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Death and Dying in 20Th Century African American Literature Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper University of South Carolina - Columbia

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Death and Dying in 20Th Century African American Literature Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper University of South Carolina - Columbia University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 1-1-2013 Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death and Dying in 20th Century African American Literature Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper University of South Carolina - Columbia Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Stoneberg-Cooper, C. A.(2013). Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death and Dying in 20th Century African American Literature. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/2440 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. GOING HARD, GOING EASY, GOING HOME: DEATH AND DYING IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE by Chayah Stoneberg-Cooper Bachelor of Arts University of Oregon, 2001 Master of Arts University of California, San Diego, 2003 Master of Arts New York University, 2005 Master of Social Work University of South Carolina, 2011 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2013 Accepted by: Qiana Whitted, Major Professor Kwame Dawes, Committee Member Folashade Alao, Committee Member Bobby Donaldson, Committee Member Lacy Ford, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Chayah Stoneberg-Cooper, 2013 All Rights Reserved. ii DEDICATION This work is dedicated to my family and friends, often one and the same, both living and dead, whose successes and struggles have made the completion of this work possible. To my Grandmother Agnes ‘Nanny’ Stoneberg, her eldest daughter Deeanne and my Beloved daughter, Yael-Ines – each of whom have educated me in the art, philosophy and practice of Humanism. To my biological and political Brothers & Sisters: particularly John-Bernard, William-Wallace, Lewis-Holden, Kristen, Jodie, Alexis, and April, thank you for your strength and courage. My deep and unreserved thanks are owed to all of my teachers, colleagues and students – too numerous to name. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to those from and headed toward ‘The Hill,’ located off the North Fork of the Siuslaw River, Oregon. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the generous support of my committee members, particularly Professors Qiana Whitted and Kwame Dawes. Thanks are owed to the faculty in the Department of English Literature and the College of Social Work at the University of South Carolina. The Palliative Care Team at Palmetto Hospital, Richland in Columbia South Carolina contributed greatly to the orientation and perspectives offered in this dissertation. I enthusiastically acknowledge the editorial suggestions by faculty and peers from New York University’s Department of Psychology, and the University of California, San Diego’s Departments of History & Ethnic Studies. My undergraduate students deserve credit for having offered me unconsidered angles of thought on the subject matter in class discussion, written work, and new questions. I am indebted to my organic intellectual cohort and community in Portland, OR, San Diego, CA, NYC, and Columbia, SC. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation answers the question: How can art represent the essential human experience of death, particularly when the creative context is one of extreme violence? And, what can be learned about the risks and rewards of the living’s relationship with the dead by way of these artistic representations? Further, how do these aesthetic renderings of death construct the ethics of life for survivors? In the case of African America, discussion of, and responses to, these questions have been primarily explored in novelist and creative writing. This dissertation examines these novelistic treatments of death- tropes, or thanatropes in eight novels written by African American writers in the 20th century. These authors explore through the use of thanatropes the potential for reconciliation after atrocity. A central concern of the literature analyzed here is: What kind of ritual, art, or aesthetic is restorative of wellness and health after catastrophic violence? African American morbidity in the psychosocial context of captivity, enslavement, forced labor, incarceration, segregation, and apartheid, has influenced African American aesthetic, especially death ritual. Hence, the artistic representation of death, ritual and funerary rites in 20th Century African American literary works offer commentary on a universal human condition, mortality, experienced under conditions of continuing adversity and inequality. v PREFACE In 2006 when I first arrived in the U.S. South I visited a tourist destination recommended for newcomers. The site was a former rice plantation, and during the tour I learned that the location was still owned by the benefactors and heirs of the enslavers who had profited from the system of chattel slavery. This was remarkable to me for a number of reasons. Having arrived in South Carolina from Zürich, CH, where the social reconciliation post-Shoah involved reparations and intensive efforts to divest of profits gained through forced and enslaved labor, the celebrated continuity of profits by the family claiming title and patrimony to this former rice plantation through proceeds from tourism was a stunning commodification of atrocity. The space was a former industrial agricultural death-camp, and I was extremely uncomfortable with the complete absence of recognition for the victims and survivors. Extreme discomfort became utter confusion upon witnessing a wedding party’s recitation of vows in the same location where admittedly, only a dozen decades prior, thousands of people had been systematically worked to death. I asked the docent about the location of memorials to the victims of enslavement and was ‘politely’ ignored. My interest in African America’s thanatologic resistance was ignited by a desecratory placard introducing the one small burial ground acknowledging the victims, which read: “Here lie the Faithful Servants.” This dissertation observes African America’s responsive efforts at recovery and consecration through literature. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iv ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................v PREFACE ............................................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: “TAKE FLIGHT, TAKE FLIGHT” ...............................................1 CHAPTER 2: “YOU KNOW HOW DANGEROUS IT IS TO WEAR DARK SKIN”: DIAGNOSIS IN INVISIBLE MAN & OXHERDING TALE ..........................................44 CHAPTER 3: “DOUBLE-FISTING DEATH WITH TWO HANDS”: THE COURSE OF DIS-EASE IN ALICE WALKER’S MERIDIAN AND GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY .......................................................................................................97 CHAPTER 4: “GOING HARD, GOING EASY, GOING HOME”: THE DEATHBEAD IN JOHN WIDEMAN’S HIDING PLACE & ERNEST GAINES’ A LESSON BEFORE DYING ...............................................................................161 CHAPTER 5: “BURY ME IN A FREE LAND”: BURIAL & BEREAVEMENT IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD & ALICE WALKER’S THE COLOR PURPLE.....................................................................221 WORKS CITED ...................................................................................................................268 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “Take Flight, Take Flight” “Which one is a fool? One who has been dead for these many years or a master in a dead man’s house. I’ll bet they’ll be trying to figure that one out for a long time. A long, long time” (178). -Robin, Flight to Canada (1976) “Put yo’ key in the lock, Mistah Man. Give the sign and come in, please you, suh. I heard a nigger say Death is his mammy. His old black mammy is name Death, he say. Well and good, onliest thing about it is Death is a man” (220). -Gabriel, Black Thunder (1927) Death is a threshold of wonder that has an ancient and venerable history as an object of human inquiry and artistic representation. Dying is also an aperture through which all humans ever born will eventually pass; it is the inevitable conclusion and culmination of each individual’s existence. Our relationship to death, and its personification wondered about in the opening these opening epigraphs display an acknowledgement that death, domesticity and identity coalesce in the creation of our ideas about individual ethics and racial politics. These excerpts by two African American authors each writing from one side of a great divide in the conditions of black mortality in the U.S. brought about by the Civil Rights movement also evidence a continuity of 1 debate and contemplation on how death figures into the construction of ‘race’ in the ideal of a national ‘family.’ The novel is the vehicle for, and window onto the relationship between death and ‘race’ in the U.S. Of course, the aesthetics of deathart and mortuary ritual offer insight onto human societies
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