"This Delta": Landscape, Race, and American Narrative

Antonio Ruíz, El sueño de Malinche ("The Dream of Malinche").

What follows is basically a place-holding post because I don't have time just now to explore all its various directions (one of which, you may have guessed, is indicated by the Ruíz painting at the beginning of this post). The road to Austin, and a Christmas-weekend visit with my mother, calls. But I'll be working out these ideas in various ways next week.

In the meantime, best wishes to all for a peace-filled and joyous Christmas season.

The holidays for me have come to mean, in addition to those things they are supposed to mean, both sacred and secular, the chance to do further reading/writing/thinking on my book project. So it's been in that spirit that I've been doing some reading I've long been needing to do--in particular, Edouard Glissant's seminal study, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. It's been in reading Glissant's dense but provocative writing that I've been reminded of some critical preoccupations of my own, which has made the past few days rewarding for me.

Some of you may remember Glissant's name from my discussions of his book Faulkner, Mississippi here and here. And indeed, Faulkner--in particular his novel Absalom, Absalom!--gets passing mention, along with other writers from this hemisphere. Despite its title, in Caribbean Discourse Glissant is in fact laying out an alternative literary and cultural history of the Americas, one that does not serve merely as an extension or branch of European history but is distinct from it: "[A] national literature emerges when a community whose collective existence is called into question tries to put together the reasons for its existence" ("Cross-Cultural Poetics," 104). The United States and most other nations in this hemisphere, by this definition, have national literatures, but Glissant's primary audience is his native Martinique and those other Caribbean nations that are cultural and economic wards of the European nations that had once possessed them as colonies.

Here's a passage I've spent some time musing on:

An immediate consequence of [New World writers' rejection of realism in favor of magical realism, as exemplified by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude] can be found in the function of landscape [author's italics]. The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from the land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings need to be understood. ("Cross-Cultural Poetics," 105-106)

Some comments below the fold.

This intersects in intriguing, complicated ways with Ralph Ellison's central contention in "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," which you can find in his essay collection Shadow and Act, and which I've posted on before:

Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds. If we examine the beginning of the Colonies, the application of this view is not, in its economic connotations at least, too far-fetched or too difficult to see. For then the Negro's body was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate. It was later, when white men drew up a plan for a democratic way of life, that the Negro began slowly to exert an influence upon America's moral consciousness. (28)

There's not an exact equivalence here between Glissant and Ellison, but they are certainly headed in the same direction. One reason why they don't quite arrive in the same place, as it were, is in Ellison's own "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," another well-known essay in Shadow and Act. In it, one of his arguments is that American culture is in essence one big minstrel show, and makes this provocative statement in its midst: "When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical" (54). Given that Ellison wrote all these essays at the mid-point of the 20th century, one needs to remember that context and qualify accordingly. But the fact that Ellison does not talk about miscegenation in these essays, at least, except in their cultural manifestations, suggests to me that racial commingling can be talked about as a figurative equivalent to landscape: that is, it as fact/consequence creates a resistance to dominant (read: European) narratives in the same way that landscape did (and does?)--indeed, a quick re-read of Hortense Spillers' important essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (pdf file; it's long and dense reading, just so you know) both updates Ellison's "Twentieth-Century Fiction" and, in places, uses language strikingly similar to Glissant's.

Faulkner, for all these writers, is central in these matters, and "this Delta," a phrase Ike McCaslin uses near the close of "Delta Autumn," seems to embody for me that centrality: it's the delta's literal fecundity that makes slavery flourish . . . but it is also the fecundity of human bodies, black and white, who work the land that leads to what Faulkner (through Ike) understood as the dooming of the South.

As I said above, I don't have time to develop what I see as the implications of all this, so I'll do no more than list them here. The most significant thing for me is that, at long last, I have in this image of landscape-as-character a frame for the book-project which in various ways will allow me to unify some otherwise disparate materials and genres: Columbus mis-reading the Caribbean because his map is (a literal reading of) the Bible; casta paintings (and even the Virgin of Guadalupe herself) as depictions of a cultural landscape that the Church and Crown wanted to read in one way but Mexicans grew to read in another; a way to finally make sense of the very odd things regarding the treatment of race in Show Boat (some of which I addressed here long ago).

This listing feels very inadequate to me, but I hope it may pique some curiosity among my reader(s) for later posts.

And to those of you who read this far: Thank you and, again, a blessed holiday season to you and yours.

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"True stories are not often good art": Some comments on Strange True Stories of Louisiana

An undated photo of the Delphine Lalaurie House, on the corner of Royal and Governor Nichols streets in New Orleans. Image found here. This house is the setting for Cable's story, "The 'Haunted House' in Royal Street" (which you can read online here.

Recently, I posted some comments on literary regionalism's potential for indulging in a cultural provincialism that, as nostalgia, is basically harmless but can help feed the social anxieties of some to the point of heightening their resistance or outright hostility toward the nation's political institutions. As I noted in that post, a fair amount of Southern fiction from the Jim Crow era participated in that feeding. But a Southern writer I could/should have mentioned in that post who kind of passively-aggressively resists that impulse is George Washington Cable. Here, I'll briefly seek to make amends by saying a few words about his story collection, Strange True Stories of Louisiana.

More below the fold.

Back in December of 2008, I posted here on Cable's best-known novel, The Grandissimes; if reading that interests you, you may enjoy this post over at Domestic Issue. As you'll see in that first post, I was initially skeptical of those people who see in Cable a precursor of Faulkner, but I've since come around to their way of thinking: Both writers deeply loved their regions and its people, but that love didn't blind either to those regions' flaws--most particularly to the fact that both regions' codes (legal, social, economic . . . take your pick) were predicated upon maintaining the moral outrage of slavery and, afterward, segregation. Cable's writing leans stylistically toward a stilted sentimentality in his narratives, but I and others suspect that that is a marketing decision rather than a direction in which he was naturally inclined. It's just such a style that pervaded the local colorist writing of the time. But Cable's readers--especially his Southern ones--could tell he was no moonlight-and-magnolias apologist. Indeed, as the Castillo piece I just linked to relates, Cable, whose family was so staunchly Southern that they left New Orleans when General Benjamin Butler's Union army took control in the spring of 1862 (more about Butler's rule in New Orleans here), would fall out of favor with his fellow Southerners for his (for the time) direct criticisms of slavery and segregation.

Lots of background, I know, but it's to purpose. When I started reading "How I Got Them," Strange True Stories' lengthy introduction, in which Cable relates to his reader how these stories--diary entries, letters, rough drafts of memoirs, etc.--came to be in his possession, I confess to thinking, Sure these are actual stories. His rendering, via large gaps in the text on the page, of the original documents' missing corners and his inclusion of lithographs of actual letters and diaries only heightened my skepticism. How very proto-postmodern, I thought. His tone in "How I Got Them" kept reminding me of Hawthorne's tone in "The Custom-House," his preface to The Scarlet Letter, to the point that I felt sorry that ol' Nate hadn't thought to work up a lithograph of Hester's "A" to include. More reading, though, assures me that actual people did indeed send these to Cable or, just as he describes, he and his agent would hear of these pieces and track them down through surviving relatives of their authors.

But I'm not telling you about this book because of its stories' origins in actual events in New Orleans and southern Louisiana for the hundred or so years from its early days as a French colony to the Civil War. Rather, what is of interest is how Cable has given these stories a sense of unity that causes this collection to be more than a simple assemblage of vignettes. In fact, it reminded me a little of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: each has stand-alone sections linked, mostly, by recurring characters (some recur in the sense that they're referred to indirectly); and the sections don't appear in chronological order. (Cable's book is more strictly chronological, but "Alix de Morainville" is the story of the titular character's past in France during the Reign of Terror, a past she alludes to in the preceding story, "The Adventures of François and Suzanne"; meanwhile, the last narrative, "War Diary of a Union Woman in the South," follows after a couple of stories set during Reconstruction.) More subtly, though, whereas with Faulkner's novel it is the House of McCaslin that is haunted by slavery's legacy, the (almost literal) and thematic center of Strange True Stories is a literal house--the one in the image at the beginning of this post--which is haunted by slavery and segregation, certainly thematically and, perhaps, literally as well (note my source for the image).

"The 'Haunted House' in Royal Street" is actually two stories. The first concerns Madame Delphine LaLaurie, quite the socialite in her day, and the city's outrage when it was revealed that her rumored brutal treatment of her slaves was indeed true; the second is about the house's second life during Reconstruction as an unsegregated school for girls that, with the change in government, is forced to send away its black students . . . if only there were a way to determine who is indeed black that isn't more than a little socially and politically awkward. By themselves, they really wouldn't amount to much. But Cable, I think it's safe to say, sees in these stories something more, as the following passage from early in the story suggests, in which Cable describes the view from the second-story belvedere over the street:

I was much above any neighboring roof. Far to the south and south-west the newer New Orleans spread away over the flat land. North-eastward, but near at hand, were the masts of ships and steamers, with glimpses here and there of the water, and farther away the open breadth of the great yellow river sweeping around Slaughterhouse Point under an air heavy with the falling black smoke and white steam of hurrying tugs. Closer by, there was a strange confusion of roofs, trees, walls, vines, tiled roofs, brown and pink, and stuccoed walls, pink, white, yellow, red, and every sort of gray. The old convent of the Ursulines stood in the midst, and against it the old chapel of St. Mary with a great sycamore on one side and a willow on the other. Almost under me I noticed some of the semicircular arches of rotten red brick that were once a part of the Spanish barracks. In the north the "Old Third" (third city district) lay, as though I looked down upon it from a cliff--a tempestuous gray sea of slate roofs dotted with tossing green tree-tops. Beyond it, not far away, the deep green, ragged line of cypress swamp half encircled it and gleamed weirdly under a sky packed with dark clouds that flashed and growled and boomed and growled again. You could see rain falling from one cloud over Lake Pontchartrain; the strong gale brought the sweet smell of it. Westward, yonder, you may still descry the old calaboose just peeping over the tops of some lofty trees; and that bunch a little at the left is Congo Square; but the old, old calaboose--the one to which this house was once strangely related--is hiding behind the cathedral here on the south. The street that crosses Royal here and makes the corner on which the house stands is Hospital street; and yonder, westward, where it bends a little to the right and runs away so bright, clean, and empty between two long lines of groves and flower gardens, it is the old Bayou Road to the lake. It was down that road that the mistress of this house fled in her carriage from its door with the howling mob at her heels. Before you descend from the belvedere turn and note how the roof drops away in eight different slopes; and think--from whichever one of these slopes it was--of the little fluttering, befrocked lump of terrified childhood that leaped from there and fell clean to the paved yard below.

As you can see, Cable isn't engaged here in straight objective description as he provides some foreshadowing of events in the first act of the story. But I'd also argue that there's something even more literary at work here. The house is at once a vantage point from which to survey the "strange confusion" of New Orleans and, as we'll see via the two acts, something like the apotheosis (or perhaps a vortex?) of that confusion. But this house, as a space whose stories seem to be about more than the particulars of the physical space within which those stories occur, also appears to be not just the center for Strange True Stories but also a gathering of images and narratives for Cable as a writer. I don't yet know enough to say more, but I do know that Cable borrows the name Delphine for a character in his story collection, Old Creole Days, and another story in that same collection appears to be an expansion on an incident briefly alluded to in "Haunted-House"'s second act.

The other stories in Strange True Stories vary in their quality; with one exception, I won't be writing about them for the book project. As glimpses into the lives of women (the central characters in all these stories are women) of the better-off classes, though, they make for engaging reading; and "War Diary of a Union Woman in the South," disappoints because I wish it were longer: it begins with the woman and her husband feeling compelled to leave New Orleans and ending up in a place where they thought they would be safe from the war: Vicksburg; her descriptions of life in that city during Grant's siege are gripping. But they don't become that something more that lets them signify something larger and more complex. "Haunted-House," though, becomes more than a true story, to the point that it just may haunt you, too.

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Faulkner, race, and the eye of the beholder

Now with a bit of additional writing.

Faulkner's burial, Oxford Mississippi, July 7, 1962. Image found here.

"[R]acism is in the eye of the beholder." --Andrew Breitbart

(Well, yes, in some sense. And the corollary of that remark is that if the beholder has designated himself to be a hammer, everything looks like a nail.)

The immediate context for Breitbart's quote was his (stated) understanding of what the 2-minute excerpt of the Shirley Sherrod video showed. I've already said my piece about all that. But I've been experiencing all that through another context yesterday and today, that of some reading I've been doing for my book project--in particular, some older (late-'80s and early-'90s) criticism on William Faulkner's novel, Go Down, Moses. As those who, like me, were in graduate literature programs back then may recall, those were the days of the ascendancy of theory and the resulting intra-departmental turf wars among the New Historicists, post-colonialists, feminists, Marxists, etc., etc.; the desire to expand the canon and, for some, seeing theoretical work as a way to do some not-so-incidental political work via inserting the inevitable "oh, by the way" kinds of passages in articles and books that point out the sociocultural blindnesses of the author and/or the characters s/he has created.

Just about the only work those moments accomplish in these pieces is that they inoculate their writers from the potential charge that they, too, must be blind to their subjects' blindnesses for not having pointed them out. They are purely defensive moves that add little to the reader's understanding of the text . . . apart from reminding us of the bleedin' obvious, that human beings, try as they might, can never fully erase from their language or behavior whatever virtues or prejudices their environment have imprinted on them.

As you've probably gathered, I've run into a couple such pieces during my reading yesterday and today. Of course, given that these articles' subject is Faulkner's depictions of African-Americans in Go Down, Moses, it would be naïve not to expect them. Moreover, because this novel is dedicated to Caroline Barr, the hundred-year-old black woman who served the Faulkner family from the time that William was a small boy and who died during the writing of the material that would become the novel, we're provided with a legitimate excuse to examine the novel in comparison with Faulkner's (genuine, heartfelt, but yes, socially and culturally awkward (at best; offensive, some have characterized it) with regard to Barr's family's wishes) public actions and statements about Barr before and at her death. But this post isn't about that, exactly. Rather, it's to ask a question: What would we have Faulkner do about this? It is difficult to speak with him about his attitudes regarding race, seeing as he's inconveniently dead (see the picture at the top of this post); however much we may wish otherwise, he's no longer in a position to revisit and rethink them.

That may sound a bit snarky, but the fact either not well known or forgotten or ignored is that when Faulkner was alive and given the opportunity to do so, he did revisit his public statements on race and, as he felt necessary, revised them. Louis Daniel Brodsky recounts (.pdf) the public response to Faulkner's "Letter to the North," published in Life on March 5, 1956, regarding the Supreme Court-imposed integration of the University of Alabama. The quickie summary: Faulkner gave a couple of interviews during this time while quite drunk and said some things that, had he been sober, he never would have said, not even in jest; in his writing, though, his position on desegregation was that it was just, it was inevitable, and it must happen, but that he wanted it to happen on the South's terms, not imposed from without by the federal government. I don't know if it was he who popularized the phrase "go slow," but those exact words appear in some of his writings on the subject. You can imagine how this played. Some blacks and white Northern liberals accused him of deliberate delay; white Southerners called him a scalawag and sent him threats via the mail. Moreover, you can imagine how some people read all this now: Why advocate moderation (read: delay) when you yourself say desegregation is both just and inevitable?

There are two replies to this. The first is, Faulkner didn't have to say a word on this subject to begin with, and certainly not in fora as public as Life magazine. However, as a result of having won the Nobel Prize for literature, he took on, uncomfortably to be sure, the role of public figure; in the specific case of the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama, he feared that people would be killed and felt obligated to do whatever he could to keep that from happening. Given the time and circumstances, he was pretty damned brave. The other reply also has to do with time and circumstance: My mother, not quite 70, remembers swimming in a whites-only swimming pool in Austin (yes--Austin, that bluer-than-blue island in the very-red state of Texas) when she was a kid. I mention that to make two points: a) How those times are not all that distant from our own; b) how dramatically, how fundamentally our society has changed in that short a time, thus making it exceedingly difficult to remember how, not so long ago, people fought and died both for and against even the smallest incremental changes in the status quo. Sure, Faulkner's moderate course seems mealy-mouthed now--how could it not?--but, as I noted above, extremists on both sides of the desegregation question were driving the debate, and his position, calculated to ensure that as few people were killed as possible, was both brave for him to make as a white Southern man, and sane.

Another way of putting all this: Passing judgment on the racial attitudes of someone living in a time and place very different from our own frankly seems like a cheap way to score rhetorical points, especially if we're not asking an equally-important question: had we been living in the same time and place, would we have done differently? Or better? Or, for that matter, anything at all?

I think it's also true of Faulkner that he was even braver on the issue of race in his fiction and that it's possible to see his thinking evolve over the course of his career, Go Down, Moses being, again, not as direct and affirming of social justice as we in our own relatively-more-enlightened time might wish, but (at least as I read it) powerfully moving--perhaps (I contend) in ways that Faulkner doesn't fully control.

Like all of us, Faulkner was a product of his place and time. He was wise enough to see the South, a place he loved deeply, as terribly flawed by the legacy of slavery, its blacks' and whites' mutual fear and hatred and mistrust, and felt compelled as an artist to explore, as honestly as he knew how, all that very unpleasant heritage. All of which makes quite funny a short "P.S." in a letter he received from a New Yorker in support of Faulkner's "Letter to the North," which Brodsky quotes in his article:

"I was fascinated by the 3 novels of yours that I read. If only you had grown up in N.Y.!"

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"Be Real Black for Me"; or, the One-Drop Rule turned upside-down

More substantive blogging to come, but this got my attention this morning:

Part of the running discussion between my colleague and me that I alluded to here was that my colleague had recently been hearing discussions of the "Is Obama black enough?" meme that appeared shortly after Obama announced his candidacy. While I cannot pretend to speak for any African-Americans or out of the experience of growing up black in this country, I can say that a) I understand what gives rise to such questions; and b) those questions (still) strike me as just a wee bit denigrating of both Obama and, I have to say, the people (blacks as well as whites) asking them: Purity Tests are not a healthy direction for discussions of the politics of race.

Anyway. Here, via Ta-Nehisi Coates from a few days back, is a nice rebuttal from American Exception to all that:

Here is a useful bit of information that we might reflect upon during the next four years: Barack Obama is the President, not the host of Soul Train.

What more needs to be said on this? Here's hoping I'll not again feel the need to revisit this.

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A post-Inauguration remembrance of something pre-Inauguration

By Richard Crowson, just-departed editorial cartoonist of the Wichita Eagle. Image found here (via Douglas and Main).

This image makes me smile, and I would like to believe that Lincoln, who personally was not as enlightened on matters of race as his public image would suggest, would have been amenable to sharing a fist-bump with our new President. If Obama's approval ratings are any indication, many many people who didn't vote for him back in November are fist-bumping him in their own ways, too--if only because he's the President and, given what lies ahead for us as a nation, those of us who love our country should wish any President well. Heck: Despite my personal feelings about the previous administration, occasionally aired here, I certainly didn't want Bush or his administration to fail and take no personal pleasure in thinking that he did. That would be as perverse a way to think as it is for Rush Limbaugh to publicly state he wants Obama's presidency to fail (I won't link; it's easy enough to find on the 'Nets). As I understand Limbaugh's remarks, he's speaking out of the context of his being a member of the Disloyal Opposition, rather than a racist one. But still. And, to be sure, there are some (few, but still too many) who cannot abide by the White House's being occupied by this or any African-American.

The above is a sad affirmation of something I kind of sort of alluded to here: that seeing Obama become a President is, without a doubt, a tremendous moment in our long and painful history that has been so utterly shaped, at every level, by the question of race. But rather than think that our work is done as a nation, it's more accurate to think of this as a gesture in the right direction toward finishing that work . . . all the while remembering that that work, given our ideals, will never be completely done.

Over the past two days, I have been having a running conversation about all this with a friend of mine out at the Air Force base where I teach. She was a fervent Hillary supporter during the primaries who, though thrilled at Obama's victory, still would love to see a woman President (full disclosure: as would I). In the course of our talking about how, still, our nation's collective attitudes about race are, pardon the pun, not so black-and-white as some would have us believe, I was reminded of something that happened to me while I was still living in Mobile back in the '90s.

Lots of details have faded: when it was, why I happened to be looking out the front window of the house to begin with, how many people there were, etc. What matters more is what I do remember. First of all, the setting: It was early evening and cold by Mobile standards. For whatever reason, I looked out the front window, and there was an old station wagon parked in front of the house, its hood up. I could see a man standing in front of the car, and there was enough light from our porch to reveal that he was black.

I went out to offer tools, to give him a jump, to offer him the phone to call someone if things reached that point. There were at least five other people in the car--I remember two women and two small children. I greeted them as well; they smiled, cautiously, at me. I don't remember now what exactly this man, perhaps in his 50s or 60s, said he thought was the matter with his car; what I do remember is what he kept telling me as I talked with him: something to the effect that he'd be leaving soon and, even more striking, kept apologizing for his car's breaking down right there in front of my house. He was polite in his responses to me but resistant to my offers of help. That was okay of course; we Men don't want to accept help too early in the game, no matter how much it might be in our better interest to accept--I'm a skilled player of that game, too, even in the face of ample past instances of bone-headed results arising from playing the game too far past the point of no return. But what I couldn't make sense of was his apparent need to apologize for what was happening. Why apologize to a total stranger for one's car's breaking down in front of that stranger's house? It's not his fault, after all.

It wasn't until the man had made it politely clear to me that he didn't want to accept my help and I turned to go back inside to report to P., my then-wife, that it struck me: What this man was saying to me had nothing to do with the particulars of what was being said that night but with a long, long cultural memory of innumerable events much like this one that he assumed I was also remembering--black folks shouldn't be in mostly-white parts of town after dark. They run the risk of verbal and even physical hostility from the residents, spending a night in jail or, in Mobile, worse: only about 10 years before, a black man was hanged downtown by some white men as part of a Klan ritual. Never mind what I was saying; in a real sense, that man wasn't listening to me at all but to that cultural memory. The script for the evening was written before I was even aware this family's car was out there. It's a frustrating thing: on the one hand, that memory interfered with his hearing, really hearing, my offers of help; but on the other hand, who could blame him for not hearing? He was mistaken, and yet he was not.

Some time passed--I don't remember how much. I'd look out the window every once in a while to see what was happening. There the car sat, and there the man kept trying to get it to run. Finally, P. said that at the very least we could offer the use of the phone again and invite the other folks inside for coffee and hot chocolate. So she and I went out to talk with them. This time the man accepted the offer of the phone and the kids, though not the women, came inside to get warmed up. The kids had hot chocolate. The man reached a relation of his; he arrived; and they all rode home with him, leaving the station wagon there. I stopped looking out the window then. The next morning, the car was gone.

What to say about all this, really? The existence of that cultural memory and the fact that, despite our post-Emancipation, post Brown v. Board of Education, post-Civil Rights Acts and, later, a post-Obama Administration-future world that we live in, that memory will be with us for a while yet--that's an inarguable Fact. I'd like to think that our gestures toward that family that night participated in a tiny way toward helping ease that memory on its way out the door, as do I hope that my two daughters' strong friendships with African-American kids will do the same. But it's going to take a while: this year marks the 390th anniversary of the arrival of 20 Africans to the English colony at Jamestown; if you grant that "America" includes the Spanish and Portuguese colonies as well, tack on about 100 more years: Bartolomé de las Casas is rightly lauded throughout Latin America for winning for indigenous populations legal protection from enslavement; however, it was also he who proposed the importation of Africans as a solution for the colonies' labor needs. And does it need to be said? Perhaps so: Some whites feel the need to cling to this very same memory.

That's a lot of memory to overcome, on both sides. But in the long list of Good Fights, this one is up near the top. Obama's victory is an important part of that Good Fight but not by any means the final one.

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Natty Bumppo's "natur": The anxiety of bearing no cross

Illustration depicting the aged Natty Bumppo's first appearance, silhouetted against an enormous setting sun, in Cooper's The Prairie (1827). Image found here.

I know, I know: I said I was reading Cooper so you didn't have to. But no one said anything about shielding you from reading about Cooper.

Over at Domestic Issue there's a long post that meditates on the word and phrase you see in its title. What follows is the core of the post:

At the beginning of this post, I wondered whether, by rendering Bumppo’s pronunciation of the word as “natur,” Cooper might want to suggest something more existential about his protagonist: that he at some level feels some lack in his nature that puts him at risk of being alienated from the people with whom he claims a racial kinship. It’s here that I would like to engage in a bit more speculation: that the key to Bumppo’s anxiety is suggested by a pun, which may or may not be intentional on Cooper’s part, in Bumppo’s saying that his “blood bears no cross”: that is, that while Bumppo believes in God and “Providence,” it would be a mistake to identify him as a Christian–at least, as that term is understood by the other whites in the novel. At a time when religious affiliation, a community’s being held together and affirming its members via a shared faith in God–and, more precisely, a shared expression of that faith via theology and doctrine–was an accepted part of communal life and was fully embraced by almost everyone, it is not too excessive to suggest the possibility that Bumppo’s spiritual estrangement from his fellows compels him to affirm his kinship via his consanguinity–his “natur”–all the while fearing that even consanguinity might not be sufficient.

There's also a brief guest appearance by a naked and emaciated Cabeza de Vaca. Really now: How can you resist that teaser?

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In which the Meridian reads Cooper so you don't have to (even though you should)

Natty Bumppo tells a sitting Uncas, "Look at me! I'm a white guy, and I still make a better Indian than you do!" Or something like that. Click to enlarge the image. Image found here.

Reading James Fenimore Cooper is one of the less-pleasurable lots of the specialist in American literature. It's not that we have to read lots and lots of Cooper (unless it's our fate to concentrate on the literature of the first half of the 19th century, or on any of various themes Cooper raises--a proto-environmentalism, Indian/settler relations (and race more generally), male/female relations, etc.); but, sooner or later, we must. The Leatherstocking Tales are indispensable reading for anyone who wants to get a sense of prevailing attitudes in this country regarding the themes I listed above, and Natty Bumppo, despite (or perhaps because of) his near-insufferable unctuousness, is our first truly American character.

I'm appreciative of all this. But while reading The Last of the Mohicans for book-project reasons, I feel Uncas' pain in the scene depicted above. Never mind where in the novel this scene occurs; it matters not. If Bumppo is in it, he will be disquisitioning on the subject he knows best: himself--or, more accurately, how his knowledge of the woods and the things in it is superior to that of everyone else (with the exception of Chingachgook, Uncas' father and the one person Bumppo consistently defers to in the novel).

The other thing Bumppo asserts with strange regularity is his racial purity. His blood "bears no cross," he says, almost like a mantra, often using that line either as a preface or as an epilogue to statements that, as often as not, have nothing to do with his or anyone else's race. Yet Bumppo, raised by the Lenai Lenappi from childhood, is culturally mixed even if his blood is not; thus, he is intriguing precisely when he is being most obnoxious. There's something very American, to me, in this tension between Bumppo's constant assertions of his racial purity and his simultaneous apparent blindness to the fact of his culturally-mixed heritage.

More later on this last bit. I just felt you should know that someone is looking out for you.

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Lynn Westmoreland, His Songs and Sayings; or, Who says white folks don't know how to signify?

Bumped up because it has more stuff added to it:

A. B. Frost, 1851-1928. "Terrapin speaking to Brer Rabbit" Illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings: Folklore of the Old Plantation by Joel Chandler Harris. Image found here.

For a discussion of "signifying," go here

Lynn Westmoreland, Republican Congressman from Georgia, yesterday:

"Just from what little I've seen of her [Michelle] and Mister Obama, Senator Obama, they're a member of an elitist class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

When a reporter sought clarification on the racially loaded word, Westmoreland replied, "Uppity, yeah."

Lynn Westmoreland, today:

“I’ve never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of ‘uppity’ is ‘affecting an air of inflated self-esteem —- snobbish.’ That’s what we meant by uppity when we used it in the mill village where I grew up.”

Oxford English Dictionary (whose definition for "uppity" does agree with Westmoreland's, by the way), the four examples of usage given, oldest-known first:

1880 J. C. Harris, Uncle Remus, 86 Hit wuz wunner dese yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck. 1933 Times Lit. Suppl. 9 Nov. 776a Grammy is living contentedly enough with an 'uppity' young creature named Penny 1952 F. L. Allen, Big Change 11 viii 130 The effect of the automobile revolution was especially noticeable in the South, where one began to hear whites complaining about 'uppity niggers' on the highways, where there was no Jim Crow. 1982 B. Chatwin On the Black Hill v. 28 He had a head for figures and a method for dealing with 'uppity' tenants.

With the exception of Chatwin's novel, which is set in Wales, all these usages for "uppity" directly describe African-Americans not knowing their place, in the judgment of the speakers¹ (the Times Literary Supplement passage is from a review of Roark Bradford's Kingdom Coming (hat-tip: Edge of the American West, which beat me to the OED by a day).

Call me a skeptic, but I do doubt that the citizens of the Georgia mill-town of Westmoreland's formative years had their understanding of "uppity" shaped by Bruce Chatwin novels.

All words require other words around them in order to signify. But the language of race and of social standing, especially in the South, requires context as well in order for them to fully signify. Westmoreland may not know his fellow Georgian Joel Chandler Harris introduced "uppity" into the American lexicon in precisely the way he says it does not know it meant, but here he looks like nothing so much as Harris's Brer Rabbit avoiding becoming the main course of Brer Fox's barbecue.

I expect--and hope--that he will be less successful than Brer Rabbit. Figuratively speaking, you understand.

Indeed: Haste the day when Westmoreland's more-than-a-little-disingenuous professed ignorance of this adjective's racial and racist origins indeed comes to pass and we can all indeed be ignorant enough of those origins to use it to pejoratively describe any person, regardless of color, who is in some way too big for his britches. That time may in fact be occurring among younger people, judging from some comments at other sites regarding Westmoreland's comment. In the meantime, though, even granting Westmoreland the benefit of the doubt here, his implied ignorance of his own state and region's social and cultural history is breathtaking. I of course have no direct proof that Westmoreland is lying, but as this rhyming couplet from a toasting poem that Henry Louis Gates Jr. quotes in his book The Signifying Monkey makes clear, there's another--and better--reason to be angry with Westmoreland:

[Lion] said, "Monkey, I'm not kicking your ass for lyin',
I'm kicking your hairy ass for signifyin'." (57)

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¹ A slight modification to my comments on the usage of "uppity" above:

The Harris story the OED usage example comes from is "The Fate of Mr. Jack Sparrow"; a fuller context for that passage follows:

"Lemme tell you dis," said the old man, laying down the section of horse-collar he had been plaiting, and looking hard at the little boy-"lemme tell you dis-der ain't no way fer ter make tattlers en tailb'arers turn out good. No, dey ain't. I bin mixin' up wid fokes now gwine on eighty year, en I ain't seed no tattler come ter no good een'. Dat I ain't. En ef ole man M'thoozlum wuz livin' clean twel yit, he'd up'n tell you de same. Sho ez youer settin' dar. You 'member w'at 'come er de bird w'at went tattlin' 'roun' 'bout Brer Rabbit?"

The little boy didn't remember, but he was very anxious to know, and he also wanted to know what kind of a bird it was that so disgraced itself.

"Hit wuz wunner dese yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck," said the old man; "dey wuz allers bodder'n' longer udder fokes's bizness, en dey keeps at it down ter dis day-peckin' yer, en pickin' dar, en scratchin' out yander.

Tattling, as I know I had, um, impressed upon me when I was a child, is a form of not minding one's own business, of not knowing one's place. And since the Uncle Remus tales aren't overtly racialized (by that, I mean that the different characters don't appear to stand for black or white people but just for people), neither is this first in-print usage at all "racial" but, rather, social in its immediate context.

That said, I and, I suspect, most Southerners would recognize that that context becomes much blurrier when used by a white person to describe a black person. Here's an example of what I mean, using the first part of Westmoreland's statement above: "Just from what little I've seen of her and Mister Obama, Senator Obama." Note the emendation from "Mister" to "Senator." I don't think anyone would have objected to his simply having left the title as "Mister." Perhaps, as a fellow elected official, Westmoreland simply, as a matter of instinct, corrects himself in favor of the title indicating Obama's elected position, as other Congresspeople and Senators do when speaking of each other in public--in Westmoreland's defense, "Michelle's" presence in the statement complicates matters, making it harder to be automatically officious when he comes up to "Obama." But, as anyone who has seen that great scene in In the Heat of the Night between Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier knows, how whites and blacks address each other was (and for some, I suspect, remains) a vexed issue. So perhaps Westmoreland has all that in mind as well as he's speaking. But, again: if the latter is the case, then for him to plead ignorance of how "uppity" traditionally signifies when whites speak of African-Americans is disingenuous.

One last thing: Westmoreland's saying "they're a member of an elitist class individual that thinks that they're uppity." Setting aside what the word signifies, "uppity" is a judgment others place on a person. People, as the OED examples make clear, don't think that about themselves.

Of course, there is a last possibility, as suggested by the tortured grammar of the statement: that Congressman Westmoreland is, um, not terribly bright:



LAST UPDATE (I promise): The phone conversation reported between a commenter and Westmoreland's office here (scroll down a bit) demonstrates quite elegantly how two can play Westmoreland's game.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates and the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twenty-first Century

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.--W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, "I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings"

To call Ta-Nehisi Coates the Second Coming of DuBois is perhaps a bit much; I think it's nevertheless true, though, that Coates at his best is doing what DuBois is doing in Souls: taking stock of How Things Stand; acknowledging that, yes, the past sucked for black people but it also sucked in very different ways for whites as well; and so now, what can we all do about the Here and Now and beyond to make it less sucky for everyone? [Edit: and pointing needed fingers at those (black as well as white) who are less than helpful in this project.] That's both ambitious and, as Coates works these themes, a whole lot of intellectual and even smile-inducing fun.

Coates is a relatively-new African-American blogger not afraid to speak a bit of truth (as he sees it) to both white and black folks. His is a thinking-outside-the-box take on black politics and culture that, as I'm bumping around his blog's archives, I'm finding enervating and thought-provoking. To be sure, Barack Obama figures prominently among his posts, but have a look as well at this Village Voice piece on Condoleeza Rice--that, in its own way, serves as an interesting chiasmus of the interesting discussion going on among black conservatives about how to respond, as members of the electorate, to Obama.

A couple of examples below the fold.

Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph to a brief take-down of conservative civil-rights icon Shelby Steele (spellings here and below are Coates'):

When I watched Steele talk [at the recent Aspen Ideas Conference], I didn't feele bad for black America, I felt bad for the white people who were there drinking it up. (In fairness, many were not.) It really saddens me to write that. I actually agree with Steele on one thing---the end of the Civil Rights Industrial Complex is great thing for black people everywhere. But Steele is tied to that complex, and his ideas are just as bereft. Like the men he derides as extortionists (which they are) Steel is running a hustle--Sharpton and Jackson traffic in white guilt. Steele traffics in white ignorance. And they keep all the profits. I've never seen "white guilt" or "white ignorance" do a damn thing for black folks.

There's also this discussion of some of the discussion of this recent Emily Bazelon article on class-based integration of schools. Coates signs on, but with a compelling observation about the similarities in how government at whatever level goes about addressing racial and economic inequalities:

Matt, Kevin and Richard Kahlenberg are debating over whether a solution like this could be applied nationally. The consensus being basically, no, because we aren't going to blow up the system of school districts in this country. But to my mind, the piece helps us get out from under the cloud of pessimism that follows any conversation about the gap in test-scores.

But there is something else at work here. [Bazelon's] research on class and achievement is helpful because it really shows (to me) that the real problem of America's racist past is that it basically affected a massive wealth-transfer out of black communities. More than that, I like Emily's piece because it exposes the lie that racial inequality is completely intractable. But that's never really been true. There are two questions here--how are we going to fix the race chasm, and how far are we really willing to go to do it? People like to focus on the former, because the truly frightening one is the latter. We're forever trying to achieve equality by not negatively impacting white people. You can look back at the War on Poverty and see how desperate folks were to make it look color-blind. How'd that work out? I think one of the reasons Affirmative Action was extended to basically everyone by white males, was likely, so it wouldn't be reparations. Ironically, class-based integration uses the same logic. I'm a fan because I believe in it on principle. But the politics of it seem to be captive to ancient formulations: Despite the fact that slavery and Jim Crow crippled black folks, we want to heal those wounds by inconviencing white people as little as possible. It's been this way since Reconstruction. If I'm pessimistic about anything it's not knowing the right thing to do, it's the will to get it done.

I hope you'll go and have a look at more of his work. He's worth your time.

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Denial on the Mississippi?: Part II--the river as engine of nostalgia in Show Boat

Map from Mississippi River Cruises

Note: Part I of "Denial on the Mississippi?" is here.

While I was away from "here," I had occasion to do some more thinking about Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat and make a substantial start on an essay that, with luck, might appear in print somewhere. This is part of a version of that essay. I don't know whether the fact that, with the exception of passing references to it, I've not (yet) found a substantial piece published on it in the past ten years bodes well or ill for its chances in the academic journal marketplace, but at least no one can argue that the marketplace is overrun with Ferber criticism generally.

As I noted in that earlier post, that critical silence is itself curious to me, given Show Boat's subsequent history of innumerable revivals as a stage musical and its three film versions. There is something in its story that continues to appeal strongly to a mainstream American audience. I myself don't have any firm theories as to why this is the case--either the dearth of scholarship or the reasons for its appeal--though I'll mention the work of a scholar regarding the latter. However, the more I have thought about and tried to write on this novel, the more I think that scholars interested in American popular culture from the early decades of the 20th century would find it an intriguing novel.

They'll also find it a frustrating novel, if their experience turns out to be anything like mine. It doesn't appear to make any sort of argument, either about Life or American culture (except, perhaps, very obliquely toward its conclusion); it champions no causes, either noble or offensive; its characters don't change for the better or worse as events occur; it even seems to leave us free to like or not like its principal characters. It simply is. Therein might lie one reason for the lack of critical discourse on Show Boat: it's a hard novel to talk back to in an academic manner. Perhaps I'm just weird, but it's Show Boat's very blankness that has grown on me over the past couple of months. Surely, something, some mechanism, some force, some set of assumptions operates behind that blankness that a better reader than I can tease out and present as a way of beginning to explain why, for a very long time now, what Lauren Berlant terms the "superstructure" of Show Boat (consisting of the novel and its various stage and cinematic treatments) has appealed to American audiences for so long. But aside from Berlant--a very good and very smart reader indeed--no one has yet come along to do this sort of work. So, my poor reader(s) and (knock on wood) the greater academic world are stuck with my efforts for the moment.

Below the fold: some tracing out of Berlant's work and the direction I head in from that, along with a circling back to a passage I quoted in Part I. Apologies in advance for the length of this post and for the inclusion of some turgid prose--mine as well as others'.

Berlant's essay is called "Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat," which is the last essay in a book called Cultural Institutions of the Novel. Her essay's larger subject is the relationship between sentimental fiction and historical realities, Show Boat serving as a model of that dynamic:

The disguise of "feeling" as a thing distant from and superior to public-sphere norms of instrumental rationality requires the modern sentimental text's central moments of instruction and identification to appear only as sublime ephemera, fragile temporal material of feeling and memory that constantly escape becoming knowledge that might inform, even revolutionize, the institutions and the common sense of official culture. These are the contradictions of modern American feminine sentimentality: a commitment to and revulsion caused by excesses of feeling in a world of politics, instrumental reason, and public-sphere mediation; the adoption of the commodity form to express the overwhelming predicament of subaltern identity in the face of the taxonomic and material violence of national capitalism. (399)

Berlant's first sentence is the one I am more interested in here for the moment, for it offers an explanation as to why the Civil War (and here I need to correct an earlier claim I made) merits only one mention in Ferber's novel, despite its chronology's having what I would argue is its beginning during the war, and then only to note, post-Reconstruction, that even as its audiences still struggled to recover from the war, the crew and actors of the Cotton Blossom "alone seemed to be leading an enchanted existence, suspended on another plane" (51). That first sentence of Berlant's also goes a long way toward explaining Show Boat's blankness that I mentioned above. Berlant goes on to argue, via a truly fine reading of "Ol' Man River," that what Show Boat's "superstructure" is interested in rendering ephemeral are "both . . . the suppressed and displaced history of American slaves and . . . the context of white misapprehension, the white will-to-not-know that supports the fantasy norms its romantic fictions express" (411). Thus, Berlant concludes, the history of Show Boat is "the history of the development of an apparatus of forgetting" (414).

Here is where my poor contribution parts ways a bit from Berlant's work. Though it incorporates some observations specifically about the novel, her essay is more concerned with that apparatus's history of development and, thus, moves away from certain of the novel's particulars that the stage and film versions don't dwell on. As I have thought about Ferber's novel, though, to my mind one "apparatus of forgetting" is already present throughout the text: the Mississippi River and its tributaries, the other plane on which the Cotton Blossom's crew and acting troupe lead their enchanted existence. The development of that apparatus of forgetting isn't something that emerges in the interim between the novel's publication and its stage and film adaptations. As has also happened with our popular memory of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (odd, isn't it, how Jim rarely if ever gets mentioned along with these two), the Mississippi, not because of but despite its location and hydrology, seems always already at an imaginative remove from our nation's painful historical and cultural realities.¹ Even within the world of Huckleberry Finn itself, it's not hard either to imagine Huck wanting to be on that other plane regarding the dilemma he finds himself in with Jim, or to imagine the atmosphere of the Cotton Blossom as being like something Huck could easily have fantasized.² It should surprise no one, once we gain the perspective of hindsight, that when Parthenia Hawks, Andy Hawks' wife, asks what time it is at one point on her first trip on the Cotton Blossom, it is Julie Dozier who responds, "What does it matter?" (54)

What Huck and Jim and, in Show Boat, Julie and her husband Steve Baker hope for but inevitably fail in achieving is escape from the ramifications of the legal and social politics of race. Huck and Jim's raft and the Cotton Blossom have to put in sooner or later. But even as this is their wish, for others in Show Boat the trope of racial ambiguity also provides, along with a good bit of not-so-latent anxiety, what appears to be an erotic element.

What follows are a couple of sentences from Show Boat that I quoted in Part I of "Denial on the Mississippi," this time including a couple of other sentences to frame the ones originally quoted:

Then, too, Nature, the old witch-wanton, had set the yeast to working in the flabby dough of Parthy Ann's organism. Andy told her that his real name was André and that he was descended, through his mother, from a long line of Basque fisher folk who had lived in the vicinity of St. Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées. It probably was true, and certainly accounted for his swarthy skin, his bright brown eyes, his impulsiveness, his vivacious manner. The first time he kissed this tall, raw-boned New England woman, he was startled at the robustness with which she met and returned the caress. (21-22)

The phrase "It probably was true," as I mentioned before, affirms without confirming as fact Andy's explanation of his ethnic heritage, thus leaving in the narrative an uncertainty that the narrator ignores from that point on but which, I argue in my essay, manifests itself in Parthenia by way of her close surveillance of their daughter Magnolia when she is socializing with people that Parthenia knows or (in the case of Julie) suspects of being black. But it would also seem implicit in the passage I just quoted that Andy's story, whatever her doubts as to its veracity, also attracts her to him.

How to reconcile this apparent admission of the erotic attraction of racial ambiguity for the very people who would (and do) restrict or forbid or condemn such tendencies in public (as Parthenia herself does many, many times in the course of Ferber's novel)? There is also the matter, in the novel's famous scene of Julie's and Steve's exposure as a miscegenated couple, of how Andy behaves toward them (the short answer: ambivalently); of why it is that Magnolia, characterized throughout the text as a Daddy's Girl, is (according to the narrator) unaccountably drawn to Julie; and most perplexing of all, why, when Julie and Steve are forced to leave the Cotton Blossom, genuinely traumatizing Magnolia, literally no further mention of her trauma is given voice in the novel. And finally, there is the matter of Magnolia's later gaining of fame and fortune by singing African-American songs and spirituals "authentically"--that is, in the manner of the black people she had learned the songs from. Through it all, the river remains unchanged in the eyes of either Magnolia or the narrator--unvexed, even. Finally, there's the no-little-matter of a question Camille raised in a comment on Part I of this post that I've also been mulling over.

But all that will have to wait for another post (or so).
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¹Think, for example, of Abraham Lincoln's famous statement upon hearing that Vicksburg had fallen to Union forces in July of 1863: "The Father of Waters again flows unvexed to the sea." Lincoln's language, it seems, does more than merely announce the opening of a major waterway for Union forces that effectively cut the Confederacy in half. Implicit in the remark is, at the very least, an anthropomorphizing of the river; more, his use of an indigenous people's reverential name for the river perhaps is intended to confer the aura of sacredness upon it.

²American landscape's effect(s) on our nation's collective imagination, whether the Mississippi or Rip Van Winkle's Katterskill Mountains or what have you (think of Emerson's inimitable phrase from "Nature," "In the woods is perpetual youth"), surely is a crucial component of American Romanticism, which Toni Morrison, following Michael Rogin's discussion in his book on Melville, Subversive Genealogy, argues really came into its own at the very time that national debates regarding slavery were at their most heated. Berlant's essay doesn't address any of these matters, but it would not be difficult for someone so inclined to make the link between her arguments and Rogin's critique of Romanticism.
I personally am not so inclined; some of the very strongest criticisms of slavery--and, for that matter, our collective complicity in perpetuating it if we do nothing (I'm speaking in particular of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience")--emerged directly out of American Romanticism. To understand Transcendentalism only in terms of escape from the world that is too much with us is, I think, to understand it only partially.

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Home by Dark: A speculative reading

Eudora Welty stands in front of the ruins of Windsor, Port Gibson, Mississippi. Taken by by Frank H. Lyell. And yes: those are small trees that have taken root on the tops of the columns.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned in passing what might be Welty's most familiar picture, Home by Dark, Yalobusha Co. I can't find a decent-sized online image to link to, so I refer you instead here. I invite you to go there and have a good look at it. I'll wait for you below the fold.

Seeing as I own two books on which this picture appears (and, now that I've added One Time One Place to my Amazon Wish List, will someday own three), I know this photo well. Or, rather, I thought I did. My realization that more is going on in this picture than I had assumed didn't dawn on me at the museum yesterday. Slow of study as I am, it was only some time after I put up yesterday's post and then ran across the image again that I really, you know, looked at it.

Welty's photos' titles tend to be descriptive of their subjects: Here It Comes! Crowd on a Boxcar, Watching a Circus Being Unloaded, for example, pretty much lets you know what you're looking at. Others, like Window Shopping, Grenada, which I described in yesterday's post, are ostensibly descriptive, but as I noted there I think that the title points us in the direction of a more figurative way of thinking about the picture. Still, though, such titles don't make us wonder why they've been given to the image.

Home by Dark, though, is another matter, I think. On its surface, this picture could not be a more simple or tranquil, even clichéd, rural southern scene: a mule-drawn wagon bearing a family on a plumbline-straight dirt road through a field, some woods in the distance forming the horizon. Its title refers to a time of day; more than that, though, it suggests both a destination and a hoped-for arrival time . . . or, perhaps, a deadline.

That latter possibility first suggested itself when I realized for the first time, while noting the twist in the woman's torso as she looks back toward the viewer, that the family on the wagon is African-American. Suddenly, the image's title, its surface tranquility and even clichéd nature were replaced in me by something else--not menace exactly but, certainly, tension. Another, more ominous set of clichés.

As with Welty's other pictures, I cannot say what was involved in its being taken, how much directing Welty engaged in with her subjects prior to taking it. But this one, like the others, has a sense of matter-of-factness to it. Like the others, it simply seeks to portray its subjects as people . . . and it was simply so that, for African-Americans in certain places in the rural South during the Jim Crow era, where one was in relation to one's home as sundown approached had an urgency to it that it did not for whites. This is not opinion but fact; lamentable though that was, the fact remains that, for black people, surveillance was a condition of existence.

Welty's photograph depicts this fact; just as she so often does in her fiction, here she lets us observe this slice of the world without dictating how to think about it. Welty herself, on the back cover of One Time One Place, puts the matter thus, and I'll let her eloquence conclude this post:

I wished no more to indict anybody, to prove or disprove anything by my pictures, than I would have wished to do harm to the people in them, or have expected any harm from them to come to me.

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Denial on the Mississippi?: The strange career of the narrator in Show Boat

I find narrators of stories fascinating. Most of us pay them no mind, especially if they happen to be third-person narrators. But they are of the utmost importance: it doesn't matter who the characters of a narrative are or how compelling their stories are, if some entity doesn't feel compelled to relate that tale, it doesn't get told. And consider this rather crude analogy. The narrator provides a window through whom we see the world of the story . . . or at least that portion of that world available to the narrator. Just as usually happens when we look through windows, much of the time we forget the narrator's presence. As distinctive as Huck Finn's voice is, I sometimes forget that he is his own story's narrator. But every once in a while, we encounter, as it were, a speck of dirt or a stain or a flaw or crack in the glass itself, drawing our attention away from the story being told and toward the medium through which we're being told it.

Such for me is the case with the narrator of Edna Ferber's immensely popular 1926 novel, Show Boat. A third-person narrator usually limited to Magnolia Ravenal nèe Hawks' point of view, it often exhibits qualities more common among omniscient narrators, but at other times--at one crucial moment in particular--is not able to report on what Magnolia is thinking. Ordinarily, I wouldn't be too concerned about these inconsistencies. I would just chalk them up to inattentive writing and editing and then be on my way. But these inconsistencies most often occur when race is at issue in some form or fashion in the novel. This, I think, is of significance in a novel that isn't about race per se but whose most dramatic moment is unquestionably the moment in which it's revealed that Julie Dozier is of mixed race and her white husband Steve Baker draws blood from her finger and then sucks it so that he too "becomes" black according to the letter and spirit of "one-drop" laws. It's also of significance when Magnolia unaccountably finds herself drawn to Julie, when the narrator drops hints that other characters--most prominently Magnolia's father Andy, the captain of the Cotton Blossom (the show boat of the title)--might be passing for white, and when Magnolia's mother Parthenia seems not to question--or perhaps want to question--Andy's ethnicity yet constantly polices Magnolia's contact with the black crew members of the Cotton Blossom and tries to keep her away from Julie when she and Steve are forced to leave the boat after the revelation of their miscegenated status.

Add to all this such things as the narrator's descriptions of Julie, prior to the scene just described, that come straight out of any number of "tragic mulatto" narratives of the 19th century, Andy's revelation that he had once worked in blackface in a minstrel show¹ and his strange ambivalence toward Julie, the fact that, despite a fairly long flashback describing how Andy and Parthenia met and courted in the mid-1860s, no mention of the Civil War appears there or anywhere else in it, and a narrative voice that alternates between sympathetic and overtly racist descriptions of African-Americans, and you have (I think) a novel whose narrator is as complex and conflicted as you're likely to find in American literature. If there is a more oddly-narrated novel about race out there--apart from, interestingly, Thomas H. Dixon's blatantly-racist The Sins of the Father--I haven't run across it.

First disclaimer: If you think that, like most English majors with some letters after their names, I'm making way too big a deal about a novel that isn't even all that good (or, just making way too big a deal about a novel, period), I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that position. But, well, this is what I was trained to do, and I like doing it every once in a while.

Other disclaimers--and some actual text to look at, below the fold.

I'll be quite frank: Ferber is not a sophisticated novelist, and Show Boat is not a sophisticated novel. As I say above, this business about the narrator may be due to nothing more than sloppy editing. But I can't help being intrigued by it, for the reasons I stated in my first post on Show Boat: it's set for the most part on the Mississippi, as Huckleberry Finn is--and, for the most part, on the very sort of boat Huck and Jim had planned to catch a ride on for their trip up the Ohio. Acting figures prominently in both--more specifically, in each there's some exploration of the convergences between acting and race. But all that will have to wait for another post.

The other thing that intrigues me is that, despite her enormous popularity in the first half of the 20th century--and the popularity of Show Boat in particular--there's a surprising dearth of scholarship on Ferber. Her personal life and career, and the characters she tends to create (strong women, sometimes married, sometimes not, but not "needy" or helpless types), would seem tailor-made for feminist and pop-culture types. So, my other excuse for this is that I'm not trying to argue for her greatness but draw some attention to features of her work that are curious and (if I'm lucky) significant. My strong hunch is that they might prove to be.

Finally, I hope no one makes the mistake of thinking that what follows is anything more than sketched out. It's hard to write lengthy texts on a blog, especially texts that try to make an argument. But I hope that this makes some sense, and I hope that if you have questions, you'll ask them in the comments.

Okay: some text:

The first concerns Andy Hawks, who at a time that the narrative doesn't specify but which can be determined, through textual clues from elsewhere, to have been the mid-1860s, "drift[ed] up into Massachusetts one summer on a visit to fishermen kin" (21); this is when he meets Parthenia. Here is the narrator's report of Andy's ethnicity as he relates it to her:

[He] told her that his real name was André and that he was descended, through his mother, from a long line of Basque fisher folk who had lived in the vicinity of St. Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées. It probably was true, and certainly accounted for his swarthy skin, his bright brown eyes, his impulsiveness, his vivacious manner. (21-22)

For someone like me, who got out of grad school by writing about miscegenation narratives, a passage like this is critic's catnip: Andy's exotic genealogy through the mother's side and his equally-exotic skin color and manner are the sort of thing that appear again and again in narratives dealing with miscegenation, as initial ways of accounting for a character who is subsequently revealed to be of mixed race. The fact that the narrator had earlier described Andy as having "a trick of talking very fast as he clawed the mutton-chop whiskers first this side, then that, with one brown hairy little hand" that made him appear "grotesque [and] simian" (13) only heightens my suspicions about this passage. But note that clause "It probably was true," simultaneously affirming and casting some doubt on Andy's accounting of himself. It's difficult to tell, moreover, whether this is something Andy in fact knows this to be true, has been told this and believes it or, rather, it is a deliberate invention on his or his parents' part.

So: certainly as far as the narrator is concerned, there is some ambiguity and ambivalence about Andy's origins. Even more intriguing for me, though, is what Parthenia makes of this story. The narrator will make one more passing reference (no pun) to his ethnicity; meanwhile, nowhere does the narrator record Parthenia's response to this information, much less whether she believes it.

Meanwhile, what to make of passages such as these?

Magnolia, as a child,

learned to strut and shuffle and buck-and-wing from the Negroes whose black faces dotted the boards of the Southern wharves as thickly as grace notes sprinkle a bar of lively music. (20)

but compare that to this description of the head cook and his assistants in the galley whom Parthenia confronts over what she regards as their waste of food:

A simple, ignorant soul, the black man, and a somewhat savage; as mighty in his small domain as Captain Andy in his large one. All about him now were his helpers, black men like himself, with rolling eyes and great lips all too ready to gash into grins if this hard-visaged female intruder were to worst him. (23)

And back and forth the narrator veers like this, from pleasant to not-so-pleasant stereotype, apparently approving simultaneously Magnolia's attraction to black people and, in particular, to Julie, and Parthenia's policing of Magnolia's interactions with them, and not quite knowing what to make of Andy.

What to call this narrator's perspective? I'm tempted to call it nostalgia, and even to assign the adjective "antebellum" to it. But its inconstancy of perspective makes it something other than the "moonlight and magnolias" sort of nostalgia. In the footnote below, I mention the possible links between the narrator and the tradition of minstrelsy, so that's something to explore and think about more. I have more rereading and thinking to do before I can draw a firm conclusion about this. But there are other things I want to consider, as well: the parallels regarding the function of the Mississippi in this novel and Huckleberry Finn; the link(s) between passing and acting (it is no coincidence that Julie is deemed the best actor aboard the Cotton Blossom) and, for that matter, Magnolia's attraction both to Julie and to acting.

But all of will have to wait till another post, you'll be pleased to know. If you've read this far, I sincerely thank you.

Part II is here.


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¹About all I have space and time (not to mention knowledge) to say about minstrelsy here is that its cultural history and legacy in this country are by no means decided. The most-common view, as put forth by Eric Lott in his 1993 book Love and Theft, is that minstrelsy was severely reductive in its depictions of black people and is responsible for many present-day stereotypes of African-Americans. While poking about in the library yesterday, though, I ran across William J. Mahar's 1999 study Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, which seeks to argue that minstrelsy--specifically, blackface itself--allowed performers to offer critiques of dominant culture without the performers' being attached by their audiences to those critiques. Right now--that is, as of the writing of this little footnote--I frankly see Show Boat's narrator as perhaps being in blackface as well, in a figurative sense--that image would certainly serve to get at some of the questions I have about him/her. I can't explore this further, though, till I reread the novel more closely . . . and, for that matter, decide what I think about minstrelsy.

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Rewriting the "One-Drop Rule": The nexus of Christianism and Nativisn

It's been a while since I've written a post like this and, believe me, I have tried very hard to keep from it. And I promise that cheerier, or at least less-weighty, reading will appear here, as it always does. As with most of us, I find it more pleasurable to give rein to my frivolous side(s).

But you know how it is: There is silly blindness, and there is that blindness that looks in the direction of a darkness so frightening that it can't be laughed off but must be named, in the collective face of those Americans and Christians who champion and propagate this blindness, for what it is: as un-American and un-Christian.

To spare those not interested in reading more, the rest is below the fold.

This post has its origins in the proposed immigration bill being debated in Congress, but it is not about that bill per se. Rather, it's the sentiment that to my mind, and disturbingly so, drives the rhetoric of many who participate in this debate. I'll pick up Christianism's link to all this in a bit.

My position on immigration policy: I write this as someone who does believe in secure borders but who also grew up in Texas and thus is distressed by the coming requirement that crossing the border into Mexico will require a passport--and who, it must be said, as a result of his two years living in Mexico grew to have enormous respect for people willing to risk what they risk both at the border and in the States in order to earn what they earn on behalf of their families; as one who believes it isn't a bad idea to keep closer track of people who enter into this country with visas but who also thinks that the annual number of visas available to farm and manual laborers is ridiculously small; as one who believes that all people in this country, citizens and migrants and people with visas, should obey the laws of this country but who also thinks that some people have weird definitions for the word amnesty (especially within the context of the proposed bill's requirements for those presently here illegally who want to return here legally) not to mention laughably unrealistic ideas--if they even have ideas--on what to do instead with those people currently here illegally; as one, finally, who thinks employers can and should follow the law when hiring but who also accepts as a given that we owe much of our prosperity as a nation not to Wall Street or our education but to the simple fact that our fields and construction sites and restaurants and yards and houses and office buildings are filled with people (many of them here illegally, yes) doing work that the vast, vast majority of us, to put it euphemistically, have decided, for whatever reason, to opt out of. Sure--speaking within the context of the law, we owe the lawbreaker nothing. Speaking within another context, though, we owe these people far more--as Americans at least, if not as human beings, and that is something that the debate as currently configured seems not to take into account. In short: If you were to ask me what I think about immigration policy, I'd have to say, "It's complicated."

Enough of that. (The above is one of those instances where I wish that there were a footnote hack for Blogger.)

Here's why I originally had thought in the past about writing a post on current immigration debates: In all the talk about "securing our borders," the only border anyone seems intent on securing is our southern border. The fear expressed is that terrorists could slip in from the south. Without at all discounting that possibility, and admitting the possibility that I might be wrong, I don't recall a single publicized incident in which a suspected terrorist had entered or was caught attempting to enter from Mexico. All the instances I can think of involve people being caught at the Canadian border or people with visas that had expired. The border with Canada is almost twice as long as that with Mexico; our ports remain without mandated scanning of containers for radiation because of pressure from retailers like Wal-Mart . . . and it's only because we're speaking of borders here that I'm not taking up the issue of our still-unprotected chemical plants and refineries. But you get the point: We have more than one border, but only one of them seems to merit militarization on a scale approaching that of a border shared by enemy states.

I know the answer: The southern border is the one we have the most "problems" with. I am not blind to many of those problems, chief among them the drug trade and the trafficking in human lives that current immigration policy is largely responsible for. But there are those, as we know, who engage in these debate about secure borders who don't mention the drug trade (which perpetrates far more collective terror and violence in this country than terrorists so far have). Their fear is of a sort of cultural terrorism: their sense that immigrants from Latin America seem not to want to assimilate, as usually symbolized by learning English; instead, these people fear, we feel compelled to assimilate to accommodate them and thus risk losing our national identity. Whatever that's supposed to mean--and as if I didn't know.

It is an old, old and not at all flattering thread of our history, this outsized fear of (usually) dark-skinned peoples who don't share "our values." Never mind that no statistical data shows that Hispanics are less likely to assimilate than immigrants of other ethnicities, and never mind that for every anecdote offered of people taking offense that the person they're speaking to doesn't speak Spanish, I can offer one of a first-generation Hispanic-American slightly embarrassed to acknowledge that s/he speaks almost no Spanish--or, for that matter, stories of American tourists in Mexico angry that the people they're dealing with don't speak English. Never mind all that. What about our fear?

Here, unfortunately, is where we find Christianists aiding and abetting this fear.

Via Glenn Greenwald and Crooked Timber, I learned of some blogger reaction to this Pew Foundation survey of Muslims in the U.S. and the extent to which they (Muslims) feel assimilated in this country. I gather from Greenwald that these other bloggers didn't note the study's title or opening paragraph, or, for that matter, the very good news the survey reveals regarding American Muslims' sense of their economic stability, of the status of women, and their concern regarding terrorism; what they appear to have focused on was that 48% of those surveyed thought of themselves as "Muslim" first; 28% thought of themselves as "American" first; 18% answered "both;" 7% responded with "Don't know." Curiously, as John Quiggen notes in the Crooked Timber post,

By contrast, for self-described US Christians, the results were 48 per cent for American first, and only 42 per cent for Christian first, with 7 per cent saying “Both” and 3 per cent Don’t Know.

Quiggen, following Galatians 3:28, makes the obvious point: Shouldn't all Christians identify themselves, a priori, as Christians? Greenwald's post, via links to and comments on some recent news items, says that we all should have reason to fear certain people who identify themselves as Christians, and for the same reason we fear certain people who identify themselves as Muslims . . . yet, as he notes, we didn't hear much about the former from a certain realm of the blogosphere because they weren't identified as being Muslims. And, even though it is sickening to ponder for any length of time, no Christian will want to miss Greenwald's discussion of the results of a 2005 survey on Catholic and Protestant attitudes on torture--especially as compared to the population as a whole.

All this, this conflation/confusing of religion with national identity, which apparently is okay when Christian Americans (or is it American Christians?) somehow leads certain of us to affirm behavior--justified to us as being done on our behalf, no less--that we once loudly condemned in other nations but now, of course, can say nothing about (the proper response to the One-Drop Rule is, of course, "that's the pot calling the kettle black"). So now, having lost the moral high ground--and, moreover, treated to the sorry spectacle of national leaders who induce us to act out of fear rather than out of the courage of our convictions as a nation--we have no choice but to act out of fear. Brown-skinned people from the south scare us because, well, we're afraid of ALL brown-skinned people . . . especially really religious brown-skinned people. 'Cause, you know, religion can make you nuts. Unless of course you're a Protestant.

All this is not merely angering. It is also saddening and, frankly, embarrassing. It is cowering, it is living in fear, and it is borne not of an affirming assertion of will but a loss of secular and spiritual faith. Nations and religions must by definition have identities, no question. But the great strength of this nation has been precisely its openness and generosity; as for Christianity, its downfall throughout history is when it allies itself too closely with secular entities. It suffers as an institution; more crucially, though, it loses its moral authority. In extreme cases, it can make some of us consider trying to pass for secular when socially convenient. But hey: if the Church decides to be in favor of, say, torture, I figure it's decided to pass for something far more perverse than "secular."

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