by Edward Ball
White terror plays its hand, and Constant’s hand is played.
After the vote, Governor Henry Warmoth sends a statement to the legislature. The society will heal, he says, “only when the dream of a natural, inborn right to supremacy shall be abandoned.” A sentence that might be written at various times, perhaps even recently.
PART VI
PETITS BLANCS / LITTLE WHITES
21
When I was a child, I loved the book Little Black Sambo. It was among the handful of children’s books my parents read aloud, a fifty-pager sold and read everywhere. The author, Helen Bannerman, was long dead, and we must have had an early edition, printed in the 1930s, to judge from the pickanninies and big-lipped Negroes of the illustrations. It was my mother’s book when she learned to read as a little girl, growing up in New Orleans.
Sambo is a boy in southern India, with parents named Black Jumbo and Black Mumbo. Despite the setting in a nameless Indian state, Sambo and family are coons of white American fantasy. Sambo is on a walk when he runs into four tigers, who wish to eat him. He gives up his clothes and his umbrella as a bribe to save his own life, and the tigers try the things on, preening in Sambo’s bright gear. Jealous of one another, the tigers chase a path around a tree until they wear it down to a pit and melt themselves into a puddle of butter. Sambo picks up his clothes, collects the butter in a tin. He takes it home to his mother, Black Mumbo, who uses the butter in pancakes.
Sambo is a cunning child. Almost mauled, he pratfalls his way to triumph. He is black as coal, with red lips. I have to wonder about the character: the boy who saves his own life by accident, because he is ignorant and happy, because he knows he has to fool the kings of the jungle. I wonder about the innocent black boy who outsmarts a mob trying to kill him. The plot sounds familiar.
Little Black Sambo, read by millions of white children during the 1900s, is a fable of tribe and species. It is hardly enough, I think, to see Black Sambo as a piece of “indoctrination” or “teaching of stereotypes.” The children’s story is less like an individual lesson in racial identity, and more like part of a flow. Black Sambo joins a million other droplets of popular culture to create a stream of images. Taken together, Sambo and his ilk are like a hose that helps to fill a pool. And if you test the water that the pool contains, you might find that you are taking an inventory of the unconscious.
Sigmund Freud, who died in 1939, said he did not discover the unconscious. Poets have always known of it, and they should have credit. In Freud’s time—the early 1900s, Black Sambo’s time—the idea that there might be a primary mind beneath the mind of the self, like a sea on which consciousness floats, seemed unbelievable (to most everyone but poets). A hundred years later, in the 2000s, more people buy in. Yet what is hard to accept, even among believers in the unconscious, is that this murky reservoir of language and images and memory is really the principal mind, and the conscious, sentient self is not. If Homo sapiens is “knowing man,” what the woman or man wishes to deny is that awareness drifts like a lifeboat on the waters of the unconscious, whose depths can just faintly be known. And that the unconscious, with its undersea creatures, may have the greater influence on the individual’s identity and behavior than her or his choices, decisions, and attempts at navigation.
We carry around, for example, forgotten matter from the years of childhood. Many of the impressions of youth are pushed into the well of the unconscious. Some become latent and inaccessible, although these may surface in dreams. What else lies in there? Pictures and fantasies, links of associations formed in language and dropped like ropes into the pool. The thing we call identity is made from aggregates of stuff that are suspended in the liquid bath beneath the waking self. The unconscious is a place independent of the waking mind, which believes it is in possession of the whole person. The unconscious does not listen to instruction from the self. It does not obey if you instruct yourself not to dream during sleep.
A waterfall of symbols that code for whiteness and blackness flows in and collects at the bottom of the self. There, the stream of images and fantasies and associations assumes shapes. The aggregate hardens like sediment and tends to stay intact. You have substances stored for good, which do not easily wear out.
For example, blackface. If you want to name one symptom that lets you diagnose that the unconscious exists and contains race identity, blackface is the sign. It is a richly pregnant symptom. What is disturbing about blackface is that it shows the contents of an unconscious that is white. To look upon blackface—now, during the 2000s—is to dig up repressed features of the racial unconscious. People respond strongly to blackface because it is a sign, which, when read down to its referent, contains a glimpse of the contents of white identity.
“Whiteness” is a body of signs that may be found in the unconscious of those who identify themselves as white. (It may also be found swimming like a creature in the minds of people who are not white.) Whiteness is coherent, it has a recognizable outline; it possesses a structure that imposes itself on waking life. It helps to determine behavior, and it helps to shape the thing known as “choice.” Sigmund Freud felt the idea of unconscious determinism, the hypothesis of psychoanalysis, insulted the common belief in human agency and choice. “Mental processes are in themselves unconscious, and of all mental life, there are only certain individual acts and portions that are conscious,” he said in a lecture in 1917. The thought that the sediment of old pictures and associations can be stirred up and retaliate on the self by compelling behavior still feels like a lie. It is really just an unpleasant truth.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, first prepared during Black Sambo’s time, “unconscious,” by definition #3, is a thing “not realized or known as existing in oneself.” The idea appears in a couplet, three hundred years old, from the English poet Richard Blackmore:
Unconscious causes only still impart
Their utmost skill, their utmost power exert.
Inside the unconscious, I think, is a submerged island of whiteness. It is like a landmass. It forms a platform and foundation for the self. But like an underwater reef, it is unseen and unacknowledged.
An unconscious formation, like the island of whiteness, is defined by its being unrecognizable. You do not know it when you see it. It is a thing that by its nature you wish not to see. It is a fact whose existence you disavow.
We would like to disavow that the phenomenon of whiteness exists. I would like to disavow it. And yet we spend it like currency, and we take home the social goods that it buys. The ego is enlarged by whiteness. Public spaces are defined by it, and by the lack of it. When you have eyes with which to see it, whiteness becomes conspicuous.
What would be the effect for us, whites, of dredging the underwater reef of white identity? What occurs when you try to carry some of what is unconscious up into the conscious mind? It is not easy to dislodge unconscious material. Racial identity, deeply embedded, cannot be removed and replaced, like computer memory. What is possible is to acquire some awareness of racial formations inside the self and to place that awareness with other sentience possessed by “knowing man.”
To peer down into one’s own mental well and make an inventory of what it contains does not transform you into a new person. To examine the entity of whiteness in the recesses of the mind does not cause you to be reborn. To dredge up some of the thick sediment and release it into consciousness is to experience a slight diminishment in what is unknown, that is all. The person remains the same, maybe a little altered.
I believe there are mountains of race identity that lie unconscious, beneath the sea of the mind, and their existence is not disproved by unracist behavior. The geology of race thought is craggy and durable. If I declare my love for blackness, or if I believe in equal rights, or if I desire to redress the racial wrongs of history, those things do not mean that blackness amounts to more than piedmont next to the high cliff of whiteness on the seafloor of my unconscious.
Here is an observation
that is hard to make. If I reject white supremacy, saying it is not a part of me, that does not mean that the order of things within the unconscious does not still place white over black. I suspect the self is not responsible for the contents of the unconscious. But conscious people are accountable in the end for what comes out, for the announcements of the unconscious—for behaviors, if you like. The unconscious has the raw material, the person runs the delivery system. Try as you like to deflect and to sublimate what pours out of the well. It often works. Try as you wish to modify the contents of the unconscious. It may work, doubtfully.
* * *
Constant is an agent of racist terror, and he is one of us. What lies in the unconscious of this ordinary man who cannot keep a full work calendar and who terrorizes people? Maybe a hundred things can be found, with names. Bloodlust from war. Disgust with blackness. Subservience to authority. Attraction to blackness. Insecurity of self. Fear of blackness. Rage at scapegoats, defined by their blackness. The main items, maybe, are forms of aversion and arousal around blackness. He is one of us, one of ours. Does Constant share an attraction and repulsion around blackness with other whites? He does, both with the majority of whites then, and perhaps with the majority during the so-very-enlightened 2000s. Aversion is a subliminal state. Its presence is deniable by the one who feels it. And importantly, it is always denied. Aversion is a strong condition; it is even stronger the more that it is disavowed. Consider the “I am not a racist” school of racism.
The thing itself, aversion and attraction to blackness, grows like a crystal within the cave of the unconscious. It starts as a tiny facet on the wall, its prism sending light this way and that. It is unknown to the people who host it. The facet grows. Shine a beam and the big crystal gleams.
Many whites alive during the years of Reconstruction reject the method of the White Camellia. Yet many desire the ends the marauders achieve, namely, white domination. In our time, we scorn the White Camellia and feel morally superior to it. And we nevertheless bathe ourselves in the comfort and control that Constant and his comrades leave as their bequest.
He is a mediocre man, like a middling salary worker of today. He is bland and ordinary, not heroic. Small and empty, not majestic like Satan. He is one of ours.
I am advertising some of the venal things my predecessor did. But I am not delivering him to justice. I do not scold him: he is one of us. We may say that Constant Lecorgne and his clique are ignorant, cruel, mentally ill, debased, and more. And yet what they do is legible. We can understand it as a campaign made on our behalf.
This is a story of race violence and terror that is Janus-faced. It is both exceptional and normal. It is aberrant in its cruel extreme. And yet it is typical, because the wider community tacitly supports it.
Our own years, the 2000s, come with a feeling that some call “white guilt.” The experience of guilt, with scolding applied to the self, is like a screen that obscures a less conscious process. Guilt is more like a symptom that points beyond, at something else. It does not refer to things that one values, principles or ideals that have failed—or it does not point to them alone. It points instead at what or at whom one fears. The experience of white guilt is an expression of fear about the cost of race domination, the punishment that history wishes to make us pay. Guilt is productive, and it is a necessary and natural stage in the act of reckoning. We are likely to pass through it in order to come to a reckoning with the crimes committed on our behalf. In that way, guilt is something like a stage of grief. On the other hand, many of us are just as likely to desire the fruits of those crimes and to enjoy them while we still can.
* * *
It is December 1868. Campaigns of terror like the ones in Louisiana take place all around the South, from Texas to Georgia, from Kentucky to South Carolina. The Democrats lose the national election, and Ulysses Grant wins.
But les nègres are still down. Let them stay down.
The Crescent City Democrats quit the stage when their leader, Frederick Ogden, dissolves the ward club. He is not finished. He will come back.
Gabrielle Duchemin prepares for her sixth baby. The child is conceived during the month of April 1868—just when the marauding starts. Is rampage the hour when Constant most wants his wife? Does he desire her more intensely after the White Camellia begins its torments?
The boy comes on December 16. His parents name him Saint Mark. You have the family leader, Yves Jean de Dieu—Yves John of God, and now you have Saint Mark Lecorgne. In the New Testament, the author of the second Gospel, Mark the Evangelist, is a prophet. He is a saint embodied with his own symbol, which is a lion with wings, holding a book. Mark the Evangelist is like the roar of proclamation in flight. His is a great and lasting testament.
I doubt Gabrielle thinks of it this way. No doubt her unconscious would make her disavow it. But I think that this moment is the one in the history of her place, and maybe in the history of the United States, when the cause of whiteness is born. Gabrielle is witness to a kind of proclamation of white identity. It is sometime during these years, down South, that white supremacy becomes an American program, a coherent idea with an independent life. It becomes a project, a shape and a plan.
White rule has been with us since the first ships from Europe came and tested the dirt to plant empire. But white domination has been atmospheric, for the reason that it faces weak opposition. Prior to the Civil War, white supremacy was a natural state, a climate often invisible to those within it. Some whites see it, of course. I think of Herman Melville in Moby-Dick; I think of Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court, who writes in Dred Scott v. Sandford that people of color “have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But whiteness commonly could not be made visible, because white supremacy was the form of everyday life. After the war, whiteness becomes nonnatural. It turns visible and contingent because it faces competing claims. It faces the idea of tribal equality. It faces the idea that whites do not possess inevitable authority. It is only with Reconstruction, when the prospect of racial equality appears above the horizon, that whiteness becomes a program to achieve rather than to defend. During Reconstruction, white supremacy takes shape as a movement that it is necessary to argue and to impose. It is necessary to do violence in its behalf. White identity may wish to return to its initial state. It wishes to disappear from public view and be made natural once again. But this cannot be done.
And there is another thing, if I am allowed to say it. It is sometime in this season that whiteness enters the social unconscious of the country. It takes invisible root in national life. I do not believe white supremacy is a regional phenomenon, an ideology that is the possession of whites in the South. Sometime in this season, white identity seeps into the collective, national mind—and there, it seizes grip.
In December, near Christmas, Gabrielle gives birth to Saint Mark. Mothers are sometimes in awe of what they have done (and rightly). A mother can see her baby as a testament.
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Constant and Gabrielle have a dilapidated rental on Annunciation Street, near the corner of Austerlitz. (Annunciation was once Jersey Street, but city fathers wished to honor the pregnancy of the Virgin Mary, and so the name was changed.) The Lecorgnes are the only whites on their block; every other household, according to census takers, is “black” or “mulatto.”
A black block feels like cold comfort. Considering what this man has done to launder the world clean. Constant is fully what he did not wish to become, namely, a petit blanc, a little white.
Joseph Lecorgne lives with his wife, Estelle Daunoy, and their children on Jena Street, close to where the Lecorgne brothers grew up. He has fallen off the government payroll. Age thirty-four, and no longer justice of the peace, Joseph sometimes advertises as a carpenter, sometimes as a gardener. He is also a petit blanc. Joseph appears to be absent from the guerrilla movement, and from politics. The reason may be temperamental. Just as Yves of God is a fixer in local government, and just as Constant may be milit
ant, Joseph is content with being detached. But it may also be that during these years, Joseph is not well.
In fact, Joseph Lecorgne is sick. Doctors diagnose his condition as “Bright’s disease,” a kidney disorder. He is ill and getting more so. The diagnosis is the beginning of Joseph’s long decline. The disease is chronic and progressive, a kind of nephritis that causes edema as well as heart trouble. Treatments for Joseph are as bad as the disease—mercury, opium, and heavy diuretics. As his nephritis worsens, it disables him, and Joseph is only sometimes able to work.
Yves of God remains steady and flush. He has the family homestead on Lecorgne row. His neighborhood is white, except for two black servants who work for him and live in an outbuilding behind the house. Yves runs a household of nine: he and his wife, Estelle Fazende; two young children; and Estelle’s mother, Sophie. Plus four more: Yves’s widowed sister, Aurore; her seventeen-year-old son, Edgar; and two African Americans, George Parker and Frannie Joseph, who do everyone’s bidding. Yves captains this big barge of family life as the comptroller for Jefferson City. And he does busy side work as justice of the peace. He has maneuvered himself back into the job, taking it from his brother Joseph, over the objection of the Freedmen’s Bureau.