MOVING EVER FORWARD: READING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MOTION AND
SPACE AS A REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA IN TONI MORRISON’S SONG OF
SOLOMON AND COLSON WHITEHEAD’S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
by
Samantha Richmond
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of
The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL
May 2017
Copyright by Samantha Richmond 2017
ii i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to express deepest gratitude to my thesis chair, Dr. Andrew
Furman, for his guidance throughout this process. I would like to thank Dr. Sika
Dagbovie-Mullins for insightful suggestions and guidance towards critical texts that really deepened my understanding of these theoretical fields. Thank you to Dr. Adam
Spry for advice and helpful suggestions in the editing stage of this manuscript. Thank you to my wonderful and supportive family: Sandra Jae, Donald, and Tony for their constant love and support during the writing of this thesis (and every other part of my life). A huge thank you to my friends in the English department who were my support, my solace, and my guides, especially: Advitiya, Rachel, Jenn, Jess, and Ashely.
iv ABSTRACT
Author: Samantha Richmond
Title: Moving Ever Forward: Reading the Significance of Motion and Space as a Representation of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
Institution: Florida Atlantic University
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Andrew Furman
Degree: Master of Arts
Year: 2017
This thesis argues that three models of trauma theory, which include traditional trauma theory, postcolonial trauma theory, and cultural trauma theory, must be joined to fully understand the trauma experienced by African Americans within the novels Song of
Solomon by Toni Morrison and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. By implementing these three theories, we can see how each novel’s main character is exploring and learning about African American trauma and better understand how an adjustment of space and time creates the possibility for the implementation of trauma theory.
Each novel presents a journey, and it is through this movement through space that each character can serve as a witness to African American trauma. This is done in
Morrison’s text by condensing the geographical space of the American north and south
v into one town, which serves to pluralize African American culture. In Whitehead’s text,
American history is removed from its chronological place, which creates a duality that instills Freud’s theory of the uncanny within both the character and the reader.
vi
MOVING EVER FORWARD: READING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MOTION AND
SPACE AS A REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA IN TONI MORRISON’S SONG OF
SOLOMON AND COLSON WHITEHEAD’S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
I: THE DUALITY OF SPACE IN SONG OF SOLOMON ...... 12
II: CONDENSED TIME AND LITERALIZED SPACE IN THE UNDERGROUND
RAILROAD ...... 29
III: CONCLUSION ...... 41
REFERENCES...... 44
vii INTRODUCTION
Movement, the act of taking a physical body and shifting it into another position or space, is a vital action in any novel. There is the movement of a character’s physical body from one space to another; there is the movement of a character’s mentality, or way of thinking, from the start of the novel to the end; there is the movement of an entire group of people’s mentalities from one space to the next. Some novels must take greater care to consider movement as they write about the historical realities they depict, such as
Europe’s colonization of Africa, the era of European countries’ movement into the continent of Africa, uprooting its people and enslaving them in the name of racial authority and Europe’s financial benefit. The United States quickly became a part of this upheaval, becoming a part of the transatlantic slave trade, violently uprooting people from all over Africa and forcing them to come to the States and work in horrific, abusive, dehumanizing conditions without pay, an action that was rationalized by aggressive dehumanization. This forced movement of millions of African peoples was not a movement to be soon forgotten by its descendants. In the book, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity by Ron Eyerman, he asserts that
“…Africa is more than a spiritual home, and much more than a cultural resource, it is a site of redemption. Whether or not one actually returned there in a physical sense was probably less important than its symbolic meaning as homeland, beyond slavery and
1 outside history” (167). This movement back to the place their ancestors were forcibly uprooted from was, for many African Americans, a figurative move. It was a move back to their identity as it existed prior to the traumatic memory of American slavery. In this context, movement comes in the form of escape, relocation, and the idea of social mobility, which is a part of the American mythology (Eyerman 154). This theme of motion and movement is in large part due to the trauma experienced by Africans and their African American descendants in the United States.
Movement is therefore presented as a solution to this trauma, as seen in the form of the escaped slave narrative depicted in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground
Railroad, or in the form of the escaped flight back to Africa, a major theme of Toni
Morrison’s Song of Solomon; in The Underground Railroad, the main character must witness and experience two hundred years of consolidated traumas as she moves physically from the slave plantation to her freedom in the north; in Song of Solomon, the main character exists in a town that represents the consolidated figurative spaces of the north and south that provides the impetus for him to learn and understand of his trauma.
Through their own movement in the texts, these characters witness the pluralized African
American experiences, the condensation of time, and reconcile their own history of forced relocation. Both authors take the journey that they have placed upon their character and provided them with a fantastical element: for Whitehead’s Cora, this is the consolidation of time and experience; for Morrison’s Milkman, this is the shifting of spaces to consolidate the US’s divided geography into a single town. By moving the physical space and time itself, I can assert that they have created a doubled space, which
2 allows for a direct contrast between the horrors of slavery and segregation with the shared human desire for interpersonal connection and identity formation.
To better understand the need for a theme of movement, there needs to be an incorporation of the fields of trauma studies that exist and relate to the African American experience. The recent field of postcolonial trauma theory has spent much time and effort in analyzing the issues with traditional trauma theory; scholars have asserted over the past few decades that traditional trauma theory is Eurocentric. However, with the work in cultural trauma as done by Eyerman, there is a disconnect between traditional trauma studies and postcolonial trauma studies. Cultural trauma has been analyzed and has defined the significance of African American trauma, which needs to be considered when contextualizing the field of postcolonial trauma theory. Often, there is a fixation on what does not work within the traditional trauma theory rather than working to apply the theory to the pluralized societies many postcolonial trauma theorists are attempting to define. In the novels by Morrison and Whitehead, there is a fantastical element that creates a no-place for the characters, known in science fiction as the absent paradigm.
Both texts include many elements of magical realism that develop original paradigms to regulate the novels’ messages the same way that science fiction literature does. In
American history, African Americans have been other-ed and excluded from the United
States historical narrative. Therefore, this no-place can be applied to African American experiences, in which there is a conspicuous disregard for their specific cultural history and suffering throughout American history.
In the critical postcolonial text, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak defines the oppression of the Other by showing how “great care was taken to obliterate
3 the textual ingredients with which a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary—not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law” (75). To effectively “other” a group of people, typically the minority group,
Spivak argues that the government had to take time to diminish or erase any mode of text through which subjects could develop empathy or understanding for the oppressed group.
The government did this by infiltrating the ideology of its people, developing scientific explanations for the oppression, and instituting laws that would make the government legally obligated to oppress. This is exactly how the United States other-ed and oppressed
African Americans; first there was legal slavery, then legal segregation. Then there was the diminishing of this history in the minds of its citizens by skimming through or wholly ignoring the legal oppression the government had legally enacted. They effectively erased the oppression from the minds of Americans, shifting the ideological perspective regarding the African American minority.
Much of the discussion surrounding the entire field of trauma studies has looked at the ways in which postcolonial theory and the experiences of people in postcolonial societies have been excluded from the paradigm of trauma as it is currently defined. Alan
Gibbs, a prominent postcolonial trauma theorist, argues that it is “…dangerous and presumptuous, to homogenize history in this way, to suggest that humans have always suffered in the same way from trauma” (Craps et al 907). By applying the typical approach in traditional trauma studies to the traumas of people in non-western cultures, or minorities within western cultures, there is a homogenization of history that erases culture. Instead, what must be considered are the different traumas enacted specifically on pluralized societies like the United States. Considering how African Americans have
4 been specifically traumatized will allow for a better understanding of the methods for healing. This is precisely why it is so vital to consider Eyerman’s text, which goes through the different periods of American history and how African Americans’ treatment and perspectives shifted from one generation to the next.
In Postcolonial Trauma theory, there is an attempt to bring together the vast fields of Postcolonialism and Trauma theory to understand how traditional trauma theory is simultaneously applicable to and excluding of the postcolonial experience. In the article
“Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels,” Stef Craps and Gert Buelens reference feminist psychotherapist Laura S. Brown, who “…has argued that traumatic experiences of people of color, women, gays and lesbians, lower-class people, and people with disabilities often fly under the trauma-theoretical radar because current definitions of trauma have been constructed from the experiences of dominant groups in Western society” (3). In the standard analysis of traditional trauma theory, there is an expectation and consistent application of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which many theorists in the postcolonial trauma theory field argue is an act of epistemic violence.
This application of a metropolitan formulation, when treated as trans-human universals, is another way of oppressing and silencing the trauma of American slavery and the ramifications for the descendants of slaves. I intend to use Freud’s theory of the uncanny not as a means for analyzing the trauma experienced by the African American characters, but as a mode for reading The Underground Railroad. The uncanny is applied to the reader’s experience rather than to the characters’ experience to show how Whitehead takes the familiarity of American history and alters it to remind the reader of these vast traumas.
5 Sonya Andermahr responds to the field of traditional trauma studies by asserting that “racially based forms of trauma historically rooted in the global systems of slavery and colonialism pose a significant challenge to the Eurocentric model of trauma as a single overwhelming event” (501). Traditional trauma studies has worked closely with the Holocaust and the intergenerational trauma that is experienced due to that singular event. However, as Andermahr has noted, there are other traumatic experiences that do not follow that model. In the case of American slavery, that event extended over hundreds of years, and after that traumatic experience ended, the descendants of those traumatized not only inherited their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents’ trauma, they also experienced new traumas in the form of segregation and the hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan that arose post-slavery. Therefore, it is so important to study both
The Underground Railroad and Song of Solomon through this theoretical perspective:
Whitehead’s novel consolidates the vast traumas into one character’s experience, and
Morrison’s novel looks closely at the intergenerational experiences of African Americans in a post-slavery America.
Further, Eyerman analyzes the ways in which African American identity was formed after slavery. He looks specifically at African American history and how there was a development of that specific cultural identity as a direct result of not only the institution of slavery, but also the ways that the United States government neglected the impact of slavery on the country from the time of Restoration. Eyerman focuses his theoretical standpoint on the idea of cultural memory and how that memory becomes a part of a person’s existence even when they themselves did not experience the first-hand trauma of slavery. Eyerman asserts that “As opposed to psychological or physical trauma,
6 which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion” (2). Where the standard use of the term trauma tends to focus specifically on the individual experience, what occurs within cultural trauma is a loss of group identity. There is an erasure of a culture’s experience, including the emotional wounds that may appear consistently across a group rather than varying widely from one person to the next. This is particularly applicable to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, in which we see a character in an African American neighborhood trying to establish identity within a community that is experiencing the emotional anguish of an extreme neglect from their own country and society. His own historical paradigm is absent from his reality, and he therefore must enact a magical journey that will take him into his cultural past and individual future.
In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead creates his own “u-topia” in which the historical underground railroad has been reimagined as a literal railroad; he has taken a piece of American history and developed a paradigmatic mirage through which to tell a story of an escaped slave and her attempted journey to freedom. This absent paradigm, the imagined literal underground railroad, allows Whitehead’s readers to exist in an alternate world wherein he has room to consolidate and reframe the traumas of African
Americans in the history of the United States. Whitehead’s u-topia is a world in which the oppression and trauma that has been enacted upon African Americans, the trauma an absent paradigm in themselves, throughout American history are compressed into one specific time and place; in this semi-familiar world, we see how trauma is applicable to the postcolonial African American experience.
7 This can be tied more closely with postcolonial trauma theory when we consider what the trauma of slavery did to thousands of African people. In the article “The
Question of ‘Solidarity’ in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition
Principle” by Hamish Dalley, Dalley quotes Ogaga Ifowodo, who argues “that colonialism ought to be understood as an intrinsically traumatizing force, a disruption par excellence in which one is forcibly reconstituted by the demands of an outsider…cast adrift from any frame of reference” (373). African slaves were forcibly removed from all their cultural and geographical contexts, and given a horrific life with no ties to their former reality. This would create an absent paradigm for them, as is seen in Whitehead’s novel. Further, Ifowodo notes that there is no longer a frame of reference, or paradigm, through which the trauma of slavery can be fully understood (Dalley 373). Similarly, in
Song of Solomon, Morrison alludes to different African folklore traditions connected to slavery; her main male and female protagonists literally take flight, which ties back to the
African-American folklore of slaves flying back to Africa and freedom. This is her literary attempt to deal with trauma; not through the diagnoses typically found in
American Psychological texts, but through the tradition of storytelling.
The paradigm continues for generations after slavery was abolished because that historical cultural tie to their past is removed; the descendants of slavery had no history classes teaching them the specifics of their cultural heritage; they were handed white
American culture, but remained removed from that culture and history. Cynthia A. Davis notes that in Toni Morrison’s fiction, “her world and characters are inescapably involved with problems of perception, definition, and meaning” (323). This applies to the constant re-naming and mis-naming that occurs throughout Morrison’s text, from the main
8 character’s resented name, Milkman (changed from his birth name of Macon Dead Jr.), to his friend and subsequent rival, Guitar. Davis argues that this is an act of distortion.
However, this act of renaming shows instead how the African American characters are distancing themselves from the standard white American names and instead creating their own world and identity, much like postcolonial trauma theory has done with the standard study of traditional trauma theory.
Morrison also completes this new paradigm by making the black characters the focus of the story; any white characters or white people who influence the novel’s characters are wholly tangential. There is very little white voice or action in the novel.
Davis notes that “all of Morrison’s characters exist in a world defined by its blackness and by the surrounding white society that both violates and denies it” (323). Because the surrounding white society has denied Morrison’s characters and their culture, Morrison in turn has excluded the society that has denied them. This plays back to how postcolonial trauma studies are dealing with the struggle to become a part of and a separate entity to traditional trauma studies. Stef Craps notes that “by almost always taking the need to decenter the Holocaust as our starting point, we are not inadvertently reaffirming its centrality” (Craps et al 913). The Holocaust was horrific; however, traditional trauma studies has always kept that experience as the norm for all understandings of trauma. By constantly defining themselves against the trauma of the Holocaust, Craps is highlighting how they are confirming that it is the center of traditional trauma studies. In the same way, rather than showing the black characters as experiencing trauma in their interactions with white characters, Morrison has made them the central focus. This removes white
9 people from the center of the African American experience and creates a new way of looking at African American trauma.
This thesis will show the ways that movement exists as a solution for the experience of African Americans through the novels Song of Solomon and The
Underground Railroad. This thesis will provide an analysis of the movement of both
Morrison’s Milkman and Whitehead’s Cora and consider how they reconcile and experience their shared traumas. This thesis will also speak to the need for further
American cultural understanding of ways people have been historically oppressed in this country, and how that oppression has been neglected within the narrative propagated by
American society. This neglect is most prevalent in the identity formation of Morrison’s
Milkman. Then it is shown in its formation within Whitehead’s novel in the time that
Whitehead has condensed and then applied to Cora. The research done in the field of postcolonial trauma studies will support these theories by showing how the African
American experience has been pluralized through the division between the American north and south. Further, postcolonial trauma studies have enhanced the trauma studies field, opening it up to various forms of experience beyond the western and European traumas.
In Chapter One, “The Duality of Space in Song of Solomon,” I will be considering how the hero’s journey appears within the novel, and how Milkman’s journey begins within the confines of his own town. I will analyze the ways that Morrison consolidates the cultures of the North and South into one town in Michigan by creating the culture of the south within the home of Pilate, Milkman’s aunt, contrasting with Milkman’s father,
Macon Dead, who has fully rejected his past and embraced his life in the north. This is
10 vital to Milkman’s journey as Macon Dead and Pilate represent wholly different but both important aspects of African American cultural trauma as defined by Eyerman.
In Chapter Two, “Condensed Time and Literalized Space in The Underground
Railroad,” I will use Freud’s theory of the Uncanny to understand how and why
Whitehead altered the spatial and chronological history of African Americans. Freud’s
Uncanny fixates on the horror of spaces, and this is vital when dealing with the trauma of slavery and how it impacted the lives of African Americans for generations to come.
Because the trauma being discussed is the trauma of an entire group of people, it is important to consider and apply individual traumatic diagnoses and how they can be reframed to include many people. Whitehead does this by consolidating an entire cultural experience into this one woman’s journey.
11 I: THE DUALITY OF SPACE IN TONI MORRISON’S SONG OF SOLOMON
Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon, begins with a suicide in which a man voluntarily throws his body from the top of the No Mercy Hospital to the pavement of
Not Doctor Street. Robert Smith’s flight occurs the day that the novel’s protagonist,
Macon (Milkman) Dead, is born. This opening journey from rooftop to the pavement of
Not Doctor Street establishes the novel’s theme of flight and journey that will be a necessary part of Milkman’s own heroic journey; this journey is facilitated by the spaces that Morrison creates both within a singular geographical space as well as over larger geographical expanses. Milkman will spend the first part of the novel stagnant and ignorant, living in his parents’ home until he is thirty-six. During those decades where he is situated in a single physical space, Milkman will begin to see how his family and community has created a reinvented space of their own. Within the towns themselves, there is reclamation of identity and a new nomenclature that occurs with both the names of the characters as well as the names of the streets and buildings they reside in. This reinvention is due to the constant rejection from American society; in this renaming, they are reclaiming their identities and experiences. This is what spurs in Milkman the desire to travel, to learn, and to grow. The novel is about his discovery of his family, his history, and his own existence as an African American man in twentieth century America.
Morrison establishes Milkman’s journey as one that moves from the north to the south, and in doing so she not only creates a pluralized society, but she depicts the divide in
12 African American identity that varies from the north to the south. This identity is due to the vast cultural differences and experiences of African Americans living in the north versus the south. We will see how African Americans who have experienced the culture of the south have had their identities shaped very differently from those in the north. This divide reflects the complicated traumatic experience that is not singular or easily applicable to all African Americans in the same manner; postcolonial and cultural trauma theory will address the complexities of this trauma as it is experienced by the various, culturally different African American characters throughout the novel. Each character is left in a doubled position; they each create within themselves a person who lives with the horror of their trauma and a person trying to live and exist and create their own space.
In moving across America, Milkman has seen the space he exists within as a living reminder of his history as well as his and his ancestors’ traumas. In “Decolonizing
Trauma Studies: A Response,” Rothberg argues, “we must re-think trauma as collective, spatial, and material” (225). One major difference between traditional trauma theory and postcolonial trauma theory is the idea of trauma as it occurs across multiple spaces and generations rather than in a single region or to a single group of people. Rothberg asserts that there must be an understanding of how trauma works in pluralized societies; how there is typically spatial misplacement, a mingling of the mythical and mundane, and finally, how a character’s experience of time can be splintered by the trauma they have experienced. In Cultural Trauma, Ron Eyerman notes that “Collective memory specifies the temporal parameters of past and future, where we came from and where we are going, and also why we are here now” (6). Rothberg and Eyerman both build off the connections
13 between trauma, memory, and time. Through renaming and narrativization, the cultural memory is being rebuilt to understand how the community came to be in this space. The street is named for the only black doctor working in the town; the hospital is named for its unwillingness to accept and take care of the black community. Their trauma is being called out and named for the people to understand not only the space they live in, but how oppression and neglect made that space what it is currently.
Milkman experiences a hero’s journey, but this journey has an unusual geographical landscape because it exists in both the American north and south, which has been restructured so that the south exists in the north in the form of his Aunt Pilate. This unusual landscape is precisely why postcolonial and cultural trauma theories are so vital to this text; there must be an understanding not only of the renaming of regions and spaces, but the way in which they are redesigned and doubled as a result. They become more than one, just as African Americans had to become more than what they had been deemed by the society they exist within. He will travel through the misnamed streets of his town, towards his aunt’s house that is physically close and culturally far, and then through Pennsylvania to Virginia, where he learns of his connections to slavery, to flight, and to the novel’s titular character, Solomon (also known as Shalimar). As she noted in the foreword to her Vintage edition of the text, Morrison’s goal was to write a novel with a “journey, then, with the accomplishment of flight, the triumphant end of a trip through earth, to its surface, on into water, and finally into air. All very saga-like. Old-school heroic, but with other meanings” (xii). She succeeded in creating a hero’s journey that in turn cultivates a male African American identity, an exploration of trauma, and a depiction of the duality of that African American man’s identity.
14 Robert Smith has created within his life two spaces that he moves within, and this is witnessed in the final moments of his life as he commits suicide. Hours prior to
Milkman’s birth, Smith conducts his flight from the roof of No Mercy Hospital to Not
Doctor Street. In this journey, Robert Smith has travelled from two places to two destinations simultaneously; the first, a leap from the government-recognized charity hospital’s roof to the pavement on the government-recognized Mains Avenue. The second is a leap from No Mercy Hospital onto Not Doctor Street. In Milkman’s town, names are significant because they indicate a reclamation of space and its social system.
In “Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” Cynthia A. Davis argues that what Morrison has done with misnaming is to show how “a whole group of people have been denied the right to create a recognizable public self—as individuals or as community” (327). The people of this town have decided to take their social rejection and reciprocate it by rejecting the names given by the government. Rather than refer to the businesses and streets by the names given to them by the white government, they have adjusted the names to fit their lives and experiences. For example, the reason
Smith’s destination is called Not Doctor Street is because that is the road on which the only black doctor in town ran his business; after a sign was posted denoting that this street was “Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street” (4), the residents of the town decided they could officially refer to it as Not Doctor Street. So, Smith’s flight was not only a dual journey, it was also a deeper symbol of his reclamation of his own life, a life that has been neglected and rejected by American society as a whole.
Once again, there is a division; it began with the divide between the north and the south, then with Smith’s two paths within two spaces, and now there is revealed the
15 divide between white and black. It is revealed later in the novel that Smith was a member of The Seven Days, a group of seven black men who worked to restore balance to the world by killing a white person every time a black person was murdered. Their mission was driven by a love they felt for their community, and they wanted to ensure that there was some justice found in the unjust world they lived in. In his suicide note, Smith writes, “…I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me.
I loved you all” (Morrison 3). There are two versions of Smith’s journey: there is the white, officially recognized suicide that he enacted, and then there is his flight from his home and from the people he worked so hard to protect. This note allows Smith to alter the narrative of his act: rather than a suicide, he has chosen to take flight and fly away from the people he loved. Just as the town reclaimed its buildings by renaming, Smith has reclaimed his own life and death. Judith Herman, another postcolonial trauma theorist, continues Rothberg’s argument that postcolonial trauma happens over dualistic spaces and multiple generations; she argues that this is a method for dealing with the trauma of having been repeatedly and continuously oppressed and hurt over the course of some decades. She argues that trauma can be expressed in narrative, and this narrativization is crucial to survival. The Seven Days are acting out and seeking justice, and when it became too much for Smith, he had to construct a new narrative through his suicide note.
In this narrative, he was not killing himself, but rather flying away of his own accord and with his own wings.
The largest doubling that exists in the book, and the doubling that is necessary for reading trauma, is the doubling of truth; in both these novels, there is a contrast between factual history and the narrativized history that those in a position of power often create
16 and perpetuate. Milkman’s father represents this power-position because he continually rejects the people around him to sustain his superiority over the other African Americans in his town. This rejection creates a son, Milkman, who is wholly ignorant to his past and his ancestors’ past traumas. While Robert Smith and The Seven Days have realized their place in the system’s constructed narrative, Milkman has yet to discover his own history, which he must do over the course of the novel to understand both its truth and its narrativization.
To convey how limited his viewpoint is in childhood, Morrison depicts a boy who knows nothing but his own feelings and motivations. Milkman begins his life in
Michigan, denoted in the novel as being part of the north. Here, he has very little connection to his family. On Sundays, his family would go for rides in the car, but
Morrison makes it clear that it is not about bonding with one another, but rather so that
Milkman’s father, Macon Dead, could “satisfy himself that he was indeed a successful man” (31). In the car, Milkman was trapped between his parents, only able to look through the rearview mirror. He realized that “riding backward made him uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going—just where he had been— troubled him” (Morrison 32). While Milkman’s journey would lead him to learn about his family’s past, what this car ride depicted was how he was trapped in his own experiences.
His father was so self-involved and worried about his own social standing that he neglected his family and the needs that they had. Rather than knowing where his ancestors had been or even how the other four members of his family felt, Milkman only knew where he had been. While he could speak to his life as a young black child, he could not create a larger experience from that memory. Eyerman notes that “Theories of
17 identity-formation or socialization tend to conceptualize memory as part of the development of the self or personality and to locate that process within an individual, with the aim of understanding human actions and their emotional basis. In such accounts, the past becomes the present through the embodied reactions of individuals as they carry out their daily lives. In this way, memory helps to account for human behavior” (5).
Milkman’s memory was only of himself and his needs; therefore, his behaviors would only depict his own wants and needs. While the theories Eyerman speaks of must work to isolate the individual within the experiences they have had around them, this is not fully possible for Milkman. His experiences are already isolated and therefore his human behavior is wholly selfish and self-involved. Milkman needs to create a cultural memory for himself; throughout the novel he is fixated on how he is treated and how he fits into a group, but he never concerns himself with how he is treating those around him, let alone have an awareness of how he fits into the national treatment of African Americans.
Morrison creates a doubled figurative space to show the contrasts of cultural trauma between the north and the south by having Milkman’s father, Macon Dead, and his aunt, Pilate, live in the same town but exist within very different identities and using very different methods for dealing with their traumatic experiences. Both lived in
Pennsylvania on a farm, the children of a former slave, and both witnessed firsthand their father shot to death on his own property by wealthy white men. Where Pilate rode into her past, traveling to the places they had lived and the state her father had come from, and tried to piece together and embrace the oppression in her history, Macon denied it, and raised his children to exist without an idea of their family’s triumphs and traumas. While
Pilate’s motivation stems from self-exploration and familial love, Macon’s drive for
18 success and money becomes the sole motivation for his character. He is one of the most successful black men in the town, and he is despised by the other characters for it. With his success, he developed a feeling of superiority to the other members of the town; therefore, he must drive with his family and show off the wealth he has accumulated.
Milkman spends his life witnessing a father unconcerned for the people around him, hoping only to be noticed for the ways he is better than them. Macon’s sister, Pilate, lies in contrast to him in every way; she was, in Macon’s eyes, “odd, murky, and worst of all, unkempt. A regular source of embarrassment, if he would allow it” (Morrison 20).
Macon even “trembled with the thought of the white men in the bank—the me who helped him buy and mortgage houses—discovering that this raggedy bootlegger was his sister” (Morrison 20). Pilate is unconcerned with how she is expected to present herself; she is comfortable in nature and never seemed to leave behind the childhood she and
Macon had in Pennsylvania. She is a part of Milkman’s history; she is also the early impetus to his need for a journey. Later, when Milkman would travel to Virginia, he would witness firsthand the people who were so much like Pilate; he saw the women sitting on the porches and thought, “that’s the way Pilate must have looked as a girl, looked even now, but out of place in the big northern city she had come to” (Morrison
263). She reveals to Milkman the aspects of his father’s childhood his father had worked so hard to suppress. While Macon has worked strenuously to become a part of the North, in the process he silenced all his connections to his history. In keeping Milkman away from his aunt, attempting to maintain their social status in the town, he is creating a pluralistic society within his own town. Pilate is Virginia and Pennsylvania and all the
19 places she has travelled and lived, and Milkman would soon learn more of his past and the South when he would arrive at her house at twelve years old.
Macon and Pilate represent the difference in cultural identity that some African
American intellectuals struggled to embody and define at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth century. In discussing the cultural trauma experienced by African Americans, Eyerman writes,
“The notion of African American identity was articulated in the later decades of
the nineteenth century by a generation of black intellectuals for whom slavery was
a thing of the past, not the present. It was the memory of slavery and its
representation through speech and artworks that grounded African American
identity and permitted its institutionalization in organizations like the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909.
If slavery was traumatic for this generation of intellectuals, it was so in retrospect,
mediated through recollection and reflection, and, for some, tinged with some
strategic, practical, and political interest.” (2)
Macon’s concern over the opinions of the white businessmen and his own financial interests put him into this mentality that existed just a few decades prior to when the novel takes place. While the intellectuals Eyerman discusses may not have been as selfish in their interests and goals as Macon, what they do reflect is the dismissal of the ways that the history of slavery was impacting their lives in the present. They did not want any memory of slavery to tinge their political interests just as Macon does not want his sister’s appearance, reputation, and existence to tinge his own professional interests. So, a geographical divide was created within Milkman’s town.
20 This geographical divide is the spatial misplacement that Rothberg discussed.
Pilate is the anachronistic aspect of Milkman’s life because she is fits into the south that
Milkman discovers, but what has become the past for Macon Dead. Just as there had been with Robert Smith, there is once again a dual journey occurring in a single space in time.
When Milkman does arrive at the house of his aunt, he discovers information about his past; about who his father was as a child, how Pilate had lived in Virginia, and how his grandfather was shot off a fence (although the specifics and racial injustice of this story would not be revealed to him until later). It is also the first time in the novel that racial discrimination is discussed in Milkman’s presence. While the town is a symbol of repeated oppression and neglect of its African American residents, Milkman is depicted as being wholly ignorant of this reality. In Pilate’s house, Reba is recounting the time she won a $2,000 diamond ring, and she notes how she had only gone into Sears because in the town there “ain’t but two toilets downtown they let colored in: Mayflower Restaurant and Sears” (Morrison 46). It is only because she needed to use the restroom that she entered the store at all. While Macon had rejected any experience of cultural oppression, these women in Pilate’s home simply disregard it as it relates to their own happiness.
Davis notes that “white brutality and insensitivity are part of the environment the black characters must struggle with, but they are most often conditions, institutionalized and often anonymous, rather than events with ‘ritualistic overtones’” (335). Reba and Pilate laugh about the story and note the rejection of Reba’s fame because of her race, but that is not what defines them; what defines them is Reba’s luck, her desire to keep the ring rather than earn money off it, and the way they were able to laugh about the lack of available restrooms. In this new home to Milkman, he is shown how racial oppression
21 may be part of these women’s lives and experiences as well as his own, but he does not yet know the importance of it to his own story; after his day spent there, he realizes that he “was five feet seven then but it was the first time in his life that he remembered being completely happy” (Morrison 47). In his first journey to Pilate’s house, he connects with his family and learns of his history; unlike the car rides with his family where no one spoke and he was trapped staring out the rearview window, now he begins to learn of his history, so he can finally start to experience true joy. However, his happiness is still coming from a place of ignorance that he cannot seem to stem until he accepts the past that not only he has experienced, but what his parents have experienced and their ancestors.
Milkman’s best friend, Guitar, is another part of the reconstructed geographical space of the novel; he, along with Pilate, embody the south as it is displaced into the north. Throughout the novel, he is constantly pressuring Milkman to truly see the reality of the trauma that they are experiencing, and the trauma that Milkman needs to care about. Like Pilate, he puts a pressure on Milkman to understand his past if he wants to become the hero of his own story. Guitar is from Florida, part of the south, and he has experienced firsthand the cruelty that exists for black men in America. Guitar’s father was killed in a factory incident, and rather than facing the legal repercussions of the incident, the white man in charge handed Guitar’s mother $60, which she gladly accepted and which never felt like justice to Guitar. In conversations with one another, there grows a geographical divide between the two men, as Milkman still does not understand his own oppression. In a conversation about tea and where it comes from, Milkman does not want a lesson in geography, he simply wants to enjoy his tea. But Guitar challenges this
22 when he says, “No geography? Okay, no geography. What about some history in your tea? Or some sociopolitico—No. That’s still geography. Goddam, Milk, I do believe my whole life’s geography” (Morrison 114). Here Guitar is trying to show Milkman why it is so important to care about the space they live in because it is about more than just having names and working for their money; it is about the ways in which they have come to be so limited in their professional options, their life’s pursuits, and the justice they will not receive if their lives are lost due to the mistakes or the violence of a white person.
Milkman’s ignorance stems from a period in American history where there was a lack of any African American cultural history incorporated into the cultural narrative, and this lack of a narrative was easily ignored by Milkman, who was a man born into a wealthier family, providing him with a position of privilege within his own traumatic experience. Guitar is trying to show Milkman the world in which he exists, a world that
Guitar has always been acutely aware of because he was born in the south and brought up in poverty, but Milkman cannot understand this until he moves out of the town and exists in the southern world where there is active and more violent oppression. This is all occurring just after World War II, which Eyerman notes was a time when “…prior to and during the war there were attempts to reinterpret the history of the United States to include more blacks, at least in terms of program content if not employment, and to combat the stereotyping that still dominated popular culture, after the war there was a return to normal. No serious discussion of race or race relations could be found on the radio and programming favored and reinforced stereotypes, from Amos and Andy to
Aunt Jemima, to Jack Benny’s manservant, Rochester, to name some of the most popular” (142). In the various forms of media, little was said about the trauma that people
23 in Milkman’s status could have been existing within and surrounded by daily; therefore, since it was not overt, there was an erasure of that experience that was not directly impacting them, which is what Milkman depicts. Pilate herself notes that Milkman
“…come in the world tryin to keep from gettin killed… Ain’t nothing goin to kill him but his own ignorance” (Morrison 140). Pilate understands this because long ago in Virginia she had asked, “Well, how do colored people get where they want to go?” to which the townspeople replied, “Ain’t supposed to go nowhere…” (Morrison 145). Pilate learned long ago that the only way to know her past and to alleviate her ignorance was to continually move because that is exactly what the people who were oppressing her did not want her to do. She was always actively rejected by her community, both in the south and again when she moved north; she witnessed the cultural neglect that was impacting
African Americans constantly. So, it is only once Milkman leaves the town and his journey takes on a more traditional mode of travel from Michigan to the south that he finally begins to learn how his experience and physical space has been defined by trauma.
This is the only way he can avoid the fate placed on him by Pilate because it is the only way he can no longer be a victim of his own ignorance. It is in this movement that both he and the reader see how the geographical space is pluralized, confirming the consolidated space of his town. As the novel becomes one of physical movement and the physical space of the text is extended, the emotions Milkman’s feels are increasingly acute. While he was home in Michigan, “he wanted to beat a path away from his parents’ past, which was also their present and was threatening to become his present as well”
(Morrison 180). Milkman had heard of his parents’ personal struggles with one another and how they felt trapped in their marriages, but he did not want to embrace them and
24 allow that to define him. However, when he moves further from home, the stories he had been told grew more important to him. In Pennsylvania, when Reverend Cooper, a childhood friend of Macon Dead meets Milkman, he retells the story of Macon Dead
Senior’s murder at the hands of white men. For Milkman, he “…wondered at his own anger. He hadn’t felt angry when he first heard about it. Why now?” (Morrison 232).
Prior to his travels, Milkman felt he had been used by his parents as a bargaining tool, someone who could choose a side. Davis argues that this is a “cycle of conflicting and shifting subject-object relationships in which both sides try simultaneously to remain in control of the relationship and to use the Other’s look to confirm identity” (325).
Milkman was the Other in his parents’ stories. His father told him of his past to force
Milkman to side with him; his mother told him of her past to urge him to take pity on her.
Once again, this can be looked at as a geographical divide; there are figurative spaces that are created within people, and Milkman is the other who must choose a space. Instead, he physically removes himself and travels to the literal space where he can feel the history for himself. It is only then that he no longer becomes the other; he is now the subject who lives and breathes and now has a figurative territory of his own.
As he goes further south, this territory can develop into a shared space he realizes is connected to something larger; it is not to be fought for, as his parents had shown him, but rather to be a part of something, just as his town had done in renaming its spaces.
When he finally arrives in Shalimar, Virginia, where Pilate had lived, he realizes how different his northern perspective was from that of the south. Milkman passively and unintentionally offends the men of Shalimar by showing to them how money was unimportant to him; he flippantly asks about buying a new car without suggesting a trade-
25 in or showing any concern for the price of the car. To the men in Shalimar, he was telling them that he knew they had “just vegetable gardens, which the women took care of, and chickens and pigs that the children took care of. He was telling them that they weren’t men, that they relied on women and children for food…They looked at his skin and saw that it was as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers” (Morrison
266). In Michigan, Macon had aligned himself and his son with the white men they did business with; he had created a world for Milkman in which Milkman never had to see the way other black men were treated by white society. Now, in Shalimar, Milkman is amongst people who could be his relatives, but he has no cultural connection to them.
Milkman does realize that behavior towards those men was a show as he sits in the living room with Susan Byrd, who the niece of his grandmother. Sitting with her, learning about his past, he changes, and realizes, “…he didn’t have to get over, to turn on, or up, or even out” (Morrison 293). Morrison is creating a journey for Milkman to show him how he had been performing for white society while existing in his father’s territory of willful ignorance. Through relocation, Milkman comes to understand who he was and who he can be, whether it is in Michigan or Pennsylvania or Virginia. Since the
United States’ history lessons and radio shows would not teach him of his history, he had to travel and search it out for himself. Milkman only becomes the hero when he finds himself and claims his own space.
When in Shalimar, Milkman hears the children singing a song about a man named
Solomon, which ends with, “Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone/Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home” (Morrison 303). Milkman pieces together the things he has
26 learned of his past and realizes that the song is talking about his great-grandfather, a slave who leapt off a cliff to fly back to Africa. Solomon has become the hero to this town; many of its citizens claim to be related to him and carry the last name of Solomon. They retell the story of Solomon as a part of their own narrativization; it provides an ease to the trauma and creates a duality. They have their home in Virginia, where the men feel emasculated and face a daily struggle to survive, and they have their home in Africa, the place their claimed ancestor flew to when he escaped his American fate. Eyerman asserts that “…Africa is more than a spiritual home, and much more than a cultural resource, it is a site of redemption. Whether one returned there in a physical sense was probably less important than its symbolic meaning as homeland, beyond slavery and outside history”
(167). This town, aware of its oppression and cultural trauma as African Americans, claims Solomon to become a part of his flight back to Africa. Because they know their history, they can move beyond it and find redemption in the story of Solomon and in the solace of Africa. This is the last piece in Milkman’s journey and identity formation.
Morrison closes the novel with Milkman leaping through the air into the murderous arms of Guitar. She does not state who lives and dies because Milkman’s fate is about the reclamation of identity; just as the townspeople believe that Solomon flew to
Africa rather than plummeting off the cliff to his death, Milkman’s existence now has joined that narrativization. He has learned of his past, realized how much he loved his home after he left it, and finally understood the trauma that has impacted himself, his community, and his people. This allows Milkman to take his own flight and leap, just as
Solomon and Robert Smith had done; now that he has travelled and pieced together his own personal geography, he can fly. Eyerman notes that “In American mythology,
27 mobility is often associated with freedom, with the possibility to begin anew…In a new study of the ‘migration narrative,’ Farrah Griffin reveals how blues lyrics also carried messages telling how the fear of lynching and other forms of violent repression motivated people to leave the South” (154). For Milkman, his freedom comes not from leaving the south but in discovering it. Because he did not know the fear his ancestors faced, he could not flee it, but rather, he had to fly to it.
28 II: CONDENSED TIME AND LITERALIZED SPACE IN COLSON WHITEHEAD’S
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
As in Song of Solomon, in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, there is a heroic journey that is accomplished by journeying through and exploring trauma.
This time the journey is that of Cora, a woman born into slavery, who is taking
Whitehead’s fictionalized and reconstructed underground railroad to escape. Morrison, one recalls, took the literal spaces and social designations of north and south and shifted them into figurative symbols, represented by Pilate’s and Macon Dead’s lifestyles and behaviors. Whitehead, in contrast, took the figurative space recognized in history as the underground railroad and made it a real, literal railroad. Further, he took the chronological order of history and folded it in upon itself, breaking apart the pieces of the
African American experience and piling them together into a singular space in time. In doing so, he could convey hundreds of years of African American trauma into one woman’s heroic journey. Cora travels from her enslaved life north, and on that journey, she witnesses the Tuskegee trials, forced sterilization of African American women, and the beginnings of the KKK. In condensing time and history into this one woman’s journey, Whitehead has extended her experience beyond colonization and into a postcolonial world. She is witnessing multigenerational trauma, and in this alteration, she has become a part of the postcolonial trauma presented by Rothberg and other theorists.
29 This novel devotes its time to Cora and her escape from slavery, and throughout this escape, there is the constant presence of altered time and space explicitly detailed and often quite familiar to the reader. Whitehead has taken Morrison’s consolidated figurative space and made it literal to not only depict the trauma of this postcolonial woman living in and escaping from slavery, but to show the cultural trauma faced over time by African
Americans up through the twentieth century, from slavery to the Tuskegee syphilis trials.
While Morrison deconstructed trauma through metaphor, Whitehead exposed that same trauma by making it as clear and actualized as possible. This depiction of trauma is substantiated by both Rothberg and Eyerman’s theories of trauma. The novel can be especially aligned with Eyerman’s text because he delves into the various stages of trauma that have occurred from one chronological era to the next that African Americans have experienced throughout U.S. history. Through Cora’s journey, there is an alteration of how time is viewed; Whitehead takes hundreds of years of African American history and adjusts it so that it can be viewed within this woman’s life. He takes the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the forced sterilization of African American women, both of which occurred in the twentieth century, and places them alongside Cora’s journey so that she and the reader can view the traumas that occurred to African Americans during and beyond slavery. This creates for Cora a supernatural journey: she has superseded the natural order of time; therefore, she is moving not only through space, but also through time. Further, Whitehead alters historical space; he takes the underground railroad, whichwas historically a figurative “railroad” made up of homes and bunkers that were created to help slaves escape to freedom, and creates an actual railroad: a train underground that Cora must take to journey north.
30 What Whitehead induces in his reimagining of history is a feeling of the uncanny, a theory developed by Sigmund Freud. Freud defines the uncanny as a part of the superficial realm of aesthetics, but rather than the positive, beautiful, and glamorous feelings typically attributed to aesthetics, the uncanny are the images of horror and the grotesque. He further defines the uncanny as being not simply uncomfortable or disturbing, but also as a feeling of being detached from your home or designated comfort zone. While Freud ties the feeling of the uncanny to the castration complex, arguing that this discomfort that is later prevalent in adults’ lives stems from a universal fear that young boys faced when they realized that women did not have the same physical makeup that they did. When this is realized, these boys then lose their sense of that designated comfort zone, forever missing the safety of a singular world. While Whitehead does not deal with any sort of castration complex (though he does deal with the literal castration that occurred as punishment to slaves), what he induces is a similar feeling of a loss of a safe and singular comfort zone. In schools, children are taught a diluted version of history; for fear of traumatizing students, the actual traumas that have been enforced and faced by African Americans is nearly absent. When Whitehead includes the explicit events that have occurred in history, the reader is forcibly removed from the safety of ignorance and made to deal with a vivid reimagining of history.
Where Freud uses human psychoanalysis to project his theory, Whitehead is using the realms of history and fiction. He has created a novel that derives wholly from history, creating an altered chronology to tell his story. To show the use of the uncanny in this doubling, Freud uses the example of the doppelgänger to elaborate upon his point. His theory is that there are the two halves of the conscience, the id and the ego. When they
31 are combined, they create a human conscience that can delve into one’s own psyche and become self-aware of motivations, experiences, and lessons. He argues that this exists in literature as the doppelganger, and typically they arise in stories where there are two people who exist in the world, identical to one another, and they represent different emotional drives that the other lacks. Freud writes,
“They (the disturbances of the ego) involve the idea of the ‘double’ (the
Doppelganger), in all its nuances and manifestations—that is to say, the
appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look
alike. This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental
processes from one of these persons to the other—what we would call telepathy—
so that the one becomes co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions, and
experience. Moreover, a person may identify himself with another and so become
unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for his own. The self
may thus be duplicated, divided, and interchanged” (141-142).
These two characters, representing the halves of the conscience, are telepathic; they can communicate with one another, share thoughts and emotions. As the self is duplicated, divided, and interchanged, it alters and can be then depicted in varying states. Similarly, in school, Americans are taught the history of slavery and the other horrors faced by
African Americans that were designated as legal by the American government. However, often this history is either neglected by teachers who attempt to erase that history, or it is not long dwelled on by students to maintain some sense of national pride. In this act of neglect, there is that splitting of the conscience, and so Whitehead’s text forces the two sides of the conscience to confront one another and that uncanny discomfort is developed
32 in the reader. Further, when someone learns about these topics and is not directly impacted by this history in a traumatic way, there is a tendency to reject or ignore this aspect of history. In fiction, an author imposes a narrative into the reader’s mind; when this occurs with a narrative taken directly from history, there develops a telepathy between the two contradicting stories in a reader’s mind, and they must face this duality and understand its consequences.
Whitehead creates his fiction based on reader’s own knowledge of history to create this doubling; the reader’s incoming knowledge, when translated into the text itself, allows these two experiences to be interchanged, which disconcerts readers because they must confront the history that they may have come to neglect or ignore.
Freud defines the uncanny as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (124). Whitehead utilizes this uncanny feeling that is designated to the horrific and grotesque to display clearly for the reader the horrors enacted upon African Americans in U.S. history. By causing this uneasy shift in the reading of the novel, he has reminded the reader of the discomfort of American history, from the Tuskegee syphilis trials to the forced sterilization of African American women to the truly horrifying event of legal human slavery, allowing the trauma to be witnessed and reminded to the readers who had “long been familiar” with these facts, but may have chosen to ignore them or forget to avoid facing this traumatic history.
To depict the mirroring and doubling of history and fiction, Whitehead begins each chapter with a posting searching for escaped slaves that is wholly separate from the text and content of the novel. This grounds readers into some historical reality before he begins altering the time and space of that history. One such posting noted the thirty-dollar
33 reward for “a negro girl by the name of LIZZIE” (Whitehead 10). This post ended with a signature and the ascribed date, “July 18, 1820” (Whitehead 10). By placing it into this very specific space in time and removing the posting from the actual text of the novel,
Whitehead has used this imagery to set the chronology for the novel while also showing the ways that the characters’ experiences in the novel are definitively postcolonial and incapable of representing only one singular space or time. Rothberg asserts that recent postcolonial work “…is intensely invested in local conditions and in demonstrating the diverse forms that colonialism took and the diverse impacts that those colonialisms have had on already pluralized societies and regions” (230). While in Song of Solomon,
Morrison demonstrated the diverse impacts of colonialism by developing the diametric north/south experiences of African American trauma in the twentieth century, Whitehead deals with this pluralized society by altering his landscape and consolidating the chronology. Where Morrison shifted culture, Whitehead shifted the larger universal experiences.
Because postcolonial trauma theory differentiates itself from the standard trauma theory discourse by looking at pluralized societies rather than one specific event,
Whitehead has taken multiple events and altered them to fit his narrative expression; his narrative is highlighting Rothberg’s point about the struggle to apply trauma to pluralized societies. Rather than try and fit the entirety of postcolonial traumas into a singular novel in their correct historical context, which would spread over dozens of countries and hundreds of years, Whitehead has chosen the traumatic experience felt by all African peoples and their descendants who were forcibly relocated to America as slaves. Because of colonization and slavery, the United States became an inherently pluralized society; if
34 there are already multiple cultures and societies existing within this one country, then
Whitehead can and should pluralize the experiences of the characters beyond historical accuracy. This occurs as Cora moves on the railroad from the south and travels further north.
Cora is taking a literal railroad that has been built underground to escape to free states. Whitehead describes the railroad as follows:
“The stairs led onto a small platform. The black mouths of the gigantic tunnel
opened at either end. It must have been twenty feet tall, walls lined with dark and
light colored stones in an alternating pattern. Two steel rails ran the visible length
of the tunnel, pinned into the dirt by wooden cross-ties. The steel ran south and
north presumably, springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward
a miraculous terminus. Someone had been thoughtful enough to arrange a small
bench on the platform.” (65)
While any specific details about how the railroad was built were notably left out in the novel, they are shown to be irrelevant; in this moment, we are told to erase what we have learned in the past about the underground railroad, and instead to accept this new reality.
Until the readers arrive at its location along with Cora, the railroad is itself elusive; the reader can only assume Cora is travelling along the historically accurate, figurative underground railroad. But in the moment Whitehead introduces us to his actual railroad, the paradigm shifts; as in science fiction there is a missing semantic paradigm; now in this novel we are faced with a constructive paradigm.
This in turn mirrors the postcolonial trauma theoretical argument made by Ogaga
Ifowodo, who asserts “that colonialism ought to be understood as an intrinsically
35 traumatizing force, a disruption par excellence in which one is forcibly reconstructed by the demands of an outsider…cast adrift from any frame of reference” (Dalley 373). By removing any specific historical context for the railroad, Whitehead is the outsider removing our frame of reference. He is showing to the reader the same lack of reference that Cora and other slaves felt about their own personal history, and really any context for their current histories. Early in the novel, Cora reflects on her own lack of identity or personal narrative; she notes that “if she picked a day for her birthday every now and then she might hit upon hers as well. In fact, today might be her birthday. What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man’s world?” (Whitehead 4).
Cora does not know her birthday and will never get to acknowledge with certainty the day that we all celebrate as being of the utmost significance; the day we came into our world. For Cora, it is a day in which she entered someone else’s world; this is the intrinsic trauma. Not only is her freedom stolen, but her claim to any personal identity.
Her frame of reference is only that of a world in which she is forced to work and forced to exist in and forced to take up the smallest amount of space.
Whitehead then takes the universal trauma of the plantation further by changing the historical timeline for the Tuskegee tests and placing them within the timeline of the novel. Originally, the Tuskegee tests happened between 1932 and 1972, about eighty years after the abolishment of slavery. In these twentieth century tests, hundreds of
African American men, who either had syphilis already or were given syphilis by the doctors running the trial, were used in these trials for what they were told was “bad blood.” Even after penicillin was discovered as the cure for syphilis due to these tests, the men were never treated. Numerous men died from syphilis, 40 wives contracted the
36 disease, and 19 children were subsequently born with congenital syphilis. Whitehead presents these trials in the novel as happening to men in South Carolina.
Until she discovers what is going on, South Carolina had become a place where
Cora had begun to feel at home. She had been working in the history museum and had found herself finally feeling a semblance of freedom and safety. However, she and her friend Sam begin talking to a doctor, and they discovered that “the men were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis” (Whitehead 120). The doctor argues with Sam, claiming, “The syphilis program was one of many studies and experiments underway at the colored wing of the hospital” (Whitehead 121). The doctor then reveals part of the reason for these experiments was the white American anxiety over potential slave revolts. He notes, “America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in time—we could free them from bondage without fear that they’d butcher us in our sleep”
(Whitehead 121). This is a significant moment because this anxiety, this fear of losing the place of privilege, has plagued the white American mentality throughout its history.
There is always a clause to the freedom and comfort of African Americans. In this quote, the doctor argues that they can be liberated, but they cannot birth children who may outnumber the white Americans and subvert the racial majority.
Similarly, when slavery was finally abolished in the United States, this anxiety played itself out in the “separate but equal” legal segregation. Eyerman notes that cultural trauma occurs when “as opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, cultural trauma
37 refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion” (2). Whitehead has depicted this exact trauma because he begins by depicting the trauma of being forced into slavery through Ajarry; then he shows Cora’s trauma as a woman born into slavery; finally, he shows to Cora all the traumas that would occur to her descendants by condensing time.
He is perfectly depicting the constant tearing of social fabric; every time African
Americans reclaimed their identity and experience, it was traumatized further through legal mandates. By placing Cora into this situation, Whitehead is utilizing that uncanny experience to express the historical trauma African Americans have faced inside of the larger trauma present in the slave narrative. This is an important postcolonial move to impress upon his readers the full context of the oppression and degradation of African
Americans in the United States.
Davis’s argument regarding Morrison’s exclusion of white characters, that “white brutality and insensitivity are part of the environment the black characters must struggle with, but they are most often conditions, institutionalized and often anonymous, rather than events with ritualistic overtones” (335) similarly applies to Cora’s journey. In
Whitehead’s novel, the brutality is at the forefront; Cora is constantly dealing with and working through her daily interactions with the people who have so intensely oppressed her since her birth. To better understand this institutionalized brutality, Whitehead presents it explicitly. This explicit trauma faced is depicted in the scene when Cora has left South Carolina and moved further north to North Carolina. It is in this location that
Cora experiences what life would have been like for an escaped slave on the historically correct underground railroad. While she is not swept into the night through safe routes,
38 she does mirror the experience of escaped slaves staying in safe houses on their way to freedom.
While in the novel North Carolina is a free state at this time, the town she is hiding in has its own way of ensuring that its residents’ racial anxieties are expressed in a violent way even without owning slaves. When she arrives, Cora sees
“the corpses hung from trees as rotting ornaments. Some of them were naked,
others partially clothed, the trousers black where their bowels emptied when their
necks snapped. Gross wounds and injuries marked the flesh of those closest to
her, the two caught by the station agent’s lantern. One had been castrated, an ugly
mouth gaping where his manhood had been. The other was a woman. Her belly
curved. Cora had never been good at knowing if a body was with a child. Their
bulging eyes seemed to rebuke her stares, but what were the attentions of one girl,
disturbing their rest, compared to how the world had scourged them since the day
they were brought into it? ‘They call this the Freedom Trail now.’” (153)
Whitehead is forcing his readers to understand what living in a free state meant. The town brutalized African Americans, forced them to live with it, and mocked them through their naming of the trail. Davis also noted the psychic violence enacted upon African
Americans, stating that in Song of Solomon, “All of Morrison’s characters exist in a world defined by its blackness and by the surrounding white society that both violates and denies it” (323). This trail of lynched African American bodies is the absolute violation; the denial comes as this town allows their hatred and anxiety towards the people to lead them to live alongside this trail. They have chosen to live among the horror
39 they have legally established. Whitehead has added to the horror and trauma faced and inherited and continuously experienced by African Americans in American society.
The reader further experiences the feeling of the uncanny because Whitehead has taken inspiration from the traditional slave narrative and created a work of fiction from it.
While this novel is not a firsthand account, the omniscient narration is from Cora’s perspective. The reader can follow her journey as a slave just as though she were telling it from a firsthand perspective. Once again, Whitehead has defamiliarized the familiar and left the reader in a state of familiarity and confusion. Regarding slave narratives,
Eyerman writes,
“The slave narratives have been central to the construction of a counter, collective
memory and in the constitution and resolution of cultural trauma. Seen as
representations, the images presented are framed by the circumstances of their
production, and their reception has varied according to time and place. Even as
first-hand and first-person accounts, they are structured according to narrative
conventions and by the intended effects on, as well as the expectations of, their
presumed audience. They tell a story, a moral tale, which identifies heroes and
villains, giving voice to pain and faces to perpetrators but, more importantly,
however, they turn victims into agents and tragedy into triumph.” (42)
Slave narratives exist as historical reminders of what has occurred in the United States; they are the collective memory that is often forgotten. Two hundred years later,
Whitehead has written this text as an urgent reminder of what has happened, and he takes the narrative conventions a step beyond slave narratives by developing that literal railroad.
40 III: CONCLUSION
This project asserted the argument that the novels of Morrison and Whitehead both depicted the significance of movement and journey by presenting the specific traumas of African Americans. In considering both Eyerman’s cultural trauma theory and
Rothberg’s postcolonial trauma theory, there can grow a better understanding of the complexities and continually enacted, and subtly altered, punishments and oppressions imposed on African Americans throughout the span of United States’ history. By incorporating Freud, who was a large inspiration for the initial theoretical bases of traditional trauma theory, African American trauma can be most effectively understood.
Morrison and Whitehead initiate journeys for both of their characters so that they can display the significance of space as it represents the complexities of African American society and American society as a whole.
Eyerman writes of the different periods of African American trauma and the ways that African American history was embraced, adjusted, or (most commonly) altogether rejected. Eyerman asserted that “there is a difference between trauma as it affects individuals and as a cultural process. As cultural process, trauma is mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory” (1). In both novels, a single character’s experience, or the “individual” Eyerman discussed, is adjusted and expanded to symbolize the larger cultural process. Morrison presented this by showing how Milkman changes as he moves
41 from one space to another in his town; she showed how he grew and learned in his journey from his father’s house to his aunt’s house, and then from the north to the south.
He existed in a place of privilege, and was actively differentiated from every other character in his life; he had more money than Guitar, he was a man and lived his life with that privilege over his sisters, he did not have to struggle to earn money the way his father did, and he did not have to grow up as a woman in the south and then move north and continue to be rejected by that northern society the way his aunt did. It was only through movement and travel that Milkman could understand and become a part of the collective
African American identity.
Further, Whitehead presented this through his abbreviation of time to take Cora, an enslaved woman who was born into a period of colonization, and created within her character a witness for all the various traumas Eyerman noted. She too became more than just an individual character; she became a part of the collective identity and memory of all African Americans through the middle of the twentieth century. She becomes a symbol of representation, a symbol which is frequently neglected and rejected by the
United States. It is in this position that she also becomes the double for that rejection, which is why it is necessary to incorporate Freud’s theory of the uncanny and the double.
She is Whitehead’s way of asserting that the horrific aspects of the African American experience, from slavery to forced sterilization, have created a dual identity because of the way that American history has rejected them. This uncanny feeling is presented as
Cora travels through different regions and is constantly silenced as she sees these horrors firsthand.
42 Finally, both novels show the postcolonial experience by displaying the characters’ journeys from north to south, and vice versa. It becomes necessary to implement postcolonial trauma theory to depict how African American society has become pluralized, and how privilege can then exist because of these varied experiences.
These three forms of trauma theory combine to show the necessity of movement and journey for these characters, and for the depiction of trauma. They speak to the larger issues of American history and the ways in which history is neglected, altered, and outright ignored, which only further perpetuates ignorance and feelings of a doubling or internal division as other-ed people must witness their own experiences and how those experiences are ignored by American society.
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