Toni Morrison on the Origins of American Racism

In her 2008 novel A Mercy Toni Morrison imagines a frontier Virginia of the late 1600s, a century before the American Revolution. She has found in this time and place valuable insights into the relationship between slavery and race, a relationship that is taken for granted but that is after all contingent.

Morrison is a keen student of history. Reading her 1992 essay Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, her brief for a background element of blackness as necessary for the construction of whiteness, I was directed by a footnote to discover William Dunbar, a Scottish settler and slave-holder in late 18th century Mississippi, who turned out to have such an interesting life that I've been gathering material for a project ever since. In the genesis of A Mercy she was inspired, she says, by Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising against the governor of Virginia in 1676 for his failure to retaliate against Indian raids on frontier villages. The rebels in fact forced the government to flee the capitol and conducted numerous attacks on Indians before being put down. Morrison noticed the composition of Bacon's rebel force: wealthy and poor, property owners and indentured servants, whites and blacks, all united to a common purpose by the perceived indifference of the English governor and the threat of Indian attacks.

There is evidence that colonial authorities took steps to harden racial divides in the aftermath of the rebellion. When it became established that whites had more impunity than blacks (in many areas a non-white had no legal protection from white violence) the relationship between blackness and slavery was cemented. This served the interests of the slave-owning planters by socially dividing not only black slaves but all blacks from the rest of the working-class population. In the creation of white supremacy Morrison sees a monstrous homogeneity replacing a dense heterogeneity.

In wilderness 1680s Virginia Morrison assembles a meticulously diverse group of people, that is to say women after the decent but vainglorious Jacob Vaark passes away leaving his widow Rebekka, a refugee from English urban poverty, Florens, a slave taken reluctantly by Vaark from a Portuguese merchant in partial payment of a debt, Lina, an Indian orphaned by plague and sold to Vaark "by Presbyterians," and the lowly Sorrow, who some say is the mixed-blood daughter of the captain of the ill-fated ship the wreck of which she is the only survivor...but this is only a bit much when I lay it all out like that. In a review by John Updike he opens with a mention of Faulkner. The way I would put it is that A Mercy is written more in the impressionistic, Modernist style of Morrison's masterpiece Beloved (1987) than any of the intervening novels. The wilderness suits this densely atmospheric style which is also, as Faulkner understood, appropriate for the internal narratives of poorly-formed people.

Florens is in love with a freeman, a blacksmith, that is a black man who works as a smith and a smithee of black men. He rejects Florens as too rough and uncultivated for him. As traumatic and even ruinous his rejection is for Florens, he is soon to experience a greater one, for no black man in the racist future will feel entitled to judge and be judged on the basis of character alone. As Florens experiences him he represents a future that will never arrive - not only her future with him but a future with proud black men unencumbered with racism.


Related books that have been the subjects of posts here include Edward Jones's The Known World and Marlon James' Book of Night Women.

Marlon James' Book of Night Women

This blog is a reader's journal, going back now for four years' worth of novels. I only read books that I want to read. Usually they're either African novels, Irish novels, or novels that are getting good press or awards and that look like they're up my alley. The point is they're pretty much all novels that I enjoy (ones that are to my taste), and they're also mostly quite good, since they passed through a least a filter or two to get read by me and posted about here. Every now and then, though, a novel comes along that shows what a really good book is like. It stands out all the more from standing out in this group of good, personally-selected books. Marlon James' The Book of Night Women (2009, Riverhead Books) is one of these standouts.

This is an excellent novel that anyone with any interest in African-American literature or in the literature of Atlantic slavery must read. Set on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in the late 1700s it tells the story of Lilith, a young slave whose green eyes are a legacy of her father, a white overseer. It is a coming of age story as Lilith must learn what it is to be a woman, a black, a slave and a half-caste. She learns all of these things over the course of several years when she becomes a "big house" slave, learns about her family history, and lives through a bloody slave revolt. The story is riveting and I will resist the temptation to go over much of it here. I would much prefer that you buy the book and enjoy it for yourself.

Over the past several decades a great deal of research on the slave trade and on the communities of slaves and slave-owners has opened up this lost world to historians and novelists alike. Toni Morrison and Maryse Conde are two novelists who have pioneered reconstructive and reimagined work with this material, and they also happen to be two of the best writers working in North America today. Now Marlon James indisputably joins their company with his passionate dedication to getting it as right as possible. (Edward P. Jones' The Known World was the subject of an earlier post here, there is also a post on the period piece Sab by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda.)

James has written this book using a seemingly omniscient narrator whose identity is revealed at the end of the book. This narrator uses an impressive reconstruction of the black Caribbean patois of the time. Reading the first page I thought I was in for a murky Faulkneresque experiment but in fact James pulls off the ambitious linguistic job ably. His research is most impressive, from African vodun to the structure of plantations and even the sailor brogues of the lowly white slavedrivers sounds startlingly authentic.

He also avoids, apparently without effort although in fact the effort must have been intense, sentimentalizing the blacks or presenting two-dimensional whites. Miss Isobel, the brilliant, psychotic Creole mistress, is one of the most memorable characters I've read in a long time, and the relationship between Lilith and Robert Quinn the Irish overseer captures expertly the hopelessness of both "lovers," stumbled in to an impossible love.

Really don't miss this one.

Gertrudis and Sab

I'm not sure where I got this copy of the University of Texas Press omnibus edition of Sab and Autobiography by the 19th century Cuban writer Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (1814-1873). Occasionally I notice a book that's been on the shelves unread for a while, and that I don't have any clear take on, and add it to the Stack. Part of the way that the Stack (actually it's a shelf, actually it's books between bookends on top of a bookcase) works is that books come up to be read six months or so, I think, after I add them, I can't say exactly why I feel that pre-programming my reading in this way is a good practice but I do. It subtracts some willfulness from the activity, or something like that.

Anyway, what we have here is an anti-slavery novel written by a disaffected, expatriate, upper-class Cuban woman and published in 1840, early enough to be of some historical significance (although it is hardly, as a blurb-writer for the jacket states, "without a doubt one of the most important works of fiction in the nineteenth century," even if we limit our scope to Latin America). In its didacticism and formality it reminds me of W. E. B. DuBois' Dark Princess (1928). We value this kind of politicized cultural artifact more for what it represents, or for the fact that it simply exists, than we do for its purely literary merit.

Not that that is true of all historical writing with a strong social agenda, by any means. I don't think that Uncle Tom's Cabin (published, as the jacket points out, eleven years after Sab) is a great work of literature but it measures up to a lot of more popular fiction of its time. This edition of Sab has a photo of a black man posing in the stocks from 1850s Cuba, but don't look here for any unflinching depiction of the physical brutality of slavery. Rather this is essentially a romantic novel about a noble and competent "mulatto" (the author's word), a cousin in fact of the minor gentry to whom he belongs, and his doomed love for the planter's daughter - that sort of thing. The story does not even end in the violence with which the real-life version inevitably would have; the broken-hearted man just dies of a mysterious something.

Really, for the non-specialist, the only really essential period literature of 19th century slavery are the slave narratives themselves, the English-language ones have been well-excavated (although I'm sure there's more), and there is undoubtedly more than one undiscovered treasure written in Spanish or Portuguese, where there is much more work to be done.

What made this read most interesting to me was the inclusion of Autobiography, a short sketch of the author's life written close in time to Sab. Gertrudis Gomez has many admirable qualities, as we already know from the simple facts that she was appalled by slavery even though she was raised at the top of a slavery society, and that she resisted and in fact escaped arranged marriages and hypocritical respectability, and that she made her way to the literary salons of Europe where she promoted herself and enjoyed some recognition during her own life. But it's the less attractive, more contrary, more damaged side of Gomez that is more interesting to the reader. She has a strong pattern of becoming involved with men and then "discovering" that they are not what they seem: of poor character, manipulative, and false in love, is the basic indictment. She cycles through this pattern enough times that one comes to realize that she is her own issue. The Bronte sisters romanticized this type of alienated woman (and rightly linked her to social inequities of the time), but with Gomez we see her unvarnished, vain and difficult (more like the wonderful real-life Grimke sisters). This awareness (Autobiography is placed before Sab in the book) makes the text much more interesting, both politically and psychologically.

The Known World

Edward P. Jones, The Known World, HarperCollins, 2003. Using recent scholarship on census data and other 19th century sources, Jones tells an extraordinary story of daughters owning mothers, brothers owning brothers, black slave owners, illegal slave trading and many other aspects of life under slavery that have hitherto been unappreciated. He shows how the institution of slavery corrupted everyone who lived with it, black, white, or otherwise. We are still working through the national issue of slavery. Now we are seeing a great wave of African-American literature, and Toni Morrison, Maryse Conde, and Edwin P. Jones are all tremendous examples.