Reading these texts as a writer allowed me deeper access to them. It was as though I had been looking at a fishbowl, seeing the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills, the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green, the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl itself, the structure transparently, invisibly, permitting the ordered life it contained to exist in the larger world. In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives, on my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable, necessary concomitant of the act of creation. What became transparent were the self-evident ways Americans chose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanistic presence.
Young America distinguished itself by pressing with full awareness toward a future, a freedom, a kind of human dignity believed to be unprecedented in the world. A whole tradition of “universal” yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled phrase “the American Dream.” While the immigrants’ dream deserves the exhaustive scrutiny it has received in the scholarly disciplines and the arts, it is just as important to know what these people were rushing from as it is to know what they were hastening to. If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them? And how might that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?
The flight from the Old World to the New is generally understood to be a flight from oppression and limitation to freedom and possibility. In fact, for some the escape was a flight from license—from a society perceived to be unacceptably permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined. For those fleeing for reasons other than religious ones, however, constraint and limitation impelled the journey. The Old World offered these emigrants only poverty, prison, social ostracism, and not infrequently death. There was, of course, another group of immigrants who came for the adventures possible in founding a colony for rather than against one or another mother country or fatherland. And of course there were the merchants, who came for the cash.
To all these people, the attraction was of the “clean slate” variety, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again, but to be born again in new clothes, as it were: the new setting would provide new raiments of self. The New World offered the vision of a limitless future that gleamed more brightly against the constraint, dissatisfaction, and turmoil being left behind. A promise genuinely promising. With luck and endurance one could discover freedom, find a way to make God’s law manifest in Man, or end up rich as a prince. The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of man’s license and corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt.
There was much more to make the trip worth the risk. The habit of genuflection would be replaced by the thrill of command. Power—control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and punishment to disciplining and punishing; from being socially ostracized to becoming an arbiter of social rank. One could be released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into a kind of historylessness—a blank page waiting to be inscribed. Much was to be written there: noble impulses were made into law and appropriated for a national tradition, but so were base ones, learned and elaborated in the rejected and rejecting homeland.
The body of literature produced by the young nation is one place it inscribed these fears, forces, and hopes. It is difficult to read the literature of young America without being struck by how antithetical it is to our modern conception of “the American Dream,” how pronounced is the absence of that term’s elusive mixture of hope, realism, materialism, and promise. Coming from a people who made much of their “newness”—their potential, their freedom, their innocence—it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened, and how haunted the early, founding literature truly is.
We have words and labels for this haunting—“gothic,” “romantic,” “sermonic,” “Puritan”—whose sources are, of course, to be found in the literature of the world from which they fled. But the strong affinity between the nineteenth-century American psyche and gothic romance has, rightly, been much remarked upon. It is not surprising that a young country, repelled by Europe’s moral and social disorder and swooning in a fit of desire and rejection, would devote its talents to reproducing in its own literature the typology of diabolism from which its citizens and their fathers had fled. After all, one way to benefit from the lessons of earlier mistakes and past misfortunes was to record them—an inoculation against their repetition, as it were.
Romance was the form in which this uniquely American prophylaxis was played out. Long after it had faded in Europe, romance remained the cherished expression of young America. What was there in American romanticism that made it so attractive to Americans as a battle plain upon which to fight, to engage, to imagine their demons?
It has been suggested that romance is an evasion of history, and thus perhaps attractive to a people trying to evade the recent past. But I am more persuaded by arguments that find in it the head-on encounter with very real, very pressing historical forces and the contradictions inherent in them, as these come to be experienced by writers. Romance, an exploration of anxiety imported from the shadows of European culture, made possible the embrace—sometimes safe, other times risky—of some quite specific, understandably human, American fears: the fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness; of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; of the absence of so-called civilization; of loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of human freedom—the thing they coveted most of all. Romance offered writers not less but more; not a narrow historical canvas but a wide one; not escape but enlargement. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror—whose most significant, overweening ingredient was darkness, with all the connotative value it contained.
There is no romance free of what Melville called “the power of blackness,” especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could articulate the fears, the dilemmas, the divisions that obsessed it historically, morally, metaphysically, and socially. This slave population seemed to volunteer as objects for meditation on the lure and elusiveness of human freedom, on the outcast’s terror and his dread of failure, of powerlessness, Nature without limits, inborn loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed … ; in other words, on human freedom in all terms except those of human potential and the rights of man.
And yet the rights of man, an organizing principle upon which the nation was founded, was inevitably, and especially, yoked to Africanism. Its history and origin are permanently allied with another seductive concept—the hierarchy of race. As Orlando Patterson has noted, we should not be surprised that the Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised if it could not. The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery.
In that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. And what rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and rationalize external exploitation was an Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire—that is uniquely American. (There also exists a European Africanism with its counterpart in its own colonial literature.)
What I wish to examine is how the image of reigned-in, bound, suppressed, and repress
ed darkness became objectified in American literature as an Africanistic persona. I want to show how the duties of that persona—duties of mirroring and embodying and exorcism—are demanded and displayed throughout much of the national literature and help provide its distinguishing characteristics.
Earlier I said that cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation’s literature, and that what seemed to be on the “mind” of the literature of the United States was the self conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man. Emerson’s call for that new man, “The American Scholar,” indicates the deliberateness of the construction, the conscious necessity for establishing difference. But the writers who responded to this call, accepting or rejecting it, did not look solely to Europe to establish a reference for difference. There was a very theatrical difference underfoot. Writers were able to celebrate or deplore an identity—already existing or rapidly taking form—that was elaborated through racial difference. That difference provided a huge trove of signs, symbols, and agencies for organizing, separating, and consolidating identity along valuable lines of interest.
Bernard Bailyn has provided us with an extraordinary investigation of European settlers in the act of becoming Americans. Particularly relevant is a description in his Voyagers to the West. I want to quote a rather long passage from that book because it helps to clarify and underscore the salient aspects of this American character that I have been describing:
William Dunbar, seen through his letters and diary, appears to be more fictional than real …. He … was a man in his early twenties who appeared suddenly in the Mississippi wilderness to stake out a claim to a large parcel of land, then disappeared to the Caribbean, to return leading a battalion of “wild” slaves with whose labor alone he built an estate where before there had been nothing but trees and uncultivated soil …. He was … complex … and … part of a violent biracial world whose tensions could lead in strange directions. For this wilderness planter was a scientist, who would later correspond with Jefferson on science and exploration, a Mississippi planter whose contributions to the American Philosophical Society … included linguistics, archaeology, hydrostatics, astronomy, and climatology, and whose geographical explorations were reported in widely known publications …. An exotic figure in the plantation world of early Mississippi … he … imported into that raw, half-savage world the niceties of European culture: not chandeliers and costly rugs, but books, surveyor’s equipment of the finest kind, and the latest instruments of science.
Dunbar … was educated first by tutors at home, then at the university in Aberdeen, where his interest in mathematics, astronomy, and belles-lettres took mature shape. What happened to him after his return home and later in London, where he circulated with young intellectuals, what propelled, or led, him out of the metropolis on the first leg of his long voyage west is not known. But whatever his motivation may have been, in April 1771, aged only twenty-two, Dunbar appeared in Philadelphia ….
Ever eager for gentility, this well-educated product of the Scottish enlightenment and of London’s sophistication—this bookish young littérateur and scientist who, only five years earlier, had been corresponding about scientific problems—about “Dean Swifts beatitudes,” about the “virtuous and happy life,” and about the Lord’s commandment that mankind should “love one another”—was strangely insensitive to the suffering of those who served him. In July 1776 he recorded not the independence of the American colonies from Britain, but the suppression of an alleged conspiracy for freedom by slaves on his own plantation ….
Dunbar, the young erudit, the Scottish scientist and man of letters, was no sadist. His plantation regime was, by the standards of the time, mild; he clothed and fed his slaves decently, and frequently relented in his more severe punishments. But 4,000 miles from the sources of culture, alone on the far periphery of British civilization where physical survival was a daily struggle, where ruthless exploitation was a way of life, and where disorder, violence, and human degradation were commonplace, he had triumphed by successful adaptation. Endlessly enterprising and resourceful, his finer sensibilities dulled by the abrasions of frontier life, and feeling within himself a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage world.
May I call your attention to some elements of this portrait, some pairings and interdependencies that are marked in this narrative of William Dunbar? First, the historical connection between the Enlightenment and the institution of slavery—the rights of man and his enslavement. Second, the relationship of Dunbar’s education and his New World enterprise. His education was exceptionally cultivated and included the latest thoughts on theology and science—in an effort perhaps to make them mutually accountable, to make each support the other. He is a product not only of “the Scottish enlightenment” but also of “London’s sophistication.” He read Swift, discussed the Christian commandment to “love one another,” and is described as “strangely” insensitive to the suffering of his slaves. On July 12, 1776, he records with astonishment and hurt the slave rebellion on his plantation: “Judge my surprise. Of what avail is kindness & good usage when rewarded by such ingratitude.” “Constantly bewildered,” Bailyn goes on, “by his slaves’ behavior … [Dunbar] recovered two runaways and ‘condemned them to receive 500 lashes each at five dif[feren]t times, and to carry a chain & log fixt to the ancle.’” I take this to be a succinct portrait of the process by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted. It is a formation that has at least four desirable consequences, all of which are referred to in Bailyn’s summation of Dunbar’s character and located in how Dunbar feels “within himself.” Let me repeat: “feeling … a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage world.” A power, a sense of freedom he had not known before. But what had he “known before”? Fine education, London sophistication, theological and scientific thought. None of these, one gathers, could provide him with the authority and autonomy Mississippi planter life did. His “sense” is a “force” that “flows”: not a willed domination, a thought-out, calculated choice, but rather a kind of natural resource, already present, a Niagara Falls waiting to spill over as soon as he is in a position to possess “absolute control over the lives of others.” And once he has moved into that position, he is resurrected as a new man, a distinctive man, a different man. Whatever his social status in London, in the New World he is a gentleman. More gentle; more man. Because the site of his transformation is within rawness. He is backgrounded by savagery.
Autonomy, newness, difference, authority, absolute power: these are the major themes and concerns of American literature, and each one is made possible, shaped, and activated by a complex awareness and use of a constituted Africanism that, deployed as rawness and savagery, provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of that quintessential American identity.
Autonomy—freedom—translates into the much championed and revered “individualism”; newness translates into “innocence”; distinctiveness becomes difference and strategies for maintaining it; authority becomes a romantic, conquering “heroism” and “virility” and raises the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others. These four are made possible, finally, by the fifth: absolute power called forth and acted out against, upon, and within a natural and mental landscape conceived of as a “raw, half-savage world.”
Why “raw and half-savage”? Because it is peopled by a nonwhite indigenous population? Perhaps. But certainly because there is readily at hand a bound and unfree, rebellious but serviceable black population by which Dunbar and all white men are enabled to measure these privileging and privileged differences.
Eventually i
ndividualism will lead to a prototype of Americans as solitary, alienated malcontents. What, one wants to ask, are Americans alienated from? What are Americans always so insistently innocent of? Different from? And over whom is absolute power held, from whom withheld, to whom distributed?
Answers to these questions lie in the potent and ego-reinforcing presence of an Africanistic population. The new white male can now persuade himself that savagery is “out there”: that the lashes ordered (five hundred, applied five times: twenty-five hundred in total) are not one’s own savagery; that repeated and dangerous breaks for freedom are “puzzling” confirmations of black irrationality; that the combination of Dean Swift’s beatitudes and a life of regularized violence is civilized; that, if sensibilities are dulled enough, the rawness remains external.
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