The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,68

the “talks” he and Huck have, long sweet talks we are not privy to. What did you talk about, Huck?). What should solicit our attention is not what Jim seems, but what Twain, Huck, and especially Tom need from him. Huckleberry Finn may indeed be “great,” because in its structure, in what hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.

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My suggestion that Africanism has come to have a metaphysical necessity should in no way be understood to imply that it has lost its ideological one. There is still much ill-gotten gain to reap from rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of inferiority and the ranking of differences. There is still much national solace in continuing dreams of democratic egalitarianism to be gained by hiding class conflict, rage, and impotence in figurations of race. And there is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminiscences of “individualism” and “freedom” if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite. “Individualism” is foregrounded and believed in when its background is stereotyped, enforced dependency. “Freedom” (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply cheek by jowl with the bound and the unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced. The ideological dependence on racialism is intact.

Surely, it will be said, white Americans have considered questions of morality and ethics, the supremacy of mind and the vulnerability of body, the blessings and liabilities of progress and modernity, without reference to the situation of its black population. Where, it will be asked, does one find the record that such a referent was part of these deliberations?

My answer to this question is another one: In what public discourse can the reference to black people be said not to exist? It is there in every moment of the nation’s mightiest struggles. The presence of black people not only lies behind the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, and the illiterate. In the construction of a free and public school system, in the balancing of representation in legislative bodies, in jurisprudence and the legal definitions of justice. In theological discourse, in the memoranda of banking houses, in the concept of manifest destiny and the narrative that accompanies the initiation of every immigrant into the community of American citizenship.

The literature of the United States, like its history, illustrates and represents the transformations of biological, ideological, and metaphysical concepts of racial differences. But literature has an additional concern and subject matter: the private imagination interacting with the external world it inhabits. Literature redistributes and mutates in figurative language the social conventions of Africanism. In minstrelsy, a layer of blackness applied to a white face released it from law. Just as entertainers, through blackface, could render permissible topics that would otherwise have been taboo, so American writers have been able to employ an imagined Africanistic persona to articulate and imaginatively act out the forbidden in American culture.

Encoded or implicit, indirect or overt, the linguistic responses to an Africanistic presence complicate the texts, sometimes contradicting them entirely. They can serve as allegorical fodder for the contemplation of Eden, expulsion, and the availability of grace. They provide paradox, ambiguity; they reveal omissions, repetitions, disruptions, polarities, reifications, violence. In other words, they give the texts a deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly presented to us. It would be a pity if criticism of this literature continued to shellac these texts, immobilizing their complexities and power beneath its tight, reflecting surface. It would be a pity if the criticism remained too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.

Unspeakable Things Unspoken

The Afro-American Presence in American Literature

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I planned to call this paper “Canon Fodder,” because the terms put me in mind of a kind of trained muscular response that appears to be on display in some areas of the recent canon debate. Also I liked the clash and swirl of those two words. At first they reminded me of that host of young men—black or “ethnics” or poor or working class—who left high school for the war in Vietnam and were perceived by war resisters as “fodder.” Indeed many of those who went, as well as those who returned, were treated as