washington went hunting and came home dead” (27). Because he headed for the woods with a rifle in his hand, everyone assumed that Moses went hunting but failed to comprehend that he was not hunting game but a man, a legend. Hunting game and hunting the ancestors are analogous. There are three key hunting scenes in this text. The first is John’s hunt for dinner; the second is his recurring dream; and the third is his recollection of a previous hunting trip with Old Jack. All three scenes are critical to the evolution of the hunting metaphor. On his ninth day in the Town, John sets out to locate dinner in the woods, and happens upon deer tracks. Confident in his tracking skills, he is sure that he will catch the deer. For hours, he operates by what he knows: “I knew what the tracks had to tell me…. I knew he was not large…. I knew he was alone…. And I knew, too, that I had a chance to catch him…. I knew that I would catch him.” (244-45). Then

suddenly, John becomes less sure: “I didn’t know why he had done that…. I did not know precisely when he had sensed me…. Guessing when he would make his turn…” (246-47). Finally, John realizes that, if he is going to catch this deer, he must rely on instinct and not logic. He admits that “the situation was logical, but the solution was without logic” (248). He gives up fatigued however, saying, “I would never find him. I was not that good” (250). Just as he does on this hunt, John loses confidence in his ability to track an elusive past and, out of frustration, nearly gives up. At this point in the narrative, he does not yet understand that he must progress beyond reason if he wishes to piece together a family history. John’s dream that has haunted him from his childhood is the key to this hunting metaphor. The protagonist dreams that, while hunting, he discovers “the spoor of a big buck, bigger than any I had ever seen” and proceeds to track the game. When he encounters the buck, he realizes that he had really been tracking his father all along. He says I came to the edge of a clearing and saw a man in the center of it, naked to the waist, despite the driving snow and horrible cold, building a cairn of giant triangular boulders. I knew that it was Moses Washington. I watched him from cover, seeing the rippling of muscle as he lifted the massive rocks, hearing him grunt as he clumsied them into place. When he finished he stepped back and admired his handiwork, and then he brought up his foot and proceeded to kick the cairn apart, sending rocks avalanching down in disarray…. [W]hen the destruction was complete, he turned and looked at me and laughed, and then he vanished into the woods. (148) John continues the dream, saying that, after Moses left, he attempted to rebuild the memorial but, because the stones were all triangular, they fit together logically but seemingly never perfectly as they did when Moses erected them. He says that he then became trapped in his dream, unable to stop himself from repetitively razing and rebuilding the cairn. This dream is especially meaningful in that it symbolizes John's real-life quest. On the brink of his discovery, John believes that he has been tracking his

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father but his trek is much more complicated. His true challenge is to reconstruct the cairn or the memorial – the legacy of the Washington men – that Moses had struggled to piece together. After laboring with the pieces and discerning the shape of this legacy, Moses destroys it, because John must erect the memorial for himself. The protagonist struggles with the challenge because he is using logic to comprehend the shape of something exceeding the logical. Likewise, John must learn to think beyond the facts logged on his color-coded, time-and-date-stamped index cards. He must use more than reasoning to uncover the true story of his past. He must deduce why his father killed himself for no apparent reason, or, as his childhood dream represents it metaphorically, why Moses “vanished into the woods.” Finally, having traced the facts all the way to Chaneysville where he discovers twelve unmarked graves, the protagonist initially believes that he has come to a dead end. However, he recalls a hunting trip with Old Jack in which he had followed his game until sundown refusing to give up, exclaiming “I don’t give a damn about him [the buck]…. I want to know where the hell he’s going” (392). Admitting to Old Jack that he had lost his buck, his mentor responds, “You ain’t lost him. You just lost your feel for him. He’s still there. Quit tryin’ to figure out where he’s at and jest follow him” (393). Now, taking the old man’s advice to heart, John follows Moses and C.K beyond the logical (death), and imagines what happened to his father and great grandfather. He follows Moses’ lead and “[does] what any good woodsman would do: he put[s] himself in the mind of the game and head[s] off after it” (338). It is essential that we trace the development of the hunting metaphor up to this point because, in doing so, we can understand the narrative’s conclusion. On their last day in the town, John and Judith pack their belongings in preparation to leave, but John asks Judith to leave him in the cabin to take care of the final business that he “wanted to be alone to do” (431). Leaving the books, pamphlets, diaries, maps, and the folio in their proper place “ready for the next man who would need them,” (431) he gathers his pads, note cards, and writing utensils and sets them on the ground under the kindling. He then says that I went back inside the cabin and got the kerosene and brought it back and poured it freely over the pyre, making sure to soak the cards

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thoroughly. I was a bit careless, and got some of it on my boots, but that would make no difference…. As I struck the match it came to me how strange it would look to someone else, someone from far away. And as I dropped the match to the wood and watched the flames go twisting, I wondered if that someone would understand. (431-32) Key words in this passage suggest that John performs/commits self-immolation. His use of the word “pyre” intimates death; he points out that it did not matter that he spilled kerosene on his boots; and he wonders if Judith would understand, adopting a tone that suggests that he will never know. Several scholars, perhaps because they do not follow the theme of afterlife and the metaphor of hunting to the absolute end of the novel, do not arrive at this conclusion. Klaus Ensslen writes that John’s concern with Judith seeing the smoke rising from the hillside is his worry that she will not understand why he burns “all of the hard facts he has accumulated” (286). Matthew Wilson plainly asserts that “Washington doesn’t join the ancestors at the end of the novel” (103). I propose, however, that the narrative clearly leads up to this point. While we have already determined that John learns to embrace an African-American vernacular culture that incorporates the written, oral and understood histories, it is only in keeping with the protagonist’s development that he honors and perpetuates his forefathers’ legacy. In this story about a man’s literal and metaphorical excavation of a buried past, the professor of History becomes a revisionist historiographer, relying upon public documents, family history, and community legend to reconstruct a fragmented legacy from the “bits and pieces” remaining (48). The author creatively employs historical fact – taking the protagonist to the site “where they hid the bodies,” (186) and allowing him to imagine what really occurred in Chaneysville so many years ago – to resurrect and reconstruct the Chaneysville incident.

1 See Klaus Ensslen’s summary and treatment of the narrative in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature.

2 C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 3 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1991) 180.

3 This concept of African-Americans’ preservation of slave (hi)stories within an African centered vernacular culture is evident in other neo-slave narratives, including Corregidora, in which the story of

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a Portuguese slave owner’s rape of his slave women is passed down through generations of his female progeny/victims. Although it only briefly deals with slavery, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, in which the legend of Sapphira Wade and “18 & 23”is pervasive, is another African-American authored texts that illustrates this principle.

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CONCLUSION

The setting is testimony service on a Wednesday night in the traditional African American church. The young people are gathered in the back of the sanctuary chewing gum, passing notes, and laughing at the old folks. One thing they can count on, besides having the usher instruct them to spit their gum onto the paper in her hand, is the testimony of the church mother sitting on the front pew. The old woman stands and begins to talk about “the goodness of the Lord,” punctuating her sentences with a wave of her handkerchief. She begins her testimony by saying, “You can’t tell it! Let me tell it!” These words imply that the woman’s story somehow loses meaning if told by someone else. An elderly man in the deacons’ corner follows the woman’s testimony with an old congregational song: You don’t know You wasn’t there You don’t know when You don’t know where You don’t know… His words, too, convey the significance of telling one’s own story. Testimony is central to the African American tradition. Great meaning is imbedded in songs of testimony with such lyrics as “My soul looks back and wonders how I got over.” African Americans have long emphasized the importance of relating the experiences of their tedious journeys – from bondage to freedom, from sadness to joy – for themselves. Similarly, contemporary African American literature, more specifically the neo-slave narrative (sub)genre, holds this same respect for recounting

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the past from a more personal perspective. Although African American writers today have never been slaves themselves, and therefore cannot speak as slaves, they have borrowed from the Negro Spirituals and other historical modes of African-American expression (preaching, moaning, and storytelling to name a few) in order to engage in a kind of “neo-testimony” of the American slave experience. This project has first examined how a few of the several neo-slave narrative authors have adopted a testimonial tradition as they have resurrected and re-presented buried histories. Authors like Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, David Bradley, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison have engaged in a both critical and imaginative project to testify of the American slave past from the inside out –finally to “tell it!” from the slave’s perspective. Bradley, Williams, and Morrison have relied upon such oral practices as storytelling, singing, moaning, and preaching to construct these “new” narratives of American slavery. The verbal accounts of the town griot (Old Jack), the ancient African (Azacca), and the fugitive mulatta (Harriette Brewer) are all essential to the story David Bradley tells about thirteen Chaneysville fugitives. Moreover, these runaways’ last words were the staunch lyrics of the Negro Spiritual, “Oh Freedom,” that later became prominent during the Civil Rights Movement. Kaine’s and Paul D’s hearty voices lace the narratives of Dessa Rose and Beloved as the men sing extemporaneously about their loves and losses. Through her alternative type of preaching, Baby Suggs, holy, admonishes the members of her community to love themselves. What remains to be explored is how other such neo-slave narrative writers as Gayl Jones and Ernest Gaines participate in this neo-testimonial practice. Regarding Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, what should be said of the history of rape and resistance that is transmitted from the lips of the older Corregidora women to the ears of the younger ones seated on their laps? How is the history remembered for the little girl on grandmother Corregidora’s lap akin to the history told solely to the daughter seated between Dessa’s thighs? In Gaines’ narrative, what is the significance of history locked away in the memory of Miss Jane, only to be told how, when, and to

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whom the elderly woman chooses? In addition, how similar are Ned’s teachings to Baby Suggs’ exhortations, as Gaines’ character stirs his community to change? So many writers within this (sub)genre provide several examples of the keeping power of oral practices. They demonstrate how storytelling, preaching, and other forms of verbal expression not only preserve ancestral histories, but also sustain the human spirit. By employing several African American oral traditions in their narratives, these authors validate verbal customs in the African diaspora. I submit that this adoption of communication beyond the written word – the utilization of the spoken, sung, and non-word as well as words from within the diaspora – is neo- testimonial, because it allows for the (hi)stories of the American slave experience finally to be told from the slaves’ perspectives and as they might have told them. While slave authors or narrators usually appealed to a white audience, attempting to master the master’s language, neo-slave narrative authors write in a manner that demands that their readers meet them where they are. Beyond oral traditions, some neo-slave narrative authors also employ multiple narrating voices in their texts. While Bradley includes several framework stories in Chaneysville, Williams incorporates the three representative voices of the white male, the southern mistress, and the slave woman into Dessa Rose. On the other hand, Morrison allows the voices of the three women – Sethe, Denver, and Beloved – to dominate the climax of the narrative in the stream-of-consciousness chapters. All of these practices are very different from the single, detached, and seemingly omniscient voice of old history textbooks. By using multiple voices and exploring single events from varying perspectives, the authors illustrate that more than one perspective and narrative – the master narrative, so to speak – of history exists. Similarly, Ishmael Reed disrupts the master narrative of southern American history when he dismantles the image of Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator. Additionally, like David Bradley, when Reed allows fictional persons and historical figures to stand side by side, he demonstrates that sometimes the reconstruction of historical personages and events resembles the fabrication of storybook characters. Octavia Butler also destabilizes our understanding of history when she shows us that the Big House and the plantation do not always appear as large and threatening as

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they really are; that the stories of slave abuse, exploitation, and oppression took place within the walls of quaint, boxy homes as they did on the property of grand, white- columned houses. All five of the writers discussed in this study are guilty of “tricking” time in some way. Doing something entirely different from the others, Ishmael Reed folds the twentieth century into the nineteenth century so that the two worlds coexist. On the other hand, Morrison, Bradley, Williams and Butler write narratives with a recursive plot that illustrates the continuity between the past and the present. While the storylines of Beloved, The Chaneysville Incident and Dessa Rose trace the characters’ relapses into past events and experiences, Kindred’s recursive plot is caused by the main character Dana’s physical and recurring translations from her present to her ancestors’ past and back again.1 More often than not, the recursion found in these narratives is caused by the pressing need to remember (recall) or re-member (piece together) a suppressed or forgotten past. For this reason, these narratives can be described as the stories of fugitives either of slavery or of the memory of slavery. In short, the lesson to be learned is that history is not going anywhere, and that one can and must learn how to acknowledge the past without living in it.2 For this reason, Beloved, Chaneysville, and Kindred employ a trope of remembering and dis-remembering. The characters in each of these novels endure an intense process of reconstructing an elusive past or fully confronting a haunting one, and, in so doing, those once ominous and intrusive ghosts of the past become “digestible” memories (Sale 41). Morrison advises that “the past, until you confront it, until you live through it, keeps coming back in other forms. The shapes redesign themselves in other constellations, until you get a chance to play it over again” (qtd. in Taylor-Guthrie 241). Once Sethe learns to confront her past in its entirety, she, with the help of the women in the community, is able to move toward her future. When John Washington triumphs over his elusive past, the History that was once “cold-blooded” and “cumbersome” like a “dinosaur” becomes quite welcome and understood family history (Chaneysville 262). When Dana, finally understanding and accepting the reason for her multiple transports to the past, simultaneously preserves

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the life of a maternal ancestor and puts a permanent end to Master Rufus’ sexual advances, she frees herself from history’s possessive hold. Somewhere in the process of facing the past head on, its ghosts (incarnate or not) become bearable memories. While this study has primarily examined the works of Ishmael Reed, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and David Bradley, its findings are applicable to other neo-slave narratives, especially the more contemporary texts that Ashraf Rushdy describes as palimpsest.3 In addition, this examination of a (sub)genre that repetitively foregrounds the female slave experience (in contrast to the majority of antebellum slave narratives that focus on the male slave experience) is also applicable to contemporary intersectionality theory that points out the separate but equally significant implications of race and gender. What does it mean, for example, to be a female slave (and slave mother)? In summary, although this project has contributed to current discourse on these post-modern texts, there are still more texts within the (sub)genre to be studied and other matters in need of more analysis. What patterns and themes do Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, Ernest Gaines’ Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Oxherding Tale contribute to this discussion of neo- slave narratives? Moreover, what similar narrative, thematic, and historical issues does Michelle Cliff face in her treatment of slavery in the Caribbean? How is her story about a people she describes as lotus eaters reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Sethe who makes a business of beating back the past, or Octavia Butler’s Dana who is eager to settle into her marriage with almost all traces of her ancestry purged from her bookshelves? All of these and many more questions are left to be addressed in the study of this significant and intriguing (sub)genre of African-American literature.

1 It must be noted here that Gayle Jones’ Corregidora also shifts between the past and the present as the protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, frequently recalls her mother’s and grandmother’s stories about their owner’s sexual abuse.

2 Author Michelle Cliff teaches this same lesson in Abeng, which explores slavery and its aftereffects in Caribbean history.

3 Rushdy defines palimpsest narratives as “those first-person or third-person novels in which a contemporary African American subject describes modern social relations that are directly conditioned or affected by an incident, event, or narrative from the time of slavery” (The Oxford Companion 535).

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Anita P. Wholuba was born into a mixed culture. Her father is a native of Liberia, West Africa and her mother is from the American South – Hartford, Alabama. She is the eldest of two daughters and the first in her family to obtain a doctoral degree. Both of her parents are extremely proud to see their "baby" complete her PhD studies. Her father always tells her that, if she were "back home" in Africa, they would "kill a cow" in celebration of her accomplishments.

A native of Lakeland, Florida, Ms. Wholuba earned her BA degree in English at the University of South Florida in 1998. During her membership in the McNair Scholars Program, she began studying the neo-slave narrative (sub)genre under the guidance of her mentor in African-American Literature, Dr. Charles Heglar. She has presented research on neo-slave narratives, antebellum slave narratives, and creative voice in Black literary expression in some local and regional conferences. Her areas of research and teaching interest include the intersection of race and gender in American literature; the inception, appropriation and perpetuation of African-American stereotypes and images; and the similarities between slave escape and African- American passing.

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