Transatlantica, 2 | 2012 Discourse of Slavery: Freedom and the Negotiation of Power and Identity in Co

Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal 2 | 2012 Cartographies de l'Amérique / Histoires d'esclaves Discourse of Slavery: Freedom and the Negotiation of Power and Identity in Context Lori Lee Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6237 DOI : 10.4000/transatlantica.6237 ISSN : 1765-2766 Éditeur AFEA Référence électronique Lori Lee, « Discourse of Slavery: Freedom and the Negotiation of Power and Identity in Context », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2012, mis en ligne le 21 mai 2013, consulté le 29 avril 2021. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6237 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.6237 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 29 avril 2021. Transatlantica – Revue d'études américaines est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modiﬁcation 4.0 International. Discourse of Slavery: Freedom and the Negotiation of Power and Identity in Co... 1 Discourse of Slavery: Freedom and the Negotiation of Power and Identity in Context Lori Lee 1 Consider the following quote from a former slave: “The Master says we are all free, but it don’t mean we is white. And it don’t mean we is equal (George King, 1930, quoted in Baker and Baker, 1996, 238).” This insightful observation eloquently captures the essence of this essay. What people say is not always what they mean, and what they mean is mediated through both their context and the identity of those engaged in conversation. The institution of slavery in the Americas constructed a legacy of racism and inequality, which was exacerbated in the process of emancipation and reconstruction. Elements of this legacy find expression within Works Progress Administration interviews with former slaves. These narratives, both through what they say and do not say, reveal that constructions of racial inequality did not disappear with the end of the institution of slavery. The contextual creation of slave narratives and the processes of their construction and reconstruction resulted in a negotiation of power over the authentic discourse of slavery. These media also provide insight into how the negotiation of identity was influenced by constructs of race and ethnicity. This essay examines these negotiations and particularly emphasizes the ways in which the contexts of emancipation and the circumscribed condition of the freed individual mediated the meaning of freedom in the lives of the formerly enslaved. The impact of racial inequality on the negotiated identities of African Americans and Anglo Americans are also explored. 2 The term discourse has two connotations, one linguistic and one social. The linguistics form of discourse refers to “connected segments of speech or writing” (Conley and O’Barr, 1998, 7). Analysis of linguistic discourse requires examination of how such segments, or texts, are structured and how they are used in communication (ibid.). Discourse in its more abstract, social sense has been discussed in the work of Foucault (1993). Foucault defines discourse as communication that takes place within a society Transatlantica, 2 | 2012 Discourse of Slavery: Freedom and the Negotiation of Power and Identity in Co... 2 about an issue or set of issues (Conley and O’Barr, 1998, 6). It examines how something gets talked about. This is intimately related to how people think about that issue and how they act in relation to it. The dominance of a particular discourse within a society inevitably reflects the power structure of society (ibid.). Through talk, the dominant discourse can be sanctioned, questioned, or subverted. Following Conley and O’Barr, I refer to the linguistic form of discourse as microdiscourse and the social form as macrodiscourse (ibid.). These dual aspects of discourse are examined through the form of narrative. Following a discussion of the challenges of working with slave narratives, audiotaped slave narratives are analyzed to assess microdiscourse. Then select written narratives from Mississippi are analyzed to examine the macrodiscourse of slavery in a regional context. Challenges of working with slave narratives 3 The Works Progress Administration began a Slave Narrative project in 1937 to obtain information about the experiences of slavery from former slaves. Writers had transferred nearly twenty-three hundred slave narratives to the Writer’s Unit at the Library of Congress by the end of the project (Baker and Baker, 1996, 7). The selective collection of these narratives that will be analyzed for this essay spans from 1937 to 1951. These narratives are analyzed to gain insight into the macrodiscourse and microdiscourse of slavery—how former slaves talked about slavery to interviewers from government organizations and the broader discourse that was encompassed by and within these narratives. 4 There are several challenges in using the slave narratives as a source. One issue is the long interval of time that elapsed between emancipation and the interviews. The interviews were conducted from 1937-1951, over seventy years after emancipation. Consequently, many informants were children during the era of slavery. One’s experience within slavery was variable in many ways for children and adults. Therefore a number of the narratives offer a child’s perspective of slavery. The seventy-plus year lapse also interferes with memory. 5 Another difficulty is interviewer bias. Most interviewers were white (except in Virginia) and most informants were elderly blacks, creating clear class and racial boundaries between the interviewer and the interviewee. The respect traditionally accorded to the elderly in Southern society did offer some leeway to the former slaves in telling their stories and allowed them an opportunity to speak openly (Berlin et al., 1998, xx). Racial and gender etiquette of the 1930s and 1940s impacted interviews as well. For example, an African American male may have been reluctant to reveal some aspects of his past to a young, Caucasian female (Baker and Baker, 1996, 4). Just as informants’ narratives evoke what they felt was significant about slavery, the interviewers’ questions that invoked these narratives reveal what they felt was most significant. This situation was rendered more complex by the fact that many of the interviewers and informants lived in the same towns. White interviewers were often related to the “local elite,” a relationship that was usually known to the men and women being interviewed (Rawick, 1977a, xlii). Therefore, informants would likely have tailored their narratives to accommodate this potential dilemma. Vague answers were probably as much a consequence of suspicion of the interviewers and their motives as they were of fading memory. Transatlantica, 2 | 2012 Discourse of Slavery: Freedom and the Negotiation of Power and Identity in Co... 3 6 Significantly, many narratives were edited at least once prior to publication. When the interviews were published, the questions were removed and the narrative was pieced together to represent a more or less steadily flowing narrative. Editing was done at the writer and/or appraiser’s discretion. This meant that if a writer and/or appraiser perceived some material to be offensive or “untrue” then it was sometimes removed from the narrative or the narrative itself was not sent on to Washington D.C. Insight into this process can be found in the appraisal sheets for individual narratives in the Alabama collection, which became a part of the historical record. C.H. Wetmore noted that narrations which presented slavery as humane were “believable” and “convincing,” whereas those that depicted conflict between slaves and slaveowners or overseers were “suspect” (paraphrased from Rawick, 1977a, xxxx). Wetmore’s comments did not prevent the narratives he documented from being sent to Washington D.C. unedited. However, they do exemplify the kinds of things that were suggested for editing or removal and these suggestions were probably implemented in other cases. 7 What was deemed offensive, inauthentic, or “untrue” in the narratives was mediated by context. During the Civil War, abolitionists depicted slavery as an evil that must be cast out of the United States. But during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white northerners and southerners began to redefine slavery as a benign and even philanthropic institution, recalling themes used by planters in defense of slavery. The rancor and severity of the post-war period was contrasted with the supposed harmony of the era of slavery (Berlin et al., 1998, xiv). This redefinition of slavery was one byproduct of the post-Civil War national reconciliation process. 8 Therefore the geographic context and the social context, in the form of racial tensions and hegemonic relations, impacted the censoring of the narratives. By defining aspects of the narratives as inauthentic and selectively publishing perspectives of slavery that resonated with the contemporary white perspective of the slavery experience, some W.P.A. writers and appraisers were circumscribing the voices of the former slaves and filtering their words through an imposed lens. By editing the interviews, writers were asserting power and reconstructing the narrative. Editing represents a manner of silencing, which is a form of linguistic oppression (Ochs and Capps, 1996, 35). Through narrative, individuals define themselves. When others modify autobiographical narratives, they are redefining and contesting self-definition.

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