Black Ink

by Stephanie Stokes Oliver

  “An inner urge calling me to serve society”

  Because of the influence of my mother and father, I guess I always had a deep urge to serve humanity, but I didn’t start out with an interest to enter the ministry. I thought I could probably do it better as a lawyer or doctor. One of my closest friends at Morehouse, Walter McCall, was clear about his intention of going into the ministry, but I was slow to make up my mind. I did serve as assistant to my father for six months… .

  Two men—Dr. [Benjamin] Mays, president of Morehouse college and one of the great influences in my life, and Dr. George Kelsey, a professor of philosophy and religion—made me stop and think. Both were ministers, both deeply religious, and yet both were learned men, aware of all the trends of modern thinking. I could see in their lives the ideal of what I wanted a minister to be.

  It was in my senior year of college that I entered the ministry. I had felt the urge to enter the ministry from my high school days, but accumulated doubts had somewhat blocked the urge. Now it appeared again with an inescapable drive. I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.

  I guess the influence of my father had a great deal to do with my going into the ministry. This is not to say that he ever spoke to me in terms of being a minister but that my admiration for him was the great moving factor. He set forth a noble example that I didn’t mind following. I still feel the effects of the noble moral and ethical ideals that I grew up under. They have been real and precious to me, and even in moments of theological doubt I could never turn away from them.

  At the age of nineteen I finished college and was ready to enter seminary.

  Crozer Seminary

  Not until 1948, when I entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, did I begin a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil. I turned to a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke. All of these masters stimulated my thinking—such as it was—and, while finding things to question in each of them, I nevertheless learned a great deal from their study.

  I spent a great deal of time reading the work of the great social philosophers. I came early to Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis, which left an indelible imprint on my thinking by giving me a theological basis for the social concern which had already grown up in me as a result of my early experiences. Of course there were points at which I differed with Rauschenbusch. I felt that he had fallen victim to the nineteenth-century “cult of inevitable progress” which led him to a superficial optimism concerning man’s nature. Moreover, he came perilously close to identifying the Kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system—a tendency which should never befall the Church. But in spite of these shortcomings Rauschenbusch had done a great service for the Christian Church by insisting that the gospel deals with the whole man—not only his soul but his body; not only his spiritual well-being but his material well-being.

  … One Sunday afternoon I traveled to Philadelphia to hear a sermon by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University. He was there to preach for the Fellowship House of Philadelphia. Dr. Johnson had just returned from a trip to India, and, to my great interest, he spoke of the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. His message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.

  Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously. As I read I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. I was particularly moved by his Salt March to the Sea and his numerous fasts. The whole concept of Satyagraha (Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force; Satyagraha, therefore, means truth force or love force) was profoundly significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships. The “turn the other cheek” philosophy and the “love your enemies” philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations were in conflict a more realistic approach seemed necessary. But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.

  Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking. The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contracts theory of Hobbes, the “back to nature” optimism of Rousseau, the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi.

  The Site of Memory

  *

  TONI MORRISON

  Literacy was power, a way of assuming and proving the “humanity” that the Constitution denied them.

  Chloe Anthony “Toni” Wofford Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. The author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015), and several books for children, she is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved. In 1993, she became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and, in 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She serves as professor emeritus at Princeton University, where she taught for seventeen years after working as a book editor at Random House.

  Still providing inspiration for writers, Morrison wrote in a 2013 Twitter post that has been widely quoted: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

  Here, in an essay adapted from an interview published in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction by Toni Morrison, originally appearing in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, Morrison discusses the origins of Black literature, the critical job of the Black writer now, and the devastating personal loss that led to the characterizations in Song of Solomon.

  In this country the print origins of black literature (as distinguished from the oral origins) were slave narratives. These book-length narratives (autobiographies, recollections, memoirs), of which well over a hundred were published, are familiar texts to historians and students of black history. They range from the adventure-packed life of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1769) to the quiet desperation of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), in which Harriet Jacobs (“Linda Brent”) records hiding for seven years in a room too small to stand up in; from the political savvy of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) to the subtlety and modesty of Henry Bibb, whose voice, in Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), is surrounded by (“loaded with” is a better phrase) documents attesting to its authenticity. Bibb is careful to note that his formal schooling (three weeks) was short, but that he was “educated in the school of adversity, whips, and chains.” Born in Kentucky, he put aside his plans to escape in order to marry. But when he learned that he was the father of a slave and watched the degradation of his wife and child, he reactivated those plans.

  Whatever the style and circumstances of these narratives, they were written to say principally two things. One: “This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but that also represents the race.” Two: “I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are hum
an beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery.” With these two missions in mind, the narratives were clearly pointed.

  In Equiano’s account, the purpose is quite up-front. Born in 1745 near the Niger River and captured at the age of ten, he survived the Middle Passage, American plantation slavery, wars in Canada and the Mediterranean; learned navigation and clerking from a Quaker named Robert King, and bought his freedom at twenty-one. He lived as a free servant, traveling widely and living most of his latter life in England. Here he is speaking to the British without equivocation: “I hope to have the satisfaction of seeing the renovation of liberty and justice resting on the British government… . I hope and expect the attention of gentlemen of power… . May the time come—at least the speculation is to me pleasing—when the sable people shall gratefully commemorate the auspicious era of extensive freedom.” With typically eighteenth-century reticence he records his singular and representative life for one purpose: to change things. In fact, he and his co-authors did change things. Their works gave fuel to the fires that abolitionists were setting everywhere.

  More difficult was getting the fair appraisal of literary critics. The writings of church martyrs and confessors are and were read for the eloquence of their message as well as their experience of redemption, but the American slaves’ autobiographical narratives were frequently scorned as “biased,” “inflammatory” and “improbable.” These attacks are particularly difficult to understand in view of the fact that it was extremely important, as you can imagine, for the writers of these narratives to appear as objective as possible—not to offend the reader by being too angry, or by showing too much outrage, or by calling the reader names. As recently as 1966, Paul Edward, who edited and abridged Equiano’s story, praises the narrative for its refusal to be “inflammatory.”

  “As a rule,” Edwards writes, “he [Equiano] puts no emotional pressure on the reader other than that which the situation itself contains—his language does not strain after our sympathy, but expects it to be given naturally and at the proper time. This quiet avoidance of emotional display produces many of the best passages in the book.” Similarly, an 1836 review of Charles Bell’s Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave, which appeared in the Quarterly AntiSlavery Magazine, praised Bell’s account for its objectivity. “We rejoice in the book the more, because it is not a partisan work… . It broaches no theory in regard to [slavery], nor proposes any mode or time of emancipation.”

  As determined as the black writers were to persuade the reader of the evil of slavery, they also complimented him by assuming his nobility of heart and his high-mindedness. They tried to summon up his finer nature in order to encourage him to employ it. They knew that their readers were the people who could make a difference in terminating slavery. Their stories—of brutality, adversity and deliverance—had great popularity in spite of critical hostility in many quarters and patronizing sympathy in others. There was a time when the hunger for “slave stories” was difficult to quiet, as sales figures show. Douglass’s Narrative sold five thousand copies in four months; by 1847 it had sold eleven thousand copies. Equiano’s book had thirty-six editions between 1789 and 1850. Moses Roper’s book had ten editions from 1837 to 1856; William Wells Brown’s was reprinted four times in its first year. Solomon Northrop’s [sic] book sold twenty-seven thousand copies before two years had passed. A book by Josiah Henson (argued by some to be the model for the “Tom” of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin) had a pre-publication sale of five thousand.

  In addition to using their own lives to expose the horrors of slavery, they had a companion motive for their efforts. The prohibition against teaching a slave to read and write (which in many Southern states carried severe punishment) and against a slave’s learning to read and write had to be scuttled at all costs. These writers knew that literacy was power. Voting, after all, was inextricably connected to the ability to read; literacy was a way of assuming and proving the “humanity” that the Constitution denied them. That is why the narratives carry the subtitle “written by himself,” or “herself,” and include introductions and prefaces by white sympathizers to authenticate them. Other narratives, “edited by” such well-known antislavery figures as Lydia Maria Child and John Greenleaf Whittier contain prefaces to assure the reader how little editing was needed. A literate slave was supposed to be a contradiction in terms.

  One has to remember that the climate in which they write reflected not only the Age of Enlightenment but its twin, born at the same time, the Age of Scientific Racism. David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson, to mention only a few, had documented their conclusions that blacks were incapable of intelligence. Frederick Douglass knew otherwise, and he wrote refutations of what Jefferson said in “Notes on the State of Virginia”: “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” A sentence that I have always thought ought to be engraved at the door to the Rockefeller Collection of African Art. Hegel, in 1813, had said that Africans had no “history” and couldn’t write in modern languages. Kant disregarded a perceptive observation by a black man by saying, “This fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”

  Yet no slave society in the history of the world wrote more—or more thoughtfully—about its own enslavement. The milieu, however, dictated the purpose and the style. The narratives are instructive, moral and obviously representative. Some of them are patterned after the sentimental novel that was in vogue at the time. But whatever the level of eloquence or the form, popular taste discouraged the writers from dwelling too long or too carefully on the more sordid details of their experience. Whenever there was an unusually violent incident, or a scatological one, or something “excessive,” one finds the writer taking refuge in the literary conventions of the day. “I was left in a state of distraction not to be described” (Equiano). “But let us now leave the rough usage of the field … and turn our attention to the less repulsive slave life as it existed in the house of my childhood” (Douglass). “I am not about to harrow the feelings of my readers by a terrific representation of the untold horrors of that fearful system of oppression… . It is not my purpose to descend deeply into the dark and noisome caverns of the hell of slavery” (Henry Box Brown).

  Over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, “But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.” In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things, and they “forgot” many other things. There was a careful selection of the instances that they would record and a careful rendering of those that they chose to describe. Lydia Maria Child identified the problem in her introduction to “Linda Brent’s” tale of sexual abuse: “I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I’m willing to take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil drawn [aside].”

  But most importantly—at least for me—there was no mention of their interior life.

  For me—a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman—the exercise is very different. My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate.” The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.

  Moving that veil aside requires, therefore, certain things. First of all, I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others. Th
us, memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin and in what I find to be significant. Zora Neale Hurston said, “Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.” These “memories within” are the subsoil of my work. But memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.

  ——

  If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu—the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves themselves told—is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us. How I gain access to that interior life is what drives me and is the part of this talk which both distinguishes my fiction from autobiographical strategies and which also embraces certain autobiographical strategies. It’s a kind of literary archeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act; my reliance on the image—on the remains—in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth. By “image,” of course, I don’t mean “symbol”; I simply mean “picture” and the feelings that accompany the picture.

  Fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the product of imagination—invention—and it claims the freedom to dispense with “what really happened,” or where it really happened, or when it really happened, and nothing in it needs to be publicly verifiable, although much in it can be verified. By contrast, the scholarship of the biographer and the literary critic seems to us only trustworthy when the events of fiction can be traced to some publicly verifiable fact. It’s the research of the “Oh, yes, this is where he or she got it from” school, which gets its own credibility from excavating the credibility of the sources of the imagination, not the nature of the imagination.