Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery 0190642793, 9780190642792

Citation preview

 

Untimely Democracy

 

 

Untimely Democracy The Politics of Progress after Slavery

G R E G O RY   L A S K I

1

 

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Laski, Gregory, author. Title: Untimely democracy : the politics of progress after slavery / Gregory Laski. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017017170 | ISBN 9780190642792 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190871369 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. | Progress in literature. | Democracy in literature. | Slavery in literature. | African Americans in literature. Classification: LCC PS153.N5 L38 2017 | DDC 810.9/896073—dc13 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017170 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

 

For my parents

 

 

CONTENTS

List of Figures    ix Acknowledgments   xi

Introduction: Democracy’s Progress    1 1. On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-​Past: Reading Thomas Jefferson and W. E. B. Du Bois in the Times of Slavery and Freedom    29 2. Narrating the Present-​Past in Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times   62 3. Making Reparation; or, How to Count the Wrongs of Slavery    93 4. Failed Futures: Of Prophecy and Pessimism at the Nadir    137 5. Pauline E. Hopkins’s Untimely Democracy: Stasis, Agitation, Agency   161 Epilogue: Democracy’s Plunges    190 Notes   213 Index   259

vii

 

 

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 2.1. 2.2. 3.1.

3.2.

3.3. 3.4. 3.5.

Initial entries in Thomas Jefferson’s “chronological catalogue,” Notes on the State of Virginia, London edition (1787)  48 Final entries in Thomas Jefferson’s “chronological catalogue,” Notes on the State of Virginia, London edition (1787)  49 “The After-​Thought,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, first edition, published by A. C. McClurg & Co., April 18, 1903  59 “The After-​Thought,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’s manuscript of The Souls of Black Folk  60 Headline, “Frederick Douglass at His Old Home,” Baltimore Sun, June 19, 1877  66 “An Insulted City,” Washington National Republican, May 12, 1877  77 Image of slave in chains appears in Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” Being an Appeal in Behalf of Men Released from Slavery, A Plea for American Freedmen and a Rational Proposition to Grant Pensions to Persons of Color Emancipated from Slavery (1890)  103 Cover, Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” Being an Appeal in Behalf of Men Released from Slavery, A Plea for American Freedmen and a Rational Proposition to Grant Pensions to Persons of Color Emancipated from Slavery (1891)  106 Circular, “National Ex-​Slave Convention,” Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (1899)  110 T. Starr Murfree, “Please Listen to My Plea,” Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (no date)  112 Asher B. Durand, after John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence (engraving, 1823)  122

ix

 

x

E.1.

E.2.

E.3.

E.4. E.5.

List o f Fig ure s

The emcee of The New Millennium Minstrel Show, Honeycutt (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), performs in blackface as Abraham Lincoln; in this frame, he leans back as he declares, “This is the new millennium!” Bamboozled (2000), dir. Spike Lee.  191 Having shed his usual costume, Manray (Savion Glover) appears on the stage of The New Millennium Minstrel Show; he recreates the fall he performed in the pilot episode. Bamboozled (2000), dir. Spike Lee.  198 Manray (Savion Glover), in costume as Mantan, in the pilot of The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Bamboozled (2000), dir. Spike Lee  198 Ralph Ellison, manuscript of Invisible Man  205 Ralph Ellison, manuscript of Invisible Man  206

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been looking forward to composing these acknowledgments for a long time, not simply because writing them would signal one of the final stages of producing this book, but also, and more important, because doing so would allow me to recognize the people and institutions who have supported and nurtured this project—​indeed, enabled its existence—​across many years. First thanks go to the English Department at Northwestern University, where the ideas for this book were formed and cultivated. It is hard for me to imagine that a warmer, more intellectually robust graduate program exists anywhere else. Embodying this culture, Julia Stern offered a model of the joys of scholarly life that continues to inspire and guide. Always attentive to the crucial human dimensions of the work of teaching and research, she has generously shared wisdom that I am only now beginning to grasp. Charles W. Mills welcomed me into his graduate seminar on race and philosophy and then agreed to join my committee, enriching my thinking at every turn. I am grateful to him for that and for his continued encouragement. Ivy Wilson and Betsy Erkkilä saw the ways that my argument could take shape as a book well before I did. I hope that I have realized some of that vision here. So many others from Northwestern contributed to this project and my development—​both while I was a graduate student and (in ways amazing to me) long after. For imparting crucial lessons about what it means to be a scholar and teacher, I thank Jules Law, Wendy Wall, Susie Phillips, Carl Smith, Jay Grossman, and especially Bob Gundlach. Reginald Gibbons and Sara Monoson indulged my dabbling in Greek, and Laurie Shannon and Regina Schwartz helped me to articulate the critical edge of my ideas. Special thanks go to John Alba Cutler, who graciously answered multiple queries about the proposal and submission process, giving me confidence all the way. Nick Davis did the same, sharing his genius about Bamboozled and the world of film generally. And Sharon P. Holland, xi

 

xii

Ack nowl edg ments

whose work I admired long before I enrolled in her critical race theory seminar, teaches me still. The graduate students with whom I  trained define collegiality. I  am so grateful for the continued friendship of Wanalee Romero, Carissa Harris, and Melissa Rauterkus, my intellectual coconspirator. Katy Chiles recruited me to Northwestern many years ago and answered questions about early American racial formation as my work on this book came to a close. Wendy Roberts, Jackie Hendricks, Michael Slater, Carrie Pena, Hugh McIntosh, Laura Passin, Vanessa Corredera, Jason Malikow, Nathan Leahy, Rachel Blumenthal, Raashi Rastogi, Whitney Taylor, Eric Hengstebeck, Nathan Mead, and many others, including all the members of both of my cohorts, made my years in Evanston a pleasure. Rickey Fayne introduced me to the concepts at the center of my work on Charles W. Chesnutt and Sutton E. Griggs. A brilliant reader and great friend, Sarah Turner Lahey has exerted a singular influence on this project. Across every draft, she gave me just the feedback I needed and motivated me to move on to the next stage. Beyond Northwestern, manifold individuals and institutions have helped me bring this book to completion. In this regard, I  must begin with the Civil War Caucus of the Midwest Modern Language Association. Led by the remarkable Kathleen Diffley, the caucus stands as the epitome of intellectual community, reminding me why I  wanted to do this sort of work in the first place. Betsy Duquette offered comments that provoked my thinking and has been a marvelous mentor and friend. I thank Cody Marrs for his enlivening example and sound advice. Chris Hager did a wonderful reading of an early version of my book proposal, giving me the language to frame my argument. Jeffrey Insko and Christopher Hanlon are some of the best people in the profession: thanks to Jeff for offering excellent feedback on a draft of the Introduction and to Chris for helping me navigate the publishing process. Thanks, too, to Jane Schultz, Coleman Hutchison, John Barnard, Justine Murison, Derrick Spires, and Ben Fagan, and to Julia Stern for bringing me into the fold in the first place. For their useful suggestions and kind words, I  am grateful to the leaders and participants of the other conferences at which I  presented portions of this book:  C19:  The Society of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists (especially Francesca Sawaya, Ken Warren, M.  Giulia Fabi, Caroline Gebhard, and Tess Chakkalakal); the Modern Language Association; the Newberry Library Seminar in Early American History and Culture (especially Marcy Dinius); the 2016 Ralph Ellison Seminar at the Library of Congress (especially Alex Corey, Adam Bradley, Grant Shreve, Michael Hill, and Lena Hill); the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College (especially Soyica Diggs Colbert, Brian Hochman, Hamilton Carroll, Garrett Morrison, and Mary

 

Ack nowl edg ment s

xiii

Ganster); and the American Literature Association (especially Ben Railton, Melissa Adams-​Campbell, and Sarah Wagner-​McCoy). Many individuals have devoted their time to helping me grow as a scholar in more informal ways. Three deserve special mention. Soyica Diggs Colbert, my brilliant seminar leader at FASI, has influenced my thinking so much over the years and has remained a steadfast supporter of my work. She volunteered to read the entire manuscript at a very busy time and, as usual, helped me to articulate my ideas in the best way possible. Since our first meeting at Mt. Everest (in Evanston, IL), Russ Castronovo has been an incredible mentor: he has read drafts, suggested sources, and given sage advice—​always with great care and always seemingly without effort. He is who I want to be when I grow up. Chris Freeburg’s generosity is astounding. I may have sent him every iteration of my proposal (there were many), and his quick, keen, and cheerful comments helped me to clarify my claims and aims. My thanks to you all. Early on, Eric Gardner and John Ernest gave me valuable ideas and urged me to persevere, as did Dana Nelson. Kyla Tompkins entreated me to think anew about my archive. Dom Mastroianni’s trenchant observations helped me to refine the keywords of my argument, and Marcy Dinius’s support enabled me to craft my initial thoughts on Thomas Jefferson and W. E. B. Du Bois into something more. Michael Drexler’s remarks on a later draft of that chapter informed my revisions of the whole manuscript. Francesca Sawaya encouraged me to consider including Chesnutt and Griggs, and then helped me to make sense of these figures. I have learned about Griggs in particular from Andreá Williams. Wilson Brissett enabled me to re-​envision my chapter on redress; I thank him for that and for always affirming my belief that teaching and research are necessarily linked. Brian Hochman shared incisive comments on my Introduction as well as wisdom about the publishing process. And Alex Corey, Barbara Foley, and Grant Shreve offered timely and transformative insights about Ralph Ellison. I have been fortunate to study alongside many great instructors across my educational career. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, Glenn Hendler and Sandra Gustafson introduced me to nineteenth-​century America. Sandra has remained a vital interlocutor; her interventions made this project better than it otherwise would have been. I am grateful, too, for the example of Toni Irving, Romana Huk, Steve Tomasula, Kremena Todorova, and Sean Walsh. I have no doubt that some of my first English teachers—​Shirley Stevens, Theresa Schroth, Linda Zipparo, and Rita Hoepp—​led me down this path. Staff members at multiple libraries and scholarly institutions have facilitated my research on this book. At the Library of Congress, Eric Frazier, Maphon Ashmon, Arlene Balkansky, Amber Paranick, Patrick Kerwin, and Chamisa Redmond require recognition. I also happily acknowledge the staff at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia; the

 

xiv

Ack nowl edg ments

Moorland-​Spingarn Research Center at Howard University (especially Joellen El Bashir); the Newberry Library (especially Diane Dillon); the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (especially Jeremy Smith); and the National Archives. I am grateful, too, for the work of Kelly Merriam. Portions of this book first appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists, which is the official publication of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-​ Century Americanists, and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. The University of Pennsylvania Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, respectively, have granted permission to reprint. Thanks as well to Dana Nelson and Chris Castiglia, who, as co-​editors of J19, have supported my scholarship, and to one of the journal’s anonymous reviewers, whose comments on my article on Stephen Crane provided a plan for revision that reached far beyond that forum. The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust has allowed me to reproduce unpublished materials from the Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress; I thank John Callahan for his assistance in coordinating this arrangement. And I acknowledge the David Graham Du Bois Trust for permission to draw from the manuscripts of W. E. B. Du Bois. For making this book a material reality, I first have to thank Keidrick Roy, whose talents are many and whose intellectual enthusiasm is inspiring. My gratitude also goes to Sam Sloan and Tim Thornburg for their eagle eyes, and to all the students in my classes over the years, especially those in recent seminars on Invisible Man and racial representation. As department chairs, Kathleen Harrington believed from the very beginning, and Candice Pipes encouraged my scholarly pursuits. Thanks to them both and to my colleagues for their excitement and interest. I feel fortunate to have Oxford University Press as my publisher. Brendan O’Neill had faith in this project’s potential and shepherded the manuscript through the evaluation process with characteristic good humor and efficiency. To Daylanne English and the anonymous reviewer for the Press: countless thanks for your engaged and affirming reading of my manuscript—​your specific suggestions made this book better. My gratitude to Suzanne Ryan, Sarah Pirovitz, Alexa Marcon, and Abigail Johnson for gracefully guiding me through the final phases of the publishing process; to Henry Southgate for copyediting the manuscript; and to Shalini Balakrishnan for managing production. And thank you to Jessica Hinds-​Bond, who not only created the index but taught me much about the world of books. Friends from various places and stages of my life cheered me on as I wrote. The futon at the residence of Robyn Russo (and now Javier Gonzalez-​Castillo, too) facilitated annual trips to Washington, DC, archives. I am grateful to Robyn for that, but even more for her friendship. Sarah Daly, Greg Salzler, Lindsay Clark, Walt Donat, Mike Delaney, Tim Stonelake, Katie Plichta, Laura Davies,

 

Ack nowl edg ment s

xv

Ricky Leal, and Jon Kuzma expressed support and created important diversions as well: thanks to all of you. My friend Beau Berman helped me to perfect my pitch, and Adela Penagos, former teacher and trusted adviser, nudged me to completion. Kevin Brezler, my collaborator from the nonprofit sector, always reminds me of the important continuities and discontinuities between that world and the one I currently inhabit. I thank him for that, and I recognize all the students and staff of Summerbridge Pittsburgh who have left such a mark on me, intellectually and personally. My appreciation goes also to Steve Carter, cross-​ town Americanist; Emily Bloom and Dustin Stewart, whose time in Colorado Springs was too short; and Elizabeth Coggins, my Democratic Dialogue Project co-​founder. Finally, I  express my deepest gratitude to my parents, Henry Laski Jr. and Janice Laski, who have supported my education in every way and celebrated with me as I reached milestones they never could have imagined for themselves. With love, they have given me rides to libraries, fed me as I wrote, and encouraged me to finish. To my father, who always said yes to requests to pick up a book as he left the office, and to my mother, who read to me as a child, even when she was exhausted from long days of work: thank you for making this possible.

 

 

Introduction Democracy’s Progress The abolition of Slavery, and the extirpation of the Slaveholding Class, (cut out and thrown away like a tumor by surgical operation,) makes incomparably the longest advance for Radical Democracy, utterly removing its only really dangerous impediment, and insuring its progress in the United States—​and thence, of course, over the world. —​Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871) Democracy is a function of time. —​Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future (2006)

Amid what would prove to be the short-​lived project of Reconstruction, Walt Whitman offered a characteristically capacious account of the cultural and political form that concerned him across his career. If in Leaves of Grass (1855) Whitman gives “the sign of democracy,” then in Democratic Vistas (1871) he indexes democracy’s temporal direction. Associating this system with a forward-​ looking temporality and moribund aristocratic traditions with a sustained backward glance (“to lean back and monarchize, or to look forward and democratize”), Whitman declares that “the only large and satisfactory justification of ” democracy—​which he considers a “convertible” term for “America”—​“resides in the future.”1 The central project of Democratic Vistas is to call for a literature that is capable of bringing this future into being. Insisting that democracy cannot be “held together merely by political means,” legislation and elections (9), Whitman describes the sort of aesthetic production that would undergird this political structure as “bold, modern, and all-​surrounding and kosmical” as America (58). He continues, “It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past” (59). If the “bend” in that last sentence seems to allow for a forceful turning away from the past, as if a prospective temporal position must be maintained even by a kind of violence, it is because the stakes of this posture are not insignificant. For Whitman’s primary anxiety in Democratic Vistas is the fragile status—​racially, economically, culturally, and regionally—​of the newly 1

 

2

Int roduc tion

reunited United States; as he explains, “the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me” (10). Understood against this backdrop, Whitman’s appeal for a national literature is inextricable from this urgent, but still unanswered, need. It is this unwritten corpus that Whitman, in a partly hopeful, partly anxious note, terms one of the “immensest results of the War” that is “doubtless waiting yet unformed, in the future” (82). As this confession makes clear, the recent past that constitutes the political present of Whitman’s essay is the legacy of the “Secession war” (19), whose carnage the author witnessed firsthand, and whose political reverberations were alive in the nation’s capital, where he was living as he prepared Democratic Vistas. Published on the heels of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the pamphlet began as a response to Thomas Carlyle’s “Shooting Niagara—​And After?,” an antidemocratic screed that the New York Tribune reprinted in August 1867. Carlyle took as his primary target Benjamin Disraeli’s 1867 Reform Act, which proposed the extension of the franchise to members of the working class, but he tendered the United States as a cautionary tale against such democratic expansion: “three million Blacks, men and brothers (of a sort), are completely ‘emancipated;’ launched into the career of improvement—​likely to be ‘improved off the face of the earth’ in a generation or two!”2 Though his own attitude about black voting rights was mixed at best, Whitman rebuts Carlyle’s position in one of his notes, where he declares, “I favor the widest opening of the doors” (83), and again in a poignantly prophetic passage in the essay proper, where he asserts that one of the greatest “dangers to a Nation” consists in “having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—​they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account” (25). And yet, beyond these excerpts, which themselves are only elliptically about racial equality, Democratic Vistas never directly engages the contexts of slavery and its afterlife: the struggle for African American citizenship and political access, lynching and disenfranchisement. This silence stands as the animating tension of Democratic Vistas.3 How could the so-​called poet of American democracy publish such a document when and where he did, and yet not represent this reality? Scholars have long labored over this question. Some understand the omission as bespeaking Whitman’s inability to consider more troubling political problems—​his tendency to relegate them to a space outside the nation or to a future where they already are resolved—​or his adherence, in varying degrees, to the normative white supremacy of the nineteenth century. A more sanguine position understands Whitman’s approach as a rhetorical strategy that allows him to attend to concerns about black citizenship while also enabling him to support the work of sectional reconciliation.4

 

Int roduc tion

3

But if we consider this problem outside the immediate precincts of Whitman’s career, we find that this document offers a compelling meditation—​a metacritical vista, if you will—​on the defining temporal dimension of American democracy generally. That is, if Whitman cannot seem to find a place for the legacy of slavery in this political system except as a “dangerous impediment” to “progress” heroically excised (82), then his tract simply gives voice to a constitutive feature of the standard narrative of democracy. From Thomas Jefferson’s colonial America to Whitman’s nineteenth century to our twenty-​first-​century present, the story we tell about this political form places its promise in a future that is necessarily divorced from the problematic (and often still-​quite-​present) past of racial bondage. According to this tradition, such a history, and the threat of stasis that attends it, must be relegated to a fixed past in order to enable the possibility of progress to emerge as a possibility at all.5 Speaking nine years later, and nearly two decades after the formal abolition of black bondage, Frederick Douglass revealed—​by virtue of his attempt to unsettle it—​the special power that this narrative held in the postbellum United States. “No man can tell just when” the “foul spirit” of slavery “departed from our land, if, indeed, it has yet departed,” he declared in an 1880 lecture. With its turn to spectral rhetoric, Douglass’s statement signifies the difficulty of articulating the persistence of a past that by all official legal and political accounts had ended and yet nonetheless made itself felt to black Americans in very real forms. Implied within this problem is another, one that Whitman’s elision of race makes it unnecessary for him to engage. How to confront the persistence of slavery’s “foul spirit,” to underscore the haunting continuities between the epochs of bondage and freedom, without forsaking hope for what Douglass in the same address called a “better day”?6 Meditating on these questions with remarkable insight and imaginative acuity in the aftermath of Reconstruction, this study’s featured figures—​Douglass, Stephen Crane, Callie House, W.  E. B.  Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, and Pauline E. Hopkins—​produced a body of work that responds to Whitman’s call. But while they affirmed the poet’s sense of the necessary connections between the aesthetic and political dimensions of American democracy, they issued an answer that fundamentally altered the temporal premises underlying his vision. Reading this writing as political theory in narrative form, Untimely Democracy finds in their representations of the living legacy of bondage a rethinking of the relationship between temporality and political possibility that challenges the aspirations informing some of our fundamental assumptions about this system: what a desire for “progress” enables and forecloses, and how we recognize and achieve it. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Jefferson to Barack Obama posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the vitality of this political form. Considered against this account, Hopkins’s

 

4

Int roduc tion

elision of the difference between an act of lynching after 1865 and the violence visited upon black bodies under chattel slavery in her novel Contending Forces (1900) represents a problematic stasis that signals democracy’s arrested development. For such a formulation denies the temporal distinction that motivates political action. But for Hopkins and the other writers examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens often proceeds most potently, paradoxically, when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Rather than emphasizing the rupture and discontinuity that underwrite the promise of perfectibility in the standard story of democratic progress, these authors deploy the idea of a historical past that is neither left behind nor improved upon—​what Du Bois calls the “present-​past” of slavery—​as a critical resource in their struggle to realize racial justice.7 In what I term their vision of untimely democracy, these figures transform the pervasive imperative for “progress” (and cognate appeals to “future generations” or the desire for a “better future”) from an ambiguous and often-​misleading end into a difficult, deliberative process. Interrupting the steady forward movement that propels the desire for progress and has produced so many false starts, their narratives replace the future with the present-​past as the temporal horizon that guides political action. This untimely political principle accordingly constitutes a mode that is neither exclusively progressive nor exclusively static. Instead, it stands as a critical—​and always dynamic—​third way, a path to democratic promises that have been perpetually denied.8 For these writers, in short, the best (if not last) chance to realize democracy is to embrace the past that refuses to pass away.

Telling Time in the Nadir When Douglass doubted the disappearance of slavery’s “foul spirit,” he did not simply seek to draw attention to the continuities between racial slavery and antiblack discrimination that marked the present tense of his 1880 address. (As we will see, such a project was polemical enough in its own right.) Douglass’s declaration also, if more subtly, contested a growing consensus about the shape of time. The nineteenth century witnessed a fundamental shift in the conceptualization and experience of temporality. If the rhythms of daily life previously had been dictated primarily by nature and God, other, often mechanical sources of authority came to exert a world-​shaping force across this period.9 The commodification of clocks and timekeeping devices, which began to be mass-​produced in the antebellum United States and were prominently featured on public buildings by the close of the century, loom large in this historical narrative.10 Myriad technical innovations that emerged in the century’s final decades also played a

 

Int roduc tion

5

role: transportation technologies, revolutions in telecommunication, and studies of manufacturing efficiency, to offer just a few examples, effected transformations in quotidian habits and epistemic structures.11 Raising questions about who possessed “the right to give, extract, and keep time,” these developments had crucial implications for political power and national identity. By the turn of the century, participating in a shared sense of time constituted a mode of cultivating one’s status as a civilized being and as a citizen.12 The evolution of the nineteenth-​century railroad brings this temporal reorientation into sharp relief. One of the many practical and philosophical questions this form of transportation posed was the problem of just how to measure time given the different points at which trains stopped and the various regions they connected. As the railroad system developed in the middle decades of the century, both in miles of tracks and in the speed capacity of trains, time regulation became all the more necessary, not simply because of commercial and scheduling interests but also because of the desire to avert collisions and accidents. At first treated on a regional level by associations of railroad companies and allied organizations, the problem finally received a larger-​scale solution in 1883 when “Standard Railway Time” emerged. This defining event ordered differences in local times and worked in concert with scientific and governmental interests in standard time. Crucially, it gave temporality, like the movement of a railroad, a linear shape.13 To be sure, the time of trains was not greeted without protest, and other modes of measuring time persisted despite and as a consequence of such normalizing trends.14 Indeed, some of the most vibrant work in nineteenth-​century American studies in recent years has revealed the temporal heterogeneity that marks a period that generally has been characterized as one of mechanization and standardization.15 Even as a “national common time” had “redefined life in every quarter of the nation” by the close of the nineteenth century, Lloyd Pratt reminds us that other modes of keeping time existed. As Pratt explains in Archives of American Time, these alternative temporalities found particularly rich expression in the literature of the era, which did anything but accede to the shared experience of time as linear and progressive that Benedict Anderson has famously identified as one of the imaginative conditions of the modern nation.16 The texts I examine reveal a similar interest in contesting the conflation of linear, progressive temporality with national time and, perhaps more important, with the normative time of national politics. But where Pratt’s study, like much of this recent critical work, focuses almost exclusively on the first half of the nineteenth century, Untimely Democracy sets it sights on the postbellum period, concentrating most intensely on the turn into the twentieth century.17 Historians have understood this moment as one of stagnation and decay in civil rights and as an epoch marked by problematic uplift work in the service of racial

 

6

Int roduc tion

progress.18 In this study, I bring these two narratives together and seek to complicate our sense of this era by asking what the reality of postbellum political stagnation might do for democracy: that is, how it can function as an occasion for rethinking what progress means, and how best to reach this desired end. This was the question, almost of necessity, that writers and activists confronted in seeking to represent recurrence, repetition, and stasis as politically viable, and even valuable, temporal modes. For the linear, progressive time of the train may not have achieved complete sovereignty in the late nineteenth-​century landscape in which these figures lived and wrote, but it did accrue significant political, legal, and cultural force. As Democratic Vistas indicates, the process of Reconstruction played a decisive part in the consolidation and authorization of this temporality. David W. Blight has argued that the practical work of sectional reconciliation that emerged in the wake of America’s internecine conflict encouraged a forward-​looking posture that threatened to “bypass” the struggle for abolition and black rights that was “the heart of the Civil War’s meaning.”19 Indeed, even as the Radical Republican effort to integrate African Americans into the nation as citizens yielded material fruit in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the very passage of this legislation encouraged the desire for closure, serving, as it were, as signposts denoting the nation’s progress toward the moment in which it could declare itself postslavery. If the voting rights amendment, ratified in 1870, signaled the final stage of Reconstruction, then the defunding of the Freedmen’s Bureau two years later marked yet another step in bringing about this terminus.20 An official end to Reconstruction came in 1877, when the inauguration of the reconciliationist Republican Rutherford B. Hayes announced that the South would be left to its own devices in regard to racial politics.21 Explaining that the Civil War “arrested” the “material development” of the South, Hayes offered this prognosis in his inaugural address: “the fact is clear that in the progress of events the time has come” to allow the rebellious states to enjoy the “blessing of wise, honest, and peaceful local self-​government.” The new president represented this return to self-​rule as a political good that would benefit both blacks and whites, Northerners and Southerners. In his rendering, both would share a future in which the past of racial strife would be no more: Hayes pledged to “forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line and the distinction between North and South, to the end that we may have not merely a united North or a united South, but a united country.”22 With its focus on a common future that depended upon a common time, Hayes’s speech powerfully reveals the temporal imaginary that facilitated the work of reconciliation.23 For African Americans, however, this nation seemed anything but new, and the difference between North and South hardly remained insignificant. Indeed, what followed Hayes’s election was the epoch that the historian Rayford

 

Int roduc tion

7

W. Logan, writing in 1954, termed the “nadir” of race relations in the United States.24 Scholars have since debated whether Logan’s is the best designation for the period running roughly from the close of Reconstruction through the first years of the twentieth century. In their introduction to Post-​Bellum, Pre-​ Harlem, an important revisionary treatment of this period in literary history, Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard contend that the “nadir” is “misleading” insofar as it purports a “negative judgment” of this epoch, emphasizing “black victimization and de facto slavery” at the expense of “high aesthetic experimentation and political dynamism.”25 McCaskill and Gebhard’s call for a renewed appraisal of both the language we use to designate this era and the literary production accompanying it is as crucial now as it was when their volume was published more than a decade ago. And yet, it seems to me important to reflect on the ways “nadir” might remain suggestive, and even quite illuminating, for capturing the intersections of literature, race, and the politics of time in this period. Given its roots in the field of astronomy, where it signifies the point opposite the zenith, the spatial properties of “nadir” are immediately apparent.26 But the sense of degradation, decline, and stagnation that the term conjures also has significant implications for conceptions of time. Revealing in their historical survey of the “unsteady march” of racial progress that the Civil Rights–​ era maxim “Two steps forward, one step back” holds scholarly water, Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith explain that “the two steps forward have come in concentrated bursts of ten to fifteen years” (the immediate aftermath of the Civil War is one of their primary examples), while the “one step back … has repeatedly been a lengthy stride covering a period of sixty to seventy-​ five years.” Accordingly, “the normal experience of the typical black person in U.S. history has been to live in a time of stagnation and decline in progress toward racial equality.”27 In offering this sobering summa, Klinkner and Smith invoke “a time of stagnation” in the sociological and historical register; but this richly evocative turn of phrase also warrants a more figurative reading. Drawing out this metaphorical sense, I suggest in this study that we think of the “nadir” not so much as delimiting a historical period, but rather as a time of stagnation, that is, a temporality of stasis. It is precisely this static temporality that the figures in this book bring into striking relief in their elaboration of a positive, active politics in the time of stagnation that was the nadir.28 By doing so, they demonstrate how the sort of “negative” aspects of this historical period might facilitate and fuel the very literary dynamism that McCaskill and Gebhard underline as one of the defining yet undervalued features of the nadir. Where transportation technologies functioned to homogenize time as forward moving, the authors and activists whose writings I  examine foreground other developments that worked precisely in

 

8

Int roduc tion

the opposite direction. From the Supreme Court’s disavowal in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases of any continuities between antebellum slavery and postbellum discrimination to the dawn of de jure segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), African Americans felt time’s nonlinear tempos, even its apparent arrest, with a particular intensity. If we note that a railroad car was the iconic site at the center of this last decision, we can begin to appreciate the topography of the terrain Douglass navigated in his 1880 speech. In trying to make legible the foul spirit of slavery, he negotiated a complex political, cultural, and legal landscape that was marked, as it were, by a collision between the linear time of the train and the recursive time of slavery, whose force manifested itself in the form of disenfranchisement, lynching, and second-​class citizenship that made black Americans acutely aware of the nadir’s temporal depths.

The Paradoxical Politics of Racial Progress in the Postbellum United States But if the living past of slavery attuned black writers to what Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952) would call a “slightly different sense of time,” there was scarcely consensus about the political implications that various ways of imagining temporal (non)movement held for the struggle for racial justice.29 In fact, the agon between linear and recursive structures of time shaping the landscape of the post-​Reconstruction United States generally also marked discussions within African American intellectual and political circles. As the chapters that follow will make clear, these contexts reveal that the narrative labor of configuring the relationship among past, present, and future has a special political import, for the way we weave together these temporal domains in the stories we tell about democracy functions to inform political practices and ultimately to regulate political prospects.30 Perhaps nowhere did the various crosscurrents animating the intraracial politics of time come into relief more sharply than in the 1885 commencement exercises of Storer College, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Speaking to the graduates of one of the first institutions founded in the wake of the Civil War to educate freedmen, Alexander Crummell, an Episcopal minister and African American author, implored his audience to hear and heed “The Need of New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era.” As the almost-​obsessive repetition of “new” in its title suggests, Crummell’s address was an impassioned argument against what he characterized as “an irresistible tendency in the Negro mind in this land to dwell morbidly and absorbingly upon the servile past.”31 With the phrase “servile past,” Crummell captured at once the enforced servitude that was recent

 

Int roduc tion

9

history for black Americans and the destructive worldview that he believed a present meditation on it engendered. As the speaker went on to clarify, however, his aim was not to entreat his listeners to turn away entirely from the past of black bondage—​a directive that would have been difficult to heed given the college’s location at the site of John Brown’s antislavery crusade. Rather, Crummell drew a distinction between “memory” and “recollection,” defining the former as the “necessary and unavoidable entrance, storage and recurrence of facts and ideas” and the latter as “the actual seeking of the facts,” “the painstaking endeavor of the mind to bring them back again to consciousness.” Crummell concedes that the memory of slavery “cannot be faulted”—​though the address stops well short of endorsing its memorialization. Rather, in his formula, it is the “constant recollection” of this past that is utterly devastating. For such a posture represents a “bar to progress” and ultimately will “produce” a “fossilated state which is called ‘arrested development.’”32 Here, Crummell echoes President Hayes’s temporal logic and anticipates the answer to a question that Benjamin Harrison would pose in his 1889 inaugural address: “Shall the prejudices and paralysis of slavery continue to hang upon the skirts of progress?”33 Through the image of the fossil, Crummell makes what he sees as the stakes of this question all too clear: the undue dwelling on slavery will do nothing to propel the advancement of the next generation of black Americans, who, according to his idealized trajectory, “should be marching on to the broadest freedom of thought in a new and glorious present.”34 Instead, it will render them artifacts of the sort that were being studied in the emergent fields of geology and archaeology, which were using their findings to construct sequences of human cultures—​or worse yet, deem them a disappearing species, a prediction already being made in the discourse of scientific racism that held black Americans unfit for freedom.35 What precisely the graduates of Storer College were thinking as they listened to their guest speaker’s charge to locate their “duty” not in the past but in the present and future is impossible to know. But at least one attendee made his response abundantly clear. As Crummell recounts in his preface to the volume in which his address was collected, Frederick Douglass, who was present at the ceremony, expressed “his emphatic and most earnest protest”: “He took occasion, on the instant, to urge his hearers to a constant recollection of the slavery of their race and of the wrongs it had brought upon them.” Noting only that the race “cannot take a step forward for advancement, until we arrive at right convictions upon the point,” Crummell offers no further rejoinder, as if to suggest that the “right convictions” had already been set forth in the transcript of his 1885 address, which, in a violation of the very precepts of chronology he champions

 

10

Int roduc tion

in his speech, he positions as the first chapter of his book, in advance of lectures he gave on earlier dates.36 This dispute between these two leading intellectuals might be explained by any of the myriad factors distinguishing their biographies: Douglass, the former slave who had worked so tirelessly for the Union cause and who deeply wanted his fellow black Americans to enjoy the fruits of the abolitionist struggle, was at a significant remove from the freeborn, Cambridge-​educated Crummell, who during the Civil War engaged in efforts to enlist African Americans in his emigrationist cause.37 But perhaps what the commencement contretemps underscores most clearly is that if politics is inextricable from “struggles over the experience of time,” then the very horizon of the possible—​the meaning of political possibility—​itself emerges from contestations about configurations of temporality.38 That is, where Crummell ties racial progress to an embrace of the “new,” Douglass offers a different perspective on the relationship between time and the possible. His rejoinder to Crummell encourages us to wonder: in what ways might a commitment to progressive time fail to facilitate racial progress? To pose such a question in a study of the postemancipation prospects of democracy for black Americans might seem surprising, even specious. For if, as Robert Nisbet has argued in his monumental History of the Idea of Progress, “progress” has been the single most critical concept in “Western civilization for nearly three thousand years”—​functioning to make “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality” “cherished” ideals—​then African Americans would appear to offer the perfect case in point for this thesis. There arguably was nothing more precious, politically and psychologically, to those recently released from bondage than a belief in the potential for progress: a faith that historical change is accompanied by political, moral, and intellectual development, and that the past gives way to an improved present and better future.39 And yet, if this desire was shared by black leaders and ordinary citizens amid the distressing conditions of the nadir, there was much less consensus about how to achieve this progressive end or even about what “progress” meant and looked like.40 Precisely because of its wide appeal, in fact, “progress” was extraordinarily labile semantically—​and, as a consequence, politically charged. Possessing both secular and religious dimensions, it was deployed to underwrite key claims in discourses as varied as Darwinism, racial uplift, and Afrocentrism. And, of course, in the antebellum epoch, the rhetoric of “progress” was used to justify racial bondage itself.41 As a function of this range, invocations of the term hold an unexamined (and often perilous) conceptual privilege; “progress” seems to stand alone as a good idea, irrespective of its paths or ends.42 In his recent Omens of Adversity, David Scott offers a succinct summary of the history of time that elucidates this conflation. Scott explains that in the context of modernity, “temporality preeminently has been an experience of the unfolding

 

Int roduc tion

11

of historical time.” That is, in this worldview, “time” and “history” are both terminologically synonymous and conceptually consonant, and thus to measure time is to track historical change—​to follow a “linear, diachronically stretched-​out succession of cumulative instants, an endless chain of displacements of before and after.” Significantly, sequentiality here is not morally neutral; in deeming “succession” as “progressive,” modernity associates “change” with “improvement.”43 Scott’s account crucially demonstrates that the moral valuation that gives this concept a pass, as it were, rests on a particular temporal logic: the “progress” in progressive time describes a trajectory of forward movement that is also necessarily movement toward something better. The allure of this conflation between change and improvement was especially strong at the turn into the twentieth century, where declarations of racial progress underwrote a veritable cottage industry of books bearing titles such as Progress of a Race; or, the Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-​American (1898), A New Negro for a New Century (1900), and Evidences of Progress among Colored People (1905).44 The appeal that the Clark University professor W. H. Crogman and his co-​author, H. F. Kletzing, make in their Progress of a Race is instructive. “Compare, if you will, the condition of the Negro race half a century ago with that of today, and the most despondent must dismiss his fears and acknowledge the progress so marked,” the authors write in the opening assertion of their book’s penultimate chapter. Issuing equal parts invitation and command with this inaugural statement, Kletzing and Crogman go on to lead their reader through a comparative analysis of past and present: “Then the Negro was a piece of property; now he is an American citizen. Then chains and the lash and hounds were sending a constant terror to the heart of the poor slave; now the most humble of the race may claim the ballot and protection from wrongs under the law of the state.”45 Coming in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson, Kletzing and Crogman’s assertions in important ways are empirically false; accordingly, they might be understood as providing a salutary psychological balm or dismissed as deleterious. But more important than the question of accuracy is the way that this then/​now structure evinces a methodological sleight of hand that is a distinguishing feature of racial rhetoric in the United States, past and present.46 In using literal bondage as the point of comparison from which to measure progress, that is, Kletzing and Crogman guarantee all but one conclusion: the thesis of progress that they already indexed in the subtitle of their study, which announced the “Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-​American” from “the Bondage of Slavery” to “the Freedom of Citizenship.” To be sure, the “findings” of such studies constituted responses to claims that postbellum African Americans were regressing or were incapable of progress altogether outside the bonds of servitude. Hence, John Jones’s Some Foot-​Steps

 

12

Int roduc tion

of the Progress of the Colored Race (1899) includes a section that declares that “we have 123,675 /​Colored men in the United States who are skilled miners” and “we have 315 /​Colored persons in the United States up to May 13th, 1899, who are inventors of patents.”47 But for all their confident assertions of the progress already made and the progress to come (consider Jones’s use of the marker “up to”), what these studies also make clear is that to document the advancement of black Americans since slavery in such a way was not necessarily to track genuine change. To the contrary: declarations of the “end” of the era of slavery and announcements of a new future for the race often were facilitated by a disavowal of the dogged endurance of the past. Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901) can stand as case in point. Having traced not just a spatial trajectory of sociopolitical ascent but also a flight from the past of bondage, Washington concludes his autobiography by declaring that “there was never a time when I felt more hopeful for the race than I do at the present.” To sustain such a sanguine statement, however, Washington is forced to engage in an “epistemology of ignorance”: just before he offers his optimistic terminus, Washington explains away as “superficial and temporary signs” the lynching and mob violence that continued to plague black Americans at the time of his work’s publication.48 If Crummell associates racial advancement with a vigorous embrace of the present and future, we might say that, at least in this moment, Washington derives his hopefulness from viewing the present in its most narrow terms, dissevered from any relation to the painful past. As the above examples suggest, attending to the often-​divergent cultural and political projects that invocations of “progress” support is a vital task, and one that I pursue in this study through sustained close readings of a work’s often-​ idiosyncratic formal dimensions. This approach is worth underscoring, for the fiction on which I focus would not appear to recommend itself to this sort of method; in fact, with the exception of the work of Stephen Crane and perhaps Charles Chesnutt, the writings that form the literary archive of Untimely Democracy historically have been derided for their aesthetic deficiencies. As recent critics have demonstrated, however, such assessments often say more about the prejudices of regnant reading practices than about the works themselves, and ultimately betray an inability to account for the complexity that John Ernest has identified as the “principal dynamic” of this literary tradition.49 Joining these scholars, I emphasize that it is precisely through the act of parsing the premises underwriting what often is a text’s seemingly insignificant invocation of “progress” or its cognates that this era’s literature reveals itself as formally vibrant and politically incisive. Scarcely mere historical artifacts, these works are best understood as instances of activist art/​artistic activism that probe vital questions: “progress” in what sense? for whom? toward what better future?50 In short, what might appear as this corpus’s aesthetic defects—​strange narrative endings,

 

Int roduc tion

13

disconnected parts, wearying repetitions—​constitute the very features that make these texts so rewarding of close analysis and conceptually illuminating.51 What this approach enables us to see, finally, is that even as they often wrote against Washington, the African American figures explored in this study hardly are bereft of the energies underlying the positive posture that Up From Slavery parades. Rather, rejecting the temporal determinism that makes racial optimism and pessimism mutually exclusive positions, as ­chapter  4 will explore, they derive their hope from a fundamentally different reading of the relationship between past and present, and what this relationship portends for racial advancement. If the very idea of progress has been tied to a temporal logic in which historical change and improvement function synonymously, then we find in the literature of the nadir a reordering of these terms that points the way to a startlingly different account not just of what democratic progress might mean but also of what the narrative and political path toward this end might look like.

Untimely Democratic Hope Pauline E. Hopkins opens her debut novel, Contending Forces (1900), with an arresting assertion: “Let us compare the happenings of one hundred—​two hundred years ago, with those of today. The difference between then and now, if any there be, is so slight as to be scarcely worth mentioning.” Such a statement represents a radical revision to the thesis of Progress of a Race. Where Crogman and Kletzing support the claim in their study’s title by underscoring the difference between the past of slavery and the present of freedom, Hopkins offers a comparative analysis that yields an utterly different conclusion. Disallowing any distinction between “then” and “now,” she casts the racial violence and discrimination that marked the dawn of the twentieth century as the repetition of antebellum slavery—​or, as she puts it a sentence later, the past “duplicated” in the present.52 In delivering this pronouncement, Hopkins creates a crucial dissonance with the sort of temporal worldview expressed by Crogman, Kletzing, and Washington. As we shall see, in their narratives, Hopkins and her contemporaries do not simply violate Crummell’s prohibition on the “recollection” of servitude, for even as their unrelenting attention to racial bondage makes it impossible to forget the past of slavery, their texts are not primarily concerned with the work of memory—​in making “what is past present.”53 Instead, as the preface to Contending Forces suggests, the authors and activists treated in this project issue a more radical gesture. Refusing to represent the lynching and segregation of this period as new phenomena, they render postbellum oppression as a continuation of the racial degradation at the heart of chattel servitude—​what Du Bois, in

 

14

Int roduc tion

The Souls of Black Folk (1903), terms a “second slavery.”54 Accordingly, they collapse the very boundaries that would differentiate past and present in the first place. Their narratives thus forge a crucial connection between the work of representing the plight of black Americans and the political project of protesting and changing it. In this regard, the political force of their rhetoric is strong, to be sure. And yet, if we read Du Bois’s “second slavery” or Hopkins’s critique of chronology primarily as rhetorical flourishes, incitements intended to energize the flagging support of Northern whites, we run the risk of diminishing the conceptual power that these configurations hold.55 For with such phrases, these writers interrogate the function of “progress,” both as a rhetorical appeal and conceptual telos informing democracy and the possibilities that it might enable. Consequently, I treat them as political thinkers meditating in imaginative form on a problem that twenty-​first-​century accounts of democracy have yet to adequately theorize. Indeed, if Nisbet’s grand claim about the “idea of progress” rests on his assertion that this concept offers the “philosophy of history” that installs “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality” as significant political commitments, then these thinkers elaborate a definition of democracy in which this is not necessarily the case. Accordingly, the most radical edge of their vision lies in their attempt to imagine the values of liberty and equality in such a way that they are not underwritten by—​or realized via—​a progressive historical scheme.56 As ­chapter 3 discloses, this endeavor to conceive democracy outside the constraints of progressive time was engendered by the experience of the unfulfilled and the failed: the failure of emancipation to bring about genuine freedom, to be sure, but also the experience of failure that animated the political labor of Callie House, the former bondswoman who led one of the first large-​scale bids for reparations in the form of the ex-​slave pension movement. Agitating vigorously for her cause, House nonetheless insisted—​both for pragmatic and philosophical reasons—​that she made no promises to her supporters that the effort to redress slavery ever would be realized.57 Failure, in short, was built into her vision. The “failure to achieve progress” is “common enough in democratic experience,” argues Jeffrey Stout in his study Democracy and Tradition, but it “should not be allowed to sap democratic aspirations altogether.” As Stout has it, central to the idea of democratic hope is “not whether progress is being made or whether human beings will work it all out in the end” but rather the question of “whether a difference can be made.” He reminds us, “You are still making a difference when you are engaged in a successful holding action against forces that are conspiring to make things worse than they are. You are even making a difference when your actions simply keep things from worsening to the extent they would have worsened if you had not acted.”58 Stemming from his examination of the interrelated conceptions of racial identity and nationalism in twentieth-​century

 

Int roduc tion

15

black culture, Stout’s thesis usefully extricates rationales for political action from the teleological frames that so often accompany them. This move is one that House and Hopkins endorse. But in so doing, these figures also interrogate the very conception of “difference” on which Stout’s account turns. Stout grounds his elaboration of democratic hope in the possibility of making a difference, even if that difference is utterly imperceptible in the moment and leads to no apparent progress. By contrast, at the most startling points in their narratives, Douglass, Du Bois, Crane, Hopkins, and Chesnutt put pressure on the idea of temporal distinction that underwrites this sense of difference, if they do not jettison it altogether. As they stage the repetition of the past of slavery in the present tense of their postbellum narratives, it becomes difficult to discern where the past ends and the present begins. In the scene of the ex-​slave attending to the deathbed of his former master; in the recognition of putatively free black subjects as the bondsmen they never really were; in the protest of lynch law that appears indistinguishable from an abolitionist rally; and in the moment that the hoped-​for future fails to arrive, time seems to stand still. The potential for despair, both political and personal, that this sense of stagnation might engender always lingers in these tableaux, though, as we shall see, in some texts subtly and in others more overtly. But these scenes also register, and more powerfully, something akin to what Walter Benjamin would come to describe in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as the transformative potential of temporal arrest. Critiquing historical models that presume continual progress through “homogeneous, empty time”—​the kind of temporality that, as I have noted above, came to occupy an influential position at the close of Reconstruction—​Benjamin posits the subversive significance of conceptualizing a “present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.” In this model, time does not unfold in a chronological concatenation; instead, past and present constellate, revealing their resemblance in a “now” that is “shot through with chips of Messianic time.”59 It is this “stopped and yet energized temporality” that Benjamin associates with the sensibility of political revolutionaries, the “awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode.” Indeed, it is for this reason that revolutionary actors introduce new calendars, reordering the coordinates of time.60 Benjamin’s historical model has exerted a decisive influence on literary and cultural studies in recent years, with a number of scholars demonstrating its usefulness for thinking about questions of race in particular.61 But even as they affirm the way that progressive temporality can limit political possibility, the chapters that compose this book hardly function as case studies for the messianic time Benjamin describes.62 If in Benjamin’s account, the “time of the now” “comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment,” the static

 

16

Int roduc tion

temporality of slavery affords no such synoptic vista.63 In the moments of temporal standstill that punctuate and puncture their narratives, the future often remains recessed, if not entirely invisible. And yet, in refusing to represent a clear vision of a better future beyond their narrative present tense, these authors do not turn away from the prospect of a better day. Their collective refrain is hardly “no future.”64 In fact, for all their critiques of the failures of progressive time, the writers featured in the following pages never finally abandon the possibility of progress, nor do they necessarily discard the term “progress” itself.65 In Hopkins’s oeuvre, for example, distressing admissions that the “annihilation” of the race “sometimes seems very near” coexist with calls for African Americans to take their rightful place in the “march of human progress.”66 And while Douglass rejoiced in 1870 that with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment “at last, at last, the black man has a future,” less than twenty years hence, in an 1888 speech, he would declare that the “so-​ called emancipation” of the slave was a “stupendous fraud.”67 As I will argue in ­chapter 2, the separation between these statements shows that Douglass’s position on the politics of time was far from settled in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The contrast also indicates a crucial conceptual point about the political worldview this study develops more generally. Douglass’s and Hopkins’s declarations that the end of slavery is a fiction are not concessions to the prospect of an endless recurrence of the same about which nothing can be done; such passivity was anathema to them. Rather, in so stating, they invite us to see something other than paralysis in the “second slavery” of the nadir. By imagining the democratic possibilities that might emerge in moments of temporal stasis, they challenge the notion that “time never stands still in politics,” and the attendant sense that stasis is not a mode of time, much less a politically viable one.68 For these writers, in fact, it is precisely in those instances of stillness—​of progressive time’s arrested development—​that the prospect of transformation emerges most powerfully. In attending to textual examples when a future different from the past seems all but impossible, then, my aim is not so much to ignore those moments when these authors give voice to the linear, progressive temporality articulated by the likes of Washington and Crummell as it is to unravel the rich resources they offer for theorizing what Scott has called “political action in time: in failure and ruin as much as in success.”69 That is, for these figures, being “stuck” in the past of bondage made present is not a dead end but a crucial occasion to meditate on the course required to arrive at a different end—​what Sutton Griggs calls a “genuine democracy.”70 Appeals to the “future,” especially in the context of political argument, often presuppose the very idea of success that Douglass exclaimed in 1870 or Whitman in 1871: an improvement that is already secured, justice already done,

 

Int roduc tion

17

wrongs already redressed. The “future” invoked in this sense is one in which past problems no longer exist. As I show in ­chapter 4, Griggs found it vital to represent the prospect of “genuine democracy” even as he signaled the persistent past. And yet, Griggs nonetheless understood—​and Chesnutt even more so—​ that the problem with such a posture is that it misrecognizes, in Wendy Brown’s words, the “way in which the future” is “constrained, circumscribed, inscribed by the past.”71 At their most perceptive, the figures in Untimely Democracy are productively dubious about proclamations of a better future having (already) arrived. And even as they long for—​and seek through their works to realize—​ “genuine” freedom or “genuine” democracy, they are also always skeptical about just what protocols one might use to measure such a state, casting doubt on the wisdom suggesting how to secure progress toward such an end and how to recognize its arrival. “Progress” is the goal, but the term has a perpetual question mark accompanying it. In short, these writers refuse to accede to the promise of a corrected future that is impossibly disconnected from the past. Rather, for them, such a future will only ever be realized by agitating, perhaps endlessly, in the present, which for these thinkers often was utterly indistinguishable from the past—​and productively so. In their vision of untimely democracy, the prospect of a “new” future depends on recognizing and representing the violence and discrimination that marked the dawn of the twentieth century as what they were: the past of bondage repeated in the present.72 If we place this posture into conversation with Stout’s account of democratic hope, the paradoxical political potential of these scenes of stasis emerges more clearly. As I noted earlier, the model of hope that Stout articulates helpfully uncouples political action from any certain outcome, but his paradigm is not completely devoid of a telos. For at the outset of his elaboration he invokes what we might identify as a stock figure of conventional narratives of American democracy when he suggests that the obligation “to keep democratic hope alive” falls to “the next generation.”73 As the coming chapters will make clear, envisioning this political form outside the confines of such generational logic—​a logic that is inseparable from a linear, progressive temporality—​represents a formidable challenge, and one that the writers in this study do not always or consistently meet.74 But in those moments when the past of slavery brings the forward momentum of their narratives to a halt, these authors offer the conceptual contours, if not a fully fleshed-​out theory, of democracy that is strikingly untimely. In adopting the phrase “untimely” to describe their political vision, I mean to capture not simply these writers’ refusal to grant that slavery is no longer problematic for the present, but also what Nietzsche would term their capacity to act on their times by acting counter to their times.75 For in resisting the common-​sense notion that the forward movement of chronological time necessarily

 

18

Int roduc tion

signifies change, these authors endeavor to undo the seemingly insoluble link between progress and democracy. In the untimely vision they elaborate, the stasis engendered by slavery’s return in the form of Jim Crow disenfranchisement or violence does not portend arrested development but rather serves as a crucial resource for political struggle. If, for Stout, democratic hope depends upon the possibility of making a difference, even if that difference may be imperceptible, for the figures in this book the only prospect of realizing the promise of democracy—​which in the wake of emancipation was deferred once again—​lies in maintaining that, despite the forward movement of time, little has changed. From this perspective, sometimes the only hope is to compare the then of slavery and the now of freedom and to recognize no difference at all.

Prospects Establishing a foundation for this project, I  open with a chapter that constructs a conceptual grammar by pairing two of the most probing treatments of race, democracy, and temporality in the American tradition:  Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) and W.  E. B.  Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Jefferson’s vision of a polity that improves steadily through time rests on his principle of generational autonomy, the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit point for such a model: for Jefferson, blackness signifies a future endlessly haunted by bondage, and thus Africans can have no place in American democracy if this system is to unfold according to his linear trajectory of continual improvement. Jefferson’s future is Du Bois’s present, or what Souls terms the “present-​past.” With this phrase, Du Bois reorders linear time—​positioning the past after, rather than before, the present—​and insists on intergenerational responsibility as a crucial democratic value alongside equality and liberty. For Du Bois, the Freedmen’s Bureau functions as the material symbol of politics in the present-​past. While prominent members of Congress sought to delimit the duration of the institution (and thereby ensured its short life), Du Bois represents the bureau as a “permanent” organization, redefining emancipation as an ongoing, perhaps endless, process.76 And yet, even as he urges readers to assess the “Negro problem” with a temporal double consciousness that purposefully blurs past and present, Du Bois worries that emphasizing slavery’s seemingly eternal return might function not to reinvigorate democracy but rather to paralyze political action. While neither provides easy answers, then, Jefferson and Du Bois together articulate the stakes of the problem whose formal, philosophical, and political dimensions subsequent chapters take up in turn.

 

Int roduc tion

19

Moving to the late nineteenth-​century period at the heart of this book, c­ hapter  2 finds in Frederick Douglass’s final autobiography a case study for what it means to narrate the present-​past. Initially conceived as the last installment in the three-​book series chronicling his journey from fugitive to famous black citizen, the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892) enjoys neither the decisive transformation from slavery to manhood that results from Douglass’s confrontation with Edward Covey in his 1845 narrative nor the clear temporal division telegraphed in the title of his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom. Instead, this volume’s recursive trajectory points backward to servitude, bringing the author face to face with his former master. For nineteenth-​and twenty-​first-​ century readers alike, the tableau of the ex-​slave sharing a sentimental moment with the very man who sent him to Covey to be broken suggests that the radical abolitionist had become a reactionary. But in this chapter, I advance a different interpretation of the episode. By underscoring the elisions and omissions that distinguish this moment in Life and Times from contemporaneous news coverage of the event, and by deploying narrative theory to illuminate both accounts, I show that this encounter indexes a dilemma that troubles the formal structure not simply of Life and Times but of postbellum treatments of African American political progress generally: how does one chart the course of racial advancement while also signaling the incompletion of abolition? Tracing the continual additions to Life and Times—​published in 1881 and revised in 1882 and again a decade later—​I argue that this final work enacts in its form the challenge of fighting for black equality amid a political landscape that posed the forgetting of bondage as the condition for national reunion. In his final years, Douglass insisted that the harm of racial servitude could not be reduced to the physical abuse or economic deprivation visited upon a single generation. How then to explain what precisely was wrong with slavery in an attempt to “count” its legacy properly, as Du Bois would put it?77 Pursuing the philosophical implications of accounting for the afterlife of bondage in the postbellum period, ­chapter 3 trains its sights on the conflicting temporal frames deployed by authors and activists seeking redress. While there was brief national attention given to reparations in the years following the Civil War—​and even as agitation continued through the dawn of the twentieth century—​the project lost much of its official sanction after the collapse of Reconstruction. Indeed, by 1896, the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson would argue that servitude did not count at all in defining what constituted race-​based discrimination. The Plessy decision thus made it all the more crucial to clarify just what was wrong with slavery. It was precisely this question that narratives appearing in this moment took up: from Samuel Hall’s 47 Years a Slave (1912), to Callie House’s articulations of the practical and imaginative aims of the ex-​slave pension movement, to

 

20

Int roduc tion

Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898). Devoting significant attention to that last title, I argue that Crane’s novella offers the most incisive political-​philosophical exposition of what it would mean to “count” the legacy of racial servitude in the nineteenth-​century canon. In its conception of the fundamental injury of slavery as the degradation of blackness that survives abolition, Crane’s text links the plight of African Americans in the periods before and after legal emancipation. Significantly, it also highlights the crucial role that white Americans played in consolidating this wrong, not primarily in their official capacities as slaveholders but rather in the more banal forms of social nonrecognition that functioned to maintain the association between degradation and blackness following the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The Monster thus offers a powerful accounting of the cross-​generational and collective shame that was central both to the wrong of bondage and the afterlife of that injustice. In doing so, I demonstrate, it offers a way out of the problem of causality that confronts philosophical debates about making amends even today. At least in material terms, the history of the nineteenth-​century movement for reparations is a history that never came to be; it is a history of failure. Pursuing the philosophical aims of the previous chapter and returning to the political impasse explored by Jefferson and Du Bois, c­ hapter 4 prepares the way for this study’s terminus by inquiring into the political uses of the unfulfilled in the writings of Sutton E. Griggs and Charles W. Chesnutt. While both authors understood their literary careers as serving politically progressive ends, Chesnutt and Griggs deployed different formal strategies to navigate the deterministic discourses of “pessimism” and “optimism” that marked turn-​of-​the-​twentieth-​century debates about the future of the race. Whereas Griggs believed that bringing about a genuinely better future for black Americans required him to represent this future in the present, Chesnutt found a powerful posture in staging its failure in order, ultimately, to bring into being a future that might not fail. Accordingly, in The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), Chesnutt becomes a prophet of pessimism, a black writer who speaks hard truths about the nation’s repeated failures to approximate the democratic ideal. He thus anticipates one of the most vibrant discussions in twenty-​first-​ century critical race theory, namely, the debate between Afro-​pessimism and black optimism. Despite their points of divergence, both approaches consider the meaning of blackness in relationship to continuing histories of domination and exclusion and the aesthetic and political strategies that these histories might engender—​which is to say, the futures they might generate. While Chesnutt, especially in The Colonel’s Dream, hews to some of the crucial conceptual premises of Afro-​pessimism, he ultimately recalibrates the path this theoretical project offers for securing a more just future. By intensifying the pessimism in Afro-​pessimism, Chesnutt insists that forecasting the failed future was

 

Int roduc tion

21

a necessary condition for realizing any better tomorrow; his prophecies of pessimism are essential prerequisites for his optimism. In this, he clarifies, more than a century in advance, the stakes of and links between Afro-​pessimism and black optimism, revealing these methodologies not so much as opposites but as critical coproducers. Drawing together the aesthetic, political, and philosophical threads of the foregoing sections, I reveal in c­ hapter 5 how Pauline E. Hopkins transforms the porous boundary between slavery and freedom, so powerfully illuminated by Crane and Chesnutt, into the source of a paradoxical political hope—​indeed, as the best chance for realizing democracy. Announcing in the preface to Contending Forces that present problems such as rape and lynching constitute “duplications” of the past of bondage, Hopkins calls for a neo-​abolitionist crusade. Such a declaration would signal for Jefferson and Whitman, and even for Du Bois, the specter of stasis: an endless repetition of the same that portends democracy’s arrested development. In the recursive narrative structures and scenes of temporal arrest that characterize her fictional and journalistic oeuvre, however, Hopkins constructs a critical resource for the campaign to redress democracy’s failings. Interrogating the limits of liberal agency, she redefines scenes of slavery’s recurrence as a starting point for a politics that might realize progress precisely because it engenders an uncertainty about what, if anything, has changed. In pursuing Du Bois’s notion of the present-​past to its limit, and issuing a radical revision to the central tenet of Jeffersonian politics, Hopkins becomes this book’s theorist of untimely democracy par excellence. From her democratic vista, progress results not by breaking with the past but by embracing its persistence. Attending to the residues of postbellum racial politics in the contemporary moment, my study concludes with an Epilogue that places Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) into dialogue with the political thought of Ralph Ellison, whose landmark Invisible Man is the silent source for Lee’s film. At the center of both works is the image of a falling body, a trope that highlights the constitutive relationship between the present-​past of slavery and the possibility of achieving a more democratic future. But whereas Lee leaves us locked in the past of racial subjugation that his film’s treatment of blackface minstrelsy represents, Ellison returns to and revises Whitman’s vision to underscore the ways nonprogressive temporal models can facilitate political progress. Limning the energies of progress and regress, movement and stasis, through the nonteleological trajectory he imbues in his novel’s key terms, “plunge” and “fall,” Ellison posits the definitive democratic movement: to lean backward and forward, always keeping one’s vision oriented in both directions. As I  show, such an idea remains notably recessed in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama, who in his March 2008 “speech on race” launched himself on the path to become the nation’s first

 

22

Int roduc tion

black president by highlighting the crucial past of slavery and Jim Crow even as he disavowed the transformative potential of the stasis that was so central to the worldview of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—​a figure who reprised the radical temporal prospects articulated by the writers in this study.

Projects With this proleptic gesture, I want to communicate some of the methodological and conceptual premises underwriting my project and the archive it assembles. As the previous précis should make clear, it is to the voices of Douglass, Crane, Hopkins, Du Bois, Chesnutt, Griggs, and House that I endeavor to listen most intensely. Surely many others could claim a place in this conversation. For instance, Lucy Delaney and Frances E. W. Harper, whom I mention only briefly, might have played larger roles in my treatment of the discourse of reparations. Likewise, Mark Twain, whom I do not examine, certainly recommends himself given the poignant representation of the endurance of racial bondage in the final pages of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), where, thanks to Tom Sawyer’s quixotic design, Jim is forced to secure the freedom he technically already had. But whereas much has been written about race and post-​ Reconstruction politics in Twain, relatively little has been said about Crane on this score. And if Hopkins has come to occupy her rightful place in our scholarship and on our syllabi, she nonetheless remains someone we associate primarily with the sentimental and domestic; such rubrics are surely appropriate, but they have been applied in ways that needlessly keep this woman writer in Du Bois’s shadow as a political philosopher. All of this is to say, my emphases have been informed by a desire to recast our understanding of canonical authors and to articulate reasons for why we should continue thinking about quasi-​canonical ones. In adopting this approach, I  make a case for unanticipated pairings of figures like Crane and House, who shared a historical present tense—​and, in surprising ways, a temporal vision—​but whom literary history has treated as strangers, or Du Bois and Hopkins, about whom much has been said independently but whose political theories have not been understood together. Attempting to unravel these writers’ narratives in all their complexity, I  put their texts into conversation with a neglected turn-​of-​the-​century archive:  debates about racial “optimism” and “pessimism,” tracts on progress, postbellum slave narratives, and accounts of activist work in the ex-​slave pension movement. In one reading, then, my study finds in its focus on the final decades of the nineteenth century an expansive vista into the politics of time: how various configurations of the relationship among past, present, and future function to enable or foreclose certain political possibilities.

 

Int roduc tion

23

But Untimely Democracy also repeatedly exceeds its periodizing frame, by bringing together figures who are as far flung (in chronological time, at least) as Jefferson, Du Bois, and Lee, and by putting their vision into conversation with the insights of twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century political philosophy and critical race theory. This range is a function of the questions that drive the book’s conceptual trajectory. So too is my decision to devote some chapters to reading particular authors within their immediate historical contexts, while placing others across large stretches of time—​in contexts of a different historical kind. For while they manifest themselves with great political potency and clarity in the nadir, the concerns animating Untimely Democracy cannot be restricted to a given period. In this way, the works I examine betray the properties Anthony Reed ascribes to post-​1960s black experimental writing, which he studies in Freedom Time. As he explains, the “political value” of literature cannot be reduced to the institutional structures and modes of thought of its moment. There is also “something more” for which we must account:  a fundamental questioning of assumptions and assertions that speaks to the work’s context but also stands in excess of it and thus allows the text to speak “beyond” its time.78 The nebulous temporal designation in my subtitle endeavors to recognize this reality even as it also ironizes the very possibility of a temporal space “after slavery”—​a phrase that implies, problematically, that the “termination of a specific event marks its conclusion.”79 Where Reed examines the importance of the visions of freedom in post-​1960s black experimental writing for the regime of colorblindness in the twenty-​first century, Untimely Democracy makes a case for the insights of a neglected segment of a postbellum moment that itself is largely occluded in literary histories of the nineteenth century. It is striking, indeed, just how often the “nineteenth century” is represented primarily, even sometimes exclusively, by the antebellum era. One could point to many factors, economic and institutional, to explain this state of affairs; and of course the pedagogical question of coverage is also at issue. But my concern is more about the values implicit in this practice. For the conflation of “nineteenth century” and “antebellum” not only makes it difficult “to see the ways in which antebellum structures and concepts are perpetuated in” the postbellum epoch, as Elizabeth Duquette has argued. This synecdochical substitution also suggests that the aftermath of the Civil War and the period following Reconstruction are somehow less instructive or illuminating for exploring questions of aesthetic experimentation and political activism than is the run-​up to these events.80 In his Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Cody Marrs responds to this quandary by redefining the place of the nation’s internecine conflict in conceptions of this epoch. Rejecting the problematic assumptions about the movement of time inhering in the ante/​post historical divide,

 

24

Int roduc tion

Marrs proposes instead the term “transbellum,” a phrase that captures the fact that the war “continued to unfold long after 1865” and that many nineteenth-​ century writers contested the notion that this struggle had a finite end.81 As necessary and useful as this intervention is, I advise that we linger, at least a little longer, on and in the “post.” For in forcing us to focus on the “transbellum,” and in unsettling the standard designations of this literary-​historical chasm, Marrs paradoxically offers us an occasion to better understand those authors and activists working after the war that perhaps never ended. Which is to say: he gives us a way to account for the rich complexity of projects that are by definition inextricable from that conflict and its sources. Certainly one of the reasons that Callie House is largely unknown is that the whole of her writing is a continuation of the Civil War; she is a postbellum author in the most profound sense. As this case testifies, Marrs is right that one of the more problematic elements of distinguishing between the antebellum and postbellum eras is the way that such a division “segment[s]‌historical time into progressive epochal sequences.”82 Attending to the “post” accordingly requires a sense of time that is not complicit in this chronology. The readings that I undertake in the following chapters therefore betray an ambivalent relationship to the historicist interpretive practices that have come to occupy a position of prominence in Americanist scholarship. Seeking to create a mutually illuminating dialogue between the primary texts examined in this book and cultural and political discourses and legal decisions, among other synchronic contexts, my approach frequently participates in what are by now routine historicizing procedures—​procedures that presume that “texts ‘belong’ to particular moments in time.”83 Much important work of late has sought to unsettle the sense of the obvious that has become attached to this critical move, laying bare this methodology’s troubling assumptions not just for matters of periodization, but more fundamentally for our sense of a text’s relationship to its supposedly determining historical contexts. Taken together, this crucial scholarship has sketched out alternative paths for doing “history” in literary studies.84 My own worry about historicism, by comparison, is rather modest, but nonetheless pressing for the political projects of the figures I examine. For at the bottom of every idea of “history” is a certain sense of time—​a set of assumptions about temporal organization that “conditions it” and therefore “has to be elucidated.”85 In this regard, it is vital that we recognize that among the consequences of reading literary works in relation to the historical moments to which they presumably “belong” is not simply a problematic privileging of a “history” that determines and delimits the domain of the literary. Such a practice also entails the privileging of difference rather than sameness across time and thus reifies the linear temporality that has given us the ante-​/​postbellum division that makes the latter half of the nineteenth century seem to pale by comparison to the former.86

 

Int roduc tion

25

These are the very assumptions that the narratives I study forcefully contest in their effort to claim the stasis emerging from the present-​past as a politically productive temporality. Accordingly, even as I  put The Monster into dialogue with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that is surely one of its proximate contexts, I  endeavor to remain cognizant of the important ways that this novella, like the other works I treat, is inimical to the presumptions of chronology, discrete epochs, and distinct historical moments that often undergird such contextualizing practices. As Jeffrey Insko has argued, “Giving up on historicism does not mean giving up on history.”87 To this, I would add that giving up on the sort of historicism that has come to dominate literary scholarship might also mean giving in to time. That is, by using the language and structures that texts make available to access alternative temporal configurations, we not only can come to see what Elizabeth Freeman has identified as those “forms of time” that are “invisible to the historicist eye.” We also can rethink what counts as “time,” and how we might measure its tempos in our readings.88 Indeed, more than any contemporaneous historical context—​or any political theorist or philosophical paradigm, modern or otherwise—​it is the details of a work’s formal properties on which I concentrate. In this, I join Cindy Weinstein, who in her own study of temporality in American literature contends that close reading constitutes the principal mode for getting at the “aesthetic peculiarities” through which a text encodes and enacts its take on time.89 Where Weinstein’s interest is in novels, I explore a range of works that can be grouped together under the ampler category of narrative, a mode that functions fundamentally to articulate a temporal vision.90 Such a designation allows me to examine not only the fiction of Griggs and Chesnutt but also the autobiographies of Douglass and even the activist letters of House. It also captures my sense that debates about racial progress in the postbellum United States were also debates, always at least implicitly, about narrative. That is, in deliberating about how to connect past and present, and wondering what this relation augured for the future, these Americans recognized that the configuration of a narrative influences the temporal worldview to which it gives voice. Accordingly, in the following pages I lavish my analytical attention on the movement of a text’s narrative trajectory: the sudden disruption in forward momentum; the enjambed structure of a sentence that forces rereading; the appearance of a seemingly anachronistic racial designation; the paratext that reorients a novel’s timeline. For it is by lingering on (and in) these details that we can best appreciate the ways a work tells a story that continues to concern us: the prospect of democracy in America, its horizon and its paths. Just as important, such an approach allows us to appreciate what precisely is “political” about these narratives. If antebellum African American authors found in the field of the aesthetic a stand-​in for official forms of democratic

 

26

Int roduc tion

participation from which they generally were barred, as Ivy Wilson has shown, then the configuration of aesthetics and politics in the case of the postbellum writers I take up is slightly different even as it surely shares something crucial of this condition.91 The “second slavery” of the nadir required not only meditation on modes of political representation but also attention to a critical dimension of the structure itself. For Hopkins, House, Chesnutt, and others, the question was not so much: when is the time for democracy? (though this needed to be asked, yet again). Even more pressing was another: what is the time of democracy? In their explorations of the latter query, these writers produce political theory in narrative form, creating what Jacques Rancière would identify as politics itself. For in reorganizing the temporal coordinates of past, present, and future, and correspondingly rethinking the meaning of political agitation, they issue a fundamental challenge to the limits of the sensible and the imaginable. And it is finally for their unique contestation of the given, their invention of a new temporal commonsense, that the works featured in Untimely Democracy, despite the gaps in historical time and the generic differences that might recommend reading them apart, speak to one another in surprising, unsettling, and inspiring ways.92 Seeking both to name and explore their collective vision, this book forges connections across the fields of American and African American literary studies, critical race theory, and political philosophy. Dana Luciano, Lloyd Pratt, Valerie Rohy, and other Americanist critics have begun to explore how nineteenth-​ century literary texts contest and even exceed the temporal logics that predominated in their contemporaneous historical moments.93 A  parallel focus marks some of the most important contributions to African American studies, where scholars such as Anne Cheng, Saidiya Hartman, and Sharon P.  Holland have made legible the ways that conceptualizations of blackness remain constant over time despite ostensibly transformative events such as emancipation in the nineteenth century and the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth.94 Recently, in Each Hour Redeem, Daylanne K. English has shown how debates about the meaning of temporality function in this process. Partnering with English’s book in this project, Untimely Democracy stakes out a terrain that is at once more local and more expansive. Where English examines how African American authors from Phillis Wheatley to Suzan-​Lori Parks have manipulated and modulated linear timelines to expose injustice, I  focus my analysis on the works of both black and white writers of a discrete historical era. In doing so, I take as my starting point the crucial conceptual question that English raises at the end of her study: how can we imagine the specific political conditions required to respond to, and perhaps redress, racial wrong?95 In pursuing this problem, I consider questions about race and temporality as fundamentally political-​philosophical inquiries. Indeed, these concerns ought to

 

Int roduc tion

27

be at the heart of any consideration of the political form that has been central to American literary studies at least since F. O. Matthiessen constructed a canon of white male writers based on their shared “devotion to the possibilities of democracy.”96 There has been no lack of interest in democracy (or Matthiessen’s restrictive rendering of it) among literary critics in the wake of American Renaissance (1941); in the past two decades alone, scholars have explored this keyword in relation to interiority, spectrality, death, white manhood, deliberation, and public spectacles.97 And yet, as the political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon has noted, rather than treating it as an “active and constructive dimension,” conceptualizations of democracy tend to take time as “neutral.”98 This is a reality, I would add, that has allowed “linear” and “chronological” to function as exclusive glosses of the term. Untimely Democracy contests this conflation, revealing how Douglass, Du Bois, Crane, Griggs, Chesnutt, Hopkins, and House untether the politics of racial progress from the precepts of progressive time. By doing so, my book seeks not simply to offer a different sense of what it can mean for nineteenth-​century writers to devote themselves to the “possibilities of democracy.” It also puts pressure on the sense of democratic possibility that has been advanced recently by scholars working at the intersection of aesthetics, race, and politics. In The Time Is Always Now, for example, Nick Bromell demonstrates how black thinkers and authors provide us with the resources to transform received political-​philosophical accounts of democracy. As he explains, African American writers so often lived within a “history that had consolidated itself as a seemingly permanent structure of domination and injustice,” and thus this history “did not within itself provide the resources required to bring it to an end.” As a consequence, they had to draw on the powers of the imagination; it was precisely by “going outside or around history” that black Americans could envision “possibilities that had been forgotten or had not yet been born.”99 Stephen Best deploys a parallel definition when in his reading of the contrasting historical visions of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Beloved (1987), he notes that the former “conjures up a moment of pure possibility, before … history begins to rumble down the path that leads to us.”100 Making a similar move, Michelle Wright entreats us to attend to the “endless possibilities” that can emerge from an understanding of blackness that is released from the Middle Passage as defining historical referent.101 If Best associates this “pure possibility” with a more “effective political agency” and Wright understands it as an inclusive gesture, Kenneth W. Warren makes explicit the political implications of such calls in his tight periodization of the black literary tradition within the era of formal Jim Crow. For as Warren argues in What Was African American Literature?, such a narrow historical frame is necessary for democracy, which cannot thrive if the weight of this unjust past hangs too heavily over the present.102

 

28

Int roduc tion

The figures in this book lived in the thick of the oppressive conditions Bromell describes, but they do not share his—​or Best’s or Warren’s—​definition of “possibility” or interpretation of what it means for democracy. And while certainly engaging in the “struggle” for something better that Wright identifies as a characteristic of the “Middle Passage epistemology,” they do not share her sense that to be “driven by progress” necessarily means to “move ever forward.”103 In their narratives, we witness a conception of the possible that does not stand in stark opposition to “history,” to the hard realities of suffering and injustice that were hallmarks of the nadir. To the contrary: it was precisely amid and from the stasis of this “second slavery”—​and what might have seemed the death of democracy’s promise—​that they discern the conditions for a radical reconfiguration of the temporal foundations of this political form. Reading their writings, we are forced to probe what progress means, to wonder how we would know that we have achieved democracy, much less divined its possibilities. As these critical debates and our own twenty-​first-​century moment signal, the democratic vistas these authors make available can teach us not just about the postbellum politics of racial progress but also about the political system that structures our own present-​past. For they give voice to the reconstruction of the time of American democracy—​a project that is still ongoing.

 

1

On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-​Past Reading Thomas Jefferson and W. E. B. Du Bois in the Times of Slavery and Freedom The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another … is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. —​Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789 The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. To-​day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. —​W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Forswearing the past was not so much a matter of being an American as a democratic citizen. —​Judith N. Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought (1998)

Undoubtedly the most famous declaration in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is W. E. B. Du Bois’s assertion that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-​line.”1 But another declaration also marks the pages of Souls. At the conclusion of his book’s third chapter, Du Bois urges black Americans to “clin[g]‌unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget” (45). The “great words” to which Du Bois refers are those often-​conflicting constituent components of democracy: the universal rights of “liberty” and “equality” announced at the outset of the Declaration of Independence. The opening of this founding document serves as the final sentence of the most patently political section of Souls, Du Bois’s critique of 29

 

30

Untimely Democracy

Booker T.  Washington, and it functions as a bridge to the chapter entitled “Of the Meaning of Progress,” which recounts the slow (often stagnant) pace of change in the post-​Reconstruction South. As this structural position suggests, Du Bois uses the citation of this central text of American democracy to introduce a temporal dimension into his reflection on the color line, to forge a connection, that is, between racial politics and the politics of time. But how, precisely, should we understand the relationship between the temporal and the political in Souls? What would it mean to read these two declarations together—​to consider Du Bois’s statement about the color line as the problem of the twentieth century alongside his invocation of the eighteenth-​century promises of freedom and equality, which for black Americans were as unrealized as ever? In short: what might a work that has long been considered a classic of black political philosophy have to teach us about democracy’s relation to time? This chapter probes these queries by forging a dialogue between Du Bois and Thomas Jefferson, the author of the text whose “great words” appear at this crucial juncture of Souls. At first blush, the selection of these thinkers for such an endeavor might point toward a fairly predictable conclusion: the slaveholding Jefferson all too clearly embodies the tragic foreclosure of a democratic worldview, even its antithesis, whereas Du Bois, the “father of the Civil Rights Movement,” represents its salvation: democracy’s promise renewed and restored, if still not fully realized.2 Indeed, the sense that we know in advance just how to constellate these two figures may be one way to explain the fact that while the scholarship that addresses each of them independently is voluminous, scarcely any work exists that places Jefferson and Du Bois into dialogue.3 Seeking to do just that in the following pages, I show what we can gain if we approach these thinkers as conceptual interlocutors, the authors of two of the most incisive accounts of the intersections of race, time, and democracy in the American tradition: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). I contend that a comparative analysis of these texts reveals that the challenge that slavery poses for democracy cannot be conceptualized simply in terms of a constitutive contradiction between bondage and freedom, racial subordination and equality—​those terms that the historian Edmund Morgan famously identified as the “American paradox” in American Slavery, American Freedom.4 For all their differences, both Jefferson and Du Bois finally agree that any account of this political form—​especially one that aspires to attend to its dialectical other—​must necessarily engage the connection between the epochs of slavery and freedom, past and present, then and now. Alongside liberty and equality, that is, Jefferson and Du Bois install temporality as a key element in the grammar of American democracy.

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

31

Through their different renderings of the figure of a line, a sign of the disparate historical visions that mark their texts, Jefferson and Du Bois arrange the relationship between time and democracy in distinct ways and thus open up various paths for political practice. This divergence might be explained by the specific historical positions from which each thinker writes. Jefferson composes Notes amid the precariousness but also the potential that marked revolutionary America. Thus, even as he knew that slavery would have a long afterlife, he nonetheless can embrace the future as the horizon of possibility and change; for him, emancipation was inevitable, but its accomplishment ultimately would be left to the next generation. In contrast, Du Bois lives amid the legacy of slavery that Jefferson so feared: he occupies a present in which abolition has been legally achieved but in which the failures of Reconstruction and the realities of Jim Crow segregation make this present difficult to describe in the present tense. In Souls, then, Du Bois advances the idea of a temporal double consciousness that views the twentieth-​century “Negro problem” as part and parcel of the problem of racial bondage in Jefferson’s era. Accordingly, he necessarily rejects Jefferson’s relentless progressive time. And yet, Du Bois wonders about the costs of such an approach; he is acutely aware of both the possibilities and liabilities of a political vision that seeks to keep the present productively tethered to the past. As this formulation has already begun to suggest, the particular periods in which Jefferson and Du Bois wrote cannot alone explain their different political philosophies. This chapter therefore puts into action the method I began to describe in the Introduction: a mode of analysis that reads across the historical epochs that would separate these thinkers. When we assume this vantage point, we can appreciate that the crucial problem both men confront is how to define the meaning of political possibility—​and in democracy, this is finally a question of time. The political theorist Sheldon Wolin has argued that the temporal interval we designate as the “present” is neither “given” nor “arbitrary.” Rather, it is a mutable term resulting from political contestations that determine “which of the possible presents” will emerge as the organizing temporal structure of social existence.5 Accordingly, various configurations of temporality—​how we define the “present,” for example—​enable or close off certain political prospects, and even regulate the limits of the “possible” itself. As I noted in the Introduction, the narratives examined in this study work through the central political question of how to confront, and even embrace, a historical past that refuses to pass away. The challenge here is to formulate a strategy that does not result in paralysis: the inability to act in the present, to envision a different future. If, according to the historical terms Morgan sets forth, racial bondage enabled democracy’s emergence in only the most limited sense, I want to ask how an attention to the legacy of slavery might serve democratic ends. In what ways can challenging progressive timelines function not to impoverish

 

32

Untimely Democracy

but rather to invigorate this political form? And if it is possible to tell the story of American democracy without acceding to the dictates of linear, progressive temporality, what would this narrative look like?6 In the lines of Notes and Souls, we find no easy answers. In fact, as I will argue, Du Bois almost as much as Jefferson ultimately fails to account fully for the productive potential of stasis that characterizes untimely democracy. But it is for this very reason that I begin with these two figures. For it is in and through the limitations that mark their political visions that Jefferson and Du Bois offer us the imaginative tools necessary to understand the terms and stakes of the inquiries at the heart of this book. Which is to say: their failures make it possible for us to attempt a response.

Declarations of Independence As a starting point for our exploration of what possibility means in and for democracy, we might consider the range of interpretive possibilities for reading Du Bois’s citation of the Declaration. When Du Bois invoked this founding document amid the segregation and disenfranchisement of Jim Crow, he made a political provocation, to be sure. But less clear is just how we should characterize the political nature of this reference—​or more precisely, how we should define the temporal precepts underwriting it. In one reading, we might hear in Souls’ invocation of the promise of “liberty” and “equality” a repetition with a difference. Such an approach places Du Bois firmly in the company of, say, David Walker in the nineteenth century and Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth—​those authors and activists who contested the narrow conception of these terms in an effort to bring into being a more inclusive polity.7 Du Bois’s advice that black Americans “cling unwaveringly” to the words of the Declaration accordingly seems a suggestion that they seize this document’s unrealized potential as a resource in the struggle to push the nation to take the next step in the march toward racial equality.8 There may be no more democratic story to tell about the Declaration’s historical trajectory than this one, not simply because such an account installs Walker-​Du Bois-​King in the pantheon of racial progress, but more significantly, because it resonates with definitions of this political idea that highlight its irreducible contestability and openness. Wai Chee Dimock offers one version of this account in her work on “diachronic historicism.” Noting that the protocols of historicist methodologies tend to conflate “history” with a work’s contemporaneous context, Dimock encourages us to take a longer view. “Is it not possible to think of historicity as a relation less discretely periodized, one that emerges over time between any text and subsequent generations of readers?” she asks.

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

33

For Dimock, the stakes of this question are nothing less than the status of literature as a “democratic institution,” which in her model is tantamount to a text’s ability to “mov[e]‌continuously” through time, its meaning remaining open to perhaps endless change and transformation.9 In emphasizing literature’s (salutary) vulnerability to interpretation and contestation, Dimock presumes that democracy must always be on the move—​or at the very least, that historical change and difference are prerequisites for the functioning of this political form. According to this model, the stasis described in the Introduction stands as a serious stumbling block. Dimock hardly is alone in this regard. Indeed, one of the most deeply (and widely) held elements in definitions of democracy is its capacity to and for change: that is, for questioning, revision, and transformation. From this vantage point, the “possible” is more or less synonymous with the “possibility of change and difference.” In Democracy in Question, for instance, the political theorist Alan Keenan reads this system as requiring both “openness” and “closure,” constant contestation and some degree of fixity. Keenan fleshes out this dynamic in his reading of “the people” as a democratic designation and category. As he explains, the meaning of “the people” must be open to constant revision and questioning. And yet, “in order to be the kind of entity able to have and to regulate its own collective life, ‘the people’ must take on an identity whose relative clarity and stability depend on particular foundations, traditions, and institutional forms that cannot be fully general or fully open to question.” For Keenan, this puzzle extends well beyond the slippery status of “the people” as the baseline of democracy; the larger point is that “democratic politics is stuck permanently in a state of transition, or formation.”10 Keenan brilliantly articulates the fundamentally paradoxical nature of democracy’s relationship to change. But if we view this account through the stagnation that marked the nadir, a question remains: what happens when democracy is just stuck, when the persistence of some historical past would seem to threaten the mutability of which Keenan and Dimock speak?11 With its provocative probing of the politics of literary history, Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? helps to clarify the stakes of this question. Although time does not play an active conceptual role in the book, Warren’s arguments about periodization proceed within a linear, progressive temporal framework. That he tethers these timelines to a particular political posture makes this important study worth situating in relation to my own argument. For What Was African American Literature? finally illuminates the limitations of a democratic vision that neglects stasis as a politically viable temporality. As its title implies, the book contends that in our literary categorizations we should keep the black tradition firmly fixed in the past of Jim Crow. Significantly, Warren links this thesis to his hope of bringing into being a more “broadly

 

34

Untimely Democracy

democratic” America. For Warren, it was a system of state-​sanctioned oppression that gave African American literature “coherence” and indeed necessitated such cultural production in the first place; not simply did this literature aim to counter notions of black inferiority promulgated by slavery and then segregation, but, given the reality that such a large percentage of African Americans were excluded from direct involvement in politics, it necessarily fell to a select few writers to represent the race. As Warren summarizes his position, “the factors that pushed literary and cultural expression to the apparent center of black politics were antidemocratic.”12 Accordingly, in endorsing the kind of “discrete periodizations” that recognize that the past is “behind us,” Warren offers a prescription for realizing democracy that draws on the ideas of change, mutability, and fluidity across time that are at the forefront of Dimock’s sense of diachronic historicism even as his own methodology invokes the synchronic historicizing practices the latter seeks to challenge.13 And yet, Warren’s privileging of the representative dimensions of “democracy”—​of who will speak for the race—​leaves unexamined precisely how the temporal and political interact. His formulation simply stipulates that the chronological and linear temporality he deploys will serve the democratic ends of liberty and equality. But why would such a model best secure these conditions? The question is germane given that many of the authors of the nadir—​a period central to Warren’s account—​unsettled this premise as they developed alternative visions of democracy and its temporalities. If African Americans’ exclusion from the promise of full democracy requires “systemic explanations” (a phrase Warren employs in his critique of racial uplift work led by “exceptional” leaders), why would the temporal properties underlying postbellum writers’ characterization of Jim Crow as a repetition of slavery not enter into the present equation?14 To translate this line of inquiry into the textual register, and to return to Dimock: what happens if in tracking the trajectory of a text, we find not change but stasis? That is, if “across time,” the “very words” of a text “become unfixed, unmoored, and thus democratically claimable,” as Dimock explains it, what happens if we find a story not of “changefulness” but of continuity—​not difference but duration?15 How might we define democratic possibility then? These are the questions that confront us when we approach Du Bois’s citation of the Declaration from the vantage point of a less familiar excerpt from this founding document. In the draft he submitted to the Continental Congress, Jefferson included an attack on slavery, whose continued existence in the colonies he imputed to King George III. Ostensibly applying to the plight of African slaves the “inalienable rights,” if not the egalitarian vision, articulated abstractly at the document’s outset, Jefferson argued that in perpetuating this “execrable commerce,” the monarch violated the “most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him.”16

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

35

Du Bois does not draw on this provocative passage, for it was cut by the Continental Congress in the course of its deliberations.17 Nonetheless, the fact that such an excerpt enjoyed even a provisional existence gives a different inflection to Du Bois’s invocation of “liberty” and “equality”—​those terms that do appear in the final Declaration. It is not simply that these ideals are “forgotten” by the “sons of the Fathers,” as Du Bois puts it in his description of the black disenfranchisement that plagued his historical moment. At least insofar as they might have applied to African Americans, such commitments were already forgotten—​ disavowed and expunged—​by the “fathers” themselves. Viewed from this perspective, the march of racial progress seems unsteady at best; its course is disrupted and even halted by the persistence of the taint of racial exclusion that marked Du Bois’s era as much as Jefferson’s.18 Accordingly, we might take the suggestion that black Americans “cling unwaveringly” to the Declaration’s words as an index of what is required to survive the historical stasis of the post-​Reconstruction era. In citing the Declaration at a moment in which its promises seem as unrealized as ever, that is, Du Bois suggests not only that black Americans recognize their unchanging political status across historical epochs. He further implies that they use this insight about the lack of progress to fuel a campaign for civil rights that does not simply seek the inclusion of black Americans but also attempts to reconfigure the temporal tenets of democracy. As he drafted Souls, Du Bois felt the force of this concern with a special intensity. For if the policies enacted during the period of Congressional Reconstruction suggested that political equality and substantive freedom were truly in reach for African Americans, such a prospect increasingly seemed like a fantasy as the nineteenth century came to a close. While by the time Ulysses S. Grant began his second term as president it was apparent that the Republican Party’s commitment to securing African Americans’ physical safety—​much less their political and civil rights—​was waning, the ascension of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in 1877 marked an official end to Reconstruction. Having defeated his Democratic opponent in a contested election whose outcome was determined by an independent commission, Hayes quickly did away with the federal government’s military presence in the South. Whether this decision was the fruit of a promise that was made in the course of the negotiations that ultimately resulted in Hayes’s inauguration is difficult to tell. What is clear, however, is that the new president’s policies with regard to the former Confederate States paved the way for the region’s “Redemption,” a term white Southern leaders understood to signify the triumphant reclamation of their sovereignty. For African Americans, however, it more accurately signified the victory of white supremacy and the opening of a reign of racial terror.19 During this tumultuous time, Du Bois clung not simply to those “great words” of the Declaration but also to democracy materialized in the form of the

 

36

Untimely Democracy

franchise: the means by which black Americans could resist egregious encroachments on, if not fully realize, their liberty and equality. On this subject, of course, Du Bois’s most prominent public adversary was Booker T.  Washington, who famously counseled African Americans to pursue moderation in the fight for the “full exercise” of their political rights, maintaining that the “possession of property, intelligence, and high character,” not a policy of aggressive agitation, would bring about their desired end.20 To Du Bois’s mind, such a posture spelled doom for the race: “The power of the ballot,” he asserts in the opening pages of Souls, “we need in sheer self-​defence” (15). Du Bois elaborates his differences with Washington on this and other issues in a later chapter, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” closing with a call to “oppose” the “work of their greatest leader” insofar as he “apologizes for injustice” (45). But the politics of Souls are not reducible to Du Bois’s debate with his contemporary rival on the subject of the franchise or even to the present moment these two men shared.21 Indeed, Du Bois’s signature work is less the product of a particular controversy or moment than a meditation on the shape of political time and the meaning of democratic possibility. Consider, in this regard, the fact that Du Bois appends to his endorsement of “the ballot” a haunting question that discloses the more conceptual, though no less urgent, concern motivating his position: “—​else what shall save us from a second slavery?” (15; emphasis added). With the phrase “second slavery,” Du Bois frames in distinctly temporal terms the political problems plaguing African Americans in the post-​Reconstruction United States. The violence and social subjugation that blacks were experiencing at this juncture are not new phenomena, the author implies, but rather the persistence of a past that seems to collapse the very difference between the eras of slavery and freedom. Accordingly, the question is not so much how to proceed in the struggle to achieve democracy in the present, how to bring the values of liberty and equality finally into being for black citizens. The more pressing (and analytically prior) task is to recognize that the present crisis confronting African Americans, paradoxically, cannot be resolved exclusively in the present, for it inheres in both the “fathers” and the “sons,” making them seem indistinguishable. Put differently, the political problem facing black Americans could not be solved only by seeking inclusion within American democracy. The aim of making former slaves into citizens would also require a reconfiguration of its temporal tenets. In this respect, Du Bois’s most important interlocutor is not Washington but the author of the Declaration. Indeed, because Jefferson is so often associated with his pronouncements in this foundational political text, it may be useful to consider him as the author of another declaration of independence—​not from Britain, but from the past.22 For central to Jefferson’s political philosophy is the principle of generational autonomy: the notion that “each generation is

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

37

as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before,” as he puts it an 1816 letter on the subject of reforming the Virginia constitution (1402). But this dimension of Jefferson’s thought is not limited to his position on constitutionalism. “Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another,” he writes in the opening lines of a 1789 missive to James Madison, “is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government” (959). To Jefferson’s mind, the proper configuration between past and present is especially important for democracies. The capacity of each cohort of citizens to declare independence from its ancestors does not simply make possible popular sovereignty and the consent of the governed.23 More important, the very prospect of the polity’s progress hangs in the balance. So that society does not “remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors,” Jefferson explains, citizens must “keep pace with the times” (1401), making the necessary “periodical repairs” to their civic architecture (1402). That is, in a world where change is inevitable, it is crucial that each generation—​each future present—​be endowed with the ability to act in accordance with its own views and desires, not those imposed upon it by the past. Otherwise, stagnation and the death of the body politic will result.24 As Whitman’s Democratic Vistas makes clear, the idea of turning away from the past hardly is unique to Jefferson’s thinking. Indeed, historically, the emergence of this political form is inextricable from a constitutive break with tradition.25 Consider one of Jefferson’s contemporaries, Thomas Paine, who declared in Common Sense (1776) that the colonies had it in their “power to begin the world over again.”26 Surveying the sociological dimensions of democracy decades later, Alexis de Tocqueville included the tendency to turn away from the past within his inventory of the salient characteristics of individualism. “The woof of time is ever being broken and the track of past generations lost,” he wrote in the second volume of his Democracy in America (1840).27 And, as I will argue in the Epilogue, the twenty-​first century is not wanting for examples of this inclination: even as the election of Barack Obama to the presidency brought the nation’s problematic history of racial violence and inequality to the fore, the public discourse surrounding Obama’s tenure, shaped significantly by the president’s own progressive rhetoric, tends to view this past as a point of contrast to the present and a stimulus for the inevitable progress to come. But perhaps no one articulates the challenges that racial slavery poses to this dimension of democracy as clearly and powerfully as Jefferson. While he did not live to see the end of legal bondage, let alone the era that Du Bois terms a “second slavery,” Jefferson knew that racial servitude would have a long afterlife:  he predicts in Notes that the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained” would not easily pass away (264). Viewed

 

38

Untimely Democracy

against this remark, Jefferson’s question to Madison about whether one generation has the right to “bind” another seems to hold both a figurative and a more literal meaning. For, as we shall see, Jefferson’s fear of blackness is motivated not simply by what he believes to be the race’s innate physical difference or intellectual inferiority—​that is, by the threat black “blood” poses to the purity of the white race (270). Equally important is his anxiety that the abiding presence of Africans in America would arrest the development of the body politic, impeding the steady progress that is vital to his political vision. For Jefferson, that is, blackness portends a future endlessly haunted by slavery, and thus Africans can have no place in American democracy if this system is to unfold according to the linear trajectory of continual improvement that he so desires. It is this future that Du Bois inhabits as his present, or what he calls in Souls the “present-​past” (27). In creating this phrase, Du Bois reworks a fundamental tenet of Jefferson’s political philosophy. Where Jeffersonian democracy depends upon a break with the past—​and specifically with the past of racial bondage—​ Du Boisian democracy foregrounds the “present-​past,” embracing the intergenerational obligation that emerges from a view of time in which the past does not recede, giving way to the future, but rather persists in and claims the present. In this regard, Du Bois is a crucial expositor of the form of democracy that this book identifies as untimely: he realizes that it is only by violating Jefferson’s second declaration of independence—​by recognizing, that is, the way in which the so-​called past of slavery in fact continues to bind both the fathers and the sons—​that African Americans will ever come to enjoy the Declaration’s promise of “liberty” and “equality” in the present. In short, for Du Bois, realizing democracy in the United States requires a confrontation with, even an embrace of, the present-​past. And yet, as I noted at the outset, Jefferson does not simply embody the villain and Du Bois the hero in my account. For even as Du Bois recognizes the need to bring democracy into sync with the recursive rhythms of racial servitude, he also fears the prospect of stasis: he wonders if viewing the past as always present, as perhaps never properly “past,” is necessarily to accede to a future that is no different from the past. If this concern clearly induces anxiety in Jefferson, it represents for Du Bois the risks associated with a political vision that makes the persistent past a central tenet. Whereas Pauline E. Hopkins’s political theory transvalues the static time of slavery, adopting it as a critical resource for agitation, as c­ hapter 5 will show, Du Bois finally flinches at the possibility of endless recurrence. Like Jefferson, he worries that it signifies paralysis—​in short, that stasis cannot motivate meaningful political action. Accordingly, he wavers between the desire to embrace or to turn away from a vista in which the past is always present.

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

39

In the remaining sections of this chapter, I examine in detail the moments in which these two thinkers most intensely grapple with the afterlife of slavery:  Jefferson’s notorious comments on race and bondage in Notes, and Du Bois’s haunting elegy for the death of his son in Souls as well as his (related) meditation on the failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau as an institution charged with effecting the conversion of African Americans from slaves to free citizens. In pursuing such an approach, I  do not mean to suggest that Jefferson’s and Du Bois’s thinking on these complex topics—​let  alone their political philosophy generally—​can be reduced to a small number of passages in works that themselves constitute snapshots of the diverse writings these authors produced across long careers. While it is undoubtedly true that both men held a deep and abiding interest in the relationship among slavery, temporality, and politics, it is also true that they approached this subject differently at various points in their lives: Du Bois would bring to these questions a Marxist and global perspective later in his career; and Jefferson would come to see slavery as a problem requiring gradual abolition to be carried out not in his lifetime but in the (perhaps quite distant) future.28 I focus on these moments in these texts because it is in them that Jefferson and Du Bois, read together, most powerfully probe the temporal contours of democracy and meditate on the ways various forms of time inflect the prospects we associate with this political system. That is, for the author of Notes as for the author of Souls, the contradiction between slavery and democracy is also in a fundamental sense a contradiction between competing temporalities: between a vision of time in which democratic possibility rests on the capacity of the sons to break with the fathers, and a vision of time in which the possibility of democracy depends on the sons’ ability to recognize the resemblance they bear to the fathers.

Democracy in the Time of Slavery: Jefferson’s Notes Originating as Jefferson’s reply to a set of twenty-​two queries about the American colonies posed by François Marbois, a French diplomat, Notes on the State of Virginia is as much a vision of what is to come as a description of the present.29 “The Missisipi will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghaney,” Jefferson writes in Query II (“Rivers”), answering Marbois’s question about the region’s waterways with a characteristic use of the future tense (131; original emphasis). Jefferson’s emphasis on progress and development extends beyond the region’s physical landscape and into

 

40

Untimely Democracy

the domain of the human mind. Explaining his views on schooling in Query XIV (“Laws”), for example, Jefferson notes that in the “first stage” of “education,” “wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction,” “the reading” is “proposed … to be chiefly historical” (273, 274). Significantly, the aim of this focus on “history” is not to teach students to revere the past—​such a backward-​looking posture was anathema to the author—​but rather to “enable them to judge of the future” (274). Prospective meditations were especially comforting to Jefferson as he composed Notes in the early 1780s. During this period, he lost his infant daughter; his wife became seriously ill (she would die in 1782); and Virginia, the state whose security he oversaw in his capacity as governor, was under attack by the British. In the process of writing, then, he found not just a distraction but an occasion to map America’s unfolding across time.30 This conflation of “time” with “development” is not the only temporal rhythm operative in his writings, to be sure, and Jefferson’s attachment to this progressive temporality is more the consequence of a determined hope about the course of history than an “assured faith.”31 But it holds a special force in Jeffersonian thought. Indeed, it is only because he idealizes a linear, progressive model of time, in which the present promises to give way to the future, that contemplating the “will be” can assuage him. The political implications of the temporality Jefferson associates with racial slavery suggest why. In Query XVIII (“Manners”), the book’s most sustained meditation on bondage, the tone of these anticipatory reflections changes dramatically. Racial servitude emerges not simply as an “unhappy influence on the manners of our people,” as Jefferson writes in this section’s opening lines, but as a threat to the very existence of “America” (288). Echoing the excised passage on chattel servitude from the Declaration, in which he frames this practice as a violation of basic human rights, Jefferson asks, “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” This question prepares the way for the rhetorical and emotional climax: the famous pronouncement, in an excerpt that would become a crucial resource for the abolitionist crusade of nineteenth-​century African American writers, that “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”32 Essentially predicting a “total emancipation,” Jefferson concludes his apocalyptic remarks with a plea that this event might come about with “the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation” (289). But a more haunting, if less spectacular, vista appears earlier in this query, when he reflects on the effects of racial bondage on both of the parties involved. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” he explains. Taking up the master’s

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

41

case first, Jefferson notes that children, as imitative beings, cannot help but reproduce their elders’ behavior. In witnessing a slaveholder’s “intemperance of passion towards” his chattel, therefore, they receive an education in “tyranny” that effectively determines that they will act in the same way when they come of age (288). When he turns to the situation of slaves, Jefferson charts a similar trajectory, though here the circumstances are even more devastating:  the children of bound blacks are not merely influenced by their parents’ behaviors—​they are reproductions of their forebears. The fate of the slave, Jefferson writes, is to “entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him” (288). In this last passage in particular, Jefferson alludes to the conflation between blackness and slavery that was in place by the end of the seventeenth century. As Winthrop Jordan explains, in Jefferson’s colonial America, “slave” did not simply signal the perpetual loss of one’s freedom; this designation also implied a “miserable condition” that was heritable, passed down from one generation to the next.33 As I show in c­ hapter 3, which takes up the problem of redress, this hereditary social degradation exceeds even the force of legal emancipation; it makes nominally free African Americans suffer the harm of slavery in the form of a devalued blackness and places white Americans in a position of responsibility for a wrong that they may not have directly authored. Already in Jefferson’s formulation the rough outline of this phenomenon is clear. Note that even as he invokes the notion of futurity repeatedly in the space of the short sentence cited above—​the slave is fated to “entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him”—​the modifier “endless” functions to render this future null and void, for what is to come will simply be a repetition of the same. For Jefferson, that is, slavery is not merely a problem for the present; it reproduces itself through time, claiming future generations—​ masters and especially slaves—​“endlessly.” It is a “perpetual exercise” that exerts its “unhappy influence” in perpetuity. Dana Luciano is thus right to remark that Jefferson “understood slavery as an essentially temporal inconsistency within the history of the Americas.” But we might do well to pause before going on to observe that this is so because the peculiar institution’s “implicit negation of natural rights undermined the very foundation of the democratic nation.”34 To be sure, Jefferson understood the emergence of democracy in America as evidence of the triumph of the “inalienable rights” that racial bondage debased. But the author includes among these the “right” of each generation to be free and independent of the past.35 In this respect, slavery’s “temporal inconsistency” derives not simply from its flouting of life and liberty; as a “perpetual exercise” in tyranny and degradation, racial bondage is fundamentally inconsistent—​out of sync—​with the principle of generational autonomy and thus with Jefferson’s privileged time of democracy.

 

42

Untimely Democracy

To begin to unravel this tension, I want to return to Jefferson’s 1789 letter to James Madison in which he outlines the independence of the present from the past. Drawing on the word that haunts his meditations on slavery in Notes—​ “perpetual”—​the author explains to his interlocutor, himself a key architect of the US Constitution, that “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please” (963). At first glance Jefferson seems to violate his own injunction against enacting a “perpetual” law that would encumber the present. For with this principle the author confronts a conceptual dilemma: on the one hand, he seeks to ensure that every present cohort of citizens is free from the debts and burdens of its predecessor; yet, in so stipulating, he in effect limits the freedoms of citizens, making them “masters” of the earth only “in usufruct,” a legal term signifying “in trust.” But while this schema evinces a clear deference to the future, it does not necessarily undercut Jefferson’s emphasis on the sovereignty of the present generation, which primarily is concerned with independence from the past. Indeed, if we view the succeeding generation as a future present, Jefferson’s stipulation that the living hold the earth “in usufruct” functions to reinforce generational autonomy.36 Consider, in this regard, Jefferson’s comments on the subject in a July 12, 1816, letter to his friend and fellow Virginian Samuel Kercheval. He notes that “I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions”—​perhaps an allusion to a worry expressed by Madison, who felt that his colleague’s theory was “liable in practice to some very powerful objections.”37 But Jefferson nonetheless defends his position. Citing his abiding belief in progress, he writes to Kercheval that as “the human mind” “becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times” (1401). Jefferson had witnessed this principle in action nearly two decades earlier in his election to the presidency. Writing to Joseph Priestly in a March 1801 letter, composed just days after he delivered his inaugural address, Jefferson reflected on the “Revolution of 1800,” in which he assumed the position of chief executive from John Adams after an intensely partisan but finally peaceful campaign whose outcome ultimately was decided by a vote in the House of Representatives. “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun,” he exclaims: “For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new” (1086). In a powerful expression of the temporal logic of

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

43

American exceptionalism, Jefferson inverts the pronouncement of Ecclesiastes, which proclaims that there is “no new thing under the sun.”38 According to Jefferson’s account, the young nation comes to epitomize the novel, a counterexample to the ancient wisdom expressed in this Biblical text. By this measure, Jefferson’s presidency becomes a “quasi-​providential necessity,” and that of his Federalist rival represents retrogression.39 Indeed, as Jefferson depicts his opponent earlier in the epistle, Adams would have had Americans “look backwards, not forwards, for improvement” (1085). This characterization is no mere ad hominem attack on a political adversary. Such a posture is an affront to a fundamental tenet of Jefferson’s democratic philosophy. Because the future promises not simply different “circumstances” but also the existence of a superior citizenry, Jefferson holds, a polity must continually amend, revise, and reform its civic architecture. This process requires a break with the past as well as an awareness that the next generation, the successive present, will have to do the same. But if Jefferson’s theory in this way seeks to cultivate a kind of recognition in the present generation that it always will be followed by another present, the aim is not so much to limit the power of the living group of citizens by obligating it to some unknown future cohort as it is to facilitate a continual succession of presents: that is, to ensure that each present can act as “masters” of the earth until the next one arrives.40 “To keep pace with the times” is to achieve the continual development and progress that is enabled by generational autonomy. The horrific obverse of this vision of steady improvement emerges in the conclusion of Jefferson’s 1816 letter to Kercheval. Discussing what, for Jefferson, was a paradigmatic emblem of regression and stasis, he criticizes European monarchs. As he puts it, “Instead of wisely yielding to the gradual change of circumstances, of favoring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement,” they “have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would have been put into acceptable and salutary forms” (1401). Yet, as the election of 1800 implied, such a scene is possible at home as well. In fact, as Jefferson goes on to explain, if the right of the present generation to shape and form government on its own terms is not respected, it will make its voice heard through “force”: “and we shall go on, as other nations are doing, in the endless circle of oppression, rebellion, reformation; and oppression, rebellion, reformation, again; and so on forever” (1403). In this formulation, we can appreciate how Jefferson’s political philosophy stands in tension with one strain of natural history, which viewed the time of nature—​with its fearsome, unpredictable forces; its cyclical powers of decay and regeneration—​as an impediment

 

44

Untimely Democracy

to human development.41 That is, if Jefferson’s aim to rebut claims about new world degeneracy often motivates him to celebrate the physical landscape of America, here we witness nature as a less enriching, even inimical, force. Indeed, to accede to this rhythm in political affairs would be to follow the “same dreadful track” as the Europeans whose plight Jefferson laments (1403). More precisely, it would be to not move at all, but rather to be caught in a paralyzing stasis.42 Moving not forward but in an “endless circle of oppression” that continues “forever” along a “dreadful” because static “track”—​such statements, if removed from the context of this letter, might be mistaken for Jefferson’s description of racial slavery in Notes. As we have seen, the author is acutely aware of the temporal dimensions of racial bondage. It is a “perpetual exercise” in which masters educate their children in tyranny and the slave confers “his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him” (288). But placed alongside the survey of his democratic theory offered above, the political problem of racial slavery comes into full relief. If generational autonomy is the precondition for the continued existence of a democratic polity, then bondage represents an intractable barrier to the succession of independent presents that ensures progress and improvement. Indeed, it threatens the very possibility of development itself, for slavery embodies the specter of stasis that Jefferson identifies with monarchical countries that resist “progressive accommodation to progressive improvement.” The crisis that slavery’s stasis holds for the future of democracy in America—​ indeed, for the future of “America” itself—​emerges clearly in Query XIV of Notes (“Laws”). Although this section is most famous for Jefferson’s “suspicion” that “blacks” are “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (270), perhaps the passage more revealing of the writer’s attitudes toward African Americans comes a few pages earlier. Explaining the reasoning behind his position that blacks will have to be removed from the space of America even after their emancipation, Jefferson writes, Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. (264) In one sense, this excerpt might be taken to foreshadow Jefferson’s fear of black insurrection, which he articulates explicitly three sections later in his meditation on “Manners.” While the anxiety under discussion here ostensibly concerns the potential “extermination of the one or the other race”—​as if Jefferson is equally

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

45

interested in the well-​being of blacks and whites—​that latter query reveals that the potential “extirpation” of white citizens is what truly preoccupies the author. This reading would suggest that Jefferson finally allies himself with the interests of the master class, his statements that suggest sympathy for the plight of African Americans or an awareness of the moral wrong of slavery notwithstanding.43 But this passage is more complex than such a gloss would suggest. Indeed, it is worth considering whether Jefferson’s primary worry here stems from the trauma of a potential race war at all. That is, what if we read the concluding clause of this excerpt as emphasizing not the final result of the “convulsions” Jefferson predicts but rather the possibility that they might “never end”? After all, in the eighteenth-​century discourse of pathology, “convulsion” signifies “stiffening” as in a “cramp.” Combined with its more general meaning as political turbulence, as the agitation that leads to such hardening, the term seems to indicate a fear that the abiding presence of Africans in America will lead to a persistent, recurring strife that will arrest the development of the body politic.44 Note that even as Jefferson’s sentence reaches toward the future in its final clauses, the vision of what is to come is already determined by the past of slavery: it is the “deep rooted prejudices” of “whites” and the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained” that “will divide us” and bring about an endless conflict. Having enumerated what he designates as the “political” grounds justifying the colonization of African Americans, Jefferson moves on to offer an account of the “physical” barriers impeding the incorporation of freed blacks into the polity. It is in this section of “Laws” that he makes his notorious remarks on “colour”: Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-​skin, or in the scarf-​skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. … Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? (264–​65) In its attempt to establish the physical basis of blackness, this passage evinces a certainty about the knowledge of the human body that violates Jefferson’s sense of an ever-​expanding horizon of human discovery. We therefore can read it as an index of the way that blackness serves as a conceptual limit point in Jefferson’s thinking, an area that exposes his intellectual arrogance. For Jefferson’s sense of the “natural” in this passage effectively precludes the possibility of development,

 

46

Untimely Democracy

even as his political theory rests on just such a model. Indeed, Jefferson’s characterization of blackness eschews the regnant eighteenth-​century understanding of race as a mutable bodily trait and anticipates the uses to which Lamarckian and Darwinian theories about inheritance would be put in the nineteenth century to treat African Americans as “outcasts from evolution.” Consider the intensely temporal language that Jefferson deploys: it is “fixed in nature” and an “eternal monotony” that covers the visages of African Americans like an “immoveable veil.” If the temporality of nature stands in contrast to the linear progress of Jefferson’s political philosophy, as noted earlier, here we see the natural and political coming into collision to write blackness out of the future of the republic. For Jefferson repeats his “political” “objections” in scientific form (264), showing how the latter inform and subtend the former.45 It is through this passage’s famous figure of the veil—​whose temporal and political meaning Du Bois will rework—​that Jefferson finally discloses the core reason undergirding his position that blacks, even after they are freed from the bonds of slavery, cannot coexist with whites in America. Functioning not simply as a physical sign of his “suspicion” of Africans’ intellectual and physical inferiority, “the black of the negro” represents slavery’s “miserable condition,” a condition both natural and political that, insofar as it is passed down from one generation to the next, will claim not just the sons and daughters of slaves but also future white Americans responsible for the continual development of the polity. Jefferson brought the stakes of slavery for white Americans—​and for the nation—​into high relief in a 1797 letter in which he prophesied, the Saint Domingue insurrection surely weighing on his mind, that if “something is not done, & soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.”46 In the “immoveable veil of black,” Jefferson sees the specter of a future endlessly possessed by the past of slavery: a portent not of development and change but of fixity and monotony—​in short: stasis, or no future at all.47 To his mind, then, there was no other choice but to colonize blacks—​to place them beyond the borders of America—​in the hopes that such a move might function to effect the necessary break with the past that would enable the nation to progress through time. And to imagine such a course for America, as we have seen, is one of Jefferson’s primary projects in Notes.48 This notion receives its most powerful formal expression in the book’s final query. A compilation of the “Histories, Memorials, and State-​Papers” of Virginia and America more generally, Query XXIII opens with a short section of narrative prose, in which Jefferson surveys the earliest accounts of the state written by Captain John Smith and Sir Walter Raleigh as well as his own contributions to the development of the colonies such as A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) and the Declaration. The query then changes shape, breaking off into “a chronological catalogue of American state-​papers.” The entries in this

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

47

list span from the earliest days of colonization to the more recent past: beginning with a grant from Henry VII to John Cabot for the exploration of “terra incognita,” as the first document dated 1496 reads (Figure 1.1), the text of Notes proper concludes with a “Deed from the six nations of Indians to the crown,” bearing the date 1768 (Figure 1.2). Although the list occupies the space of nearly forty pages in the 1787 London edition of Notes, it, Jefferson points out, is still not “complete” (304). Whether the author here means to indicate that the compilation is “not exhaustive” or that it is “unfinished” is difficult to tell; both glosses apply. But the very placement of this catalogue as the final query seems to point toward the latter meaning: that is, ongoing and in progress.49 For while the inquiry into “histories,” “memorials,” and “pamphlets” appears as the fourth item on Marbois’s questionnaire, Jefferson positions this topic as the ultimate section of Notes.50 Thus, in concluding his book, which was written and published in the 1780s with a “chronological catalogue” whose final entry bears a date of roughly a decade earlier, Jefferson effectively represents the future—​that which will come after this final entry—​in the white space of the page. Indeed, we can already supply at least two subsequent entries if we recall that the author mentions his Summary View and the Declaration at the outset of this section but does not include a reference to these documents in the list—​as if to suggest the continued development and progress of America is all but guaranteed, the political chaos surrounding the colonies while he was writing notwithstanding. That racial slavery receives no explicit mention in a list that Jefferson originally compiled in response to a request from a bookseller attempting to document the “rise and progress” of the American colonies should come as no surprise.51 For while Jefferson does not shy away from the implications that bondage holds for the body politic earlier in Notes, he cannot include such a disturbing reflection in the progressive vision that is the subject of this final section. In his unfinished accounting of America’s movement through the linear time that this chronological list represents, slavery and blackness can have no place.

Democracy in the Time of Freedom: Du Bois’s Souls Where Jefferson elides racial slavery from his concluding chronicle, W. E. B. Du Bois revises the record in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk, inserting the fact of bondage into his version of history while also refusing to assign racial servitude to the status of past event. “Years have passed away since” the “days of bondage”—​“ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal

 

Figure 1.1  Initial entries in Thomas Jefferson’s “chronological catalogue,” Notes on the State of Virginia, London edition (1787). The list opens with a commission for the investigation of “terra incognita.” Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

 

Figure 1.2  Final entries in Thomas Jefferson’s “chronological catalogue,” Notes on the State of Virginia, London edition (1787). The list ends with an entry dated 1768, approximately a decade before Notes was composed and published. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

 

50

Untimely Democracy

and development,” he writes; “and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast” (12). The break between the first and second parts of this sentence, marked by the contrastive “and yet,” suggests one of the central tenets to which Souls gives narrative form: the forward movement of chronological time has not brought about significant racial progress for African Americans; blacks still occupy their “accustomed” position at the bottom of the sociopolitical hierarchy. Accordingly, Du Bois’s task is to remind his readers that despite legal emancipation, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (12; emphasis added). If the “will be” is in one sense emblematic of Jefferson’s progressive vision of time in Notes, “not yet” is Du Bois’s privileged temporal phrase in Souls, a necessary corollary of the “and yet” that appears in the previous sentence. For if the “freedman” is indeed to find “freedom,” the nation will have to relinquish its emphasis on “renewal and development”—​and even an unqualified belief in “progress” itself—​and come to understand that the era of slavery is “not yet” over. The author reveals the political stakes of this project in his treatment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which he describes in “Of The Dawn of Freedom,” the second chapter of Souls, as “that government of men” that “assume[d]‌charge of the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation” (18, 22). With this phrase, Du Bois alludes to one of the central controversies that surrounded the creation of this institution by Congress in 1865: the question of whether, in effectively becoming the guardian of former slaves, Washington was overstepping its powers and perhaps even exhibiting a paternalism reminiscent of life on the plantation.52 Du Bois does not skirt these and other problematic dimensions of the bureau. But insofar as the debates about this initiative stemmed from the fact that it functioned to probe the precise meanings of “the people” and the “government,” Du Bois unambiguously affirms the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau.53 In its attempt to create an educational system for ex-​slaves, advocate for equal treatment in legal proceedings, and transform an economy based on bondage to one founded on free labor, among other tasks, the institution embodies for Du Bois the kind of political commitment required to make good on the promise of emancipation.54 It “might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship,” he writes, reflecting on the agency’s potential (32).55 As the “might have” in that last phrase implies, the Freedmen’s Bureau was short-​lived: defunded by Congress just four years after its creation, this “government of men” was defunct by 1872.56 Myriad political and economic exigencies can explain the brevity of the institution’s existence. But Du Bois underscores what we might think of as the bureau’s temporal self-​conception as the signal

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

51

reason for its failure to thrive:  “It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities. … So the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment” (33). If faithfulness to the historical record were Du Bois’s guide here, it would have been more accurate for him to remark that the premature death of this institution was coterminous with its genesis. Indeed, already in 1866 Thomas D.  Eliot, a Massachusetts Republican, issued an impassioned plea that Congress extend the institution, asserting that “we owe something” to the former slaves, whom “we have done nothing to … but injury.” And yet, Eliot made no attempt to retain an element of an earlier iteration of the legislation, vetoed by Andrew Johnson, that designated an “indefinite” “duration” for the bureau. Noting that this proposal sought to continue the institution for just two years, Eliot clarified that the “care” granted to the freedmen under this provision “shall only be extended to them as shall be necessary to enable them as speedily as practicable to become self-​supporting citizens.”57 Such a posture reflects a belief that interventions of the agency might ultimately work against the realization of equality and freedom for black Americans. It was precisely this case that the New  York congressman Fernando Wood would make two years later, when he advocated for the bureau’s discontinuation on the grounds that it was never intended to be “incorporate[d]‌permanently into the Government” but only to “take care of these people in their in transitu condition—​between the condition of slavery and the condition of freedom.”58 Critiquing such thinking, Du Bois paints a picture of the bureau that forces a reconsideration of just what the transition from “slavery” to “freedom” requires, and how long it takes. As suggested by his turn to a genealogical metaphor, at the bottom of this account of the agency’s impermanence is a reflection on the relationship between generations and on the movement of time. If the Fifteenth Amendment is understood as the “child” of the institution, then the dilemma confronting Du Bois is how to make a case for a “permanent Freedmen’s Bureau,” one that would resist a generational logic that would underwrite its obsolescence (32). For what he perceptively fears is that in conceiving voting rights as the fulfillment of this institution’s mission and thus the end of its life, the amendment will simply enlarge democracy’s constituency without altering its form. To effect a more fundamental transformation, what is needed is an agency that views the project of emancipation as an ongoing, not discrete, task. In this regard, Du Bois’s call for a “permanent Freedmen’s Bureau” stands as a plea for material evidence of the nation’s commitment to recognizing—​and attempting to redress—​the conditions that continued to enslave blacks. A “permanent Freedmen’s Bureau,” in short, would amend the understanding of what democracy is and means.

 

52

Untimely Democracy

It is no coincidence, then, that in this chapter Du Bois proffers his notion of the “present-​past.” Portraying the emergence of African Americans from slavery in a South filled with masters who “still strove for their chains,” he writes, Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—​ the one, a gray-​haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—​and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-​like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife,—​aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-​child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “cursed Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-​past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children’s children live to-​day. (27) Here, the story of the end of the Civil War and the advent of black freedom does not assume the form of an epochal break in which the death of the elder generation signifies the conclusion of one historical period and the birth of another.59 To be sure, the two main emblems of the old regime of slavery are “passing” away: the white master is a “blighted, ruined form,” hardened by a life given over to tyranny; the female slave, the object of this “gentleman’s” abuses, expresses “centuries” of oppression in her “awful” face. But the family lines—​at once separate and inextricably intertwined—​represented by these figures do not come to an end with their deaths, even if war and racial terrorism have already claimed some of their progeny. For the past these icons represent endures in the form of their remaining children who transmit the animosity, rage, and passion of the era of slavery to the present generation. Perhaps Du Bois articulates this notion most powerfully in the repetition of “hating” that marks the paragraph’s final clauses. In the original version of this chapter, which was published in the March 1901 issue of the Atlantic Monthly under the title “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” the conclusion of the excerpt cited above reads, “but hating they went to their long home, and hating their children’s children live to-​day.” Written in this way, the passage implies that the “two figures” refuse to lay their grievances to rest.60 When he revises this passage for Souls, Du Bois offers a slightly different—​but no less disturbing—​point about the endurance of the past. By setting off “hating” with two commas and

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

53

thereby linking the elder and the younger cohorts by way of the repetition of structurally parallel forms of this word, Du Bois suggests that the past lives on not in the “haunting presenc[e]‌” of the ghosts of the previous generation but in the uncanny resemblance between the parents and their progeny.61 Just as the aged pair lived and died “hating,” so their “children’s children” go on “hating” “to-​day”: the participle remains the same even as the sentence shifts from the past (“went”) to the present (“live”). That Du Bois uses the word “passing,” as opposed to “past,” to describe these figures’ movement from life into death only serves to underscore his thesis: the legacy of one generation does not disappear as the next comes into being. These emblems of the past “ever stand” in part because they reproduce themselves in the form of their children, continuing to exert their force even as linear time marches on. If, as Du Bois writes in the following paragraph, such a vista was the “field of work for the Freedmen’s Bureau” (27), then the blunder that this institutional embodiment of the present-​past committed in conceiving of its mission as “temporary” is painfully clear. Du Bois accordingly dedicates the remaining lines of the chapter to what might be thought of as a kind of eulogy for the bureau that at once functions as a lament for its death and as a call to the present generation to assume the project its predecessor relinquished too soon: “The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation” (33). In contrast to Jefferson, Du Bois advances a notion of intergenerational obligation, even dependence. That the bureau and the era of emancipation to which it belonged can be classified among the nominal past does not absolve the present (and future presents) from the “most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems” (32). In this regard, Du Bois’s use of “untimely” holds a double meaning. Not simply referring to the “inopportune” death of the Freedmen’s Bureau in advance of completing its mission, “untimely” also describes the present generation’s charge in taking up a task that would seem to many altogether irrelevant to the present moment.62 While Jefferson understands such a posture as the suffocating stranglehold of the past over the present that threatens to stall progress, Du Bois makes this “heavy heritage” central to his political program. As the democratic theorist Lawrie Balfour has observed, for Du Bois a “backward look need not present an obstacle to politics in the present.”63 Yet we might make this point even stronger: for the author of Souls, the mere notion of an awareness of the past—​a “backward look”—​is insufficient insofar as it suggests a division between then and now, the elder and the younger generations. Indeed, Du Bois’s “present-​past” finally functions to probe the temporal boundaries delimiting racial thought, those structuring suppositions that Sharon P. Holland has examined in her striking

 

54

Untimely Democracy

reconsideration of the energies of race and racism. Noting that in the Western progress narrative the “black subject is mired in space and the white subject represents the full expanse of time,” Holland contends that the “meeting” of these two beings “might be thought of as never actually occurring in the same temporal plane.” The oft-​articulated “desire to move beyond” or “get over” race accordingly warrants skepticism because the encounter between “these two never literally” happens. As Holland asks, “Exactly how does one move beyond a nonevent?” In forcing the confrontation between the black and white subject in this passage, Du Bois signals an appreciation of the problem animating this query and offers a way to circumvent the politically deleterious functions that invocations of “beyond” often perform. For Holland, the desire to get “beyond race” simply “reifies” the “nonrelation” of black/​w hite “while simultaneously reinscribing the past (one’s history) in a master-slave dialectic.” Thus, the “mysterious life force of racist endeavor” is that “in constantly trying to align the world according to a particular ordering, it arrests time rather than attests to its futurity.”64 But Du Bois offers us an opportunity to think differently about the prospects of temporal arrest. By emphasizing the infiltration of the past in the present figured by the hyphen in “present-​past,” he unsettles the facile (and deceptive) declaration of the future’s independence from the past that facilitates the desire to “get beyond” while eluding the reckoning that such a longing at once presumes and negates. Put differently, at least in this passage, Souls sketches a conceptual project that sees in the stasis of slavery not just an antiracist politics but the emergence of a future that is something other than a repetition of the past. Du Bois pursues this line of thought in the concluding pages of the chapter. Acknowledging that “new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul,” he nonetheless asks his reader whether it might not “be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?” He punctuates this line with a question mark, but his next sentence reveals that it bears an urgency requiring something closer to an exclamation point: “For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free” (33). “Bound by law and custom to an economic slavery,” relegated to a “servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges,” African Americans seem to be experiencing a “second slavery” in the era of freedom (33, 15). It is a peculiar position that makes it difficult to distinguish the “twilight of nightfall” from the “flush of some faint-​dawning day,” as Du Bois puts it later in Souls (54). Given this state of affairs, in which it is difficult to tell just what time it is, what does it mean to “count” slavery’s living legacy “honestly and carefully”? To put the question differently, how can the present generation continue the “legacy of striving” without falling victim to the despair that marks Jefferson’s reflections

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

55

on the prospect of a future no different from the past? Du Bois addresses these queries in a key but neglected passage that appears near the end of his book: From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—​from this must arise a painful self-​consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-​confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism. (127) Literary critics and political theorists alike have devoted many pages to Du Bois’s famous theory of “double consciousness,” which he defines in the opening chapter of Souls as that “peculiar sensation” of always feeling one’s “two-​ness” as both an “American” and a “Negro” (11).65 But less attention has been paid to the crucial corollary he presents here. In this account of what we might designate a temporal double consciousness, the central tension revolves not simply around the felt contradiction between Americanness and blackness but between two temporalities: a linear, progressive time, which Du Bois metaphorizes as a “current” that carries the black citizen into the modern era, and a nonprogressive time represented by an “eddy” whose circular motion raises the specter of stasis.66 As my language in that last sentence implies, Du Bois also reworks Jefferson’s figure of the “veil” of blackness in this passage. Whereas in Notes this trope is associated with the “fixity” and “immobility” that Jefferson considers a threat to the body politic, Du Bois describes blackness as positioned between movement and nonmovement, past and present, progress and stasis. For the author of Souls, that is, the “Veil of Color” is not simply static. Change and development are occurring, but at a pace that is out of sync with the steady, incremental progress associated with Jefferson’s favored political time—​and problematically associated with scientific racism at the turn into the twentieth century. This is precisely the temporal model that Du Bois resists in proposing a “permanent” Freedmen’s Bureau. But even as he seeks to counter the prevailing impulse to relegate racial bondage to the past, Du Bois does not abandon the notion of progress entirely, replacing it with the stasis that Jefferson so fears. Instead, to cite a term he employs in his account of double consciousness, the idea is to “merge” these contradictory temporalities (11).67 Where Jefferson can only imagine a future for American democracy in the “current” of steady progress, Du Bois strives to bring the

 

56

Untimely Democracy

countervailing rhythms of the “eddy” into the body politic. For it is precisely by reconceiving the “heavy heritage” of slavery’s present-​past not as a burden to be disavowed but as an obligation to be acted upon that an era of true equality and liberty—​as opposed to a merely nominal freedom—​might be realized. The aim, as the opening pages of Souls suggest, is to insist on the “not yet”: to look forward to a genuine epoch of freedom while vigorously challenging the notion that this future has already arrived. Of course, as we will see in the next chapter, which traces Frederick Douglass’s attempt to negotiate between the progress and regress that seemed to characterize African American life in the aftermath of Reconstruction, this is a difficult posture to maintain. Du Bois himself avers that to remain constantly aware of the present-​past is to run the risk of falling into a deep despair—​of finding oneself caught, as it were, in a vortex from which there seems to be no escape. It is precisely this paralysis that Du Bois depicts in his harrowing meditation on the death of his son. “Of the Passing of the First-​Born,” the eleventh chapter of Souls, opens with the promise of new life: the author and his wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, welcome their child, Burghardt, into the world. But as Du Bois holds his son, the black future embodied, he sees “the shadow of the Veil” falling across Burghardt’s face (131). The image frightens the new father, for it recalls the formative moment in his youth when a white girl refused the calling card he offered her; as Du Bois writes at the outset of Souls, it was in this instant that the “shadow swept across” him and he first came to recognize the prejudice and discrimination that are the hallmarks of the color line (10). In looking into his son’s face, then, the writer experiences a crisis of vision. Does Burghardt portend the coming of a more equitable future—​an era of freedom in which the “dream of my black fathers” will “stagger a step onward”? (131) Or, does the child represent a repetition of the past? When Burghardt succumbs to diphtheria at just twenty months old, Du Bois interprets his death as an affirmative response to the latter question. Accordingly, the son’s passing affords his father a perverse comfort, an “awful gladness.” Capturing one of the central paradoxes of slavery’s horror, whose existential exigencies Toni Morrison would go on to explore in her account of Sethe’s “rough choice” in Beloved (1987), he writes, “Blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—​and my soul whispers ever to me, saying, ‘Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free’” (133).68 In this intensely intimate episode, the writer pursues to their limit the more overtly political reflections about time, history, and the persistence of racial inequality that mark the earlier pages of his book.69 For in likening the death of his child to the victory achieved by a slave who flees his master, Du Bois expresses a profound skepticism about whether a

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

57

future different from the “second slavery” of the present (or more precisely, the present-​past) ever will come into being. Indeed, in what we might think of as the nadir of Souls, Burghardt’s death seems to stop the forward movement of time. As the child took his last breath, Du Bois writes, the “sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the western hills”; the “winds spoke not”; and the “trees … stood motionless.” Even “the day” refused to “chang[e]‌” (132). Whereas the termination of the Freedmen’s Bureau before its work is done inspires his call for continued “striving,” in this chapter Du Bois issues no such cry. The “not yet” that marks the book’s opening seems to have become “when, if ever?”70 It is the latter refrain that haunts Du Bois at the conclusion of Souls. In “The After-​Thought,” a brief postscript he appends to his book, the writer issues the following plea: Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-​ born into the world-​wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed THE END (164) Whereas Jefferson posits the emerging America as an inspiring case study that invalidates the temporal prophecy of Ecclesiastes, Du Bois views his America as a disturbing case in point for the vision of time proffered by this sacred text: “that which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been.” Indeed, the question posed by the speaker of Ecclesiastes—​“Consider the work of God:  for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?”—​articulates the very challenge Du Bois attempts to address.71 Accordingly, we might read this closing passage as limning a crisis of faith in the political vision Souls puts forward in its meditation on the “present-​ past.” For if, in “Of the Passing of the First-​Born,” Du Bois glimpses a world in which endless recurrence seems to reign supreme, celebrating his son’s escape from such a plight, then in the final page of Souls the author himself seems to want to turn away from this vista. Ironically, the view is brought into relief by Du Bois’s own “crooked marks,” a phrase that functions not just as a metaphor for the writer’s script but as a figure for slavery’s present-​past, which, as we have seen, makes any simple forward movement impossible.72 In this regard, the phrase “turn the tangle straight” reveals a longing for the

 

58

Untimely Democracy

linear, progressive vision Jefferson depicts—​a plea for the chronological list with which Notes concludes. To be sure, the principles that enable Jefferson to plot this steady forward movement are anathema to Du Bois. Where the author of Notes sees in the specter of blackness the certain death of democracy, Du Bois strives to make both the black subject and the heritage of slavery he embodies central to his political vision. But despite his commitment to representing the present-​past, Du Bois nonetheless shares an anxiety with Jefferson about a future dominated by endless repetition. Put differently, even as he refuses a progressive model of time that would relegate racial servitude to the past, Du Bois cannot bring himself to embrace fully the present-​past, for he fears that doing so would be to commit oneself to a paralyzing stasis that forecloses the possibility of a better future—​ indeed, any future at all. In this respect, the form of “The After-​Thought” is crucial. In the published versions of Souls, including the book’s first edition (Figure 1.3), no period appears in the final sentence of the postscript.73 The same is true of the manuscript version of this closing page, though here a period appears after “the end” that seems to have been deleted prior to publication (Figure 1.4). The book’s concluding claim therefore reads not as a sentence proper but rather as a prose-​poem of sorts whose enjambed structure holds out a double meaning. Read all the way through, Du Bois’s meditation suggests the continued striving, the engagement with the present-​past, for which he calls so clearly in the early pages of Souls (“Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed /​ the end”).74 But if this broken line seems to suggest an easy endorsement of the “crooked marks” of slavery’s persistence, the second interpretation made possible by the form of this passage complicates matters. For read with a pause before “the end,” “The After-​Thought” seeks to erase these “crooked marks,” replacing their “tangle” with a “straight” line (“Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed”). This is finally the ambivalent position in which Du Bois finds himself at the end of Souls. He cannot conclude his volume with the list that serves as Jefferson’s terminus in Notes, for in refusing to exclude slavery from his vision, Du Bois must also resist the linear shape of Jefferson’s chronicle. But Du Bois nonetheless feels the allure of such a form. And so in “The After-​Thought” he seeks the promise of a different future held out by the figure of a line even as he insists that the only way to reach this end is to trace a “crooked” path. Which is to say: Du Bois can only embrace slavery’s present-​past if he also simultaneously disavows it.

 

Figure 1.3  “The After-​Thought,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, first edition, published by A. C. McClurg & Co., April 18, 1903. No period appears after the final word of the postscript. Courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University.

 

Figure 1.4  “The After-​Thought,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’s manuscript of The Souls of Black Folk. A period seems to follow “the end,” but, as in the first edition of Souls, no period appears after the final line of the postscript. Courtesy of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. Reproduced with permission of the David Graham Du Bois Trust.

 



On the Pos s ib ilit y o f Democrac y in the P re s e nt -Past

61

We will have to wait until this book’s final chapter for a vision of untimely democracy that unambiguously affirms the stasis that makes the author of Souls, like the author of Notes, tremble. For now, however, we move backward in time to Frederick Douglass’s attempts to navigate his post-​Reconstruction world in his final writings, which offer an account of what it means to narrate the present-​ past avant la lettre.

 

2

Narrating the Present-​Past in Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times Slavery has been fruitful in giving itself names. It has been called “the peculiar institution,” “the social system,” and the “impediment”. … It has been called a great many names, and it will call itself by yet another name; and you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next. —​Frederick Douglass, Remarks at the American Anti-​Slavery Society Meeting, May 10, 1865 We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naïve … we do not ask that they progress towards that end precisely as we have been given to believe. —​Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1966)

On June 16, 1877, Frederick Douglass arrived at a dock in Baltimore, where he boarded the steamship Matilda and set out on an overnight journey to Talbot County, Maryland, the place of his birth into slavery. Upon arriving at his destination the next day, Douglass reportedly announced that he had travelled to St. Michaels “first of all” to see his onetime master, Thomas Auld, who was believed to be near his death.1 The famous ex-​slave had achieved a national stature since he last haunted the precincts of his youth. Two years earlier, he was selected to serve as a pallbearer at the funeral of Vice President Henry Wilson—​the “first time … a colored man” had been so honored, Douglass noted.2 And just weeks before, Douglass was named the United States Marshal of the District of Columbia by Rutherford B. Hayes, whose ascent to the presidency marked an official end to Reconstruction and paved the way for the “second slavery” that the previous chapter explored. But on this Sunday in June, Marshal Douglass performed another kind of ceremonial work. Home again for the first time in forty-​one years, the ex-​slave bade his former master a final farewell.3 62

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

63

Recorded in Douglass’s last autobiography, the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892), and covered extensively by the Baltimore Sun, the 1877 meeting between the onetime bondsman and owner might be taken as a type scene of the postbellum slave narrative:  Douglass, the newly selected US Marshal, returns to the state of his captivity to visit the man who previously claimed him as property. Physically towering over the bedridden Auld, and symbolically proclaiming his victory over servitude, Douglass would seem to emerge from the encounter triumphant.4 And yet, there is reason to resist uncritically accepting this episode as a signal chapter in a book that, in one reading, seeks relentlessly to chronicle the progress African Americans have achieved since emancipation. For, whatever other victories his reunion with his former master may represent, Douglass can claim no conquest over the past of slavery, his own or that of the nation’s black population more generally, as a result of this encounter. Indeed, he leaves Auld’s bedroom preoccupied anew by his ignorance of the precise date of his birth, a fact Douglass should have known had he not suffered slavery’s abiding injury: the child’s alienation from the mother. More significant, contemporaneous newspaper accounts—​both of his visit and of a controversial speech he delivered a month earlier, in which he underscored slavery’s afterlife—​reveal that this meeting indexes the endurance, rather than the superannuation, of the racial strictures codified under servitude. Despite its explicit focus on reconciliation and the healing powers of time, then, this encounter testifies instead to the present-​past. For all its historical significance and narrative complexity, this chapter remains surprisingly unexamined. Regularly cited in biographies of the black leader, Douglass’s reunion with Auld is treated in these studies as transparent documentary evidence. For instance, Dickson Preston, author of one of the most extensive biographical accounts of Douglass’s Maryland excursion, neatly sums up the meeting:  “It had been a brief discussion, but it had cleared the atmosphere of forty-​one years of misunderstanding.”5 In his magisterial 2016 literary biography, Robert S. Levine has done much to correct such problematic treatments, offering us a richer sense of this moment and of Life and Times generally. Still, for reasons that I will describe below, I understand Douglass as possessing less agency, both as actor and author, than Levine finds in his analysis of this scene. For if it is certainly true that “Douglass was keen to use the occasion of the reunion for his own rhetorical and political purposes,” he also found how difficult it was to shape not just this particular narrative but that of the book in which it appeared.6 Perhaps one way to understand the broader stakes of this interpretive difference is to note the extent to which literary scholars as well as philosophers have lavished their attention on the other black-​white encounter in Douglass’s oeuvre: the battle between the rebellious bondsman and the sadistic slave breaker

 

64

Untimely Democracy

Edward Covey.7 As Douglass famously describes it, this contretemps “was the turning-​point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.”8 The Douglass-​Auld reunion, as portrayed in Life and Times, denies the decisive transformation that has drawn so many to this encounter and has established the Covey episode as an anchor for interpretations of the author’s corpus. I mean to trouble this trend. Specifically, I want to suggest that it is only by refusing to read the Douglass-​Auld encounter on the terms of the Covey agon—​that is, as Douglass-​the-​freedman’s “vengeance” over his ex-​master, as Levine puts it—​that the significance of this episode comes into full relief.9 For as the fault line along which the otherwise progressive formal structure and temporal vision of Life and Times break down, the section grants profound insight into how the pressures of the nadir unsettled Douglass’s political philosophy, forcing him—​and his narrative—​to return to the abolitionist agitation of the antebellum moment. To appreciate this fact, we need to reassess Life and Times, both in terms of its narrative project, its aesthetic dimensions, and its historical context, the way it navigates its complex social and political field. Since the middle of the twentieth century, Life and Times has been dismissed for lacking the rhetorical power and formal intricacy exhibited by the author’s 1845 and 1855 volumes.10 As Eric Sundquist has it, the book is “tarnished by repetition and a mild smugness, and most of all by the stark irony that Douglass’s high principles grated against the steep decline of black civil rights in the post-​Reconstruction years.”11 Whether or not we want to deem them “smug,” explicit pronouncements of Douglass’s achievements mark Life and Times from its outset: as the title page of the final iteration unabashedly announces, Douglass’s text is a record of the manifold successes its author has enjoyed in his “most eventful life,” from “his experience in the conduct of an influential newspaper” to “his appointment as united states marshal by president r. b. hayes” (LT, 453). Such declarations class Douglass’s book among W. H. Crogman and H. F. Kletzing’s Progress of a Race (1898) and John Jones’s Some Foot-​Steps of the Progress of the Colored Race (1899), those studies, I argued in the Introduction, that deploy chattel slavery as the misleading temporal marker against which to track black progress. Douglass’s statements also remind us that the imperative to document one’s humanity, which Lloyd Pratt has identified as a characteristic of the antebellum African American life narrative, still holds sway—​and in some ways, intensifies—​after emancipation.12 But if Douglass’s text partakes of these conventions and their concomitant temporal logics, Life and Times also signifies—​often against itself—​the insufficiency of such progressive frames both for describing the realities of the nadir and for forging a narrative pathway for political change. Indeed, existing alongside the signs of progress he optimistically cites are troubling moments of repetition,

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

65

reversion, and stasis that imply that the long-​sought-​after day of racial equality might not be as near as he initially supposed. Douglass’s meeting with his former master and the 1883 Supreme Court decision striking down the Civil Rights legislation of 1875, the two primary examples on which this chapter focuses, constitute contradictory evidence. For they testify to what Douglass, in a speech that heralded the coming of a “better day,” identified as the persistence of slavery’s “foul spirit” in the era of freedom (LT, 934, 930).13 In this regard, the late nineteenth-​century Douglass also fails in his “attempt to figure time exclusively as progress,” as Pratt contends in his account of the author’s antebellum narratives. And while Douglass still struggles with this “temporal variety” in Life and Times, he comes to countenance this failure as perhaps politically productive.14 Extending Pratt’s important insights into the postbellum era, and joining Levine and other scholars who have returned to Life and Times, I want in this chapter to examine the narratological and political resonances of the forward and backward movement that structures this text.15 Originally conceived as the last installment in the trilogy chronicling his journey from fugitive to famous black citizen, Life and Times enjoys neither the acute transformation that results from Douglass’s confrontation with Covey in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) nor the clear temporal division telegraphed in the title of My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).16 Instead, this final volume is troubled by a nonprogressive temporality that points backward toward bondage and thwarts Douglass’s initial desire to craft the book as a progressive summa of his career. As we shall see, this tension is embodied by the work’s textual history: Life and Times first appeared in 1881; Douglass issued a modestly revised edition in 1882 that featured changes in language but whose basic structure remained the same; a decade later, he added an entirely new section in order to address postbellum political disenfranchisement.17 Read against this backdrop, Life and Times emerges not so much as a smug celebration of racial progress but as a paradoxically progressive chronicle of Douglass’s coming to terms with recursivity and stasis—​his emergent consciousness of the political potency of nonprogressive modes of time. Viewed from this perspective, the “repetitions” that for Sundquist signify evidence of the writer’s reactionary turn seem more like problematic ruptures—​intrusions of the past—​in Douglass’s forward-​moving narrative line, as well as in his work’s attendant political vision, which betrays a belief in progress that initially rests on the past receding into the present and giving way to the future. Indeed, this chapter identifies in Douglass’s “repetitions” the central dilemma—​at once formal and political—​of Life and Times: how does one chronicle the pathway from bondage to freedom, given that it is not at all clear that the former phase has ended?

 

66

Untimely Democracy

In pursuing this question first through an examination of the Auld episode and then through a more global reading of Life and Times in the context of the last phase of Douglass’s public career, I aim not only to bring attention to this neglected text. I also hope to recover a more politically radical Douglass. For if Life and Times occasionally seems to confirm that its author is the complacent former race leader much scholarship has made him out to be, across its revisions this work also reveals a figure coming to recall the prophecy about the afterlife of slavery that he issued in the 1865 lecture reproduced in this chapter’s first epigraph. That is, we witness an author and activist who, compelled to give voice to the present-​past of slavery in the closing years of his life, is forced in his attempt to translate the unsettling temporalities of the nadir into a political practice to reconsider the utility of the pervasive (and personally held) belief that the forward movement of time necessarily implies progress.18

Douglass’s Homecoming The Baltimore Sun dispatched a special correspondent to St. Michaels to chronicle Douglass’s homecoming. Appearing on the front page of its June 19 issue under the headline “frederick douglass at his old home” (Figure 2.1), the paper’s report circulated widely, with the New York Times, the New York Tribune, and Harper’s Weekly, among manifold other publications, reprinting portions of the Sun’s account.19 As we shall see, Douglass would subsequently contest the veracity of the details of his trip that surfaced in these papers, particularly the Sun, calling the reports “defective and colored” (LT, 876); and he would, four years later in Life and Times, belatedly offer his own version of what had

Figure 2.1  Headline, “Frederick Douglass at His Old Home,” Baltimore Sun, June 19, 1877. This article chronicling Douglass’s return to the Eastern Shore appeared on the front page. Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

67

transpired. Douglass’s sense that the Sun’s account of events may have been less than objective was not without basis. Though not affiliated with any political faction, the Sun was nonetheless a “stout defender of the South,” and in the years after the Civil War, the paper was critical of Republicans, the party with which Douglass aligned himself, even as it sought to foster a spirit of national reunion.20 Yet the Sun’s report constitutes what is likely the single contemporaneous written record of Douglass’s time in St. Michaels, and despite—​or perhaps because of—​its biases, interpolations, and projections, it is worth examining closely. Had its headline not so clearly announced Douglass as its leading character, the Baltimore paper’s report initially might read like a banal entry into the register of maritime activities of the Eastern Shore. Subsuming Douglass into a mass of “colored” travelers in its opening sentence, the Sun reverses course in the following line, noting that “among the party was Frederick Douglass, United States marshal for the District of Columbia, who paid a visit for the first time since he left here forty-​one years ago to the scenes of his youth.” Semantically eliding the fact of the former slave’s bondage through its use of the innocuous verb “left” to allude to Douglass’s attempted flight from William Freeland’s farm in 1836, the Sun goes on to describe his return as a dream come true for the traveler. “Mr. Douglass some time ago expressed a wish to visit his former master, Capt. Thomas Auld” who, the article explains, “expressed his willingness and desire to meet his old servant, and this visit of Douglass to St. Michael’s was mainly for that purpose.” While the Sun’s unraveling of the backstory of this reunion is marked by a strange passivity, with events driven by vaguely specified “wishes” and “desires,” the correspondent nonetheless locates the final agency for setting the episode into motion—​and, thus, for fulfilling Douglass’s yearning—​in Auld’s hands. It is the moribund master’s “willingness” to accept his “old servant” into his home that, syntactically and symbolically, gives rise to Douglass’s trip. If the transition from an undifferentiated crowd of “colored people” going home to a very particular “Frederick Douglass” making the same journey suggests a desire to identify something symbolic in the Douglass-​Auld encounter, the ensuing sections of the report leave little doubt about how exactly the correspondent imagines the significance of the slave-​turned-​celebrity’s return. Going toward Auld’s home “as soon as convenient” after disembarking, the Sun explains, Douglass “called at Capt. Auld’s residence, where he was received by” Auld’s son-​in-​law William H. Bruff, “who addressed him as ‘Marshal Douglass.’” Upon hearing this greeting, Douglass purportedly proclaimed: “I am Marshal Douglass in Washington; here let me be Fred Douglass again.” Appearing first as a “colored” traveler, then as “Marshal Douglass,” and now simply as the “Fred” of the 1845 narrative, by the third paragraph Douglass is transmogrified once again: “The meeting between the former master and former servant was very affecting.” With this last turn, the paper announces Douglass as what the

 

68

Untimely Democracy

historian David Blight has identified as the “sine qua non of the literature of reconciliation”: the “faithful slave.”21 But we might also say that the Sun here unveils Douglass as the loyal former servant who travels home to be at the bedside of his dying master. As if to intimate that the trajectory of his postslavery career was somehow misguided, the paper remarks in the summary version of its coverage that Douglass “felt like one returning home and receiving a master’s blessing after many wanderings.”22 A kind of prodigal son, or perhaps a (formerly literal, now metaphorical) fugitive returned home, Douglass, the paper suggests, had at last found his way back to St. Michaels. In the Sun’s estimation, Douglass plays the part sublimely. Upon approaching his onetime owner, Douglass “tenderly” took Auld’s “palsied hand,” “addressed him as his old master, and manifested emotion creditable alike to his manhood and to his heart.” Although we learn in a brief sentence that Auld “was very pleasant throughout,” the Sun’s prolonged focus on Douglass’s affect—​his “tender” touch, his respectful mode of address, and, presumably, the tears he sheds as he apprehends his erstwhile owner’s fragile figure—​implies that through these expressions the former slave is in fact confirming his “manhood,” if not his very humanity, as if both were open questions. To invert one of the most familiar lines from his Narrative: if in his fight with Covey the rebellious bondsman demonstrated how “a slave was made a man,” here the freedman verifies his “manhood” through a series of gestures that paradoxically renders him more legible as a subservient being—​the kind of slave into which Covey had failed to transform him (N, 47). Whatever may have been the case in the past, the article seems at pains to underscore that there is no resistance, violent or otherwise, let  alone any bitterness, in this “affecting” scene; there is only the capacious “heart” of the noble black “man” tending the bedside of the owner who had sent him to be broken. Indeed, in a final move that supplied what we might imagine was for the Baltimore paper the ultimate credit to Douglass’s “manhood,” the former slave reportedly “begged … forgiveness” from Auld for publishing statements after his escape from Maryland that were “unjust to his old master, or had wounded his feelings.” That the Sun records the expression of apology in this way is striking, for the “or” joining “unjust” and “wounded” suggests that Douglass does not simply seek expiation for any errata that may have marked his writings about his onetime owner; he is not apologizing for his mistaken accusation in his 1848 “Letter to My Old Master,” published in the North Star and later included as an appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom, that Auld had sent his aged grandmother “like an old horse to die in the woods.”23 Rather, Douglass seeks forgiveness for a much broader transgression:  for any remark—​true or false, unjust or deserved, in his Narrative or elsewhere—​that may have injured Auld’s self-​conception.24

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

69

Despite Douglass’s apparent largesse, Auld does not reciprocate. The master would issue no apology to his onetime servant, either for enslaving him or sending him to Covey, though he does remark that Douglass was “too smart to be a slave,” and thus he “never expected to keep him in slavery.” The report offers no further insight into the aftermath of this climactic exchange, no gloss on Auld’s statements or description of Douglass’s reception of them. Instead, it concludes in a more documentary register, adding a touch of the sentimental: “Douglas called upon Capt. Auld again … to bid him good-​bye, and when they parted both men wept.” But the story of “Frederick Douglass at His Old Home”—​both the visit and the article chronicling it—​does not end here. Between his initial and return calls to Auld’s bedside, Douglass delivered a lecture to a mixed-​race audience that had assembled in a nearby grove. The Sun’s report offers a glimpse into the limits attending what a black speaker of even Douglass’s stature could say on such an occasion: “He was not here to fan the flames of sectional animosity, nor to create ill-​feeling; nor yet to recount the wrongs inflicted on his race for 200 years; nor to go into antiquity for matter to stir the blood and rouse the passions; nor to indulge in a political harangue; nor to expound the constitution of the United States.”25 This slippage between objective reporting (“He said he did not come here to make a speech”) and a kind of free indirect discourse that reads like a hybrid of transcription and commentary (“He was not here to fan the flames of sectional animosity”) is worth noting.26 For the article effectively records a litany of the kinds of lectures that Douglass had given in the very recent past, which is to say it is also therefore a generic delineation of the types of speeches Douglass might well have delivered in St. Michaels. Essentially conjuring the specter of Douglass the politically radical lecturer only to negate it in a long series of “nors,” the Sun seems delighted to linger on the speeches Douglass did not give that day: his talk was neither a lesson in constitutional law nor a rekindling of the sentiments of disunion that led to the Civil War, and it certainly was not a “political harangue” about black civil rights. What the Sun’s account ultimately suggests is that the former bondsman said nothing at all about the nation’s debt to African Americans for slavery. It was a sign, straight from the mouth of one of the nation’s most famous former slaves, that the issue of bondage was finally settled. As he moved from preface to speech proper, Douglass likely pleased the paper even more. After declaring the “great joy” he experienced in looking into the “kind old face” of Auld earlier in the day, and affirming his love for the Eastern Shore, Douglass broke into what the Baltimore newspaper describes as “a eulogy of the white race and its achievements.” If “eulogy” is a rhetorical form defined by the commendation and praise of its subject, especially on the occasion of that subject’s death, this tribute was all praise, intimating nothing of the white

 

70

Untimely Democracy

race’s passing.27 To the contrary, the speaker took the occasion to declare to the “colored people” present in the crowd that “they were in contact with the most favored, the most indomitable, the most energetic race in the world, and that he would be false to his own race if he did not tell them just where they stood—​what an immense distance they were behind the white people.” Douglass’s point, the correspondent clarifies, was not that black Americans were “fundamentally and eternally inferior to the whites”; rather, Douglass insisted, they were undoubtedly “practically inferior.” Shifting to the first person, as if to confirm that the speaker was in fact making such a declaration, the Sun quotes Douglass directly:  “We must not talk about equality until we can do what white people can do.” The recommendation the speaker offered as a remedy for this “practical inferiority” is striking as much for what it ignores as for what it prescribes. As the Sun reports, Douglass told his black listeners that if they “wished to elevate themselves” and “be respected,” they “must get money and property.” That is, the accruing of material goods, secured through hard work, constituted the formula for success proffered by the speech, which made no mention of how the manifold economic and political challenges that confronted African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War might complicate the speaker’s instructions. As promised in its preface, Douglass’s talk would have nothing to say, indeed, about the legacy of racial servitude or the nation’s short-​lived attempt to redress the injuries of black bondage in the context of Reconstruction. Such details did not trouble the audience—​or at least its white members, who, the Sun explains, greeted the lecture with special enthusiasm. In fact, this segment of the crowd “probably appreciated it more highly and liked it better than his colored hearers.” While the paper declines to specify how, exactly, Douglass’s black auditors received the speech, it does not hesitate to editorialize about the way in which they ought to have taken the message, deeming Douglass’s remarks “some of the best advice and soundest instruction” black Americans “have had for many a day.” Indeed, the Sun could not have been more approving of the whole trip. Assessing the visit in the penultimate paragraph, the correspondent reflects that Douglass struck just the right balance between his past and present roles. Not presenting too much of Douglass the Marshal of the District of Columbia nor too little of Douglass the former bondsman, he walked the line between “offensive thrusting” and “servility.” And he remained silent on unseemly because untimely subjects such as slavery’s afterlife or civil rights. Douglass’s visit to St. Michaels, as recounted by the Sun, occasioned great interest and controversy. Drawing on the Sun’s reporting, the New York Tribune, in its June 20 issue, highlighted the speaker’s comments about the “practical inferiority” of blacks. Although the article itself reprinted in full this section

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

71

of the address, the headline dropped the qualifier “practical,” announcing that the speaker offered “good advice” in “a speech to the colored people—​ wherein they are inferior to the whites.”28 In light of such billing, it should come as no surprise that Douglass’s conduct and commentary in the course of his excursion disturbed many African Americans. To them, his behavior seemed to smack of the very “cringing” and “servility” the Sun had praised him for avoiding.29 The events of this June day provide compelling evidence for those scholars who lament the thinker’s so-​called conservative turn after the war. For example, Douglass’s biographer William McFeely places the reunion scene in a chapter that opens with his claim that “the stances on various issues that Douglass was to take between 1877 and 1881 were the least honorable and least helpful to his fellow former slaves of any in his long life.”30 Whether or not we agree with McFeely, it is undeniable that this particular lecture, far from breaking new ground, reiterated values that were characteristic of Douglass’s thinking—​and not only after the war. One of the speeches Douglass delivered most frequently, both pre-​and postemancipation, was “Self-​Made Men,” a veritable encomium of the virtues of independence, industry, and material ownership he celebrated in his June 1877 talk.31 It is conceivable, then, that Douglass’s comments in his lecture were simply starker expressions of his standard ideology.32 Equally plausible, however, is the possibility that the Baltimore paper’s account was not simply biased but actually misrepresented the nature of the reunion. If Douglass enacted the very forgetting of the (ongoing) injustices perpetrated against African Americans that paved the way for national reunion and the turning away from a commitment to black civil rights, we should remember that one of the major sources from which our account of this scene comes is not neutral. (Of course, neither is the other main source, Douglass’s Life and Times, to which I will attend below.)33 These factors must enter into any assessment of Douglass’s homecoming. But there remains another, heretofore overlooked, lens through which we might view the former bondsman’s return to the county where he was born into slavery. Upon his arrival in St. Michaels, Douglass likely was reeling from the uproar precipitated by a speech he delivered on “Our National Capital,” in which he spoke of the ugly history of racial servitude in Washington, DC, and implied that the traces of de jure slavery were still quite legible. This talk and the racialized controversy it ignited constitute an intertext and context that bring into relief a very different kind of Douglass from the one who spoke in Maryland’s Eastern Shore, shedding light on the complicated intersections of national and racial politics that may have inflected, if not circumscribed, his comments and conduct there.

 

72

Untimely Democracy

Douglass in DC: The State of the Racial (Re)Union Upon finally assuming office as president in 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes named Frederick Douglass Marshal of the District of Columbia. In one sense, Douglass’s appointment was no small victory: he was the first African American selected for a position for which approval from the US Senate was required. And yet, for all the possibilities of a revision of the past emblemized by the fact that a former slave could occupy a job whose requirements once included the capture of fugitives, such a characterization occludes the other disturbing political and racial realities bound up with Douglass’s post. As Douglass observes in Life and Times, the collective “scream” of “popular displeasure” voiced by the residents of Washington city at the announcement of his selection reflected a fear in part that Douglass would “Africanize the courts”; but most of the protest emerged from the specter of a “colored man at the Executive Mansion … performing the ceremony—​a very empty one—​of introducing the aristocratic citizens of the republic to the President of the United States” (LT, 856; original emphasis). “Empty” as this duty may have been, the image it presented—​a scene of social miscegenation writ large—​too severely violated racialized hierarchies. Marshal Douglass would be excused from this particular task. If in the immediate wake of his appointment Douglass perhaps was blissfully unaware of just how firmly drawn the boundaries of race were, he was reminded of the limits of his mobility when, in May 1877, he delivered an address to a black audience in Baltimore on “Our National Capital.” Though he had written and first given the speech in the District of Columbia more than a year earlier, the controversy surrounding his appointment as marshal had altered the stakes, making the same lines he uttered in 1876 signify with much more representative force in 1877. Part history lesson, part patriotic paean to the nation’s symbolic center, and part sociological commentary, at times satirical and other times serious, “Our National Capital” was, most broadly, an assessment of the state of race relations in Washington, DC, that took stock of what Douglass called the “spirit of progress” even as it refused to turn away from the prejudice and inequality that lingered in the era of freedom. In contrast to his speech in St. Michaels, “Our National Capital” did not simply mark these signs of stasis, but insisted on calling them what they were: evidence of slavery’s afterlife, what Douglass metaphorized as bondage’s “footprints.”34 “Our National Capital” begins by recognizing the important place the city holds in the imagination of a nation just recently at war with itself. Any “American citizen worthy of the name,” Douglass asserts, “feels himself largely identified with the capital of his nation”:  “Elsewhere he may be a citizen of a state, no

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

73

larger than Delaware; here he is a citizen of a great nation” (451). Giving voice to what the historian Grace Elizabeth Hale has identified as the way the Civil War and Reconstruction “shifted the location of citizenship from the individual states to the national level,” Douglass initially resists the second part of Hale’s thesis: her sense that the category of “whiteness” facilitated the process of reconciliation between North and South in such a way that remaking the nation meant in part equating “American” with “white,” thereby effectively excluding African Americans, whether legally, socially, or symbolically, from the category of US citizen.35 Speaking at a moment in which this process had just begun—​though the compromise of 1877 was a sure sign that it was underway—​Douglass confidently inserts black citizens into the picture he paints of the “American”: “No American now has a skin too dark to call Washington his home, and no American now has a skin so white and a heart so black as to deny him that right” (451). While celebrating the “spirit of progress” (446), Douglass does not shrink from naming the less pleasant truths that mark the streets of the District of Columbia. Indeed, in a crucial turning point, the speaker declares that the ideal and the real, the possible and the actual do not necessarily align: “the contemplation of the city is one thing, and the city itself is quite another thing” (453). This bridge gives rise to the austere assertion that “Washington, as compared with many other parts of the country, has been, and still is, a most disgraceful and scandalous contradiction to the march of civilization” (454). Taking up the “has been” first, Douglass embarks upon a retrospective of the nation’s history, calling the selection of Washington as the site for the country’s capital “one of the greatest mistakes made by the fathers of the Republic” (454). He ascribes this “mistake” to the city’s attachment—​geographical, cultural, and psychological—​to slavery. “Sandwiched between two of the oldest slave states,” “pervaded by the manners, morals, politics, and religion peculiar to a slaveholding community,” Washington was not simply invested in racial bondage—​it worshipped the institution like an “idol” (455). Identifying slavery as a crucial source of the corrupt morals that have come to characterize the city more generally, Douglass locates the source of this degradation in DC’s founding citizens. Although, he notes, happily, that the “prestige” of the “old Virginia stock” has fallen since the war, Washingtonians are nonetheless “descendants of the old families”—​their heirs in the narrow and broader senses of the term—​and thus the ethos of this proslavery set lives on (458). One such embodiment of slavery’s persistence, Douglass remarks, in careful passive voice, is “commonly called, by way of extreme contempt, ‘Poor white trash’” (459–​60). If the marshal understandably tries to distance himself from the term, he evinces no such reticence in his ensuing description of this class’s reliance, psychological as much as economic, on the peculiar institution: “They were the slave drivers, the overseers, the slavehunters … the watch dogs of

 

74

Untimely Democracy

the plantation. They were generally on hand when a refractory negro was to be beaten with many stripes. To be permitted this luxury of brute enjoyment, they would follow the track of a negro, as a dog will follow a bone, or as a shark will follow a slave ship.” Having neither “bone” nor “slave ship” to pursue after emancipation, these men, Douglass estimates, improved their condition “morally and materially.” Yet, “They resent the emancipation of the negroes and would fight to day if, by that means, they could bring back the old slave system. … The trouble and complaint of these people is not that they themselves have by this change, fallen lower in the scale of society, but that the negro has risen higher. The distance between themselves and the negro has been diminished; that is all” (460). In a brilliant unpacking of what W. E. B. Du Bois would term, more than half a century later, the “psychological wage” of whiteness, Douglass shows how slavery fundamentally enabled white self-​definition, especially for those Americans at the lower end of the class system. As one of Du Bois’s most incisive readers, David Roediger has noted that the legal termination of black bondage unsettled the way that whiteness served to cover over “alienating and exploitative class relationships” by allowing poor whites to conceive of themselves as “not slaves.”36 Douglass’s understated point—​that “all” that has changed is the narrowing of the distance between whites and blacks—​incisively captures the heart of the matter: these Anglo-​Americans may not have independently and objectively “fallen lower in the scale of society.” Yet, given the mutual constitution of white and black identities, the African American’s ascent has indirectly effected his racial other’s psychological descent, essentially changing everything. If to this cohort of white Washingtonians the old slave system (lamentably) was a thing of the past, “Our National Capital” does not fully endorse this notion. In fact, the most radical element of the lecture was not that Douglass marked the dependence of whiteness on blackness, but that he resisted the forgetting of servitude so crucial to the process of national reunion: “Though slavery has now disappeared from Washington, and disappeared forever, its footprints are yet visible and deep, and will long remain so” (467). Through the trope of “footprints,” Douglass offers two instantiations of the ways Washingtonians from both sides of the color line continue to walk the trail of black bondage, embodying the institution’s “residuum” (466). For whites, the spirit of racial bondage lives on in “the black boy,” the ubiquitous servant figure so tightly woven into the cultural mores that even emancipation has not slowed its proliferation: “Every body is waited upon by the black boy. … The black boy may be old or young, large or small, tall or short, seven years or seventy years old, he is always according to the parlance of slavery, the black boy.” While he deploys the term “everybody,” Douglass implies that this character is especially important to the fragile racial status of less-​moneyed

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

75

whites; making a more subtle reference to the intersections of race and class than his earlier invocation of “poor white trash,” he observes that on her way to the market, the “wife of the humble mechanic … must have the black boy to walk behind her and carry the basket” (466). Yet, the speaker is quick to note, the “footprints” of slavery are black as well as white. “In whatever else he may have failed to learn from the old master class,” Douglass says, the “negro” “has not failed to learn their cruelty.” The “crack” of the “long whip” of the driver navigating his horse-​drawn wagon through the capital’s streets functions as a sonic and visual echo of the violence of the slave system. It is an “outfit,” Douglass notes, “that can only be seen in a land of slavery. It belongs to a bygone age and a bygone civilization” (467). At this juncture of the speech, Douglass signals a second crucial turn:  a transition from the “past with its gloom” to the “present with its promise, and to the future with its glory” (468). As his last remark about the whip of the wagon driver implies, however, any simple cordoning off of the past from the present and future is not possible. This man may “belong” to a “bygone age,” but, anachronism or not, his figure, like the “black boy,” haunts Washington in 1877. It is an “outfit” that is so deeply ingrained in the culture as to seem almost natural—​persisting across historical change. Against this backdrop, the praise for Washington’s present state that inaugurated Douglass’s remarks and to which he returns near the close, while certainly not disingenuous, does not signify pure jubilation and an uncomplicated faith in progress. Nor do the final lines of the speech, which look toward the future in declaring that “no longer the hot bed of slavery and the internal slave trade,” “no longer anchored to a barbarous past in which the footsteps of men were marked with blood,” “Washington may not only become one of the most beautiful and attractive cities in the world, but one of the grandest agents in the work of spreading peace on earth and good will toward men” (474). For all its bravado, the conclusion of “Our National Capital” seems to betray an uncertainty about the future it predicts. Douglass’s selection of the more conditional “may” over “will” plays a part here. But more important is the invocation of the image of the city’s “barbarous past in which the footsteps of men were marked with blood.” Referring to the traffic in humans that was slavery, the line recalls the figure of the “footprint,” the speech’s crucial metaphor for the institution’s living legacy. In this moment of the address, whose overt task is to declare that the past of slavery’s violence is no more, a silent citation of the figure for the persistence of bondage surfaces. Offering a powerful example of what finally distinguishes Douglass’s progressive vision from that of a work like Some Foot-​Steps of the Progress of the Colored Race, the lecture suggests that though the bloody “footsteps” of black bondage may be gone, the “footprints” remain in the present—​ and, accordingly, the precise course of the nation’s future is uncertain.

 

76

Untimely Democracy

The immediate reaction to Douglass’s lecture made it eminently clear that Washington, in May 1877, would be no place to “bury … differences” between regions or races, as Douglass said in the speech (474). Quite the contrary, “Our National Capital,” which was excerpted by the Washington Evening Star, the Washington National Republican, and the Baltimore Sun, outraged what Douglass’s friend Ottilia Assing referred to as the “pro-​slavery element of Washington.”37 Douglass was deemed a “vile slanderer” by the National Republican.38 On the front page of its May 12 issue, the paper published an article entitled “An Insulted City,” which included a petition to remove Douglass from office (Figure 2.2). The following day the New York Times reported that another such request was expected to compile twenty thousand signatures.39 The contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the talk shows that one of the speech’s main “insults” concerned Douglass’s dismantling of the foundations of white identity, which was taken as an offense against the implicit superiority of the white race.40 Veiling its defense of traumatized whiteness in the guise of concern for the interests of African Americans, the Baltimore Sun asked whether it was wise for Douglass to “insult” the “best friends” of the race he supposedly represented.41 And in an interview with the National Republican, Columbus Alexander, a Washington lawyer who initially had supported Douglass’s marshalship, remarked in shock that “a man who has received so much as he has from the people of the District” would do them such harm; he would never speak in such a way of Douglass’s “race,” Alexander added.42 If in one reading the attorney’s comments tend to reduce the situation to a kind of interpersonal dispute, they also capture the more symbolic racial dynamics of the situation.43 The black Marshal of the District of Columbia had insulted the (white) “people” of Washington. Such a gesture indicated not simply that Douglass had forgotten that he ought to be thankful for the privileges he had been given in the first place—​a line of thinking tacit both in Alexander’s comment and in the National Republican’s use of “base ingrate” to describe the lecturer in another article—​but also implied that the national iconicity of whiteness, its privileged claim to the status of unmarked universal, might have been eroding.44 However, the lecturer’s brazen racial claims were only part of the issue. Douglass’s emphasis on the past’s persistence simultaneously challenged what Blight characterizes as the national “politics of forgetting” that facilitated postwar reconciliation by suppressing the significance of slavery and the imperative, popular among black leaders (including Douglass himself), to underscore postbellum racial progress.45 In fact, along with his comments about whites, one of the most frequently criticized parts of the speech was Douglass’s assertion that it was “again getting dark for the colored race”—​a phrase that was interpreted as signaling that something other than steady forward movement might characterize the condition of black Americans at this moment.46 Defending the talk

 

Figure 2.2  “An Insulted City,” Washington National Republican, May 12, 1877. The front-​page article decried Douglass’s “slanders on our people.” Courtesy of the Serial and Government Publications Division, Library of Congress.

 

78

Untimely Democracy

in the New York Times, Douglass’s ally Sarah Jane Clarke complained that critics misinterpreted the lines demarcating the different temporal registers of the speech, noting that the press had unfairly printed “only the few passages of dispraise, mostly retrospective, and … omit[ted] altogether the many magnificent tributes of admiration for the present and hope for the future.”47 Narrowly construed, Clarke’s retort is accurate. But her account minimizes the talk’s complex conception of temporality, occluding the fact that its racial criticisms were not “mostly retrospective,” and, more important, directing attention away from “slavery’s footprints,” Douglass’s powerful figure for those signs of the living legacy of black bondage. Despite the controversy, the debate subsided, and Douglass retained his marshalship. Recalling this period in Life and Times, the author reflected that the “violent hostility kindled against me was singularly evanescent” (LT, 862). The New York Times would seem to corroborate the author’s recollection, declaring “Quiet in Washington” in its inaugural June issue. Satirizing what it implies was the Washingtonians’ overblown response to the lecture, the Times notes that the city’s residents, finding “the Capitol still in its place,” finally “grew cool” and “repented.” “It was a happy thought for some good citizen to collect” the petitions asking Hayes to remove Douglass and “quietly destroy them,” the piece reported. “And that is the end of the matter.”48 It may have been the end of the matter for Washingtonians, but it was not for Douglass, his remarks to the contrary in his final autobiography notwithstanding. Viewed against the backdrop of this lecture and the uproar it caused, the speaker’s conduct and commentary less than a month later in St. Michaels takes on an entirely different cast. Indeed, it is possible to read Douglass’s ostensibly obsequious behavior before his dying ex-​master, as well as his assertions of the “practical inferiority” of black Americans, as a perverse performance of the servile, selectively silent figure the “Our National Capital” debacle revealed that some Americans would like him to be. To return to his homecoming speech, another way to understand the rhetorical work of the long series of negations that constitute the talk’s preface is to hear in them a clandestine critique of the restrictions he had just recently realized accompanied his position as marshal. Considered as first-​person statements, that is, these negative forms enable Douglass to articulate his dissent even as he appears to conform to the desires of those who made it clear the marshal ought not give voice to such topics. If the former slave was in fact employing such survival strategies, the Sun, at least, was fooled. Asserting in a June 19 article that the “advice” Douglass “uttered in behalf of his colored brethren in his speech on Sunday” is “proof ” of the fact that he is “one of the talented men that the Eastern Shore has produced,” the paper added, “It is wholesomely in contrast with the injudicious comments which he indulged in his lecture on Washington city before an

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

79

audience of colored people in Baltimore some weeks ago.” Recall that the Sun was equally pleased with the former slave’s behavior before Auld earlier that day, deeming it his life’s “crowning honor.”49 Saidiya Hartman has argued that differentiating what exactly in the enslaved individual’s various daily performances signified submission from what signified resistance is no easy interpretive task. Accordingly, and keeping in mind Daphne Brooks’s concept of the “spectacular opacity” that characterizes performance practices of the marginalized, we would do well to wonder whether this ex-​slave’s visit to St. Michaels was, from start to finish, a case study in the “simulation of compliance for covert aims.”50 Of course, complicating such a reading is the fact that the speaker’s submission-​as-​resistance arises in the first place from a set of racialized power relations in which he, despite his status as marshal, occupies a subordinate position. The popular protest following his lecture on “Our National Capital” presented the real possibility that Douglass might lose the steady income associated with the office, and, perhaps more important, suffer the embarrassment of being removed from his position—​a defeat that likely would also negatively impact the public perception of African Americans’ capacities generally.51 Given these factors, Douglass may well have calculated that on this Sunday in St. Michaels it was better to wear what Clarke, writing in the New York Times, called “the rusty old padlocks of 30 years ago”—​the muzzle of slavery—​and remain silent on the issues he raised in his Washington speech.52 That is, while surely a sign of agency, however limited, Douglass’s potential subversions also must be recognized as a kind of metaphorical stopping of his mouth precipitated by the response to “Our National Capital.”

“Time Makes All Things Even”? Facing the Present-​Past Douglass issued his own account of what transpired during his St. Michaels excursion belatedly, when the first edition of Life and Times was published in 1881, four years after his meeting with the man who once claimed him as a slave. He would reprint the episode without significant change in subsequent editions of the book, including the final version, which appeared in 1892. In his rendering, the recollecting author offers a number of corrections to what he deems the “defective” report published by the Sun in 1877. Douglass notes, for instance, that he did not travel to the Eastern Shore for the express purpose of seeking out Auld, but instead visited the region at the request of his “colored friend, Charles Caldwell,” only deciding to reunite with his ex-​owner extemporaneously when invited to do so by one of Auld’s caretakers (LT, 876). He also reworks the nature of his apology:  whereas the paper held that he “begged … forgiveness,” the

 

80

Untimely Democracy

author recounts that he simply admitted his “mistake” in accusing Auld of sending his grandmother to the woods to die (LT, 877).53 And missing completely from Life and Times is any mention of the homecoming speech he supposedly delivered. In other respects, however, Douglass’s account does not diverge radically from the Sun’s. Though given less exaggerated treatment in his retelling, details such as his embrace with his master, as well as his admission that he feels affection for the dying Auld, remain. The retention of these elements—​all of which caused him embarrassment—​no doubt reflects Douglass’s constrained position: issuing his story after the fact, the author arrives late on the scene, as it were, and has limited ability to reframe the episode. But more interesting than what the reworked version does or does not extricate is the way Douglass seeks to deploy his meeting with Auld as unambiguous evidence of the progress the nation is making in reconciling the strife between masters and slaves. As if he were still haunted by the political imperative to segregate the past from the present embodied in the reaction to his speech on “Our National Capital,” Douglass is at pains in Life and Times to wield this segment as a sign of the triumph of the present over the past, even as the details of Douglass’s retelling also subtly signify—​against the episode’s explicit focus on progress—​the persistence of the historical past of slavery. And in this account, that past manifests itself in a deeply personal way. Douglass places his encounter with Auld in a climactic chapter in Life and Times provocatively entitled “Time Makes All Things Even.” The author offers a heuristic device for interpreting this episode when he invokes the rhetoric of narratology at the outset, remarking, “It will be remembered by those who have followed the thread of my story” that St. Michaels was “the scene of some of my saddest experiences of slave life” (LT, 874).54 At least in one incarnation, the “thread” of Douglass’s tale is undoubtedly linear. The author makes this point when he contrasts the prospect of a reunion with Auld under the “old regime” and one under the new: “Had I been asked in the days of slavery to visit this man I should have regarded the invitation as one to put fetters on my ankles and handcuffs on my wrists. … But now that slavery was destroyed, and the slave and the master stood upon equal ground, I was not only willing to meet him, but was very glad to do so” (LT, 875). Douglass’s emphasis on the difference between the significance of a visit to Auld “then” and “now” indexes a larger structural concern of his book’s project: taken in its most skeletal form, the autobiography depends on the movement from the author’s life as a slave in part one to his life as a freedman and beyond in the subsequent sections. In fact, in the 1881 and 1882 printings, the reunion episode comes just two chapters before the final one, holding a decisive position in a work that, as the writer remarks in the closing lines of the first edition, demonstrates that he has

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

81

“lived several lives in one”: “First, the life of slavery; secondly, the life of a fugitive from slavery; thirdly, the life of comparative freedom; fourthly, the life of conflict and battle; and, fifthly, the life of victory, if not complete, at least assured.”55 This final phase of Douglass’s history needs to look different from the previous stages for Life and Times to achieve its overt narratological mission: marking the distance from bondage to freedom, which is also to say from stage one to five, from the beginning to the end of the book.56 Here, we see Kletzing and Crogman’s imperative for progress translated into narrative form: it is the task of the linear “thread” to link the successive changes that constitute this representative black man’s life. Beyond these generic constraints, there are historical reasons motivating Douglass’s imposition of a linear narrative frame on his autobiography, even in the context of this chapter that would seem to unsettle the shape of his “thread.” If the forgetting of slavery was part and parcel of the work of national reconciliation, postbellum racial discourse also was marked by another temporally inflected question: what would become of the African American after emancipation? While it was clear by the 1880s that the prognostication once popular in the immediate aftermath of the war that the black population would quickly pass into extinction was incorrect, the debate about whether African Americans were regressing or progressing was very much unresolved in the final decades of the nineteenth century, especially given the application of social Darwinism to racial thought.57 From this perspective, then, Douglass’s progressive chronicle indexes a pervasive political and cultural conversation about the fate of black citizens. The image of the sturdy marshal towering over the ailing body of his once master holds significant symbolic force, not just in the context of Douglass’s personal life but as a public emblem of the vigor of the race after slavery, a sign of its certain “victory.” And yet, from a narratological perspective, the fact that Douglass visits his ex-​master necessarily disrupts the forward-​moving line of his book’s thread; it introduces a regression into the progressive chronicle of its author’s life. As Douglass himself notes, his “return” “to this place and among the same people” was “strange” (LT, 874). Such a comment, with its suggestion of the uncanny, recommends that the “thread” of Life and Times might be read as a more tortuous line, perhaps the kind that the mythological Ariadne gives to Theseus, her beloved, to facilitate his escape from the labyrinth in which he is entrapped. Applying this classical kernel to narrative theory, J. Hillis Miller reads Ariadne’s thread as at once the solution to the maze in which her lover is locked and the retracing—​a reproduction—​of the maze itself. From this, Miller posits that as a narrative figure and as a term for describing the time of storytelling, the line “cannot be detached from the problem of repetition,” from those “returnings, knottings, recrossings, crinklings to and fro,” from “anything,” in short, “that happens to the line to trouble its straightforward linearity.”58 Two strands spun from the same narrative yarn, repetition and linearity are inextricably linked.

 

82

Untimely Democracy

According to this logic, Douglass’s “thread” holds a double meaning. If the Auld episode is proof of the writer’s progress—​the victory of the marshal over the dying master—​then it is also, paradoxically, the unraveling of this triumph. For Douglass’s progress here emerges precisely from a return to his origins in slavery; anticipating the “crooked marks” of The Souls of Black Folk, this return drives Douglass’s narrative back in time just as the nadir seemed to arrest black Americans in a “second slavery.”59 A key moment in the chapter clarifies this idea. After the author issues a litany of the abuses he “sustained” as Auld’s property and implies that he had retroactively treated his owner to the same—​not through the means of the law or the whip, but through intellectual weapons, the power of publicity and oratory—​he explains, I had made his name and his deeds familiar to the world by my writings in four different languages, yet here we were after four decades once more face to face—​he on his bed, aged and tremulous, drawing near the sunset of life, and I, his former slave, United States Marshal of the District of Columbia, holding his hand and in friendly conversation with him, in a sort of final settlement of past differences, preparatory to his stepping into his grave, where all distinctions are at an end, and where the great and the small, the slave and his master, are reduced to the same level. (LT, 875) In bringing Auld and Douglass together “once more face to face,” this passage stages what Kimberly W. Benston has identified as African American literature’s “primal scene”: “confrontation with the face of mastery.” In such moments, the black subject glimpses in the face of the other “an epiphany about its relation to the starkly coded black-​and-​white world of received figures, a vision that, whether substantive or heuristic, can result in a formative narrative or ideology.”60 Within the context of American servitude, the “formative” sense of self that results from the slave’s glimpse into the white visage is, of course, that he is a degraded bondsman. But, as Orlando Patterson, drawing on Hegel, has pointed out, the object of the slave’s gaze—​the master—​comes to his identity by virtue of this very same process.61 That is, just as the slave is made a subjugated being by way of his relation to his owner, the master is installed in his superordinate position because his chattel designates him as such. Douglass emphasizes the “friendly” character of this meeting, suggesting that at this point he can in fact finally “face” Auld as his equal; his remark, cited above, that the “slave and the master stood upon equal ground” appears just a few lines later. But given the centrality of such episodes to the literature of slavery—​including Douglass’s own narratives, which stage the encounter with Covey as a homicidal facing scene—​it is worth interrogating the subtleties of this tableau, which

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

83

the author claims to be a sign of the equality between an ex-​slave and his ex-​master. Considered from the vantage point of 1881 or even 1877, Douglass is Auld’s legal equal, though, as we will see, crucial Supreme Court rulings would render this status tenuous.62 Indeed, the scene encodes the more vexed senses of “equality” that already were functioning to subvert this formal station. Both men may be “equal” in the sense of their mutual dependence on one another; in the final analysis, the complicated question of why and how Douglass arranged for his meeting seems at the very least to reveal a shared (though still vexed) sense of affection between the men. And yet, because Douglass’s overt crafting of the encounter as a sign of equality relies, by definition, on the fact that he once was Auld’s slave, we might wonder just how “equal” the author believes he is to his former master when he stands before Auld “once more face to face.” Does the act of looking confirm his identity as Auld’s peer—​perhaps even his superior—​or does the marshal see reflected in the white man’s visage the image of himself as a slave? One way to answer this question is to turn to the author’s language in this moment. Consider the tentativeness of the phrase “a sort of final settlement of past differences,” and the fact that “settlement” itself suggests a forced coming to terms rather than a genuine atonement or reconciliation.63 Even more significant is Douglass’s remark that it is in the “grave” that “all distinctions are at an end,” for in this chapter Douglass meets an Auld who, although moribund, is technically not yet dead. Indeed, whereas the recollecting author observes that his ex-​owner’s death was “announced in the papers” “soon after” his visit in June 1877 (LT, 878), the historical record indicates that Auld would live for three more years, expiring in 1880, only one year before Douglass published the inaugural edition of Life and Times.64 Levine understands this mistaken chronology as evidence of the way the author “creatively” and “somewhat self-​servingly” “makes the reunion into a gratifying story about how” his “kind visit allowed the old master to die in peace.”65 But in the context of this chapter, whose very conception of progress and racial equality depends in part on the real and symbolic death of the master, it seems more like a disavowal of slavery’s endurance, here given human form by the dying, but not dead, Auld. In light of Auld’s undisclosed vitality, if anything is “reduced to the same level” in this section, it would seem to be Douglass’s past and present selves: his identity as a (former) “slave” and his present role as “United States Marshal,” signifiers that appear side by side in the passage, separated only by a comma, as if equivalent components of the existential equation constituting Douglass’s “I.” The author’s official status as marshal takes on additional significance in his retelling of the initial moments of the reunion. As Douglass has it, when he and Auld “simultaneously” exchange verbal greetings at the opening of their meeting, Auld addresses his (former) slave by his official political title, “Marshal Douglass,” whereas Douglass calls his (former) owner what he “had always

 

84

Untimely Democracy

called him, ‘Captain Auld.’” When Douglass realizes that Auld addresses him in the formal register, he says, “not Marshal, but Frederick to you as formerly” (LT, 876; original emphasis). Significantly, Auld makes no corresponding gesture, and while he consistently refers to Douglass as “Frederick,” the author never calls his (former) master anything other than “Captain Auld.” As we have seen, in the Sun’s coverage of the meeting, Douglass is greeted by Auld’s son-​in-​law, William Bruff, who addresses his visitor as “Marshal” before the latter asks to be called “Frederick.” That this exchange transpires between the ex-​slave and the ex-​master within the pages of Life and Times may merely register the author’s intention to set the historical record straight. The narratological import of this revision is great, however. From this vantage point, the detail manifests itself as a sign that the progressive narrative line of the author’s account of the meeting has crossed over itself. For Douglass and Auld refer to one another in a way that indicates not that time has passed—​and in moving forward that it “makes all things even”—​but rather that no time has passed at all. No longer “Marshal Douglass” but now “Frederick,” it is as if the author in this moment once again becomes Auld’s slave. The precise nature of the interplay between past and present in this scene comes into sharpest focus when we consider that in the final minutes of the interview Douglass asks if Auld can reveal that piece of information he has never known for certain: his age (LT, 877). Douglass is here seeking the knowledge of his personal history—​a sense of his familial genealogy—​that slavery has denied him. It is a question that he should have asked his mother, had he known her, or even seen her “more than four or five times” (N, 13). As implied by that last quote, which comes from his inaugural work, in the course of his first two narratives, Douglass’s lament about what Patterson has termed slavery’s natal alienation takes a very particular form.66 Beyond the fact that Douglass did not have a sustained relationship with his mother, he specifically rues that he was not present at the moment of her death. Recounting his grief in his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, the text in which he affords us the most complete portrait of Harriet Bailey, the author writes, I was not allowed to visit her during any part of her long illness; nor did I see her for a long time before she was taken ill and died. The heartless and ghastly form of slavery rises between mother and child, even at the bed of death. (BF, 155; original emphasis) In his 1845 Narrative, Douglass also devotes a series of paragraphs to the loss of his mother; included in this montage is the following comment: I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. (N, 13)

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

85

In Life and Times, however, the writer makes no explicit mention of being deprived of the opportunity to be with Harriet Bailey at the end of her days. All the 1892 autobiography offers on the specific subject of his mother’s final moments is this comparatively terse statement: Her death soon ended the little communication that had existed between us. (LT, 484)67 A similar movement toward reticence marks Douglass’s treatment of his paternity across the autobiographies. Whereas in both the 1845 and 1855 narratives he notes that his father was a “white man” and that it was “whispered that my master was my father” (N, 12; BF, 151), in the final autobiography, the author refuses to engage in such speculation, remarking only, “Of my father I  know nothing” (LT, 477). My intention here is not to enter into the complicated genealogical debate about Douglass’s parentage. Much has already been written on the topic, with particular attention given to the identity of Douglass’s father.68 It is most likely the case that Aaron Anthony, Harriet Bailey’s master, fathered the would-​be famous fugitive slave; Preston’s research into the Anthony family records has uncovered an entry marking Douglass’s birth that would seem to offer confirmation.69 More recently, however, McFeely has implied that Auld may have had the opportunity to engage in an affair with Harriet Bailey while he worked as a seaman in St. Michaels, even as he courted Anthony’s daughter, Lucretia, whom he would go on to marry.70 But if Auld did in fact father Douglass, he is unable to provide the former slave with the precise date of his birth; as the author reports in Life and Times, all Auld can say on this score is that he “thought I was born in February, 1818” (LT, 877; emphasis added). The ex-​master’s response to the author’s inquiry conflicts with Douglass’s own estimates of his age—​he calculates his year of birth as 1817—​and he leaves the reunion doubting his once owner’s revelation.71 In juxtaposing Douglass’s laments in his first two autobiographies that he could not visit his mother in her final hours and Douglass’s deathbed interview with Auld in Life and Times—​a work in which he makes no mention of his regret at not being present at his mother’s death, and in which he remains reticent about his paternity—​I simply want to suggest there is a plausible narratological case to be made for reading Auld as Douglass’s father. It is, at the very least, striking that, at “the bed of death” of Auld, Douglass asks his former master if he knows his age—​that crucial question to which a slave’s master would likely hold an answer, especially if he were also his father. Regardless of Douglass’s beliefs about his parentage, in light of the omission in this final work of the detail that slavery deprived him of being at his mother’s deathbed, the symbolic resonance of this episode is especially rich. It is as if Douglass asks Auld what he would have asked Harriet Bailey had he not been

 

86

Untimely Democracy

separated from her by virtue of the peculiar institution’s rending of familial ties. In this moment, the deathbed of Thomas Auld stands in for the deathbed of his mother, subsuming the more overt comments about Harriet Bailey that mark the 1845 and 1855 works and serving as the sign of this text’s silent mourning of slavery’s natal alienation. If, as Peter Brooks contends in his classic Reading for the Plot, within the textual economy of narrative an “event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it,” then Douglass’s meeting with Auld would seem to present a limit case.72 For this episode embodies a kind of repetition that is not reducible to an instance of retrospection, whether it be the memory of Douglass’s childhood as a slave or the retracing (with a difference) in narrative form of his 1877 trip to St. Michaels. Nor is it, to return to Miller’s narratological figure, the case that the forward-​moving line of Life and Times momentarily crosses back on itself in this scene, revisiting the past in order to achieve a necessary piece of knowledge before resuming its original trajectory with more clarity. More precisely understood, this chapter captures Douglass making the visit to his mother’s deathbed that he never made. It recalls, that is, a scene from his past that did not occur in the first place. There may be variation, but the recall is of an impossible sort. Douglass relives, yet lives for the very first time, the pilgrimage (he never made) to his mother’s bed in her final hours. Understood in this way, even the degree of variation in the scene seems unclear: Thomas Auld stands in for Harriet Bailey, and past and present, slavery and freedom, are overlaid, so that, for a moment, they become indistinguishable.73 Indeed, if, bracketing the question of paternity, we recall that Auld is for Douglass the public image of black bondage—​the very symbol of slavery’s wrongs he put on display in, among other works, his famous 1848 “Letter to My Old Master”—​then a final paradox emerges. More than thirty years after he legally gained his liberty, and nearly four decades after his escape from slavery, what the freedman here confronts (again) is the face of mastery par excellence: the face that, according to Douglass’s own symbolic logic, is the source of his alienation from his mother. And if this primordial loss exacted by slavery has “left” the author “without an intelligible beginning in the world,” as he declares in his 1855 autobiography (BF, 157), then this reunion, which affords him no certain knowledge of his age, simply brings Douglass back to the start, for it is an encounter with the avatar of the institution that inflicted this wound in the first place. In the end, far from “making all things even,” as the chapter title announces, time instead has replayed the past.

“History repeats itself ” In the conclusion of the first edition of Life and Times, just after Douglass charts the developmental phases of his career, from the “life of slavery” to the “life of

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

87

victory, if not complete, at least assured,” he remarks, “Forty years of my life have been given to the cause of my people, and if I had forty years more they should all be sacredly given to the great cause” (LT 1881, 487, 488).74 Dying in 1895, Douglass would not in fact have “forty years more” to devote to the task of effecting the full emancipation of black Americans. Nonetheless, when Douglass penned these lines in 1881, his career as a writer and political leader was far from over. Indeed, he would revise and reissue Life and Times on two more occasions, adding in 1892 a completely new section to what he once thought was his finished text. Reflecting on the conclusion of his autobiography’s 1881 iteration in the opening chapter of the final Life and Times, he confesses that at that earlier date his “work” was still far from complete (LT, 941). “Work” here signifies in both a political, public, sense—​Douglass’s fight for the full equality of black Americans—​and in its more literary meaning: the “work” of Life and Times. As the overlap between these two definitions suggests, Life and Times is much more than personal autobiography. In taking up his pen to write yet another chapter, to add another section to what he thought was his completed manuscript, Douglass gives narrative form to the incompletion of abolition, and Life and Times thereby testifies to slavery’s persistence, not simply by virtue of the vexed trajectory of its story line, but in its very material existence.75 Accordingly, the inaugural chapter of the book’s final edition perhaps can be described best as something between the prologue to a tale already in progress and the misplaced epilogue to a (seemingly) finished story. Douglass’s use of the term “work” in the opening pages of the 1892 Life and Times thus takes on an additional resonance. Not pointing exclusively to the tenuous borders between the “work” of writing his personal narrative and the political “work” of his advocacy for black civil rights, the term also raises questions about the temporal boundaries of his project: what is its starting point and what is its end point, and how would the latter be defined? Douglass himself seems unsure about the answer to this question when he notes that his life’s work has been of a piece: In the earlier days of my freedom, I was called upon to expose the direful nature of the slave system, by telling my own experience while a slave. … Fifty years have passed since I entered upon that work, and now that it is ended, I find myself summoned again by the popular voice and by what is called the negro problem, to come a second time upon the witness stand and give evidence upon disputed points concerning myself and my emancipated brothers and sisters who, though free, are yet oppressed and are in as much need of an advocate as before they were set free. (LT, 938–​39) In framing his efforts to guarantee that African Americans could exercise the civil and political liberties afforded to them under the law as his being “summoned again,” the

 

88

Untimely Democracy

author casts this current chapter as the necessary result of the unfinished transition from slavery to freedom even as he proclaims that his antislavery work has “ended.” More significantly, Douglass’s legalistic rhetoric alludes to the paramount event in the vexed narrative trajectory of the 1892 Life and Times. If in the inaugural edition the forward-​moving thread unexpectedly crosses back over itself in the author’s meeting with his ex-​master, in its final form Douglass’s work encounters—​and embraces—​in its chapter on “The Supreme Court Decision” a barrier that nearly halts its progressive course. In a ruling issued on October 15, 1883, the federal judiciary overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, legislation intended to ensure that all citizens could use public accommodations and facilities, including hotels and trains, without fear of discrimination on the basis of race. Authoring the majority opinion, Justice Joseph P. Bradley argued that neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth Amendment sanctioned the antidiscrimination laws the US Congress enacted during Reconstruction. In Bradley’s interpretation, the Fourteenth Amendment’s commitment to the equal protection of all citizens applied only to the legislative actions of states, not to the conduct of individuals or even private businesses. And while the justice conceded that the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits “slavery with all its badges and incidents,” according to Bradley’s logic, the refusal of a hotel owner to serve a black American had no significant association with the history of racial bondage, and it certainly was not a continuation of slavery by the means of race prejudice. “Where does any slavery or servitude, or badge of either, arise from such an act of denial?” he queried.76 Douglass reveals that he knows precisely where slavery “arises” in this situation. Calling the 1883 ruling a “blow” at “human progress,” the writer characterizes the decision in the third part of Life and Times as a sign of the “onward march of the rebel States to their former control and ascendency” (LT, 968, 966). “Onward march” rings ironic, for at this moment, the movement of the nation on the race question seems destined not for liberty but a second bondage. Douglass explains, “When the black man’s arm was needed to defend the country … his rights were well considered. That the reverse is now true, is a proof of the fading and defacing effect of time and the transient character of Republican gratitude” (LT, 966). Significantly, this passage does not celebrate time’s justice or its potential for healing; here “time does not make all things even.” Instead, a progressive temporality facilitates the “fading” away of the past that results in the disavowal of slavery’s afterlife, if not of the historical fact of slavery itself, on display in the 1883 ruling of the nation’s highest court. At stake in the overturning of the 1875 Civil Rights Act is therefore not simply an interpretation of the most recent amendments to the US Constitution. As Douglass’s language reveals, the conception of temporality itself and the place the living past of slavery will hold therein are equally crucial. At the end of his opinion, Justice Bradley issued an explicit statement on this very issue: “When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

89

the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he … ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.”77 Effectively proclaiming the era of slavery dead, Bradley lent judicial authority to what was by this point the long-​underway process of national reunion, a process in which, as we have seen, Douglass himself may have participated—​if not wholly willingly—​on that Sunday in St. Michaels. But in this chapter, Douglass strikes no such conciliatory pose; he is the fiery lecturer of “Our National Capital” who refuses to allow the “footprints” of slavery to disappear. Giving over the rest of his reflections to an extended citation of the talk he delivered in Washington’s Lincoln Hall in the immediate aftermath of the court’s decision, as if to hint that its impact is no less powerful nearly ten years later, Douglass declares that the majority opinion has “grievously wounded” black Americans. “We feel it, as we felt, years ago, the furious attempt to force the accursed system of slavery upon the soil of Kansas; as we felt the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill; the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the Dred Scott decision,” he declares (LT, 968). While this 1883 ruling marks the end of slavery for Bradley, Douglass implies that for black Americans, the decision is yet another instance of the juridical authorization of slave power. Black Americans “feel” the judicial force of bondage in 1883 as they “felt” it years ago: the change in tense seems to matter little, for the decision “today” re-​inflicts the “wound” his race sustained previously, whether in being denied citizenship, as slaves and their descendants were in Scott v. Sandford (1857), or in effectively being declared the targets of open violence by virtue of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.78 In what might be thought of as the climax of this chapter, if not of the final edition of Life and Times, Douglass declares that the 1883 opinion marks a crucial re-​turning point for the country, a juncture at which the very relation among the temporal domains of past, present, and future seems to hang in the balance: “To-​day our Republic sits as a queen among the nations of the earth. Peace is within her walls and plenteousness within her palaces, but he is a bolder and a far more hopeful man than I am, who will affirm that this peace and prosperity will always last. History repeats itself. What has happened once may happen again” (LT, 974). If Douglass saw the Civil War as a “repetition with a difference” of the Revolution, as Cody Marrs has argued, then here he offers something like a repetition of the same.79 Recalling his earlier remark about the “onward march of the rebel States” to the sway they held previously, the final sentences of this passage seem to portend a second Civil War, another rending of the recently reconstructed union over that still-​unsettled question about the intersection of race and rights once called slavery, now referred to as the “negro problem.” But “what has happened once may happen again” also cites an international allusion the speaker makes a paragraph earlier. Analogizing the plight of black Americans to Ireland’s ongoing struggle against British imperialism, which at the time was manifesting itself in violent agitation over the issues of home rule and

 

90

Untimely Democracy

land law reform, Douglass exclaims, “We want no black Ireland in America. … The power and friendship of seven millions of people, however humble and scattered all over the country, are not to be despised” (LT, 973–​74).80 Much more than an exercise in historical prognostication, then, Douglass’s sense that “history repeats itself ” is also a kind of threat. If, as suggested by this global turn in a speech on domestic politics, the principle that “what has happened once may happen again” does not necessarily abide national borders, and if Ireland already is “react[ing] terribly upon her persecutors” (LT, 973), then the speaker’s comparison between black Americans and the Irish seems to all but guarantee a full re-​opening of the United States’ ongoing—​if repressed—​conflict over slavery. Accordingly, the “repetition” in this passage forecasts more than a replaying of the nation’s most recent political-​military conflict. It points to what Douglass characterizes elsewhere in the chapter as a kind of primordial, transnational struggle between the “spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of slavery,” now being played out abroad, but soon to visit the homeland (LT, 969). Should the “seven millions,” who, as a result of the discrimination directed against them, constitute a nation within the nation—​a “black Ireland in America”—​stage a violent resistance, as the Irish already were, the result would not simply constitute a second sectional conflict. Such an uprising would inaugurate a veritable race war—​a large-​scale (former) slave rebellion, so to speak. Here, then, Douglass articulates a crucial shift in the temporal tenets underlying his political theory. If less than two decades after its ratification, the Fourteenth Amendment had been declared “unconstitutional and void” (LT, 970), then time’s forward movement—​and the improvement in race relations that supposedly accompanies it—​might not be as certain, or even as desirable, as he initially assumed. Douglass’s hope for the future still relies on the past—​but in a different way.81 For the author of the 1892 Life and Times, the past does not exclusively function as a landmark against which to measure change. Instead, the past—​in its present endurance—​may register historical stasis or even repetition. In this regard, Douglass’s sense that “history repeats itself ” might be read as the seed of a democratic vision predicated on return and regress, a political practice that underscores the continuities between then and now. As he remarks in the chapter on the Civil Rights Cases, when “aftercoming generations” survey “this juncture of our history,” they will struggle to discern how “far we had advanced … from the barbarism of slavery toward civilization and the rights of man.” Accordingly, perhaps a replaying—​in prose if not on the battlefield—​of the nation’s ongoing agon between the “spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of slavery” is precisely what is needed to ensure that the post-​1883 decades do not similarly replicate those that preceded them (LT, 969). Douglass’s recommendation here is not that we invest naively in the notion of a future “after” slavery, inaugurating a postslavery moment in which the “post” and the “after” denote the disavowal of black bondage. To follow such a course would

 



Nar rating the P re s ent-​P a st in Fred er ick Douglas s ’s L i f e an d   Ti mes

91

be to replicate Justice Bradley’s desire to unknow the connection between the questions of discrimination before him in 1883 and the national history of black bondage. Rather, Douglass’s vision seems to imply that to work for change—​and, indeed, to hope for a future different from the past, a future in which the “aftercoming generations” might hope to live “after” slavery—​is necessarily to mark what has not truly changed in the first place. It is to show that what has happened once is happening again, and to strive for racial progress, paradoxically, by underscoring how little the nation has advanced. Or, as Douglass posits in an 1888 speech in which he declares that the “so-​called emancipation” of the slave was a “stupendous fraud,” “there comes a time when it is best that the worst should be made known.”82

“Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!”: Unending Slavery While Life and Times most explicitly engages the persistence of the past in its meditation on repetition in this chapter, we would do well to recall that this is not the first time that reversal and return have troubled the book’s narrative trajectory. As we have seen, even as Douglass celebrates his appointment to the office of marshal as a sign of racial progress, the controversy surrounding this role, as well as that resulting from his talk on “Our National Capital,” reveals the limits of this advancement. And if Auld’s death seems as if it does not come soon enough to fulfill the writer’s prophecy that “time makes all things even,” then what this white man represents—​slavery—​similarly troubles the “thread” of Life and Times on a much larger scale, making it difficult for this capstone work to realize the finality of freedom and full emancipation—​the narrative closure—​it seeks. Accordingly, perhaps the central dilemma with which Life and Times grapples is how to write the end of a story that appears far from reaching its proper conclusion. We might discern a sort of answer by taking stock of the differences that mark the culminating sections of the inaugural and final editions of this work. Recall that in 1881 the author portrays his existence as a series of progressive stages, from “the life of slavery” to the “life of victory, if not complete, at least assured” (LT 1881, 487). By contrast, the final paragraph of the 1892 Life and Times offers no such delineation of the movement from bondage to freedom. There is a moment of retrospection surveying the author’s “life as a whole,” but this portion of what is in total only a paragraph-​long conclusion reads more like an accounting of contrasts than the realization of liberation:  the co-​existence of the “dark and stormy” and the “sunshine and joy” has taken the place of the pathway from bondage to freedom. And, as in 1881, the 1892 conclusion is not without a stocktaking of the distinctions that Douglass achieved in the interim: his appointment by President Benjamin Harrison to the post of Minister of Haiti and his selection by the Haitian president to represent that nation at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. While the author characterizes these as “crowning honors,” the latter, in particular, would more accurately

 

92

Untimely Democracy

signal the continuation of his fight for black freedom (LT, 1045). For African Americans would be excluded from any meaningful participation in the Chicago fair—​their images paraded only to be mocked—​a reality that Douglass, joining Ida B. Wells, railed against in The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Douglass may have reached the conclusion of his story, but in 1892, as in 1881, his “work” would go on. As I  have suggested, this thwarted attempt to bring closure to an ongoing tale is as much a political dilemma as a narratological one. Indeed, it might be described best as a political problem articulated and worked through in narrative form. For if by the “end” of Life and Times, the author has written a book whose line testifies not simply to progress and forward movement but also to regression and stasis, then in his characterization of the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, Douglass came to name this phenomenon: “History repeats itself.” Accordingly, Life and Times stands as an archive of the author’s developing consciousness that the task of ensuring black equality might require a sustained campaign premised on the possibility that the effects of slavery might not pass away but rather endlessly proliferate, forcing the thread of his work—​taken here in both the political and literary senses—​to cross back over itself continually even as it moves forward. The closing lines of the 1892 Life and Times seem at once to embrace and disavow this principle; the book, after all, must come to a literal end. But in the public lectures he delivered in the final years of his life, Douglass refused to let the “work” of Life and Times conclude, despite the fact that the volume reached its final page. Seeking to ensure that the American people could not turn away from the impossible—​yet nonetheless crucial—​task of making amends for slavery, he continued to speak of the institution’s abiding injuries. As he put it in an 1883 speech, his task was not “to let bygones be bygones; to let the dead past bury its dead.” Rather, sounding like a proto-​William Faulkner, Douglass proclaimed, “In my view, there are no bygones in the world, and the past is not dead and cannot die.”83 Indeed, in a talk delivered earlier that same year, Douglass implied that this work would truly conclude—​that the “discussion of the Negro will cease”—​only when the United States ceases to be a nation that is “half slave and half free.”84 Douglass gave voice most forcefully to the idea already tacitly revealed by the recursive narrative course of Life and Times in a statement he made just before his death in 1895. When asked by a member of the rising generation of black Americans what the “young Negro just starting out” should do for the race, the aged leader replied, “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!”85 In what we might imagine as his self-​composed epitaph, the writer of Life and Times issues a stunning phrase that embodies repetition syntactically and semantically.86 Not simply stating his emphatic recommendation for the future of the race three times, Douglass selects a word that itself signifies both forward and backward movement, as if to suggest that slavery’s endurance will only ever be matched by an equally relentless, if not ceaseless, political and discursive agitation.87

 

3

Making Reparation; or, How to Count the Wrongs of Slavery The enslaved and battered millions have come, suffered, died and gone with all their moral and physical wounds into Eternity. To them no recompense can be made. If the American people could put a school house in every valley; a church on every hill top in the South and supply them with a teacher and preacher respectively and welcome the descendents of the former slaves to all the moral and intellectual benefits of the one and the other, without money and without price, such a sacrifice would not compensate their children for the terrible wrong done to their fathers and mothers, by their enslavement and enforced degradation. —​Frederick Douglass, “The Blessings of Liberty and Education” (1894) What persists from generation to generation is not only the refusal to compensate injustice but also the corresponding devaluation of Black subjects that originated in chattel slavery for those of African descent. —​Robert Westley, “The Accursed Share” (2005) Emancipation is important, but undoing the harms of slavery is … slow work. —​Kwame Anthony Appiah, “What’s Wrong with Slavery?” (2007)

In September 1894, two years after the publication of his final Life and Times (1892) and just months before his death, Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture at the dedication of a newly established industrial school for black Americans. Already putting into action the philosophy of perpetual agitation he would soon come to name in his epitaph, Douglass reminded his listeners that “the labors and stripes imposed upon” the “Negro” were not “the sum of his wrongs.” Douglass’s declaration is not merely an indictment of those citizens who complained of having “done enough” for the freedmen but a meditation on redressing slavery’s injuries, a process that, he explains, must take as a point of departure the formidable task of “ascertain[ing] the nature and extent of the wrong itself.” Yet a full accounting of the harms of racial servitude may resist the finite calculation Douglass’s use of “sum” suggests. For it is not simply that slavery’s “moral” 93

 

94

Untimely Democracy

and “mental” wrongs are of a “nature” that exceeds arithmetic representation. Equally important is the fact that the duration of these (already unquantifiable) injuries is scarcely discrete.1 Douglass acknowledges as much when, in a portion of the address excerpted in the epigraph above, he glosses slavery’s “extent” by invoking the “descendents” of bound blacks. The ambiguity resulting from the repetition of “their” in the final sentence is revealing. First pointing to the former slaves, and then to their children, the possessive’s referent wavers between generations by its third reprise: their “enforced degradation” (if not “enslavement”) seems to index both the parents’ and the offspring’s suffering.2 The implication is significant: making amends may not merely require payment to descendants of slaves for the remuneration denied to their forebears; redress may also demand that we account for the harms suffered by the slaves’ children, though they never experienced bondage themselves. Douglass does not pursue the problem he broaches here, turning his attention instead to the progress made by the freedmen since emancipation. But just what to make of the truth embodied by the inconclusive conclusion to Life and Times—​that the work of emancipation would be ongoing if not unending—​ haunts this and the other writings he composed in his final years. Taking up what in this speech he referred to as the impossibility of “redress,” Douglass wrote in an 1891 letter that the “nation” “can never fully atone for the wrong done to the millions who have lived and died under the galling yoke of bondage.” He then continued, “But it can, if it will, do justice and mercy to the living.”3 This statement seems more assertive, but its prescription is no less clear. How might one “do justice” to the “living” when, as Douglass’s 1894 lecture suggests, the wrong of servitude may have less to do with literal bondage than with the social devaluation of blackness in the national imaginary resulting from the centuries-​long reign of the peculiar institution? It is hardly insignificant in this regard that in both documents Douglass associates the most finite quantity he invokes—​“millions”—​with those who have “lived and died.” Such a move leaves open the matter of how to define and demarcate the injury of slavery for those still “living,” a category that would include both ex-​slaves and those born after bondage but still somehow impacted by its physical and “moral” wounds. In grappling with these questions, Douglass was not alone. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and especially in the wake of Reconstruction’s ruins, nineteenth-​century authors, activists, and politicians probed a version of this problem: what does it mean to count the wrongs of servitude, and how might one account for the institution’s abiding wrongs? In drawing on the double phrase counting/​accounting to articulate this conceptual quandary, I take a cue from a crucial moment in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As we saw in ­chapter  1, just after he moves from his eulogy for the Freedmen’s Bureau to the narrative present in “Of

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

95

the Dawn of Freedom,” Du Bois poses this question: “To-​day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.”4 Du Bois’s use of “count” here captures the quantitative, narrative, and temporal dimensions that animated discussions of reparations in the postbellum era and continue to do so in contemporary politics. If we understand “count” to signify numerical accounting, a quantitative project, then Du Bois asks what it would take to realize for the newly emancipated citizens the material conditions required for freedom. But Du Bois’s question is also about narrative accounting, about telling the tale of Reconstruction’s failure; after all, this query appears in a section that uses this particular past to explain the Jim Crow present. Cutting across these two dimensions of Du Bois’s question is the problem of temporality that Douglass’s speech, like Souls, indexes. If the “legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation,” then recognizing this “legacy,” much less acting on it, would require a temporal frame that could account for the enduring wrongs of slavery as persisting in and shaping the present; this is the version of time that Du Bois captures with the “present-​past.”5 Of course, as the previous chapter also demonstrated, the question that troubles Souls is not simply how to count the legacy of slavery, but when, if ever, it might be possible to stop counting. At stake here, then, is a third dimension of “accounting”: the sense of the term that implies “moral reckoning.”6 This last meaning points most directly to the special significance—​and problem—​questions of redress pose for the political vision that this book defines as untimely democracy. While “reparations” often are associated with monetary payment, redress projects are in fact interested in broader structural change that is not reducible to material compensation.7 One such end is the reconfiguration of time, the unsettling of the standard relationship among past, present, and future.8 As we have seen, lingering on the problematic past as something other than a paralyzing posture is a special challenge for dominant narratives of American democracy. And yet, as the legal scholar Robert Westley argues, that is precisely the move required by any serious attempt to grapple with the legacy of slavery, which is defined fundamentally by the “devaluation of people of African descent” that began in formal bondage and persists into the present. Given that this devaluation of blackness is “a cultural logic of long duration,” Westley explains, it has the “force of inertia.” Accordingly, we cannot assume that “ordinary politics” and standard “temporal frameworks” are “sufficient to change it” or even to understand it.9 In seeking to engender a new mode of imagining and acting in the world, reparations discourse strives to make slavery count in and for the present but also resists the notion that the peculiar institution is

 

96

Untimely Democracy

something that can be accounted for with standard models of temporality and measures of duration. Like much of the recent work on reparations, Westley’s investigation focuses on the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, the legal and political ground zero of the ongoing campaign for redress. Insofar as the nineteenth century figures in this contemporary scholarship, it is luminaries like Douglass and Du Bois who dominate—​and not without good reason.10 Still, we should recognize that these two men lived and worked alongside and sometimes in tension with a cohort of figures who compose a largely unexplored archive of the effort to attain reparations, an effort that started and stopped, flourished and failed, but nonetheless continued in various modes in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of my central concerns in this chapter, then, is to enlarge the archive we associate with debates about reparations, revealing the nineteenth century as a rich site for thinking about the conceptual units required for the work of revaluing black subjects:  politics and time, or more precisely, the politics of time. For in the aftermath of Reconstruction’s premature end, those who sought redress were already grappling with the challenge of how to articulate a politically productive relationship between the past of slavery and the emerging present of Jim Crow segregation, and wondering how to use this “explanatory narrative” to imagine a future that would not come to be.11 In the narratives that this chapter examines, we can see this tension emerging most palpably in the desire to account for racial bondage in a way that makes the enduring wrongs of the peculiar institution legible and recognizable—​capable of redress and even compensation—​without at the same time reducing them to a number that could be counted and a past that has concluded. The erasure of the past was a problematic aim that many postbellum Americans sought, even some who were involved in the redress movement. Hence in one of the primary forms of writing that the following pages take up—​texts by former slaves that deploy a numeral in their title, such as Samuel Hall’s 47 Years a Slave: A Brief Story of His Life before and after Freedom Came to Him (1912)—​we witness the desire for a quantitative accounting of bondage’s harms that resonates with Congressman Thaddeus Stevens’s attempt to secure material reparations for emancipated slaves. But we also see the limitations of this mode of counting:  the inability to account for slavery’s harms, past and present, with numbers alone. Indeed, while there was brief national attention given to reparations in the years following the war—​and even as activism continued through the dawn of the twentieth century—​the project lost much of its official sanction after the collapse of Reconstruction. By 1896, the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson would argue that slavery did not count at all in defining race-​based discrimination. Plessy thus made it all the more crucial to clarify just what was wrong with slavery. And it was precisely this question that the narratives of this moment took up: from Hall’s

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

97

47 Years a Slave, to Callie House’s articulations of the practical and imaginative aims of the ex-​slave pension movement, to Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898), these writings sought to define slavery in terms of its nondiscrete harms—​harms that could not be counted precisely because they endured across generations. That last title, The Monster, will seem like a surprising presence in the archive this chapter assembles. In fact, in almost every exchange I have had about this book over the years, one question continually came up: “But Stephen Crane?” Much of the modern scholarship on this writer lends credence to this quizzical reply; according to this work, Crane seems to have little if anything insightful to say about race, let alone about racial redress.12 In assigning this figure a privileged place in my meditation, I do not seek to recuperate him as an unrecognized warrior in the fight for racial justice: Stephen Crane was no Frederick Douglass or Callie House, to be sure. But the political vision of The Monster is hardly “profoundly conservative,” as John Carlos Rowe has lamented.13 To remark thus is to risk reducing the scope of this literary text’s vista—​and thus its politics—​to the least common denominators of its conception: what we know of Crane’s life, his expressed views, his identity as “white.” It is, as Anthony Reed has argued about a different archive, to evade a much richer domain of inquiry: the “political possibilities of literature as literature,” the imaginative vision that a work unfolds via the categories it deploys and questions it asks, over and against what we presume are its essential contexts.14 Indeed, that Rowe’s sentiment can stand as a gloss of the scholarly commonsense on Crane owes much to the predominance of a particular mode of historicism in the criticism on his novella. Privileging the work’s contemporaneous context, this approach seeks to unravel the meaning of The Monster by uncovering historical analogues for its main characters and themes.15 A similarly narrow conception of “history” prevails even in the scholarship that takes race as its explicit focus; a cohort of critics working in this vein has argued that the black protagonist Henry Johnson represents a man who was lynched in Crane’s hometown in 1892.16 From this perspective, The Monster may be about racial terrorism or Jim Crow discrimination. But it is not, it would seem, about slavery or its aftermath. And yet, in a crucial scene in a novella whose very title invokes a common trope for racial bondage in the nineteenth century, the narrator makes this intriguing remark when Johnson enters the Trescotts’ burning home and for a moment is nearly overtaken by the flames:  “He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration.”17 It has been difficult for critics to recognize the “slavery” in this line, much less to ask after its implications. For in locating the political significance of the novella exclusively in its synchronic historical moment, they effectively disqualify bondage as an eligible context for the work. In so doing, they not

 

98

Untimely Democracy

only miss the way Crane’s novella engages with what Douglass referred to as the “nature” and “extent” of slavery’s wrongs—​itself a contemporaneous context that challenges the delimiting temporal imaginary implicit in the very designation. More important, they also neglect the ways the text brings an imaginative insight and conceptual precision to these concerns that establishes it as one of the richest meditations on reparations in the nineteenth-​century canon. In fact, The Monster anticipates one of the primary theses that has emerged from recent scholarship on redress in critical race theory, history, legal studies, and political and moral philosophy. Over the last decade, scholars working in these fields, along with a number of activists, have argued that any attempt to come to terms with an injustice such as slavery must challenge the liberal paradigm that holds individuals responsible only for acts committed within the temporal span of their lives.18 In this regard, the fact that the novella, set in the post-​Reconstruction North, offers no evidence that its black protagonist himself had ever been a slave (or that his white employer descends from slave owners) actually testifies to, rather than detracts from, its force. Indeed, with such a structure, The Monster suggests a possible way out of a conceptual impasse that subtly haunts postbellum slave narratives and fundamentally troubles twentieth-​ and twenty-​first-​century debates about reparations, particularly in political and moral philosophy. I refer here to the worry that basing claims for redress on the wrong of racial servitude is unsound, given that such a move requires one to explain present racial disparities in terms of a cause that, chronologically speaking, is quite distant from the present. Why not turn instead to more plausible (because more historically proximate) cases of racial injustice such as Jim Crow segregation?19 Through the nonlinear tempos of recurrence and duration that mark both its content and its formal structures, The Monster develops a sense of the harm of racial bondage that has the potential to circumvent this quandary. In its conception of the fundamental injury of slavery as the degradation of blackness that survives abolition, Crane’s text links the plight of African Americans in the periods before and after legal emancipation. Significantly, it also highlights the crucial role that white Americans played in consolidating this wrong, not primarily in their official capacities as slaveholders but rather in the more banal forms of social nonrecognition that functioned to maintain the association between degradation and blackness after emancipation. The novella thus offers a powerful accounting of the cross-​generational and collective shame that was central both to the wrong of slavery and its afterlife. In doing so, it forges a constellation among the concepts of time, history, responsibility, and agency that is essential to the task of imagining racial justice. Indeed, if the central undertaking of politics is to insist on a relationship where (supposedly) one does not exist, then in showing how slavery’s afterlife

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

99

claims Henry Johnson in the form of a devalued blackness and Ned Trescott in the shape of a debt that cannot be repaid, the novella exhibits a politically charged double vision, a temporal double consciousness, whose force Ralph Ellison first glimpsed more than fifty years ago.20 Implying that The Monster held an explanatory key to the racial strife that marked the battle for civil rights, the author of Invisible Man (1952) wrote in 1960 that Crane’s text “is so fresh that the daily papers tell us all we need to know of … the timeliness of its implications.”21 Given this formulation, we might say that by the novella’s “timeliness” Ellison might also have meant its untimeliness: the way this text unsettles traditional temporalities in depicting the obligation to repair the institution’s abiding wrong. But before we turn to The Monster’s vision of how to count slavery’s harms so as to allow this painful past to serve the cause of realizing equality and liberty for all citizens, we need to develop a sense of the various political and imaginative models—​both from and beyond Crane’s immediate context—​that this novella works with and against. If what follows feels like a protracted detour toward that destination, I make the same request as the narrator of Invisible Man: bear with me.

“An Example to Future Times”: Imagining Redress in the Nineteenth Century In the period following the Civil War known as Radical Reconstruction, no officially sanctioned figure advocated for redress more powerfully than Thaddeus Stevens. For the Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, reparations primarily meant confiscating property from Confederate states and using this capital to fund payments and distribute parcels of land to freedmen. To Stevens’s mind, the matter was about remunerating slaves for the unrequited labor they performed during their bondage. “Have they not a right to it?” the politician asked. He continued, “They and their ancestors have toiled, not for years, but for ages, without one farthing of recompense. They have earned for their masters this very land and much more.”22 While the precise legislative incarnation of “and much more” remained unclear, Stevens nonetheless sought to make good on his belief that the freedmen had earned a share of the land on which they toiled when he brought House Resolution 29 to Congress in March 1867. Declaring in its preamble that “it is due to justice, and as an example to future times,” Stevens’s resolution went on to describe the quantitative dimensions of the plan for redistribution. Building on General William T. Sherman’s Field Order No. 15, section four grants “forty acres” to every adult male freedman or head of family; and section five declares

 

100

Untimely Democracy

that “a sum equal to fifty dollars” will be provided “for each homestead,” to be used “towards the erection of buildings.”23 In a meditation on the nexus of economic and political freedom, Stevens said of this particular provision: “Whatever may be the fate of the rest of the bill, I must earnestly pray that this may not be defeated. On its success, in my judgment, depends not only the happiness and respectability of the colored race, but their very existence. Homesteads to them are far more valuable than the immediate right of suffrage, though both are their due.”24 Stevens’s allusion to the yet-​to-​be-​ratified Fifteenth Amendment here offers an important window into his understanding of the intertwined material, political, and temporal stakes of reparations. Indeed, the bill’s emphasis on the future that these redressive measures would allow is as important as its quantitative calculations. In this regard, the phrase “an example to future times” in the opening clause invites us to imagine the legislation as a document that is addressed not exclusively to the present but also to future generations, who presumably would consider this bill history—​or, ideally, look upon the past of servitude it describes as a bygone age. In a speech to his colleagues in the House, Stevens sketched an account of the future that the bill envisions by way of negation. “If we refuse to this down-​trodden and oppressed race the rights which Heaven decreed them, and the remuneration which they have earned through long years of hopeless oppression, how can we hope to escape still further punishment if God is just and omnipotent?” Stevens queried. “It may come in the shape of plagues or of intestine wars—​race against race, the oppressed against the oppressor. But come it will.”25 Echoing Thomas Jefferson’s apocalyptic accounting of the prospect of slave rebellion in Notes on the State of Virginia and Abraham Lincoln’s characterization of the Civil War as atonement for bondage in his Second Inaugural Address, Stevens finally departs from both men by offering a more conclusive vision of what reparations might do to avert the repetition of the conflict Jefferson so feared and Lincoln lived to see. In this regard, the invocation of the specter of a battle between races serves as an occasion to mark the importance of this proposal to the future of the nation—​its necessity to avoid a repetition of the recent bloody past. And yet, it also functions as an occasion to define the possibility of any future. Indeed, if the speech ends with a sort of threat, the opening clause, “an example to future times,” suggests that if the bill were passed it would not simply work to save the nation from the prospect of another conflagration but that this future would be a corrected future, unburdened by the wrongs of the past, if not, perhaps, manifesting the “just” and “lasting peace” to which Lincoln gestured.26 The future Stevens imagined would not materialize, for the proposal failed to pass, never achieving the status of “history.” But if neither the more just tomorrow nor the apocalypse of persistent racial strife came to be, the rhetorical and conceptual allure of the temporal domain that took center stage in the bill

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

101

nonetheless held great sway. In the wake of the failure of H.R. 29, a number of movements continued the conversation, and all staked some claim to the sort of future Stevens described even as they often diverged in the political uses to which they put that future. The broadest and most sustained of these bids for reparations was the ex-​ slave pension movement. Emerging in the final years of the nineteenth century, it sought—​and gained—​the attention of the federal government but did not accept that as its only or exclusive end. Persisting into the early 1900s, the cause ultimately garnered the support of thousands. As the historian Mary Frances Berry has argued, it was the “first mass reparations movement led by African Americans.”27 In its earliest incarnation, however, the ex-​slave pension movement claimed a narrower legislative, though no less rhetorically expansive, origin. Walter Vaughan, a native Southerner and the once editor of the Omaha Daily Democrat, petitioned the Nebraska Republican congressman William J. Connell to bring to the House legislation that would compensate ex-​slaves for their labor by giving them a pension, in the tradition of pensions for Union soldiers.28 Connell first introduced this legislation in 1890. Like Stevens’s proposal, the bill “to provide pensions for freedmen” engaged in a quantitative accounting, but, unlike H.R. 29, it focused on economic payments rather than land possession. Declaring “any person who may have been held as a slave or involuntary servant” eligible for a pension, Connell’s proposal went on to outline a sliding scale based on the age of the freedmen and -​women: those seventy and older would receive a “sum of five hundred dollars” and a monthly payment of “fifteen dollars … during the residue of their natural lives,” while those “less than fifty years of age” would “receive four dollars per month” until they reach fifty, at which point they “shall receive eight dollars.”29 The bill would not pass, and it would endure the same fate on the multiple occasions it was reintroduced across a span of more than a decade.30 Despite its failure, the ex-​slave pension legislation grants crucial insight into one prominent sector of nineteenth-​century reparations activism, shining light on both its striking imaginative vistas and its blind spots. We might begin by noting the tension between the language describing the criterion for eligibility—​ that “any person who may have been held as a slave” is entitled to receive a pension—​and the detail that the payment of the pension will endure until the end of the individuals’ “natural lives.” The former provision offers a rather capacious definition of the person who could lay claim to this pension. If we note that blackness and slavery functioned synonymously under the regime of bondage, then those entitled to payments include not only former slaves, but also individuals who might have been recognized or treated as slaves. This is the problem Douglass outlined in his 1894 speech, and it is the logic that black leaders of the

 

102

Untimely Democracy

ex-​slave pension movement would draw on in their framing of the bill. As an advertisement for the 1899 convention on the topic announces, “Pension every negro who was emancipated. If the negro is dead give it to his child, if his child is dead give it to his grand child.”31 As if to grasp and also prevent such a possibility at once, the text of the Connell bill rules out this more expansive temporal horizon, clarifying that payments will terminate upon the death of the freedperson who is granted the pension. And while the proposal allows for the possibility that individuals “charged by laws of consanguinity with the maintenance and support” of infirm freedmen are eligible for payments, it says nothing of what might be owed to black Americans for the harms they may have suffered as descendants of slaves.32 This local tension bespeaks a larger temporal dilemma animating both the legislation and the campaign for reparations that manifests itself in Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” Being an Appeal in Behalf of Men Released from Slavery, A  Plea for American Freedmen and a Rational Proposition to Grant Pensions to Persons of Color Emancipated from Slavery. First published in 1890 and issued in a second edition after an inaugural run of ten thousand copies, Vaughan’s pamphlet articulates his vision of the aims of the ex-​slave pension legislation. Practically, the document served as a way to garner support, both fiscal and ideological; agents would sell the pamphlet and thus gain adherents.33 Bringing these two ends together in his preface, Vaughan proclaims that in seeking payment for former bondsmen, he is motivated by a “sense of duty.” This “sense of duty” Vaughan claims to feel quickly becomes a command: “Be just to the blacks of the days of slavery. Their recognition as citizens, worthy of compensation for past errors of the Government, will do more to elevate the fame of a great nation that dares to be just, even at a late hour, than all the story of its brilliant achievements in arms. The glory of American freedom will be made perfect in the pension of the surviving slaves of the antebellum period.”34 Here Vaughan links the recognition of blacks as co-​citizens in the present (and, as we will see, the future) to the idea of compensation for the “past errors of the Government,” which he defines as the denial of these individuals’ liberty that was the system of slavery—​“a system of traditional wrong.”35 Indeed, if there is a word that functions as the keynote of the document, it is “wrong.” Slaves are due recompense because of “former wrongs,” the pamphlet asserts, and slavery was a “great wrong.”36 A sketch in the front matter attempts to represent in visual form the sum of these wrongs (Figure 3.1). A black citizen—​ literally bound by chains—​looks up at the eagle that sits atop an American flag. The caption reads, “slaves from 1620 to 1862—​242 years—​sanctioned by the united states.” But if the temporal duration of this past is easy to calculate, less clear is the effect of these “past errors” (the plural is important) on the present, and just

 

Figure 3.1  This image of a slave in chains appears in Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” Being an Appeal in Behalf of Men Released from Slavery, A Plea for American Freedmen and a Rational Proposition to Grant Pensions to Persons of Color Emancipated from Slavery (1890). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

 

104

Untimely Democracy

how the pension program will correct them, ensuring the “recognition” Vaughan seeks. The document gestures toward this difficulty through the phrase “even at a late hour,” which interrupts the more confident statements that mark Vaughan’s call to readers: the national “glory” that will accrue to a country that “dares to be just,” and especially the claim that “American freedom will be made perfect in the pension of the surviving slaves.”37 More than overwrought rhetoric, that last assertion captures the transformative powers—​what we might call a sort of political and temporal magic—​that the pamphlet associates with the movement’s capacity to “correct” the errors of the past. If “wrong” pervades the document, this term’s companion is surely “correct” or “right.” As Vaughan explains, “Do what is right, and let the world know that the stars and stripes constitute the emblem of a nation that has the courage to correct the errors of ages.” Alluding to the sketch that appears in the text’s front matter, Vaughan here casts his legislation as a way to unlock the chains that continue to bind the freedmen, a way to rewrite the very meaning of the national representation of “liberty.” Significantly, the pamphlet poses its project as reclaiming a neglected principle in the Declaration of Independence, which, in draft form, clearly “meant the negro slave to be included side by side with the white master, whose freedom was acknowledged by all the world.” Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” thus looks backward to this primordial document just as it looks forward to the future its mode of reparation will ensure. With this legislation in place, the pamphlet avers, the former slave “will cast off much of this memory of his wrongs” and “the north and the south will be a unit again.” The ultimate implication of this process is nothing less than the possibility of the liberty the pamphlet aligns with the American flag: that “freedom may prove a blessing to future generations instead of an absolute curse.”38 But whose “freedom,” precisely, is Vaughan referring to in this series of predicted transformations? Here the pamphlet’s title—​Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill”—​is instructive. Securing the future freedom of emancipated slaves is only one of the ambitions of this legislation. As the above reference to regional reunion indicates, an important motive informing the bill is Vaughan’s desire to aid his native South.39 The initial possessive in the title also points to another, more personal motivation that the author reveals in an 1870 letter to his wife, which he includes in the pamphlet. Offering a sort of origin story for his legislation, Vaughan penned the following reflection while travelling to Selma, Alabama, to visit his ailing father. “Our cars are filled with former Mississippi slaves. … Some have a few dimes to pay fare to the next station, others are forced to beg car fare. But few of them are half dressed. The government should pension these ex-​slaves if they would right a great wrong. They formerly had good homes, were well fed, were provided with the best

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

105

medical attention in sickness. … I  shall feel guilty, as an American, to the crime of enslaving them, until the government has paid them the debt justly due.”40 Vaughan’s missive traffics in the tropes of the plantation romance that surface elsewhere in the pamphlet. However, more striking than this rewriting of the recent past that was part and parcel of the cultural work of national reconciliation is Vaughan’s admission of his feeling of guilt and desire for expiation. The structure of the confession is especially complex. Vaughan’s guilt seems personal; it is divulged in a letter to his wife, as if it were an intimate admission, its placement in this public document notwithstanding. And yet, the author clarifies that he will “feel guilty” not only or even primarily as an individual, but rather “as an American.” This move is significant because Vaughan, who was born in Virginia and raised in Alabama, was the child of a slaveholder; a biographical sketch included in the pamphlet reveals that his “first effort in the direct interest of the negro slave was made” when, as “a half-​grown lad,” he petitioned “his father to give the negroes in bondage” a portion of the week to use for their “own time.”41 It is clear that Vaughan sees his legislative proposal as coterminous with this appeal for “justice” from his youth. It is also clear that given his personal relationship to bondage, Vaughan might have framed the matter of guilt differently:  as a primarily personal or family interest, even though he seems to have held no slaves himself. That the author states he feels “guilty, as an American” thus might seem a strange shifting of the blame. But it might also be read, to more surprising ends, as an attempt to redefine slavery in terms of what the philosopher Robert Fullinwider has called “corporate responsibility, the responsibility of the nation as a whole,” and “civic responsibility, the responsibility of each citizen to do his fair part in honoring the nation’s obligations.”42 Vaughan makes this case when in the 1891 edition of the pamphlet he comments on the image that serves as the cover of his manifesto (Figure 3.2). The point of this pictorial account of slavery in the formation of the United States, he explains, is to emphasize that “slave labor” “provided the maximum portion of the revenue which has accomplished the vast work which the Government at Washington has carried forward in more than a century of its existence.”43 It therefore is not the duty of a particular set of individuals but rather the corporate duty of the national government—​represented in the form of lady “justice,” with an American flag by her feet—​to compensate this toil. In this sense, we might read Vaughan’s “guilt” as something closer to the collective experience of shame. I will take up this concept in my consideration of The Monster, whose vision of the work of making amends for racial bondage requires a collapsing, first of all, of the historical boundaries that demarcate past and present and, moreover, individual and collective models of responsibility.

 

Figure 3.2  Cover of Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” Being an Appeal in Behalf of Men Released from Slavery, A Plea for American Freedmen and a Rational Proposition to Grant Pensions to Persons of Color Emancipated from Slavery (1891). The word “reparation” appears on the document that the figure of justice presents to the former slave. Courtesy of the Moorland-​Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Library.

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

107

For now, it is enough to note that Vaughan’s “guilt” productively troubles the boundaries between the individual and the collective. With regard to the relationship between past and present, however, Vaughan’s vision is more problematic. In one turn, Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” seems strikingly bold, even radical, as when, picking up on the language of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, it declares that “the requiting of the wrong so long perpetrated … becomes a solemn duty of the Government”—​one that the nation must pursue with no thought to the “heavy draft upon the public treasury and upon the tax-​payers of the land.”44 And yet, this articulation of the perhaps endless work of reparation appears alongside more disturbing claims. For Vaughan imagines the cause as an effort to correct the errors of the past in such a way that will enable the slave—​and, presumably, the nation—​to “cast off ” the memory of the peculiar institution while at the same time allowing the South to benefit from the economic windfall that the legislation would enable. In the most striking illustration of this double-​edged vision, Vaughan explains that when the “debt” owed to the former bondsmen has “been requited, there will be very little occasion for a new demand in favor of civil rights on the part of colored citizens, for the reason that their status in life will be so well established that his rights will be everywhere respected in the same degree that citizens of the Caucasian race have honorable and just recognition in society.”45 If this assertion offers a hopeful accounting of what the pension movement might accomplish, it also betrays a desire to silence any further political agitation. It implies that this primarily economic form of redress will place blacks and whites on an equal plane, rendering any further African American appeal unnecessary—​or, perhaps worse, unwarranted. The radical veneer of Vaughan’s vision breaks down most strikingly when, in the 1891 pamphlet, he deploys a theological analogue to express the transformation he hopes his work will achieve. Adopting a passive structure that allows him to speak for former slaves, he asserts, “It will be accepted as an indemnity whereby a great nation makes acknowledgment of its past error, just as the blood of the Saviour shed upon the cross is recognized as an indemnification for the sins of mankind.”46 The force of the analogy is not only to position the nation in the place of Jesus but also to create the conditions whereby expiation occurs irrespective of concerns of commensurability and duration. As Christ’s crucifixion serves to forgive the sins of many in perpetuity, the nation’s “recompense” will wipe the slate clean both of past wrongs and further obligation, those “new demands” for “civil rights.” The future of freedom that Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” imagines offers a conception both of freedom and the future that depends on the correction—​which is to say, the elision—​of the burdens of bondage.

 

108

Untimely Democracy

The Promise of Callie House To Callie House, a former slave, this vision of the future seemed suspect. While she was captivated by the cause after reading Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” House ultimately shifted the movement in a different direction, both practically and theoretically. On the latter count, it was her sense of the temporality of political agitation—​its course and aim—​that most distinguished her vision from Vaughan’s and even from Stevens’s attempt to imagine redress. When House first learned of Vaughan’s legislative appeal from an agent selling the pamphlet in Rutherford County, Tennessee, she was immediately drawn to the idea. The ambition to “correct” the “wrong” and “harm” of slavery that pervades Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” must have held a special appeal for House, a widow who worked as a laundress to support her children.47 In framing the aim of the movement she would come to lead, House deployed this rhetoric to powerful effect. “We are organizing our selves together as a race of people who feels that they have been wronged,” she declared in 1899, referring to the National Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America (MRB&PA).48 One of a number of organizations aiming to secure slave pensions that emerged in the latter years of the nineteenth century, the MRB&PA was chartered in 1897 and became one of the largest such coalitions. By 1899, it had thirty-​four thousand members, and its rolls continued to grow into the hundreds of thousands.49 With House and Isaiah Dickerson, a Rutherford County pastor and educator, as its leadership, the MRB&PA embarked on a double-​pronged project:  it sought to agitate for the passage of the ex-​slave pension legislation and to raise funds to support the needs of its constituents.50 A membership certificate outlines these objectives, and also offers a way to distinguish House’s project from Vaughan’s. Whereas the eagle in the sketch from Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” holds in its mouth a banner emblazoned with “United States,” the MRB&PA’s seal features an eagle who declares “Love One Another.”51 The insignia implies a desire to invest black Americans with a collective rhetorical, political, and legal agency that was being denied to them at this moment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tenor of his pamphlet, Vaughan was no fierce advocate of this goal; in an 1897 circular, he reiterated his role as originator of the ex-​slave pension legislation and identified other agents—​Dickerson among them—​as “unauthorized to act for me or my bill.”52 But if Vaughan and the leaders of the MRB&PA were not collaborators, the black-​led organization nonetheless understood its work as fundamentally authorized by the same founding document that Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” regularly cited:  the Declaration. In her role as the MRB&PA’s national

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

109

spokesperson, House was eloquent on this score. As she put it, the objective of the group was to get the government to “pay us … an indemnity for the work we and our fore parents was rob of from the Declaration of Independence down to the Emancipation of four + half million slaves who was turn loose ignorant, bare footed, and naked, without a dollar in their pockets, without a shelter to go under out of the falling rain.”53 Where Vaughan envisions the ex-​slave pension legislation as an attempt to render justice to the intentions of Jefferson’s draft, House exposes the complex temporal dilemmas implied by appeals to this text. In a way that will align her with Crane, House contends that the Declaration’s assertion that “all men [are] born equal” proves more than that racial bondage was an error. It also stands as evidence of an unpaid debt that is long overdue: “The Negro was work and tax as chattels under the flag that you all claim to all nations to wave over the land of the free and home of the brave. Now since we have been freed and made citizens we can read for our selves that we ought to have been free nearly 100 years before we was.”54 The implication is that this debt has compounded across the span of more than a century during which slaves “ought to have been free.” Calculating such a sum was a task the MRB&PA only approximated in its promotional materials. A circular announcing the National Ex-​Slave Convention of 1899 offers a compelling example: “all governments in emancipating their slaves gave them a start in life save this government of ours, the wealthiest, grandest and proudest government under the sun,” the document asserts ironically (Figure 3.3). Invoking the recent engagement in the Spanish-​American conflict of 1898, the poster goes on to show how, for some, the nation “has an ear that hears the cries of distress”:  it “heard the Cuban’s cries a thousand miles from her shores and at great expense prepared her war vessels and in 90 days time whipped Spain. Then from her rich vaults gave Spain twenty million dollars ($20,000,000) for whipping her. Gave the Cubans three million dollars ($3,000,000) for fighting to free themselves. The ex-​slave was whipped, worked and robbed of his reward for 244 years, under a flag claiming to wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave. And we have never received a dime for this great wrong which was sanctioned by this government.”55 This meditation lays bare the distance between the treatment afforded to the Cubans and the Spaniards, on the one hand, and black Americans, on the other. The quantities, written out and rendered in numerical form, stand in stark contrast to the nonpayment to slaves, who have not even received a “dime.” But this rhetorical accounting of the injustice notwithstanding, the poster declines to offer a calculus for how to pay the balance due. In this regard, the MRB&PA offers a reminder of the difficulty of answering the question the former bondswoman Lucy Delaney sanguinely poses at the conclusion of From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (c. 1891):  “Can the negro race

 

Figure 3.3  Circular, “National Ex-​Slave Convention,” Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (1899). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Office of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, “Fraud Order” Case Files, 1894–​1951, File 1321, October 1899.

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

111

succeed, proportionately, as well as the whites, if given the same chance and an equal start?”56 Other MRB&PA promotional materials display the same difficulty, outlining the stakes of the problem (no “start” given the slaves) but rarely tendering a solution, let alone the conditions required for an “equal start” beyond the passage of the ex-​slave pension legislation. For example, “Please Listen to my Plea,” a poem that the organization reproduced on a small cardstock placard (Figure 3.4), reminds its reader that the “famous Declaration” “entitled” the slave “to life, liberty, and pursuits of happiness,” and later avers, “The universal law provided for them [the slaves] something they failed to get. /​And our government has never paid it, so they owe it yet.”57 The rhyme in that last couplet foregrounds the activist work of the MRB&PA—​its bid to “get” the debt that the government “yet” owes. But it also subtly raises the issue that Vaughan’s document evades via its Christological turn and that Delaney invokes in her use of the modifier “proportionately”: the poem may achieve sonic harmony between “get” and “yet,” but the task of redress will by definition be an exercise in incommensurability, if it is to succeed at all. House embraced this truth. Indeed, her most rhetorically potent exposition of her work comes in response to the government’s aggressive attempts to stop the MRB&PA. Fearing the threat of black political power the organization represented, the Post Office Department and the Pension Bureau sought to suppress the movement by accusing the leaders of fraud and encouraging local post offices to monitor the mail and cease delivery to representatives. Writing in a 1902 letter, H. Clay Evans, the commissioner of pensions, lamented that “more real harm is … done” by “agents” “arousing … false hopes concerning a supposedly overdue restitution … or reparation for historical wrongs, to be followed by inevitable disappointment, and probably distrust of the dominant race and of the Government.”58 That Evans could feign concern for black “distrust” given the realities of the Jim Crow America in which he wrote is remarkable. More important, however, is the way Evans frames his concern by invoking the peril of “false hopes.” For, unlike Vaughan, House never promised that her movement—​ or reparations, once secured—​would magically erase the past or remedy the wrongs of bondage. To be sure, House associated her work with a defined end; as she wrote, “It will, in my opinion, be but a question of time when those of our race who have borne the burden and heat of the day, will receive some recompense for honest labor performed during the dark and bitter days of slavery.”59 And yet, if “a question of time” in this passage seems to predict success for the movement, such a statement must be read against the fact that House’s writings everywhere anticipate the “inevitable disappointment” of which Evans spoke while also transvaluing its valence. Writing to Harrison Barrett, acting assistant attorney general of the Post Office Department, in September 1899, House

 

112

Untimely Democracy

Figure 3.4  T. Starr Murfree, “Please Listen to My Plea,” Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (no date). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Office of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, “Fraud Order” Case Files, 1894–​1951, File 1321, undated.

clarified her project. “We tell them we don’t know whether they will ever get anything or not but there is something due them,” she explained, “and if they are willing to risk their money in defraying the expenses of getting up the petition to Congress they are at liberty to do so.”60 Three months later, when she was personally under attack, House admitted that she apprised former slaves of their “right to petition,” but maintained that she made no guarantees, saying only “they can do nothing but ask, if they are allowed that privilege.”61 And in a 1900 letter, she declared, “The officers of this association have not promise nothing to nobody. We only tell the people to unite and ask the Congress of the United States to pass some measure.”62 In these missives, House provides what may be the most poignant articulation not simply of the aims of the ex-​slave pension movement but also of slavery reparations projects more generally. For she emphasizes the imperative to “ask” for what is “due” while living in and with the possibility that this petition would not be heard. For House, the prospect of disappointment became a painful personal reality. She was jailed in 1917 for mail fraud. House’s incarceration, which lasted

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

113

a little under a year, seems to have marked the conclusion of her own involvement in the movement as well as the end of the MRB&PA’s legislative agenda.63 Remarkably, in her vision of the organization she helped to form, House appears to have anticipated—​conceptually, at least—​such an end. As she put it in her September 1899 letter to Barrett, “My whole soul and body are for this Ex-​Slave Movement and are willing to sacrific[e]‌for it.”64 In stark contrast to Vaughan’s conception of the ex-​slave pension cause as a form of Christian sacrifice that can redeem the unworthy in perpetuity, House invokes a more modest sense of her role. The “sacrifice” here is personal and makes no “promise”—​either for success or for a transformative redemption. This assertion illustrates the differences that marked House’s bid for reparations from those of the white men advocating for the same cause. For Vaughan and Stevens, reparations provided the necessary means to ensure a future of freedom unburdened by the present-​past; for Vaughan, in particular, the ex-​slave pension movement offered an occasion to silence “civil rights” agitation for years to come, if not perhaps forever. For House, by contrast, redress was a necessarily untimely act—​it was important irrespective of the outcome or the future such agitation might bring. In House’s vision, in fact, the allure of the corrected future that characterizes the writings of Vaughan and Stevens was just that: allure, or worse yet, “false hope.” For House, the ex-​slaves’ “grievances” deserve to be heard, and the aim of getting what was “due” was worth fighting for even if disappointment was possible, if not quite inevitable.65 If in his epitaph Douglass called for black Americans to “agitate, agitate, agitate,” as we saw in ­chapter 2, then House answered his call, embodying this idea of agitation without end—​ and, we might add, without success.

X Years a Slave In the same year that the MRB&PA was chartered, Harry Smith published Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States (1891). The work’s concluding chapter clarifies its aims: “Notwithstanding all that has been said and written on the subject of slavery, there is still a large amount of ignorance throughout the world. The design of this book is to dispell the prevailing ignorance on this subject.”66 As these lines make apparent, Smith’s narrative is conscious of its generic status: an autobiographical account of its author’s life in bondage, Fifty Years deployed the mode of writing that dominated the African American literary scene both before and after 1865.67 But in announcing its effort to “dispel” “ignorance” about the harms of slavery, Fifty Years does more than position itself within a genre; Smith’s narrative also stakes a claim for political engagement that aligns its project with House’s efforts for redress. If the ex-​slave pension movement emerged in part as

 

114

Untimely Democracy

a consequence of the need for black Americans to consider alternative modes of political action in the nadir, then Fifty Years likewise might be understood as participating in postbellum politics by other means.68 In offering an account of its author’s half-​century as a bondsman, Smith’s narrative asks readers to confront the suffering of slavery after the institution was officially abolished; it thereby seeks to make the wrongs of bondage count at a historical moment that was all too eager to relegate slavery to a fixed past. Significantly, if the autobiographical form Smith deployed to discharge this task was hardly novel, neither was the strategy he drew upon to designate his narrative. In rendering an account of slavery by counting the duration of its author’s life in servitude, Fifty Years drew on and extended an antebellum titling convention. By the time Twelve Years a Slave, Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-​York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (1853) was published, the reading public had been exposed to works bearing such titles as the Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution, during a Captivity of More than Twenty Years among the Slaveholders of Kentucky, One of the So-​Called Christian States of North America (1846) and Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson, of Kentucky; Containing an Account of His Birth, and Twenty-​Six Years of His Life while a Slave; His Escape; Five Years of Freedom, together with Anecdotes Related to Slavery (1847). What we might consider the sine qua non of such texts came with the 1857 publication of the Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-​four Years a Slave; Sold Eight Times! In Jail Sixty Times!! Whipped Three Hundred Times!!! or the Dark Deeds of American Slavery Revealed. Participating in what Teresa Goddu has termed the antislavery movement’s “discourse of numeracy,” these works deployed a titling strategy that sought to disclose to the reading public just what slavery consisted in. By enumerating the institution’s wrongs in this way, these narratives make slavery legible and thereby aspire to mobilize opposition.69 But even as they clarify the harms of bondage, these texts also always seek to designate the ways slavery exceeds the bounds of discrete units of time or quantitative measurement, that is, how slavery can never be accurately or adequately counted and thus never fully accounted for. In Anderson’s narrative, for instance, we quickly learn that what was disclosed on the title page was, astonishingly, an underestimate: in his preface, Anderson offers that he has “changed hands about eight or nine times”; that he has “been in jail about sixty times”; and that he has “been whipped about three or four hundred times.”70 Twelve Years a Slave bears witness to the haunting implications of this reality when, near the end of the work, Northup prophesies the coming of “a terrible day of vengeance, when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy.”71 If the unit of “twelve years” in Northup’s title offers the most basic index of his enslavement—​the precise duration of his captivity—​then the inclusion of “in vain” in this prediction points to

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

115

the more difficult calculus we see in Anderson’s narrative. The qualifier suggests that even as the “day of vengeance” arrives, there still is no instant when one could cease counting slavery’s harms.72 Both dimensions of Northup’s prophecy would come to pass. With the Civil War, this “day” did arrive, and the convention of numerically entitled slave narratives endured. In fact, nearly as many such texts appeared in the years following the end of the war and into the twentieth century.73 Smith’s Fifty Years circulated alongside Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Henry Clay Bruce’s The New Man: Twenty-​Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-​Nine Years a Free Man (1895), and Samuel Hall’s 47 Years a Slave: A Brief Story of His Life before and after Freedom Came to Him (1912). Of these narratives, Keckley’s is surely the most well known, both in modern scholarship and, owing to her association with Mary Todd Lincoln, in its own day. But Behind the Scenes is unrepresentative in this regard. Indeed, the authors of postbellum slave narratives were not black luminaries; average citizens, and both men and women, penned these works. It is for this reason, William Andrews has suggested, that the postbellum slave narrative was “the most democratic literary genre adopted by African Americans” at the turn into the twentieth century.74 “Democracy” functions synonymously with “egalitarian” for Andrews, yet there is another sense in which these narratives might be deemed “democratic.” By counting and accounting for slavery’s harms after emancipation, both in their titles and in their content, these texts enact what Jacques Rancière has defined as the occasion for democratic politics: the “miscount.” For Rancière, this term designates the position of some group that is not counted, not because it does not actually exist, but because it has no place within the political field, which is dominated by the “police” power. Politics occurs when this group—​which Rancière identifies with the position of the demos—​challenges the police order, or in his words, when “those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account.” When those who do not count assert themselves in this way, they stage a confrontation between “the world where they are and the world where they are not,” and in so doing they transform the constitution of the known world. For Rancière, then, politics is fundamentally about contesting and reconfiguring the “common stage” and “the existence and status of those present on it.”75 And it is for this reason that Rancière designates the “miscount” as the fundamental principle of and the generative force for democracy. For the “miscount” is an act of unsettling: when those who do not count insist that they “must be counted,” they render “the equation out of balance.”76 Rancière’s schema illuminates the political crosscurrents animating the numerically entitled postbellum slave narratives. Consider, for example, the way Smith’s Fifty Years constitutes what we might call the afterlife of the antislavery discourse of numeracy. Like Anderson’s antebellum work, Fifty Years

 

116

Untimely Democracy

gives quantitative form to the hard facts of bondage:  the “thirty-​nine lashes” that are inflicted on a “naked back” and the “twenty-​five bushels” that make up the slave’s daily labor.77 But while this convention endures across the historical divide that separates these two texts, its particular political charge differs by virtue of appearing in—​which is to say, persisting into—​the postbellum era. As we saw, Smith reports that the project of his narrative is to inform his readers of a reality that texts like Anderson’s seemed to have failed to represent fully (or completely) even as they effectively consolidated the movement that would precipitate the abolition of chattel slavery. By insisting that there is more to be said about bondage, a writer like Smith establishes himself as a subject of account precisely by staking a claim to be able to count the painful past of slavery in the postbellum present. In this way, Smith, much like House, renders the equation out of balance, unsettling the dominant logic of the relationship between past and present, and challenging the question of whose voice can and will be heard. But what is the political end here? If the idea of the miscount is to undo the equation that constitutes the known world, is the objective to offer a more just balance? As we saw in the case of House, the answer seems to be no; her struggle was driven not so much by the allure of a debt settled but by the very idea that something was due to ex-​slaves. A similar motive subtends the postbellum slave narrative’s relationship to counting. These works at once seek to render slavery legible via the deployment of counting and to mark where numbers fail in the computation. Indeed, for Bruce in The New Man: Twenty-​Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-​Nine Years a Free Man (1895), the notion of what constitutes the equation one could deploy to redress slavery is itself the challenge. Bruce’s title asserts a sort of temporal symmetry—​a balance between servitude and citizenship, past and present—​that would seem to cite while bringing even more precision to a work like Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). And yet, striking such a balance between the epoch of slavery and formal liberty proves elusive. On the one hand, Bruce frames his narrative as an attempt to render an “impartial and unprejudiced view” of slavery; as his preface proclaims, “We are too far removed now from the heart burnings and cruelties of that system … to let our accounts of it now be colored by its memories.”78 But if Bruce here cites this temporal distance as enabling an accurate accounting, as his narrative unfolds he finds it harder to deliver on his prefatory promise. Bruce’s reflection on the process of emancipation encapsulates the dilemma. Taking up the “the condition of the Colored people at the close of the war,” he begins by describing the world ex-​slaves encountered upon their release from bondage: “They were set free without a dollar, without a foot of land, and without the wherewithal to get the next meal even.” He then situates this scene against a reflection that “shows that the labor of these people had for two hundred years

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

117

made the country tenable for the white man, had cleared away the dense forests and produced crops that brought millions of money annually to that section, which not only benefitted the South, but the North as well.” Bruce concludes that “a Christian Nation, which had received such wealth from the labor of a subjugated people, upon setting them free would, at least, have given them a square meal. Justice seems to demand one year’s support, forty acres of land and a mule each.” Through his use of “square,” Bruce seems to suggest this statement is an attempt to balance his preceding two assertions: the account of the slaves’ labor and the reality of their emancipation—​though the “at least” signals his diminished expectations. As he writes in the next sentence, “Did they get that or any portion of it? Not a cent. Four million people turned loose without a dollar.”79 Rendering this accounting “square” is an impossible venture. In 47 Years a Slave:  A  Brief Story of His Life before and after Freedom Came to Him, Samuel Hall strikes at the heart of the matter. Whereas Bruce identifies “time” as the “essential element in the solution,” invoking its healing powers, Hall holds that time offers no alluring cure; in fact, it constitutes the problem that plagues the prospect of redress in the first place.80 Here is his stunning meditation on this score: Now I want to know what the reader thinks of this inhuman treatment toward my people when your people went into the wilds of Africa and brought the Negroes here among enlightened people and placed him here as a slave and kept him in bondage nigh unto three centuries; used them like dogs, yes even placed them lower than a dog … and yet they want the Negro problem solved. Suppose they had begun solving this years sooner and remembered that he was flesh and blood the same as you. … Suppose they had begun working on us to enlighten us instead of kicking us lower and lower. The problem would have been solved years ago, yes years ago.81 Part jeremiad, part philosophical thought experiment, this reflection posits a powerful summa of the political project of the postbellum numerical slave narrative. That Hall’s address to his white readers establishes him as a subject who ought to count is clear enough. More arresting is the way this rhetorical mode of “I” and “you” quickly transforms into “my people” and “your people,” a move that situates the reader in the position of a sort of primordial enslaver, thus making him responsible for the wrong of bondage even if he had no direct role in the regime of chattel slavery. Yet perhaps most startling is Hall’s final turn: after invoking the idea of obligation, presumably setting up some sort of recommendation, he only mocks those who would “want the Negro problem solved.” Significantly, the following

 

118

Untimely Democracy

sentences, each beginning with the counterfactual “suppose,” indicate that the author’s satire may be less about those white citizens who insist that they have “done enough” for the freedmen, as Douglass declared, than about the very possibility of resolution. When Hall remarks that the “problem would have been solved years ago” had whites “remembered” that Africans were of the same “flesh and blood,” his implication seems to be that only then could the problem have been solved.82 In this way, Hall anticipates one of the crucial dimensions of the concept of the miscount. The harm it designates can never be fully redressed, nor would one want to “solve” it. For in Rancière’s terms, the miscount is a primordial “wrong” that is also the generative force of politics:  the exclusion of some to the realm of the unseen, the unheard, the uncountable—​in short, the unequal. This wrong escapes mathematical logics. It cannot be “settled” or “regulated”; rather, it can only be worked through in a way that changes the very terms of the game: a “shift” in the register of the sensible in which politics itself occurs. And this is an activity that does not end; as he explains, “The persistence of the wrong is infinite because verification of equality is infinite.”83 Accordingly, as Hall makes clear, and as House did before him, the aim is not to sum up in the sense of to render the accounts “square”; no number will ever capture the harms of bondage. Instead, the more difficult task—​and what these postbellum slave narratives attempt to approximate through their engagement with numeracy—​is the sort of shift in the understanding of temporality, both the time frame of slavery’s harm and the temporal parameters designating responsibility for this wrong. Hall’s “suppose” challenges us to consider what is to be done about slavery in the present, which cannot (as his formulation suggests) be separated from a past wrong that cannot be repaired. If in Souls Du Bois entreats his readers to meditate on how to count the afterlife of slavery, we might postulate, via Hall and Rancière, that the more difficult question (already implicit in Du Bois’s) is when to stop counting? Which is also, necessarily, to ask the following: why count and what precisely is being counted? In the subsequent sections—​the concluding movements of my meditation on redress—​I take up these questions by attending to The Monster, whose definition of the wrong of bondage aligns Stephen Crane in surprising ways not just with writers like Hall but also activists like House.

Counting with Crane The Monster concludes with a curious scene of counting: Dr. Ned Trescott, comforting his crying wife, stares at a table of empty teacups, material signifiers for the guests who did not attend her weekly social gathering. “Trescott mechanically

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

119

counted them. There were fifteen of them,” the narrator reports. And then, in what are the final lines of the novella, we again learn that “Trescott found himself occasionally trying to count the cups. There were fifteen of them” (65). The repetition here implies that the problem is not the doctor’s capacity to discern the quantity of the cups; no “about” or “or” appears, as in Anderson’s endeavor to count slavery’s pains. Rather, Trescott’s compulsive counting appears at first as an effort to account for his loss—​both economic and social—​wrought by his allegiance to Henry Johnson, a black hostler who is disfigured as a result of his attempt to save Jimmie, the Trescotts’ young son, from a burning abode. This is certainly the reading that the preceding section of the novella encourages; in the buildup to this conclusion, the leading white citizens—​one of whom “was worth $400,000 and reported to be worth over a million”—​encourage Trescott to abandon Johnson by reminding him that “you are doing yourself a great deal of harm” (62). It therefore would be easy to understand this conclusion as a case in point for those scholars who read The Monster as problematically diverting its attention away from the suffering of a scarred black protagonist to the (incommensurate) pain of its leading white character.84 And yet, Trescott’s marginalization as a consequence of his devotion to Johnson might also stand as an example of the concept of collective shame that is the legacy of racial bondage. In Crane’s accounting, the work of reparation can never be reduced to the material or the numerical; it demands, instead, recognition of the shame of slavery that claimed (albeit in different ways) both white and black Americans, and that animated legal bondage and its afterlife in Jim Crow subjugation. From its outset, the novella begins to sketch the conceptual units that coalesce in this concluding scene. Claiming even as it troubles a relation between cause and effect, chronology and simultaneity, and responsibility and reparation, The Monster begins with these lines: Little Jim was, for the time, engine Number 36, and he was making the run between Syracuse and Rochester. He was fourteen minutes behind time, and the throttle was wide open. In consequence, when he swung around the curve at the flower-​bed, a wheel of his cart destroyed a peony. Number 36 slowed down at once and looked guiltily at his father, who was mowing the lawn. … … Finally he went to the peony and tried to stand it on its pins, resuscitated, but the spine of it was hurt. … Jim could do no reparation. (9) In its figuration of Jim as “engine Number 36” engaged in a race against the clock, this passage registers the role the nineteenth-​century railroad played in establishing the temporality that came to be called, beginning in 1883, “Standard

 

120

Untimely Democracy

Railway Time.” Significantly, this temporality is forward moving; it is the kind of time in which it is possible to be “behind.” Indeed, because trains that fell out of sync with linear time risked fatal collisions, railroad companies took pains to ensure the accuracy of operators’ watches and designed procedures with the problem of tardy trains in mind.85 Read against this backdrop, the initial scene takes on additional significance. At first glance, the train’s lateness might seem sufficient to explain the cause of the accident. Yet a closer examination reveals that the crash results from the imaginary train’s increased velocity, signaled by “the throttle was wide open.” While this speed is necessitated by the fact that “engine Number 36” is running late, the narrator’s language seems to place as much causal emphasis on the train’s rapid movement as it does on its tardiness:  “In consequence” refers to both of the independent clauses that constitute the sentence that precedes it, connecting the notion of causality it invokes not simply to “He was fourteen minutes behind time” but also (and arguably more tightly, given the latter clause’s placement at the end of the sentence) to “the throttle was wide open.” By this curious logic, standardized time, with its rigid linearity and imperative to keep pace, would seem at least partly to blame for the crash; instead of enabling the train to avoid an accident, the vehicle’s effort to correct its lag may bring about the collision. The novella explores the subject of causality more concretely, though with no less ambiguity, in an exchange between Trescott and his son at the end of the opening chapter. Jim seeks out his father to confess, yet when Trescott asks him what happened, the child can offer only the following: “Now—​I was playin’ train—​and—​now—​I runned over it” (10). Apparently bereft of the temporal language that would facilitate the kind of accounting his father’s question demands, he draws only on “now,” which functions to elevate simultaneity over chronology as the privileged temporal construct in this context. Jim is unable to put events into chronological order, that is, to narrate cause as temporally prior to effect. Instead, in his explanation, the two overlap: “playin’ train” (reported in the progressive tense) coincides with, rather than gives rise to, the damage to the peony. Viewed from this angle, Jim quite literally cannot cite himself as the agent that brought about the damage to the flower, for he is unable to establish cause in the first place. If atonement for wrongdoing requires, at least initially, an admission of responsibility, then Jim can do “no reparation” because he averts the requisite first step.86 Through the disjointed sense of time on display in Jim’s language and the game he plays, The Monster gestures toward the conceptual possibility whose imaginative power it will unfold in its exploration of Johnson’s injury and Trescott’s debt: cause and effect may not follow (or follow from) one another in a straightforward chronological relation. That is, causality does not necessarily abide by the laws of linear time, the temporality of trains. The novella’s opening section

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

121

thus entreats us to wonder not simply about the place of causality and responsibility in the attempt to repair a wrong. In presenting a scene of injury that comes about to a certain extent “in consequence” of a bid to keep pace with the forward movement of standardized time, and in troubling just what constitutes the notion of cause implicit in the very phrase it deploys to describe the accident, the narrative poses the further question of how temporality itself relates to harm and repair. To paraphrase the narrator, what might doing (no) reparation have to do with time?

The Stillness of Slavery’s Time Crane provides an initial answer in a richly wrought narrative sequence whose action unfolds across six sections in the text, and whose aftermath animates the novella’s remaining pages. Henry Johnson enters Trescott’s burning home in an attempt to save the sleeping Jimmie from the flames that threaten to engulf the child’s bedroom.87 In the process, Johnson is himself overtaken by the fire—​the mounting force of which is figured at one point as “clan joining clan” (20)—​and nearly dies. Rendered faceless by the conflagration, his visage burned away when a blazing chemical from the doctor’s laboratory falls upon him, the black protagonist emerges from the fire less subject than object. As the narrator describes the moment of his rescue at the hands of “a young man who was a brakeman on the railway,” Johnson is a “thing … laid on the grass” (26).88 The loyal black servant, less person than a piece of debris, pursued by mob-​ like flames while engaged in a rescue mission to save his employer’s white child—​the tableau brought into relief by way of these details alone would seem to confirm Price McMurray’s reading of the episode as “an allegorical miniature of American racial history: Henry resists and triumphs over the legacy of his slave fathers only to be destroyed by Reconstruction and the rise of segregation.”89 But while McMurray underscores Jim Crow apartheid, leaving slavery to Johnson’s fathers, The Monster thrusts racial servitude into the present in its staging of the fire. Indeed, the metaphor for the compound that scorches Johnson’s face—​a “serpent” crawling amid a space that is figured as a “garden” (24)—​recalls the trope slave narrators often used to refer to their masters, if not also the way racial bondage was conceived of as the entrance of evil into the American Eden.90 Furthermore, one of the first sights the protagonist witnesses as he enters the house is the destruction of a particularly suggestive image: an “engraving” entitled Signing the Declaration. As the narrator describes this crucial moment, “a lick of flame had found the cord that supported” the picture, which “slumped suddenly down at one end, and then dropped to the floor, where it burst with the sound of a bomb” (21). Exploding the myth of the postslavery

 

122

Untimely Democracy

status the nation claimed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the conflagration marks the peculiar institution’s continuing grip on a house which, if not quite divided, is nonetheless “haunted” by slavery’s “bloody spectres” that throw a crimson hue on its windows, as if they “had been stained with blood” (20). In this respect, Signing the Declaration merits further discussion. The image that hangs in the entryway of the Trescott home likely is an allusion to one of the reproductions of John Trumbull’s famous painting The Declaration of Independence, perhaps the 1823 engraving by Asher B.  Durand (Figure 3.5), which was commissioned by the artist in advance of the image’s installation in the Capitol Rotunda in 1826.91 Often accompanying copies of The Declaration such as Durand’s was a key that identified each of the figures in the representation by marking its head with a number. As McMurray contends, the juxtaposition of Johnson’s (metaphoric, soon to be literal) “facelessness” with these white men’s “overdetermined visages” speaks volumes about the sort of countenance—​and, by extension, person—​the nation values.92 Pursuing this line of interpretation further, we might even imagine the protagonist as engaged in a kind of facing scene, the likes of which we saw in the encounter between Frederick Douglass and Thomas Auld in ­chapter 2: gazing into the engraving in the moment before

Figure 3.5  Asher B. Durand, after John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence (engraving, 1823). The image depicts the events of June 28, 1776, when the Committee of Five—​Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin—​presented the Declaration as drafted by Jefferson. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

123

it explodes into flames, Johnson seeks confirmation of his identity as human in the visages of the founding fathers—​but he finds it nowhere. Such a gloss is no doubt evocative. Yet the most salient detail about Trescott’s print may not concern faces, black or white, but rather the complex sense of time the tableau embodies. “There is not another like it in the world,” the art historian Irma Jaffe writes of Trumbull’s painting, noting in the next sentence that the “very immobility of the figures and the airlessness of the room suggest the frozen instant in which had been born the new state.”93 Without debating the more evaluative component of Jaffe’s claim, one might wonder about her insistence on associating the scene displayed on Trumbull’s canvas with the “instant” on July 4, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress formally announced its rationale for an independent “America.” Indeed, at its very center, the image represents not an event that occurred on July 4, when the Congress approved an altered version of Thomas Jefferson’s proposed Declaration, but rather the moment on June 28 when the Committee of Five—​Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin—​presented the original document as drafted by its leading member.94 In this regard, while the painting is often erroneously referred to as “The Signing of the Declaration of Independence,” its actual title also mischaracterizes a scene that might more properly be described in the plural, that is, as Declarations of Independence.95 For in overlaying two different dates in the history of the founding—​the event of June 28, depicted in its foreground, and that of July 4, implied by its singular title—​Trumbull’s painting creates a visual, if not fully visible, palimpsest of two documents whose respective conceptions of what (or whom) freedom might look like in the new nation could not have been more distinct.96 Indeed, among the myriad grievances it issues against King George III, Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration includes the accusation that the monarch “violat[ed]” the “most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people” by “captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” While the document generally draws on servitude as metaphor, portraying the colonists as in bondage to the tyrannical king, the “slavery” under attack here is quite literal:  the “persons of a distant people” to which Jefferson refers are Africans, and it is their “sacred rights of life and liberty” that George III abuses in the form of the transatlantic slave trade. We will never know what effect such language might have had on the place of slavery in the development of the new nation. For in the version of the Declaration accepted by the Continental Congress on July 4, this passage was nowhere to be found. As Jefferson reflects in his Autobiography (1821), it was “struck out” in “complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia,” which “still wished to continue” the traffic in persons, and in respect to the Northern colonies, which “felt a little tender under those censures” given their collaboration in the trade.97

 

124

Untimely Democracy

Bill Brown has characterized the novella’s reference to the engraving as an allusion to the “originary moment of American racism.”98 But we might also understand this episode as a powerful meditation on slavery’s extent—​its temporal reach—​that troubles the very sense of fixity that an “origin” would imply. For just as Trumbull’s painting overlays the moments of June 28 and July 4, indexing the original version of the Declaration even as it subsumes this earlier iteration in its singular title, so The Monster suggests that the failure of late nineteenth-​ century America to recognize Johnson as a co-​citizen repeats the founders’ exclusion of Africans from the vision of equality and liberty they posited in the course of their own fight against virtual slavery. Whereas in Vaughan’s vision the ex-​slave pension movement will effect the belated realization of the principle of black equality embodied by the Declaration’s excised passage, Crane’s novella offers a different reading of the relationship between then and now. In burning the engraving moments after the servant enters the house, The Monster stages yet another elision of a principle that was already disavowed in the Declaration’s transformation from original to final form. Past does not give rise to present, origin to afterlife; rather, then and now overlap in a kind of simultaneous existence. It is as if, despite Revolution, Civil War, and emancipation, no time has passed at all. Significantly, The Monster enacts this temporal conjunction by way of the narrative structure it deploys at this juncture. Uncoupling the standard relation between cause and effect, the text here presents the response to the fire before depicting the conflagration itself. In fact, it is not until the third chapter in the fire sequence that it becomes clear that the site of the incident is the Trescott abode. Just after Mrs. Trescott is pulled from her burning home by a neighbor, the narrator reports that “the time when Hannigan and his charge struggled out of the house was the time when the whistle roared its hoarse night call, smiting the crowd in the park, causing the leader of the band, who was about to order the first triumphal clang of a military march, to let his hand drop slowly to his knee” (22). In almost cinematic fashion, the novella here rewinds the action that has unfolded across its previous pages, returning us to the moment portrayed two chapters earlier in which the whistle signaled a fire in district two. But the text’s attempt to re-​establish the chronology from which it departed ultimately fails. For in its (belated) effort to make cause precede effect, this passage disorders linear time even further by enunciating a relation of simultaneity. In a perfectly balanced sentence underscored by the repeated phrase “the time when,” events that from the reader’s perspective register as past and present are made to overlap. The reported blow of the whistle actually coincides with Hannigan’s rescue. An ostensibly insignificant detail buried in the middle of the fire sequence reveals the racialized stakes of this overlap. In a “maniacal” state, Mrs. Trescott glimpses her employee: “‘Jimmie! Save Jimmie!’ she screamed in Henry’s face.”

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

125

It is difficult not to hear in Trescott’s first cry a demand to her servant, issued out of desperation, perhaps, but a demand nonetheless.99 Curiously, however, the novella implies that the matriarch may have wasted her breath. For as the narrator recounts, as soon as Johnson realizes the house is on fire, he runs toward it “with an almost fabulous speed.” In “plung[ing] past” the screaming Trescott, that is, the protagonist does not ignore the command (21); rather, he already has sprung into action.100 If the condition of “having no being except as an expression of another’s being” in part defines servitude, as Orlando Patterson has argued, Johnson acts out the master’s fantasy of the perfect slave.101 He not only risks his own life to save that of Jim but he answers Mrs. Trescott’s call even before she can issue it. The protagonist seems more like his enslaved ancestors than a free black subject. If in its initial chapter the novella thrusts linear, progressive temporality into the foreground in the furious attempt of “engine Number 36” to keep pace, then in the fire sequence The Monster takes up the lag encapsulated in the phrase “behind time.” For in embarking on his rescue mission, Johnson enters a site where the forward-​moving temporality of the train is brought to a halt (it is, recall, a “brakeman” who finally drags Johnson’s limp body from the fire) as it collides with the time of slavery, in which simultaneity supplants chronology, and persistence trumps progression.102 To be sure, the conflagration burns away much more than Johnson’s face or Trescott’s house; collapsing the distance between past and present, it places bound black and free black, ancestor and descendant, on coeval temporal terrain.

Slavery’s Shame/​The Shame of Slavery With the image of Johnson throwing himself into the Trescott home, we can return to the narrator’s curious remark, buried within the fire sequence, that the protagonist “was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration” (23). When critics comment on this line at all, they understand it as exemplary of the text’s “racist ‘theorizing.’”103 But the narrator’s attribution of Johnson’s submission to “his fathers”—​and, by implication, to his slave heritage—​deserves further consideration. For in moving the fire episode from a figure for slavery’s endurance to an exploration of the source of Johnson’s injury, the remark suggests that racial bondage, though formally abolished, nonetheless continues to harm purportedly free subjects. In so doing, the line embeds in the fire sequence a crucial meditation on injury qua injury that has yet to be pursued by Crane’s readers, who tend to explicate Johnson’s physical scar as a trope for social invisibility or for his status as an object.104 Johnson’s defacement certainly represents all of these things. But is the

 

126

Untimely Democracy

harm he suffers reducible to—​or even adequately explained by—​the facelessness that results from the serpentine substance that burns his visage? What if Johnson’s injury is not so much his defacement as the devalued self-​conception, constructed and enforced by his society, that compels him to run into the burning structure in the first place? In a brief but brilliant essay entitled “What’s Wrong with Slavery?,” Kwame Anthony Appiah develops a conception of the immorality of racial bondage that can help us to think through these questions. As Appiah has it, one cannot offer a philosophically coherent response to the query he poses simply by citing physical violence or sexual abuse—​in other words, the seemingly obvious harms of servitude. While these elements were characteristic of the institution, and although they undoubtedly wronged the enslaved, as any nineteenth-​century apologist for slavery would be quick to proclaim, such behaviors constituted abuses of the system, not the system itself.105 Appiah’s point is not of course to embrace proslavery arguments but rather to recognize that “physical cruelty is, indeed, not intrinsic to the definition of slavery.” One has to look deeper, toward bondage’s less apparent, but no less horrific, scars. For Appiah, what is truly wrong with racial servitude is the fact that it stigmatizes the enslaved, consigning them to a degraded social status and denying them what the political philosopher John Rawls has termed the “social bases of self-​respect”: “confidence that one had a life whose aims were worth pursuing and that one was competent to manage that life.” Recalling Douglass’s invocation of the phrase “enforced degradation,” this lesser status—​what Appiah terms “hereditary social inferiority” but what we might also think of as a kind of social shame—​constitutes slavery’s greatest injury.106 As Appiah’s use of “hereditary” implies, the harm of racial bondage is fundamentally an enduring one. In the United States, he reminds us, there existed an “intimate connection between racial disrespect and slave status,” such that “even free blacks were stigmatized because, though they were legally free, they belonged, unlike white people, to a kind of people that could be enslaved.”107 Crucially, the idea here is not that this stigma results from the actual submission of Africans to slavery—​as if racial servitude were the sign of the bad judgment of an individual subject as opposed to a complex system that secured domination over blacks through economic and social structures, through biopolitical practices as well as brute force. Rather, the point is that one of the components of this system—​the stigma of slavery—​was inextricably linked to blackness. And with such an equation between “black” and “slave” in place, the power of legal remedies and even the force of emancipation, while undoubtedly important, is diminished. For the devaluation of blackness codified by way of bondage is not easily undone by legal edict. Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) captures this idea when,

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

127

in a proleptic moment, Marie proclaims to Eugene that there “is a wrong where reparation is impossible. Neither wealth nor education can repair the wrong of a dishonored birth.”108 As Harper here implies, even when racial servitude was no longer on the books, its concomitant shame, embedded in blackness, came to mark African Americans, North and South, free and enslaved. Crane’s novella theorizes precisely this notion in its depiction of Johnson. For what The Monster makes clear is that the servant’s degraded status—​prior to, during, and after the blaze—​is not finally traceable to Johnson but rather to his “fathers.”109 Indeed, if, following Patterson, we understand the degradation of racial bondage as a “generalized condition” rooted in a “primal act of submission” that applied to even as it necessarily exceeded the particular slave subject, then citing Johnson’s immediate parentage here misses the mark.110 Imbuing the protagonist’s acquiescence with a much more complicated genealogy that recalls Jefferson’s comments on slavery in c­ hapter 1, The Monster suggests that the social inferiority at the core of bondage reproduces itself through time in a kind of infinite regress that, paradoxically, guarantees its persistence. In falling into the flames, Johnson confirms the dishonor bequeathed to him because of his ancestry by replaying the submission his fathers were forced to enact—​just as his fathers’ fathers were before. In this way, the novella anticipates the most provocative insight that emerges from Appiah’s essay, an idea the philosopher himself does not fully pursue: the logic of the racial debasement that haunts free blacks like Johnson repeats the logic of slave degradation that marked his fathers. For at the foundation of both systems is a dishonor that derives from one’s ancestry, whether more immediate, as The Monster suggests of Johnson, or much more distant, as in Patterson’s account of the primal roots of servitude. In other words, the shame of slavery inheres not in the “submission” of a specific individual to bondage but rather, to paraphrase Appiah, in belonging to a kind of people that were made to submit—​ to a kind of people that were enslaved. Translating this point into the lexicon of causality, we might say that inferior status functions as an explanation of both slavery’s cause and its effect: its justification and its mode of enforcement, the means by which it secures its institutional power and the way it perpetuates its legacy. Simply put, hereditary social degradation is slavery’s life and afterlife.111 While framing bondage’s endurance thus might seem to force us into a rather fatalistic conceptual position, quite the contrary is true. By conceiving of the injury of racial servitude as persistent and extensive, this model supplies the imaginative work required to overcome a serious philosophical obstacle impeding efforts to justify redress: the problem of causality. As the philosopher Bernard Boxill explains, one of the standard moves in theoretical accounts of reparation is the reliance on counterfactuals, or the assessment and measurement of compensation in terms of what it would take to bring the injured party to the “level

 

128

Untimely Democracy

of well-​being he would have enjoyed had he not been harmed.”112 Of the many dilemmas that emerge when such an approach is deployed, perhaps the most significant is that the counterfactual requires one to show that slavery is the cause of the problems confronting free blacks born post-​emancipation—​in short, that slavery continues to harm years after it was legally abolished. For postbellum slave narrators like Hall, this point may have been clear, but for Boxill, writing in the twenty-​first century, this requirement is nearly insurmountable.113 And yet, he does not abandon the cause entirely (pun intended). Instead, Boxill modifies the counterfactual argument by focusing not on the injustice of slavery but on what he identifies as the injustice of nonrecovery, which was perpetrated by whites—​and the government—​against African Americans after abolition. As he explains, “The present black population is not entitled to reparation for the harms that slavery caused it because slavery, that is the slave holders and their helpers, did not cause it any harms. The succeeding white generations caused the harms that entitles blacks to reparation. They did so by preventing the slaves and their descendants from recovering from the harms that slavery caused them.” The distinction Boxill draws here between the injury of slavery and the injury of nonrecovery largely rests on what exactly we consider to be the “harm” of racial bondage. And, curiously, this is a question to which he devotes scant attention. While in the passage quoted above, he would appear to bypass the issue by glossing slavery’s injuries rather ambiguously in terms of the behaviors of “slave holders and their helpers,” Boxill offers a more explicit definition earlier in the essay, when he notes that the “greatest harms” suffered by bound blacks “stemmed from the loss of their liberty.”114 This latter formulation is more satisfying than the first—​to have one’s freedom denied is certainly to suffer a wrong. Nonetheless, such a conception is limited in scope. Literal unfreedom is not the only wrong of bondage: think here of House’s insistence on black Americans’ right to petition for redress over and above any end this agitation might effect. And, contra Boxill, unfreedom may not be the system’s “greatest harm.” Indeed, if, following Appiah, we look to the very wrong on which the denial of liberty to the slave was founded—​hereditary social inferiority—​then the boundary between the harm of slavery and the harm of nonrecovery fails to hold. Degraded status constitutes the persistent injury suffered by blacks in slavery and freedom; or more precisely, it is the wrong that relegates them to living a kind of racial servitude in the era of freedom. What Boxill envisions as a “double injustice” thus seems more like a single wrong repeated through time.115 In fact, this is precisely the rhetoric deployed by the activist author-​lawyer Albion Tourgée, when, in an 1892 pamphlet on the subject of civil rights, he describes the history of the black American as a “sequence of unjust and oppressive acts”

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

129

in which “the only reparation offered for past injuries is some new form of injustice.”116 As this phrasing implies, more than the definition of “injury” is at stake here. For questions of temporality are inextricable from notions of harm—​and, accordingly, time inflects arguments about reparations in significant ways. It is important to note, then, that in positing a difference between the injury of slavery and the injury of nonrecovery, Boxill also draws a boundary between past and present, disclosing an investment in linear time. Of course, this does not necessarily constitute a weakness. But if our aim is to resist such a border in an attempt to direct attention to (so as to begin to repair) slavery’s ongoing wrongs, then Boxill’s innovation may be counterproductive. The Monster helps to reveal why in the analogy it forges between its two central scenes of injury and related attempts at repair: between, that is, peony and protagonist. In order to uncover the complex relation among father, son, and servant that The Monster creates in its conceptual pairing of these two injuries, we might ask what the flower that figures so prominently in the initial chapter represents, and on whom it symbolically sheds light. Crane’s readers have suggested multiple interpretations of the peony, understanding it variously as a sign of Trescott’s affluence, a prefiguration of Johnson’s near death in the conflagration, and an emblem of the doctor’s “capacity for moral sensitivity” on display in his effort to heal Johnson.117 Yet an additional possibility heretofore has gone unnoticed:  among the nineteenth-​century meanings of the peony was shame.118 Insofar as the flower functions as a kind of double for the servant, this symbolic logic would seem to lend support to an analysis of Johnson’s injury not as a primarily physical blow but as a degraded status and a devaluation of self—​in short, as slavery’s shame. But, as the previous inventory of critical glosses implies, the peony may say as much about the white protagonists (father and son) as about Johnson. Consider Jim’s response to the doctor’s quasi reprimand: “he went away, with his head lowered, shuffling his feet” (10). Guilt at first would seem to capture the significance of such a posture: Jim knows he is responsible for the damaged peony even if he has avoided articulating his role in bringing it about. Read closely, however, the child’s stance indexes something more like shame, which has less to do with an individual accepting culpability for a specific action of which he is author than with the awareness of having lost esteem in the eyes of another, and not necessarily or chiefly as a result of one’s deeds. In other words, does Jim’s downward glance primarily signify admission of responsibility or the fear of a wounded self-​image brought about by the father’s scolding? The question is important, because the difference between guilt and shame is also the difference between an individualistic, agent-​centered conception of responsibility for wrongdoing and a more capacious, relational one that defies

 

130

Untimely Democracy

standard accounts of author as cause as well as the logic of chronology more generally. As the philosopher W. James Booth explains, “Whereas guilt is a clear threshold concept, and so is a property of discrete events in our life, shame is more pervasive and seems to be bound up with the long duration of our lives and of our communities.”119 With its emphasis on the longue durée, shame enables us to conceive of wrongs that endure not simply across the course of an individual life but over the lives of collectivities and generations. The “sign of persistence,” it unsettles notions of past and present, cause and effect, tearing them out of their linear order.120 Accordingly, standard models of responsibility in which an individual accepts blame for some wrong will not suffice. What shame requires, instead, is a sense of coresponsibility, which, as Booth defines it, forges links not simply “among members of a present community,” but more importantly, between past and present citizens; it thus “speaks to an identity across time and through change, an identity that is ethical at its core yet is not dependent on notions of authorship and causal connection.”121 On this model, nineteenth-​and twenty-​first-​century white Americans alike might feel responsible for bondage, for the salient point is not whether they or their forebears owned slaves but rather that, by virtue of their membership in a formerly slaveholding nation, these citizens benefit from the material and psychological structures codified by racial servitude. If we replace Vaughan’s use of “guilt” with “shame” in his statement about his relation to the “crime” of “slavery” “as an American,” we get close to Booth’s idea here. In short, the shame of slavery is not something exclusive to black Americans. It claims whites as well, though less as a felt history of degradation than as a kind of moral obligation.122 In a short story he published just months after The Monster, Crane gestures toward something like Booth’s sense of coresponsibility. “The Blue Hotel” (1898) tells the tale of a “Swede” who travels from New  York to a Nebraska lodging house. In the course of a game of cards with the owner’s son, Johnnie, and two other boarders—​a “cowboy” and an “Easterner”—​the Swede, accusing Johnnie of cheating, initiates a fight. Leaving the hotel after winning the brawl, the Swede comes upon a saloon, where he attempts to force a local gambler to join him in a drink. Not amenable to such coercion, the gambler responds to the Swede’s demand by pulling out a blade and killing him. In its closing section, the text depicts a conversation between the cowboy and the Easterner in which the latter character reveals that Johnnie was in fact cheating and accuses his companions and himself of being complicit in the murder: “We are all in it! … Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede.”123 While none of the boarders inflicted the fatal wound, the Easterner suggests, they all are in a way responsible for the Swede’s death, as

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

131

is the gambler. The actual “sin” may not be the same with respect to every character, but the wrong is collective.124 Crane himself saw “The Blue Hotel” as the proper companion to his novella for an 1899 collection of his works, noting in a letter to his agent that the two pieces “fit” together.125 The writer does not specify a reason for his claim, but, as we have seen, the idea of collective wrong held out in the closing lines of “The Blue Hotel” is very much on display in The Monster, which underscores the notion’s temporal dimensions from its opening page. While Jim evades individual accountability in his response to his father, the sense of simultaneity manifest in his answer would seem to supply precisely the concept needed for a vision of what might be required for coming to terms with slavery. That is, if bondage unsettles standard models of causality and temporality, might not the task of imagining the conditions for making amends require an equally expansive time frame? The novella’s staging of Trescott’s deliberations about what he owes Johnson points provocatively in this direction. While the doctor never explicitly formulates his actions as a redressive project, his incessant ruminations on the topic seem almost to call out for interrogation. For if we remember that Crane clearly indicates that Trescott, not his servant, actually rescues Jim, then the doctor’s deliberations take on a more metaphorical shape, inviting a reading of his meditation on debt in terms that exceed his personal relationship with Johnson.126 Consider Trescott’s conversation with his neighbor, Judge Hagenthorpe, in the aftermath of the fire. With Johnson’s life hanging in the balance, the doctor effectively moves in with Hagenthorpe, in whose home the black protagonist languishes, his bandaged face allowing a single eye to protrude and stare “unwinkingly” at the judge. At dinner one evening, Hagenthorpe poses an uncomfortable question: “No one wants to advance such ideas, but somehow I think that that poor fellow ought to die.” The doctor demurs, but the narrator reports, “There was in Trescott’s face at once a look of recognition, as if in this tangent of the judge, he saw an old problem.” Hagenthorpe’s death wish for Johnson betrays an anxiety that an issue presumed to be dead—​slavery, that “old problem” in the human form of Johnson—​may in fact linger on, its “unwinking eye” gazing at the judge, as if to implicate him in the national evil (31). That it is an agent of the law who speaks this line is especially suggestive, not simply because racial bondage was codified by the legal system, but also because, as the decision in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases reveals, the national judiciary was intent on disjoining the past of slavery from postbellum acts of racial discrimination. But if Trescott’s “look of recognition” signals that he grasps, and perhaps even shares, the temporal anxiety implicit in Hagenthorpe’s remark, his evasive reply suggests he does not endorse his friend’s recommendation. He may glimpse an “old problem” brought back into the present in Johnson’s eye,

 

132

Untimely Democracy

yet he does not turn away. In fact, after ensuring Johnson’s continued existence, Trescott remains committed to his servant—​repaying the debt he feels he owes him for saving Jim’s life—​even as this allegiance renders him an outcast. If in the opening chapter, the narrator declares that Jim could “do no reparation” to the peony, The Monster presents a slightly different state of affairs with respect to Trescott’s attempt to redress Johnson’s injury. Even if the doctor’s efforts at repair seem futile, he nonetheless is at pains to meditate on what he owes his servant, and how best to compensate him—​and, from the perspective of the text’s formal structures, the source of this debt cannot be limited to Johnson’s rescuing Jim. Most broadly interpreted, The Monster gives narrative form not simply to the persistent injury of slavery but also to the abiding obligation to repair the harms of bondage. The time of slavery gives rise to the time of reparation, for just as the black protagonist was never technically in racial servitude but nonetheless suffers its enduring wrongs, so too is Trescott accountable for repairing an injury he himself may not have inflicted. To paraphrase the end of “The Blue Hotel,” the novella understands slavery as something “we are all (still) in.”

(Ac)counting the Debt If The Monster suggests that slavery’s endurance claims Trescott as much as Johnson, the doctor’s method of accounting that debt complicates matters. In one of his most overt statements of allegiance to his servant, the white protagonist reflects, “What am I  to do? He gave himself for—​for Jimmie. What am I to do for him?” (32). Articulated thus, the obligation is scarcely the kind that would accord with the sense of coresponsibility held out by the novella’s presentation of his deliberations as the attempt to come to terms with an “old problem.” Consider the logic of exchange manifest in this passage; it is as if Trescott’s commitment to Johnson is little more than reciprocation. Note, too, the chronology and narrow sense of causality on display in the doctor’s phrasing:  the servant’s actions precede, and thus give rise to, Trescott’s. Conceived in this way, the obligation evinces the sort of perfect balance that Bruce desires, the allure of the debt being “square.” The Monster thus offers two ways of understanding Trescott’s responsibility: one suggested by the novella’s accounting, its staging and structure gesturing toward the vision of enduringness required to repair the ongoing injuries of slavery; and the other, brought into relief by Trescott’s accounting, which privileges the chronological, the finite, and the discrete. Read from this latter vantage point, the doctor’s attempt at (material) repair does more harm than good. When the black protagonist first emerges from his convalescence, we see him traveling with Trescott in a carriage, en route to the

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

133

home of Alek Williams, the African American character with whom the servant will live. While the situation appears rather benign, these boarding arrangements function to remove Johnson from the main section of town where Trescott and Hagenthorpe reside. The scenario grows more troubling: in the subsequent chapter, Hagenthorpe appears at Williams’s home (presumably working on Trescott’s behalf) in an attempt to silence Johnson’s protests. When Williams explains that he will require more money than previously arranged for hosting Johnson, who he fears is “a devil” (37), the judge condescendingly reminds him that he ought to be grateful for receiving any payment at all: “You have never really worked in your life … and now when you are in a more prosperous condition than ever before, you come around talking like an old fool” (36). Williams’s repeated declarations about what his services are “wuth” (“if I git six dollehs for bo’ding Hennery Johnson, I uhns it!” he exclaims) seem a sort of appeal for just compensation (39). In this insistence we can discern a demand for a debt that is due not unlike the one articulated by House, though it is not a claim that rises to the level of a collective agitation; indeed, Williams is as repelled by Johnson as are the white townspeople. Still, to Hagenthorpe’s ears, the statement registers in a disturbing way. When Williams identifies his payment as a “Salary,” the narrator notes that “he laid a terrible emphasis upon” the “word” (38). Standing in stark contrast to the portrayal of the white character John Twelve as someone who was “worth $400,000” (62), this line implies a suspicion both about the value of Williams’s right to compensation and the value of Williams as a subject worthy of redress. Subtending this skepticism is the more general desire—​expressed in the judge’s death wish for Johnson—​to deny any connection between the past of slavery and the present of freedom. This was precisely the strategy offered by the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which was decided two years prior to the publication of The Monster. While we generally consider Plessy as the landmark nineteenth-​century case about the racialization of space, Crane’s novella draws our attention to the crucial temporal concern underlying the decision: the question of what precisely constituted the afterlife of slavery. According to Justice Henry Billings Brown, who authored the majority opinion, the 1890 Louisiana statute requiring the segregation of railroad passengers on the basis of race had no significant relationship to slavery. As Brown understood it, the law merely recognized a basic “distinction” between black and white Americans, a distinction “which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color.” Accordingly, it was “too clear for argument” that the law did not violate the Thirteenth Amendment, which Brown understood as abolishing only the most literal kind of racial servitude.127 But Brown went further. In the conclusion to his opinion, he refused the notion that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race

 

134

Untimely Democracy

with a badge of inferiority.” “If this be so,” he continued, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”128 In upholding the statute, then, Brown characterized as purely subjective the sense of shame that the Louisiana law imposed on black Americans. More important, by disavowing the devaluation of blackness that underwrote both racial slavery and racial segregation, he disallowed any connection between past and present. Whereas Brown privileged the linearity characteristic of the time of trains in ruling segregation constitutional, Justice John Marshall Harlan grasped how the epoch of slavery extended itself into the era of freedom in the space of the railroad car. The lone dissenter in Plessy, Harlan argued that the Thirteenth Amendment “not only struck down the institution of slavery” but also “prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude.” In this subtle shift from the past to the present tense—​from “struck down” to “prevents”—​Harlan discloses a conception of the wrong of racial bondage as ongoing and persistent. And to his mind, the Louisiana statute was a case in point. For what did the law do if not “pu[t]‌the brand of servitude” on African American citizens by telling them they “are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?”129 With this question, Harlan offered an incisive gloss of the “count” embedded in a phrase that appears throughout the decision: “on account of race.”130 Indeed, if in Brown’s worldview it was impossible to account for this supposed discrimination as a “badge of inferiority” redolent of slavery because that particular past did not count any longer, for Harlan it was impossible to achieve the standard of equality “before the law” without seeing how this statute perpetuated the shame of bondage by recognizing nominally free African Americans as slaves. As Harlan argued, if no person could be denied the privileges of citizenship “on account of his race,” then the court would have to count precisely as The Monster does: by heeding the way that the fundamental injury of racial bondage as hereditary social inferiority collapses the boundaries between past and present, cause and effect, slavery and segregation, the “free” Johnson and his enslaved ancestors.131 While that last phrase alludes to the narrator’s description of Johnson’s submission in the fire sequence, it proves equally significant in reference to Ned and Jim Trescott. No moment clarifies this idea more powerfully than the scene near the end of the novella in which the young and elder Trescott mirror one another to haunting effect. Having been transferred (back) to Trescott’s house after an attempt to escape from Williams’s abode, Johnson sits on a box in his employer’s back garden, his face cloaked by a “veil” (52) that recalls Jefferson’s famous comment that black skin is like an “immoveable veil” and anticipates Du Bois’s portrait of the color line.132 Jim entertains his friends by treating

 



Making R eparation ; or, How to Count the Wrong s of S lave r y

135

Johnson as an object, in a manner not unlike the way his father deals with the servant in his bid to make amends. As the boys challenge one another to move nearer to Johnson, the narrator explains that Jim “seemed to reap all the joys of the owner and exhibitor of one of the world’s marvels” (53). While “marvels” surely alludes to the freak show and the minstrel stage, we need not turn to these contemporaneous contexts to grasp the “residual slavery” in this episode.133 For in the ensuing section, Crane’s novella offers another model for understanding slavery’s persistence through time: it is perpetuated by fathers and sons, both black and white. Having witnessed the child’s gathering, Trescott breaks up the group, and confronts his son the next morning, asking, “Jimmie, what were you doing in the back garden yesterday—​you and the other boys—​to Henry?” Jimmie replies, “Why, we—​why, we—​now—​Willie Dalzel said I dassent go right up to him, and I did; and then he did; and then—​the other boys were ’fraid; and then—​you comed.” Trescott groaned deeply. His countenance was so clouded in sorrow that the lad, bewildered by the mystery of it, burst suddenly forth in dismal lamentations. “There, there. Don’t cry, Jim,” said Trescott, going round the desk. “Only—​” (57) The explanation promised by the dash never comes. Jim has injured Johnson, and, in a replaying of the opening episode, he again is not held accountable by his father, whose mournful face perhaps indicates his regret at his failure to make clear to his son the nature of the harm he has done. But Trescott himself does damage to Johnson, treating him as a degraded being in his very attempt to repay the black protagonist. Thus the doctor’s “sorrow” might also be a sign of a kind of shame, not necessarily the sort that implies atonement for slavery’s enduring wrong but perhaps something closer to complicity for its persistence across time through a denial of culpability—​coresponsibility negatively construed. For what this scene presents, finally, is a family line in which father and son propagate an injury that is itself reproduced by way of ancestor and descendant. That the child’s response, though no less marked by grammatical errors than in the first chapter, makes repeated use of “then” instead of “now” here is significant. Whereas the opening episode holds out the conceptions needed for the reordering of the relation between past and present, cause and effect, that is essential for coming to terms with the shame of slavery, this scene turns to the chronological “then.” In so doing, it projects a haunting vision: a series of black sons, who, like their fathers, suffer slavery’s dishonor, and white sons, who, like their fathers, can do no reparation.

 

136

Untimely Democracy

The Monster therefore might appear to end in a disturbing state of stasis suggestive of resignation.134 But if Crane offers no vision of the transformed future of freedom we find in Vaughan or Stevens, this does not necessarily imply failure. For in staring at the cups along with Trescott in the arresting final scene, we see with devastating clarity what Douglass knew in his 1894 lecture and Hall reiterated in his 1912 narrative: a finite and chronological mode of counting will never be able to account for the harms of slavery, let alone begin to repair them. Accordingly, in The Monster, the work of reparation seems akin to what House emphasized in articulating the aim of her agitation. Even as the ex-​slave pension movement sought legislation to compensate former slaves, it primarily endeavored to make claims for redress count—​worthy of being heard and recognized. In framing her activism as she did, perhaps House was indicating that in a world where the promise of “forty acres” seemed like it might be perpetually deferred, ensuring that these grievances were aired was a crucial way to alleviate the collective shame that was the lifeblood of bondage and its legacy. And in this regard, at least, Crane’s novella is hardly bereft of possibility. For even as it leaves us locked in the present, with no redemption in sight, its conclusion entreats us to recognize an essential truth of House’s movement: the shame that father and son share for a wrong that obtains in a present they did not create yet bear some responsibility for repairing still.135 As we will see in the following chapter, forecasting a future in a seemingly static present was no easy task.

 

4

Failed Futures Of Prophecy and Pessimism at the Nadir And now to close, may I venture a prophecy? There are many who see the world through smoked glasses, and who view this problem of race solely from the pessimistic point of view. I think for my own part that it is in a healthy process of solution, which, by sticking closely to correct principles and by acting upon them when the opportunity offers, we can help to further. Looking down the vista of time I see an epoch in our nation’s history, not in my time or yours, but in the not distant future, where there shall be in the United States but one people. —​Charles W. Chesnutt, “Race Prejudice: Its Causes and Cures,” June 25, 1905 If one must predict, pessimism is the safest form of prophecy. —​Manning C. Jones, “Negro’s Future in Politics,” Washington Herald, December 17, 1906 To face race in America is to be compelled toward prophecy. —​George Shulman, American Prophecy (2008)

Writing to the assistant attorney general for the Post Office Department in a letter dated August 30, 1899, Walter Gorman defended his client Isaac L. Walton against the accusation that he was “inducing persons to part with their money by false representations of fact”—​the government’s preferred charge in its bid to quell the ex-​slave pension movement, as the last chapter demonstrated. The particular “false representation” at issue concerned his rendering of the legislative status of the pension bill in promotional materials for his branch of the organization, the Ex-​Slave Petitioners’ Assembly. Walton’s uses of the phrase “now pending” to describe the legislation “carries with it no criminal intent,” Gorman averred; in fact, Walton “stat[ed] plainly that the bill failed to become a law.” Accordingly, the only matter to which the Post Office could reasonably object was that Walton was “holding out expectations which it is known cannot be realized.” But this, Gorman asserted, hardly deserved legal scrutiny. As he framed it, the issue reached into a domain far outside the precincts of the Post Office 137

 

138

Untimely Democracy

Department: “If your official position clothes you with such powers of prophecy, that enables you to anticipate the action of Congress, you are right, otherwise you are wrong.”1 Gorman himself was not sanguine about the legislative prospects of the bill; in an earlier missive, he confessed, “I differ with these colored people in their belief that such a result will ever be realized.” But for him, it was worth defending “their right to make the effort” irrespective of the possible outcome.2 Gorman’s claim that Post Office officials had no power to prophesy the trajectory of a bill whose fate he nonetheless seemed to know in advance frames this chapter’s central inquiry: what happens when the better future imagined by the ex-​slave pension movement fails to materialize? Or, to phrase the question more generally, what are the political prospects of expectations that go unfulfilled, futures that never come to be? Ever present to Callie House and other authors and activists of the nadir, this concern is a subset of the dilemma that the anthropologist David Scott has theorized as the problem of “former futures” or “futures past”: a temporal space that once seemed certain to emerge but later becomes a discarded possibility that is no longer tenable. When there is a shift “from a moment” in which the “future appears guaranteed by the present to one in which it seems undermined by it,” temporal disorientation ensues, and questions about the potential political uses of this failure emerge with clarity and urgency.3 For, as Scott explains, when the desired future disappears, there is the risk of finding oneself in a “bewildering” “standstill,” with no discernible temporal pattern—​no reassuring concatenation of past-​present-​future—​to guide political action. Writing about the aftermath of the Grenada Revolution in Omens of Adversity, Scott is particularly concerned with the political paralysis that results when a collapsed rebellion shatters the “comfortable illusion of progressive time” and “destroy[s]‌the temporality constitutive of the organization of political hope and future-​oriented expectation.”4 I emphasized in the last chapter that House displayed a notable lack of attachment to, or at least a productive skepticism of, the conflation between progressive time and progress—​hence her repeated insistence that the officers of the movement made “no promises” to members. As with the other figures at the center of this study, the ability to anticipate the prospect of failure was central to House’s untimely political vision. But if the allure of progressive timelines was not the heart of the matter, Scott’s sense that there is a special relationship between, on the one hand, temporal orientations and, on the other, possibilities for political action is nonetheless critical. Indeed, Scott’s endeavor to think about “political action” not just in conditions of “success” but also “in failure and ruin” was shared by House and her contemporaries in a special way.5 Even Booker T. Washington, writing at the end of his characteristically confident The Future of the American Negro (1899), notes that in assessing the prospects of the race, especially in the South, “I do

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

139

not suffer myself to take too optimistic a view.” Washington goes on to assert, “I believe … a solution of the question will come.” Still, we can hear in this quick shift to the future tense a subtle sense of the worry that haunted all such proclamations about the “future” of the race in the nadir: what would become of this better future if—​when—​it failed to materialize?6 Perhaps no writer of this era meditated on this prospect more intensely than Charles W. Chesnutt. One of the most prolific black authors working at the turn of the twentieth century, Chesnutt understood his literary production as serving politically progressive ends. As he put it, in what has become an almost universally cited journal entry on the “purpose” of his writing, Chesnutt trained his sights on the “unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation,” imagining for himself a literary career that would “head a determined, organized crusade against it.”7 Equally well documented is Chesnutt’s failure to bring about this ambitious end and his perpetual disappointment with the reception of his work, by editors and especially by the reading public.8 Summing up his career in 1931, Chesnutt said that he labored during a time when “the trend of public sentiment … was distinctly away from the Negro … and there was a feeling of pessimism in regard to his future.”9 Declarations such as this one, juxtaposed with the rhetorical heights of Chesnutt’s 1880 pronouncement, inform what might be designated as the pessimism pervading scholarship on Chesnutt. At least since Dickson Bruce’s foundational Black American Writing from the Nadir, the term “pessimism” has functioned as a keyword in appraisals of Chesnutt’s literary career. Making reference to The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Bruce declares, “Chesnutt produced a novel that … was notably pessimistic, untempered by the fantasies of [Pauline] Hopkins or even the stratified optimism of [George] McClellan. Indeed, he was as pessimistic as [Sutton] Griggs, though on somewhat different grounds.”10 This is especially true of scholarship on his last published novel. Nearly every one of the extended examinations of The Colonel’s Dream (1905) deploys the term “pessimism,” sometimes to describe the ending of this work, but more often to account for the author’s disposition at the time of composition, and even to explain his retreat from fiction writing.11 This approach makes a certain kind of sense. If Chesnutt’s conception of authorship allowed for no separation between the market-​based and the politically transformative dimensions of writing, then the “moral revolution” Chesnutt sought to effect was necessarily out of reach, given that he never drew the sort of readership such ambition demanded.12 Still, this emphasis on Chesnutt’s personal and professional disappointments—​conveyed in the criticism as his “pessimism”—​has functioned to preclude an examination of just how often and complexly his work stages failure. More specifically, it averts our attention from Chesnutt’s abiding engagement with the prospect of what, building on Scott,

 

140

Untimely Democracy

I want to call a failed future: a future that is better, more just, and more democratic than the past of slavery and the present of Jim Crow segregation. Though Chesnutt deals with this problem across his oeuvre, I focus on The Colonel’s Dream because the novel is itself a meditation on failure: its trajectory moves from the titular character’s cheerful plans to build a “regenerated South,” to the destruction of his design, and, significantly, to his retreat from the proposal to which he once was so committed (345). Accordingly, the novel constitutes a rich site for asking after the conceptual resources we might glean by thinking about “pessimism” not primarily from the point of view of Chesnutt as a historical author but from the perspective of the fiction he created. If this approach appears to divorce Chesnutt’s fiction from a consideration of the audiences for which he wrote, we might recall Raymond Hedin’s important observation that nineteenth-​century black writers such as Chesnutt often encoded in their texts—​in their characters and formal structures—​anticipated responses from readers. By attending closely to the details of their works, then, we can also ascertain an awareness of the landscape without, and study how these authors envisioned and negotiated the material context of their writings.13 Deploying this tactic to interpret scenes of failure in The Colonel’s Dream, I argue in this chapter that we can read Chesnutt’s writing as offering prophecies of pessimism. I take my sense of prophecy from the political theorist George Shulman, who defines it as “political language,” a form of “social criticism” that “poses fateful collective decisions.” Chesnutt surely discharges what Shulman describes as a central duty of prophets:  to “announce truths their audience is invested in denying,” “realities we must acknowledge if we are to flourish.”14 But in this way, he is a sort of strange prophet, at least in the context of the nadir, as my placing of Chesnutt’s work into dialogue with that of Washington, Mary Church Terrell, and Sutton E.  Griggs will show. For in offering no sanguine solution—​indeed, in offering nothing but a tepid encomium for the prospects of progress—​the novel delivers a prophecy that sits uneasily alongside the writing of Griggs in particular. While Griggs dealt with similar problems as Chesnutt, refusing, like him, to turn away from the often-​dour realities of Jim Crow, he deployed a complex paratextual apparatus to sketch alternative courses the future might take even if one possible tomorrow failed. He therefore was not “as pessimistic” as Chesnutt, contra Bruce’s analysis. Indeed, perhaps the chief deficiency of the critical attention to “pessimism” in Chesnutt studies has been the way this conceptual vocabulary delimits the range of inquiry, forcing an analysis of whether Chesnutt’s works are “optimistic” or “pessimistic” and then affiliating Chesnutt accordingly with other authors. I suggest in this chapter that if we redirect our approach, we can see that Chesnutt’s political theory productively unsettles both the way literary historians have affiliated Chesnutt with his contemporaries and the temporal and philosophical

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

141

premises underwriting discourses of “pessimism” and “optimism” in the nadir generally. For as they developed in both white and black circles, discussions of racial pessimism and optimism rarely bore affinities to an affirmative vision for securing a better future. In fact, these terms most often were used reductively to signal states of mind that sought to regulate how black Americans ought to respond to injustice. In drawing on this discourse, then, Chesnutt does not embrace it but rather troubles it. Revising the relationship between temporality and action that undergirded these formations, he reveals them as conceptual structures with key political implications, and ultimately asks us to rethink just what a more robust sense of pessimism might achieve.15 If in refusing the vision of a better future The Colonel’s Dream challenges the worldview of its historical moment, it also anticipates one of the most vibrant scholarly discussions in critical race theory today, namely, the debate between Afro-​pessimism and black optimism. Despite their points of divergence, both methodologies consider the meaning of blackness in relation to continuing histories of domination and exclusion, and the aesthetic and political strategies that these histories might engender—​which is to say, the futures they might bring into being. While Chesnutt hews to a crucial conceptual premise of Afro-​ pessimism, he ultimately recalibrates the path this theoretical project offers for securing a more just future. Indeed, by intensifying the pessimism in Afro-​ pessimism, Chesnutt paradoxically enables the sort of temporal optimism that underwrites his confident statement about the future in the epigraph above. Or, to put this point differently, for Chesnutt, representing the failed future was the necessary condition for realizing any better future; thus, his prophecies of pessimism are essential prerequisites for his optimism. In this, he clarifies the stakes of and links between Afro-​pessimism and black optimism, revealing them not so much as opposites but as critical coproducers. Ultimately, Chesnutt diagnoses how both his contemporaries and ours might envision the sort of future that genuinely could be different from the past.

Pessimism; or, The Safest Form of Prophecy If, as Shulman puts it, “To face race in America is to be compelled toward prophecy,” then Chesnutt surely counts as one of the greatest prophets in the long nineteenth century.16 And this was a field that featured manifold contenders, both before and after the Civil War. In the antebellum epoch, it was David Walker who perhaps most powerfully used prophetic language to seek racial justice. In his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which appeared in three different editions between 1829 and 1830, Walker urged his readers to recognize that “America is more our country, than it is the whites—​we have enriched it

 

142

Untimely Democracy

with our blood and tears.” Of white citizens, he asserted, “They must look sharp or this very thing will bring swift destruction upon them.” Predicting annihilation in order to provoke the prospect of transformation, Walker literally pointed to a path for change by printing figures of an index finger at crucial moments in his work:  for instance, when he commands whites to “hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776,” and then quotes the founding promises of the Declaration of Independence. It is Walker’s sense of divine justice that gives force to such proclamations and ultimately enables him to maintain the “unshakable optimism” that Sacvan Bercovitch has identified as a distinguishing dimension of the American jeremiad; as he proclaims in a pivotal moment in the Appeal, “O Americans! Americans!! … your destruction is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT.”17 Chesnutt shared the aim of realizing the Declaration’s promises of liberty and equality for all Americans, but the reality of continuing racial wrong compelled him to put pressure on the function of such prophesying for effecting change. Indeed, where Walker could suggest that America must “be transformed or be destroyed,” Chesnutt knew that the wager was not so clear. For the sense of imminence underwriting the Appeal seemed inapt after the collapse of Reconstruction, and the rhetoric of destruction often implied problematic prophecies of racial extinction.18 As George Fredrickson notes, “racial prognostication,” or “predictions … about the ultimate destiny of American blacks,” was one of the most pervasive modes of “race-​thinking” in the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the fiery rhetoric of Walker, this mode often was advanced in statistical discourses that attempted to ascertain rates of increase in black versus white populations; one particularly infamous prediction, that extinction was the only possible fate for freed slaves, was silenced by the results of the 1880 census, which demonstrated that the African American population in the South was growing at a rate outstripping that of whites. Fredrickson explains that there is good reason to doubt the data in these accounts; what matters, instead, is the “polemical uses to which they were put by racial theorists and propagandists.”19 Chesnutt himself entered this conversation in his series of three articles on “The Future American” published in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1900. The pieces give the lie to the fantasy—​past and future—​of a “pure white race” by reminding readers of the miscegenation that has marked America from its origins in slavery and by predicting the continuation of such mixing until the coming of an amalgamated “future American race.”20 While Chesnutt’s provocative prognostication has led SallyAnn Ferguson to comment on the writer’s “racial myopia” and his regressive desire for whiteness, it may be more instructive to understand these essays as participating in the troubling predictions of his day so as to offer a counternarrative to them.21 Chesnutt seems to suggest as much in the first article, where he emphasizes the “slo[w]‌” pace his outlined course will

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

143

take and explains that if his “opinions … lead to false conclusions, they at least” will “furnish a new point of view” (ES, 125, 121). What the author seems to be implying here is that if his “future American” turns out to be a failed future—​and the essay’s ironic tone and strained logic often point in this direction—​then at least it will have added an alternative vision to the discursive field. Engaging in the de rigueur work of racial prophecy, Booker T. Washington sketched in 1899 a future of his own that further illuminates the historical contours of this predictive impulse and offers a touchstone against which to evaluate Chesnutt’s sense of the political stakes of prophecy. In The Future of the American Negro, Washington explains, “What the race accomplishes in these first fifty years of freedom will at the end of these years, in a large measure, constitute its past. It is, indeed, a responsibility that rests upon this nation,—​the foundation laying for a people of its past, present, and future at one and the same time.”22 Countering racist uses of ahistoricism that deny a developmental trajectory to black people by engaging in a strategic ahistoricism of his own, Washington here displays his “mastery of form.”23 Because he refuses to linger on the present-​past of slavery in this meditation on the era of formal freedom as a critically determinative interval, Washington can argue that the race effectively has “no past, no inherited traditions,” and, accordingly, that this period, once elapsed, will compose the (first and foundational) past for African Americans.24 But this past also functions as the basis for, and ultimately will become, the future his book announces. In short, according to Washington’s structure, “past,” “present,” and “future” are synonymous. This is hardly the revolutionary messianic time of Benjamin, but Washington’s vision of the now is nonetheless urgent. Witness his emphasis throughout on making the case that his plan for “industrial education” must continue to thrive, for it “increases trade … between the races,” making “both forget the past.” Significantly, Washington does not here refer to the inaugural postemancipation past that he earlier folds into the present and future; rather, the “past” that both blacks and whites will “forget” is that which is elided in the timeline the book drafts: the past of slavery and the failures of Reconstruction, which was “not a very encouraging chapter,” as the writer announces at the outset. This rhetorical contortion captures the more general difficulty of Washington’s project. On the one hand, he has to recognize the living past of bondage, the evidence of which everywhere surrounds him. On the other, the prediction his book proclaims in its title presupposes the replacement of this particular past with the postbellum iteration his project seeks to inaugurate. For the crucial task is for “the Negro race” to “believe that it is a coming race.”25 In order to accomplish this end, Washington asserts, the race must be “encouraged.” Appearing in various forms throughout the work, “encouragement” often functions to facilitate calls for justice that are underwritten and

 

144

Untimely Democracy

tempered by appeals to racial uplift or interracial cooperation (“Should not the Negro be encouraged to prepare himself for any station in life that any other race fills?”).26 More important, the term indicates a disposition—​less something like racial pride (though that is part of it) than a temporal orientation that links the prospect of a future to a futural mode of being. As we have seen, for Washington the very idea of a future is linked to his understanding not just of the past and its relationship to the present but also of what past counts as the operative past. One way to read the emphasis on “encouragement” in The Future of the American Negro, then, is to say that entreating black citizens to adopt a forward-​looking posture also discourages them from looking backward, toward that dispiriting past that can be elided but never erased. Washington’s prescription found much favor. Indeed, both his work at Tuskegee University and his focus on futurity functioned for many as models for the state of mind the nation ought to adopt in confronting the “Negro problem.” Renouncing Henry McNeal Turner’s emigration plans by calling the preacher a “prophet of ill for his race,” the Chicago Daily Tribune declared in 1906 that “the negro needs every possible bit of encouragement and uplift,” both of which were ably being proffered by Washington, whose “view is hopeful for his people.”27 The New York Daily Tribune provided a glimpse of the political ends to which Washington’s project could be put when it remarked that the South Carolina senator Benjamin Tillman regularly espoused a view of the race problem that rested on a “pessimism” that “has been taken by many to represent the average Southerner’s total disbelief in the negro’s capacity for intellectual, moral or material progress.” To this vision, the paper held, Washington’s work provided an uplifting alternative.28 Invectives against “pessimism” offered important correctives against the fatalistic vision (in all senses of “fatal”) of white supremacists like Tillman or statistical prophecies of extinction. But “pessimism” also cut the other way, often serving to silence articulations of racial grievance. In one example of this phenomenon, the Seattle Republican cited in order to rebut a declaration from the Colorado Statesman, an African American weekly. Announcing its concern that the “fate of the American Negro is a hard one,” the Statesman noted that despite the fact that he is a “citizen by the constitution” and “by his spirit of loyalty to the flag,” “he is nevertheless branded almost at every turn of the road,” for “his skin is black.” The Republican denounced this statement as “pessimism of the worst as well as most dangerous type” and opined that “there is no need for a Negro in this country to take such a view of life, even if to an extent it be true.” For the Republican, the “truth” of this assessment notwithstanding, the black citizen’s response to it is paramount. And it is the response, rather than the source of the injustice, on which the paper focuses in its conclusion: if the “Afro-​American will adopt the Booker T. Washington idea and forget his political ambitions for a

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

145

season, there will be no cause for such complaints as the above, and he will soon find that he has as many rights as any one else.”29 An even more striking illustration of how discourses of pessimism served to render inefficacious racial critique manifests itself in the circulation history of Edward E. Wilson’s “The Joys of Being a Negro.” Appearing in the February 1906 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the bitingly satirical essay traffics in the sort of response to racial oppression that the white supremacist imagination would only too quickly applaud. While “it is thought … that there could be no place chosen so gloomy or so hopeless in which to be born as among this race composed to some extent of descendants of Ham,” Wilson writes, “the whole question depends … on the point of view and the state of mind.” Pursuing this posture in order to expose its absurdity, he enumerates the “negative pleasures of the Negro”:  “He has none of the burdens of governing, being relieved therefrom by his altruistic Aryan fellow-​citizens. He has none of the troubles and temptations of millionaires; he expects but little and hence is seldom disappointed. … He forgives his enemies easily. Do him a grievous injury, and a modicum of kindness removes resentment therefor.” The essay’s irony reaches a rhetorical climax in its conclusion, which offers an encomium to “hope,” the “black man’s priceless asset.” Wilson writes, “Was there ever a sublimer faith? The very heart-​ wailings of the Negro speak of a brighter beyond. Of joy he cannot be bereft. … Pessimism seldom knows him.”30 When Wilson’s essay was reprinted by the Walla Walla Evening Statesman and the Vermont Phoenix, only these concluding passages appeared. Moreover, the meditation itself was titled “The Negro’s Optimism,” a term Wilson does not use, and of course one that fundamentally alters his point.31 The upshot of the distortion is crucial: the reprinting practice mutes the satire to such an extent that Wilson’s meditation reads like a praise-​song to African Americans for so nobly enduring injustice. In fact, excerpted thus, the piece actually reinstates the “optimistic” response to Jim Crow subjugation that Wilson sets out to lampoon in the first place. As the above examples imply, the senses of pessimism and optimism within and among African Americans were no less contentious than among whites. At the dawn of the century, for example, the Bookerite and Colored American editor R. W. Thompson lauded the founder of Tuskegee for being “optimistic but never encourag[ing] a hope for the impossible”: “Sensationalism, pessimism, and the spirit of racial antagonism—​all are silenced in contemplation of the quiet, but impressive eloquence of Tuskegee’s ‘wizard.’”32 In its 1906 “Address to the American Public,” the Negro Young People’s Christian and Educational Congress repudiated pessimism in even starker terms, proclaiming, “Pessimism is a remedy for nothing. It rights no wrongs, corrects no evils, leads to no constructive results. It chills our spirit and paralyzes our energies.”33

 

146

Untimely Democracy

It was precisely this fear of paralysis that Mary Church Terrell aimed to combat in “The Bright Side of a Dark Subject,” a speech she delivered on multiple occasions at the turn into the twentieth century. The president of the National Association of Colored Women, Terrell shared Washington’s emphasis on encouragement. Indeed, even more pointedly than the founder of Tuskegee, she decried the “cult of pessimism, as it is propagated by both races today,” noting that “philosophers” of her moment, both white and black, were troublingly “hopeless” of the “future.” Unlike Washington, however, Terrell attempts to address more directly the present-​past of slavery that could understandably engender despair, especially among African Americans. For her, looking on the “bright side” does not require naiveté; as she explains in the powerful concluding section of the lecture, ventriloquizing an objection to her racial uplift paradigm, “Would you tell mothers and fathers from whom employment is held because they are black, while their children go hungry and scantily fed, that this country is just and their prospects are bright? If I would, I could not deceive a single man or woman, who has ears to hear and eyes to see tragedies enacted daily, which are a stain upon this country’s honor and a blot upon her fair name.”34 But Terrell’s response finally leads her to deploy the temporal logic of The Future of the American Negro and the measurements articulated by W. H. Crogman and H. F. Kletzing’s Progress of a Race (1898). Echoing the concluding pronouncements of the latter text, Terrell entreats her auditors to recall “a time … when the Negro’s … prospects [were] much gloomier than they are today.” Invoking a series of contrasts between the past of slavery and the present of freedom, she continues, “Forty years ago it was a crime to teach colored children to read. Today nearly two million are receiving instruction in the public schools. … Forty years ago the slave was penniless. According to the estimate of some he and his descendants are worth $800,000 today.” As these sentences suggest, Terrell, like Washington, found pessimism problematic not simply for its affinity with racial despair but for the way this temporal orientation conflicted with the necessary emphasis on what she called “the progressive spirit of the Negro,” a spirit that was best revealed and encouraged by hewing to a linear conception of progress even in the face of the present-​past.35 If Terrell and her cohort found pessimism devoid of anything productive, Manning Jones offered a more contrarian position. Reflecting on President Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to dishonorably discharge every soldier in the army’s all-​black Twenty-​Fifth Infantry after the unit, having been afforded no trial, was deemed responsible for acts of violence against white citizens in Brownsville, Texas, Jones wrote that “the future influence of the negro in national politics will be less potent.” His rationale for this claim stressed what we might think of as the productive dimensions of pessimism—​though he readily admitted the posture offered no encouragement à la Terrell or Washington: “I

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

147

prefer to be accurate, if depressing, rather than inaccurate, though inspiring.” In a statement that might stand as a summa of Wilson’s satire, Jones decreed, “If one must predict, pessimism is the safest form of prophecy.”36 Given this rhetorical tangle, it is unsurprising that Chesnutt actively sought to distance himself from “pessimism” in particular. He famously abjured the term in his Cleveland World comment on his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), wherein he declared that “the book is not a study in pessimism” and maintained that “the forces of progress will in the end prevail, and that in time a remedy may be found for every social ill.”37 As the examples discussed above indicate, “pessimism” in Chesnutt’s context was almost impossible to extricate from a hard determinism that often carried the tinge of white supremacist apocalypticism. According to this logic, “optimism” would seem to be the only politically viable posture, and certainly the only one that could support racial justice. And yet, as we have also seen, “optimism” hardly served any better. The Atlanta Constitution made the problematic ideological affiliations attending this pair all too clear when it quoted the white preacher W. W. Landrum’s linking of “optimism” with “negrophiles” and “pessimism” with “negrophobists.”38 Terrell’s focus on the “bright side” underscores the feeble ground on which both terms stood, functioning as injunctions to change one’s state of mind (to use Wilson’s apt phrase) rather than to rethink structures. If seeking an object or project that “is actually an obstacle” to reaching a desired aim constitutes “cruel optimism,” in Lauren Berlant’s designation, then we might say that in Chesnutt’s America, both optimism and pessimism were truly cruel ways of thinking about the future of the race.39 If we return to Chesnutt’s renunciation of “pessimism” in the Cleveland World, however, we might note a slippage between the confident “will” and the less certain “may.” Lingering in this interval allows us to begin to appreciate just how the author entered into this discursive landscape in order to trouble it. Indeed, even as he sought to distance himself from “pessimism” per se, Chesnutt ultimately redefined prophecy and pessimism as necessarily contiguous if not quite synonymous concepts. Consider, for instance, the unsettling prediction that appears near the end of Marrow. As Dr. William Miller and Lee Ellis survey the violence on the streets of Wellington, North Carolina, as they ride in the latter man’s carriage, Chesnutt’s narrator focalizes on Miller:  “With prophetic instinct he foresaw the hatreds to which this day would give birth; the long years of constraint and distrust which would still further widen the breach between two peoples whom fate had thrown together in one community.” Perhaps the impact of this prophecy rests less in dramatic phrases such as “hatreds” to come or “long years of constraint” than in the interaction between Miller and Ellis in this scene, which suggests that the “breach” prophesied just a moment earlier has been fulfilled. Ellis is nearly

 

148

Untimely Democracy

incapable of speech, let alone action; as the narrator puts it, “he was silent”—​and not, significantly, in the way that Pauline E. Hopkins renders silence as protest, as we will see in the next chapter. To more fully understand Chesnutt’s contention that his novel is not pessimistic, we might look to Marrow’s famous final line, where Miller agrees to treat the moribund child of Major Carteret, the man who orchestrated the violent antiblack coup that took the life of the doctor’s own child. “There’s time enough, but none to spare,” calls the young Dr. Evans to Miller, suggesting the urgency of the matter.40 “Time enough, but none to spare”: more than a decade later, Chesnutt would open his speech on “A Solution for the Race Problem” with a sardonic story that stands as a somber reprise of this line. Offering an anecdote about “a young man” who recently “called at my house to talk over the Race Question,” Chesnutt explains that “with the impatience of youth, he wanted to find an immediate solution.” After a discussion of “various suggested remedies,” the man left, “about eleven o’clock,” and “the Race Problem was no nearer solution, except by about three hours time, than it was when we began. I don’t know that we will be any further along with it when I shall have finished, except perhaps by another hour.” Chesnutt goes on to tell his listeners that the “problem is not insoluble … and is in rapid process of solution,” but this opening parable calls these statements into question and forces a reconsideration of the tenor of “time” in the conclusion to Marrow (ES, 384). For if there is “time enough, but none to spare” at the end of his 1901 novel, “time” in this speech seems to move forward, but in so doing promises no substantive progress. The passage of time that marks his conversation with the youth, or even his exchange with his audience, is scarcely synonymous with bringing the problem of prejudice any closer to resolution. Indeed, Chesnutt predicts as much with his “shall have finished.” Conjugated in the future perfect—​a tense that “places us already beyond the goal that we have yet to reach”—​the milestone gestured toward here is not racial progress but something much more modest: the end of his speech.41 The movement of “another hour” appears to mark nothing more than a measurement of clock time severed from substantive progress. In the face of this prospect, Marrow’s conclusion requires recasting: the question is not just how much “time” is “enough,” but also what optimistic invocations of “time” can accomplish politically. By this point, of course, Chesnutt had published The Colonel’s Dream; the novel, which he saw as another opportunity to write the revolutionary work he hoped Marrow might have been, was not widely read.42 He would attempt two other novels—​Paul Marchand, F. M. C. in 1921 and The Quarry in 1928—​but would succeed in publishing neither in his lifetime. Accordingly, it would be easy to situate such statements within the narrative of failure and decline that has been so central to Chesnutt scholarship. As William Andrews puts it in a comment

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

149

that can stand as an illustration of this line of inquiry, “Knowing this would be his last inning, Chesnutt wrote into the culminating events of The Colonel’s Dream a quality of grim finality which registered … his increasing despair over black prospects.”43 Without negating this thesis, I want to suggest something different about the “grim finality” of this work, namely, at this juncture in his career, Chesnutt sought to contest the desire for immediate closure exemplified by the impatient youth by challenging the temporal premises underwriting both his optimism and its supposed opposite. Indeed, if Chesnutt was quite consistent in his derision of those “who view this problem of race solely from the pessimistic point of view,” as he remarked in a 1905 lecture, he was equally unswerving in his criticism of those like the young man who seek and believe in what he calls, in the very same speech, an “instantaneous remedy for race prejudice.” As Chesnutt proclaims, “There is no magic wand which we can wave and make it vanish in a night” (ES, 236, 219; emphasis added). Chesnutt offers a figure for this desire in The Colonel’s Dream in the form of Ben Dudley, who, after witnessing the death of his uncle, Malcolm, and his former slave, Viney, “stole away and left her with her dead—​the dead master and the dead past—​and thanked God that he lived in another age, and had escaped this sin” (339). In Chesnutt’s America, there were many Ben Dudleys, many citizens who wished for the race problem to vanish thus. And, as we have seen, discourses of optimism and pessimism functioned in a special way in this regard, working to silence political agitation and engagement on this issue, if not to make the race problem disappear completely by way of an attitudinal adjustment. Within this context, then, and particularly in The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt came to embrace the practice he only hinted at in Marrow and in this lecture. Redefining the meanings of “pessimism” and “optimism,” Chesnutt unsettled their status as binary oppositions with rigid (and reductive) ideological affiliations. As I shall argue below, Chesnutt found that an intensified pessimism might not simply be the safest form of prophecy but also the most politically powerful.44

“Cheerful Optimism,” “Hopeless Pessimism,” and the Failure of the Colonel’s Dream Roughly midway through The Colonel’s Dream, just as Henry French embarks upon his crusade to reform his native Southern city, Clarendon, Chesnutt presents a scene of informal political deliberation. Enjoying coffee and cigars, a small cohort of white men discuss the prospects for racial progress in the South. The preacher Dr.  Mackenzie begins the conversation with a prophecy of French’s failure: “Your zeal for humanity does you infinite credit,” he tells the colonel,

 

150

Untimely Democracy

“but I  fear your time and money will be wasted. The Negroes are hopelessly degraded.” He offers that he once had “hoped that there was a future” for blacks after slavery, but he has “become profoundly convinced that there is no place in this nation for the Negro, except under the sod” (233). Exemplifying the apocalyptic vision the New York Daily Tribune associated with Tillman, Mackenzie is the kind of man who “had grown hopelessly pessimistic concerning the Negro” (232). In a reply that another guest identifies as an example of his “cheerful optimism,” French explains that “I am rather inclined to think that these people have a future,” and continues to say that “they are men, and they should have their chance—​at least some chance” (235, 234, 235; original emphasis). Mackenzie does not challenge the colonel, stating simply, “I shall pray for your success. … But I can only anticipate your failure” (235). Chesnutt clearly means to oppose both French’s “optimism” and Mackenzie’s “pessimism”: the latter exemplifies the sort of “pessimist” who pervaded racial discourse in the author’s milieu, the type that he derides in his speeches and lectures. And yet, importantly, French’s “cheerful optimism” offers no corrective to the preacher’s position. In fact, as the novel continues, it becomes clear that French’s own attitude toward improving Clarendon—​his optimistic vision of the future—​is precisely what causes his failure. Relentlessly described as “unprogressive” and “declining” throughout the text, Clarendon represents for French an easy site on which to project his dream to revivify the South (181). As the narrator explains, focalizing on French, It required no great stretch of imagination to see the town, a few years hence, a busy hive of industry, where no man, and no woman obliged to work, need be without employment at fair wages; where the trinity of peace, prosperity, and progress would reign supreme. … The forces of enlightenment, set in motion by his aid, and supported by just laws, should engage the retrograde forces. … Communities, like men, must either grow or decay, advance or decline; they could not stand still. (190) That the narrator tells us that the vision outlined above required little imaginative work suggests that this extract offers a key to French’s modus operandi. The passage surely demonstrates what, in their fine readings of the novel, Francesca Sawaya has argued is French’s problematic attachment to a model of corporate philanthropy devoid of concerns of democratic justice and M. Giulia Fabi has termed the narrow “mode of perception” that depends on “a clear-​cut separation between the South as the land of the past and the North as the land of the future.”45 Drawing these two accounts together, we can see how Chesnutt points to yet another failure of his protagonist’s vision: French’s investment in a sense

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

151

of time that allows only for “growth” or “decay,” advancement or declension. To be sure, the biological terms of French’s vision contain echoes of the scientific racism that underwrites Mackenize’s prophecy; “progress” and “evolution” were roughly synonymous in the nineteenth century and, given the influence of social Darwinist theories in Chesnutt’s milieu, it is difficult to separate one word from the other.46 And yet, Chesnutt has the colonel respond in a way that underscores that French does not simply revise Mackenzie’s framework in order to include black Americans in this future. The protagonist instead traffics in the registers of the economic and ethical: he argues that “after three hundred years of toil they might be fairly said to have earned their liberty,” and he then appeals to the “Golden Rule.” Such comments surely smack of the paternalism and limited vistas of the white liberal reformer that critics have argued is the focus of Chesnutt’s scorn in the novel.47 But, coming as it does after the preacher’s comments, this response also highlights the temporal form shaping the protagonist’s worldview. That is, given the rectilinear model of time he deploys, the colonel can do no more than rebut Mackenzie’s argument that the black race has no future by proffering the contrary: his sense that “these people have a future” (234; emphasis added). This assertion and his recourse to a high-​minded rhetoric aside, however, he can say little about what it takes to bring about the more just future he imagines. Hence when he visits Clarendon’s all-​black school, French advises the students that “they must look up and not down, forward and not back, seeking always incentives to hope rather than excuses for failure” (230). As this example shows, the protagonist’s binary mode of understanding time also gets mapped onto a set of normative judgments whereby forward movement signifies a good progression and backward movement suggests a troubling regression.48 What French lacks, in short, is any capacity to recognize the present-​past of slavery manifest all around him. In fact, he is often naively complicit in the perpetuation of the very past he so wants Clarendon to repudiate: from his purchase of his childhood servant Peter “for life” (144), to his reclamation of his ancestral home from the town’s successful black barber, to his facilitation of the lynching of Bud Johnson, whom the colonel tried to save from his convict labor sentence. Indeed, that the protagonist’s limited temporal vistas do not simply hamper his bid to create a different future but also render tragic his own attempt to do so is arguably the central project of the novel. Chesnutt brings this idea into relief through his depiction of the collapse of French’s dream and his retreat from it. Near the end of the work, Peter and Phil, French’s son, are both killed when the former attempts to rescue the latter from being crushed by a train. French insists that his servant and son are to be buried alongside one another; but this end, too, is dashed when a group of white supremacists exhume Peter’s body from

 

152

Untimely Democracy

the cemetery. French declares his “dream … is over” and retreats to the North, whence he came (348). In a short but dense final chapter, Chesnutt strives to sum up the story through a pair of complex Biblical allusions, whose sources R. J. Ellis has identified. In the first, the narrator invokes the Gospel of Matthew’s depiction of Jesus instructing his disciples on, among other subjects, how to recognize “false prophets”: “And so the colonel faltered, and, having put his hand to the plow, turned back. But was not his, after all, the only way? For no more now than when the Man of Sorrows looked out over the Mount of Olives, can men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles.” This allusion is quickly followed by another, from the parable of the sower, which also appears, among other places, in Matthew: “The seed which the colonel sowed seemed to fall by the wayside” (358). For Ellis, these passages draw our attention to Chesnutt’s sense of French as himself the type of the “false prophet” against whom Jesus warned his followers.49 Ellis’s reading is astute. But these final pages also offer a more general prophecy about race in America. In this regard, we might recall that the parable of the sower is in part a parable about how to hear and receive a message. That is, after all, the point that Jesus makes to his disciples via his extended metaphor of the seed and the ground on which it falls: “But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”50 Chesnutt draws on this line in the closing paragraph of his novel, where, after sketching the degraded condition of Clarendon, he shifts suddenly and declares, “There are those who hope, and those who pray, that this condition will pass, that some day our whole land will be truly free, and the strong will cheerfully help to bear the burdens of the weak, and Justice, the seed, and Peace, the flower, of liberty, will prevail throughout all our borders” (359). Critics have long been dissatisfied with this conclusion, which seems a disingenuous shift into the optimistic.51 But maybe the message here—​the prophecy—​is not so much how to sow seeds that bear fruit as it is how to respond to the seeds that fail to take, those that fall on bad soil or are “choked” by thorns.52 Indeed, that Chesnutt alludes to a parable in which “choking” is a key term is no accident: the word suggests just the sort of stasis and paralysis—​political and temporal—​on display at the novel’s end. It also hearkens back to Marrow, where the moribund Dodie, Carteret’s son, nearly chokes to death.53 Significantly, in that novel, the child has a chance to live, thanks to Miller’s intervention. But in his 1905 book, Chesnutt offers no such hope with respect to Phil, who, like Dodie, is the “latest of the line” (163). In another echo of Miller’s prophecy in Marrow, the narrator notes in the penultimate sentence that “white men go their way, and black men theirs, and these ways grow wider apart” (359). He continues with “no one knows the outcome,”

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

153

but of course, this intertextual reference to Marrow suggests otherwise. If, in Shulman’s account, “prophets are messengers who announce truths their audience is invested in denying,” what Chesnutt offers in this conclusion is a reminder that the world Miller prophesies is the present of The Colonel’s Dream—​and may be the present for years to come.54

The Possibilities of Pessimistic Prophecy At this juncture, we can begin to appreciate the way The Colonel’s Dream might be understood as “pessimistic,” but in a richer, more complex, and finally more politically productive sense than Chesnutt’s readers heretofore have recognized. Given the tenuous status of progeny in Chesnutt’s novels, we might first think of Lee Edelman’s critique of “reproductive futurism,” to which I alluded in the Introduction. But where Chesnutt would follow Edelman in his concern with the “structuring optimism of politics,” the author of The Colonel’s Dream is less keen to endorse a wholesale rejection of the “good” as a consequence.55 If anything is queer about Chesnutt’s time, it is his crossing of boundaries—​ his insistence on marking the “pull of the past on the present” that Elizabeth Freeman has termed “temporal drag.”56 For in offering no optimistic vista, no real hope for regeneration or swift destruction as in Walker’s Appeal, Chesnutt composed a novel that forced a lingering on and in the weight of what we might call, with a nod to Ben Dudley and a forward glance toward Faulkner, the not-​dead past. And in this, Chesnutt was simply fulfilling the function of the American prophet, whose task it is to “announce realities we must acknowledge if we are to flourish.”57 Discharging this duty in Chesnutt’s America was not easy. Consider the Knoxville Sentinel’s recommendation, in a review of the novel, that “the writer … cast aside some of the prejudices which now blinds his eyes and think of some of the benefits his race has received from these southern people.” Giving voice to the hegemonic optimism of the era, and recalling William Dean Howells’s famous response to Marrow as “bitter,” the paper went on, “It is to be hoped that if ‘The Colonel’s Dream’ is to be repeated, the next may be more natural and truer to life.”58 The New York-​based Globe and Commercial Advertiser offered a seemingly more neutral critique that ultimately reached the same conclusion when it lamented that the work’s deficiency lay in its “leading the reader up to a dark, blank wall, and there leaving him.”59 Such statements would come as no surprise to Chesnutt. In fact, we might claim that the novel deployed as its point of departure precisely the strategy the Advertiser condemns. If in his 1905 speech on “Race Prejudice” Chesnutt complained of those who wanted to wave a “magic wand” to make the present-​past “vanish in a night” (ES, 219), then

 

154

Untimely Democracy

rhetorically forcing readers up against a wall—​with no potential for advancement or even, perhaps, retreat—​stands as a sort of counterattack.60 But The Colonel’s Dream also contests a closely related and more intractable impulse: the desire not just for racial oppression to disappear by virtue of ignoring it, but the faith that it will disappear in time. This expression, which Chesnutt ironizes in the faux optimism that marks the final paragraphs, is something he was equally critical of in the lectures and speeches he delivered in the years prior to the publication of the novel. As he put it in a 1903 essay on disenfranchisement, “Time, we are told, heals all diseases, rights all wrongs, and is the only cure for this one. It is a cowardly argument. These people are entitled to their rights to-​day, while they are yet alive to enjoy them” (ES, 186). A year later in a lecture on “The Race Problem,” he made the point even more powerfully: “It will not do for us to sit down and do nothing in the pleasing hope that time will right every wrong, and the comfortable belief that civilization moves always steadily forward in a direct line” (ES, 203). This is, of course, just the sort of conviction that animates French’s ambitions—​and it is also what leads to his failure. Perhaps the most radical insight in the novel, then, is something that the sociologist Stephen Steinberg has argued in his twenty-​first-​century study of race in America: “progress has never been forged by optimists who live by the ‘myth of time,’” but rather by “those implacable pessimists who are not assuaged, and will never relent, until there is basic parity between the black and white citizens of the United States.”61 If we can class Chesnutt as an “implacable pessimist,” then we might also note that he has anticipated some of the crucial assumptions driving one of the most vibrant scholarly discussions in twenty-​first-​century critical race studies: Afro-​ pessimism. As described by Jared Sexton, one of the most consciously reflective of the cohort of theorists whose work can be placed under this heading, Afro-​ pessimism seeks to mark the “persistence of historical force,” namely, the afterlife of slavery. Following Frank Wilderson’s development of Orlando Patterson’s work on “social death,” Sexton proposes that we consider the term “another name for slavery,” and take “social life” as “another name for freedom.” Such nomenclature allows for the assertion, central to Afro-​pessimism but already exposed by Stephen Crane in his depiction of Henry Johnson, that “black life is lived in social death.”62 Sexton clarifies the crucial philosophical and political stakes of this thesis and the project of Afro-​pessimism generally when he writes that this “renewal of categories of thought in and through the history of racial slavery” allows us to “better apprehend the prospects for a future of freedom and justice to come.”63 Here, we can discern a temporal tenet underlying the critical field against which Afro-​ pessimism positions itself—​what Wilderson describes, in part, as “solution-​ oriented” scholarship that would evade rather than engage the implications of

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

155

the structural affinities between blackness and bondage.64 For Afro-​pessimists, in fact, meditation on the longue durée of racial servitude is the prerequisite conceptual work for any informed contemplation of the future and for any politics that would bring about such a future. Or, as Sexton explains it more precisely, “We want to think about what makes New World slavery what it is in order to pursue that future anteriority which, being both within it and irreducible to it, will have unmade it, and that anterior futurity which always already unmakes it.”65 Here, sustained critical engagement with the legacy of racial bondage promises to reveal both the better future that is immanent within that system (the future in which slavery will have been the past) and the arrival of that always-​ imminent future (the future that, in coming, renders slavery as past). The symmetry of Sexton’s formulation creates a sort of syllogism in which each of the parts follows from and leads to the other, in which each part slides into and upholds the other. His “future anteriority”/​“anterior futurity,” like his “will have unmade”/​“unmakes,” stand as “equal and opposite”; they exist in a state of conceptual equilibrium, if you will.66 Strangely reproducing something like Washington’s conclusion in The Future of the American Negro without acceding to his methods, such a schema suggests that the future in which slavery and, presumably, its afterlife are the past is almost certain, nearly guaranteed. In this, Sexton’s formulation is in tension with Wilderson’s sense of Afro-​pessimism as opposed to—​or at least productively opposing—​philosophical trajectories dependent on and seeking solution and resolution as a telos. If we consider Sexton’s “anterior futurity” in relationship to the problem of the “failed future,” however, we might take Chesnutt as putting some pressure on this formulation, particularly the symmetry subtending it. As I have argued, Chesnutt occasionally held that such a future was assured—​he often says just that in his lectures. But in many of those same talks, and in The Colonel’s Dream, he also proffers a different principle. He suggests that the faith that a better future will come needs to be put aside in order to make room for a critical engagement with the ways the past persists in the present. In fact, for him, it is only through this sort of encounter that a better future is even possible.67 Where Sexton pairs “future anteriority” with “anterior futurity,” implying a sort of necessary relationship in which the former promises the latter and vice versa, Chesnutt concerns himself with what to do when that structure falls out of balance and the hoped-​ for future does not arrive. Of course, it was precisely this position—​that of being pushed up against a wall beyond which one could not move—​that the Sentinel singled out in its review of The Colonel’s Dream. But we might also take this figure as indicating the way Chesnutt intensifies the temporal pessimism underwriting what would come to be called Afro-​pessimism. More simply put, where Sexton gives us an out, an exit, Chesnutt forces us against the wall.

 

156

Untimely Democracy

Chesnutt and/​vs. Griggs, Pessimism and/​vs. Optimism In this regard, Chesnutt’s strategy diverges not just from that of Afro-​pessimism but also from Sutton Griggs’s approach to prediction in the nadir. In order to flesh out this dialogue between Chesnutt and twenty-​first-​century critical race theory, and to illuminate what is genuinely provocative about the treatment of the failed future in The Colonel’s Dream, I want to take a brief detour through the oeuvre of Chesnutt’s contemporary. A Baptist preacher and prolific writer, Griggs composed five novels in just under a decade: from his debut Imperium in Imperio (1899), to Overshadowed (1901), Unfettered (1902), and The Hindered Hand: or, The Reign of the Repressionist (1905), to his final novel, Pointing the Way (1908). Essentially writing alongside Chesnutt, and often publishing in the very same year, Griggs likewise turned his energies to the problems of Jim Crow segregation, the persistence of the past in the present, and how best to bring about a different future—​or, what one of his characters in The Hindered Hand calls “genuine democracy.”68 Currently enjoying overdue attention in literary studies, Griggs espoused a political vision that has confounded critics. As noted above, in his assessment of the literature of the nadir, Bruce understood both Chesnutt and Griggs as “pessimistic,” but found this attitude more consistent in Chesnutt.69 Arlene Elder, in one of the earliest critical treatments of Griggs, used similar terms, but proclaimed that Griggs is finally “optimistic” in his fiction.70 Elder’s position has been refined and enlarged by recent readers, especially M. Giulia Fabi. In one of the few studies putting Chesnutt and Griggs into dialogue, Fabi argues that Pointing the Way revises The Colonel’s Dream, transforming the “paralyzing sense of impotence” that pervades the latter text into an “alternative social vision” informed by “concrete utopian planning of a better future.” Fabi singles out Griggs’s replacement of the white perspective offered via French with the black perspective of the ex-​slave Jackson Simpkins Hezekiah Morris (or Uncle Jack) as one innovation that marks this difference. But the novel also evinces a more global formal technique that distinguishes the oeuvre of Griggs from Chesnutt—​one that, if we pay attention to it, can enrich our sense of these writers’ respective navigations of the discourses of “pessimism” and “optimism,” both in the context of the nadir and our critical present.71 In Pointing the Way, Griggs offers a character whom we might consider the repetition with a difference of Chesnutt’s Mackenzie: Miss Letitia Gilbreath, a mixed-​race woman who evinces a “benumbing pessimism” about “what the colored man would amount to as a colored man,” and holds that the “only hope” is for the “Negro” to be “utterly absorbed” by the “white race.”72 Seth Molair, the

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

157

city of Belrose’s white mayor, and Clotille Strange, Letitia’s cousin, hope that the plan for black-​white cooperation they forge will eliminate the “destructive germs” this character’s posture represents (199). As if to suggest the difficulty of eradicating this disposition, however, Griggs allows for no such possibility. In a complicated plot twist, Letitia dies in an attempt to save the members of the black fire company, which was created by Clotille in an effort to ingratiate Letitia to her dark-​skinned beloved, who was a member of the group. Letitia’s “pessimism” is offset by the optimism of Uncle Jack, who becomes the black martyr of the novel when he is killed by a blow delivered by an Alabama election judge in the midst of his attempt to contest the state’s discriminatory voting laws. Jack dies before the novel’s close, but Griggs suggests that his sacrifice will bear fruit by depicting in the final chapters Baug Peppers’s persuasive argument before the Supreme Court in support of equal rights. The text never stages the ruling, but its last chapter, entitled “Disfranchisement Forgotten,” sounds a victorious note. Pointing the Way thus offers an example of what arguably is Griggs’s signature authorial strategy. Drawing together turn-​of-​the-​twentieth-​century discourses of optimism and pessimism, his novels explore various courses for the future—​ discouraging and inspiring, apocalyptic and utopian—​but ultimately they affirm a positive vision of what is to come. Although Griggs’s aesthetic abilities have been derided, he often achieves this end through a sophisticated deployment of the epilogues and other addenda that attend his works, apparatuses that Gérard Genette has defined as paratexts:  those crucial “fringe[s]‌” that function as an interpretive “threshold” for the reading of a book.73 Pointing the Way offers a vision of “no color line” in a one-​paragraph coda that is set off from the final chapter with asterisks (233), but Griggs’s other novels employ this strategy even more prominently. At the end of Overshadowed, for example, the protagonist Astral Herndon renounces America and declares that he and his progeny will claim the egalitarian “ocean” as the site of their citizenship “until such time as the shadows which now envelope the darker races in all lands shall have passed away.” The novel does not represent this future in its récit, but the epilogue prophesies that Herndon’s son “shall not long abide on the ocean,” for “under the influences which this child of destiny shall generate, the Negro shall emerge from his centuries of gloom.”74 Similarly, Griggs appends to Unfettered an extensive “sequel,” which he entitles “Dorlan’s Plan: A Dissertation on the Race Problem.” Taking its name from the novel’s protagonist, the messianic figure Dorlan Warthell, the “plan” delineates how to “open the way that the man with a black skin shall have his opportunities limited solely by his capacity.”75 While this element fulfills a sort of narrative suspense that animates Unfettered (just what is the protagonist’s prescription for the race problem?), the signal function of this paratext is its belatedness. That is, as the predominance of the

 

158

Untimely Democracy

past tense in Griggs’s foreword to the sequel emphasizes, “Dorlan’s plan” has already succeeded: “until the day when Dorlan came, Columbia sat chained on the one side by benumbing pessimism and on the other by deferred hope”; “it was he who solved the problem.” Hence while the paratext is of course Griggs’s way of engaging in a debate that is very much part of his present, he takes the future as the addressee of the “plan”: those “ages which now sleep in the womb of time” who might find there “suggestions that would enable them to deal wisely with the problems of their day.” In short, this design belongs to a past already gone, which is to say: it is also of a future already secured, the unspecified “problems” that the coming generation will face notwithstanding.76 Offering another instance of what Beth McCoy has provocatively termed “the (para)textual condition” that marks African American literature from its origins in the slave narrative, these devices allow Griggs to navigate the discourses of optimism and pessimism in a way that does not require him to accede to the problematic implications obtaining in either.77 He can represent earnestly the longue durée of slavery, sketching how the present-​past may persist into the future, but he also tenders alternative courses, courses that free him from the dour determinism that pessimistic prophecy can allow. Here, the ending of The Hindered Hand is instructive. When, in the final pages, Earl Bluefield promises his wife, Eunice, that racial justice “will surely come in time,” she responds by decrying such appeals: “Same old thing! Time! Bah!” Echoing Chesnutt’s critique of such invocations, she goes on to ask her spouse why he “can’t … persuade the people to let justice do now what they are waiting for ‘time’ to do?” While Earl entreats Eunice to have “faith,” the chapter shifts to the home of Ensal Ellwood and his beloved Tiara, who after getting married, depart for Africa, “to provide a home for the American Negro, should the demented Eunice prove to be a wiser prophet than the hopeful, irrepressible Earl.”78 This contingent “should” embodies the line Griggs negotiates in the novel. On the one hand, he anticipates the prospect of a failed future via Eunice, whom we might claim as a prophet of pessimism, and via his depiction of Ensal and Tiara’s imminent expatriation; on the other, he blunts the force of such prophesying through characters like Earl. The stakes of this calculus become clear in the paratexts of The Hindered Hand: “Notes for the Serious,” which documents the historical sources of the racial violence the work depicts, and “A Hindering Hand,” a review of Thomas Dixon’s bestselling The Leopard’s Spots (1902), which Griggs appends to the third edition of his novel. Characteristically, this “supplementary,” which records Dixon’s pernicious influence on public sentiment, ends with a vision of the “coming better days” in which this white writer—​and, by implication, his authority—​is dead, and his “epitaph” announces a “misguided soul.”79

 



Fail ed Fut ure s

159

If, as I have argued, Chesnutt anticipates (and challenges) a crucial piece of Sexton’s Afro-​pessimism, it is tempting to map Griggs onto the alleged antithesis of this approach: black optimism. As Fred Moten has put it in a phrase that Griggs’s novels enact formally, “there is cause for optimism as long as there is a need for optimism.” In Moten’s account, black optimism makes good on this pragmatic truth by realizing that utopia is “submerged in the interstices and on the outskirts of the fierce and urgent now.” This is a reality, he argues, that requires a “renewed, reconstructed, realization of imaginative intensities.”80 Such a tenet derives from the breaks and cuts that Moten associates with black musical improvisation, or what he describes as its “phantasmatic interruptions and fascinations.” Temporally understood, these techniques offer “a look ahead,” “whether that looking is the shape of a progressivist line or rounded, turned.”81 Reading Griggs along with Moten, we might say that the paratext wields a temporal torque—​taking, as in The Hindered Hand, the timeline Eunice laments and twisting it into a different possibility in the departure of Ensal and Tiara, who prepare the way for another future should the path of progress prove to offer only the forward movement of time and no improvement. But if it is Griggs who immediately comes to mind in this regard, we should recall that in allowing no evasion of the present-​past of slavery, Chesnutt also sought to cultivate the imaginative stance Moten describes in his formulation of an anti-​utopian utopia that is “submerged” in the “now.” This is a posture, I have argued, that Chesnutt felt would never flourish without a sustained confrontation with the present-​past. In Chesnutt’s nadir, as in Griggs’s, the need for optimism was clear enough, but just what constituted the cause—​and the form it would take—​was the critical issue. Accordingly, rather than mapping them onto respective positions in an Afro-​pessimism/​black optimism binary, we might more precisely understand Chesnutt vis-​à-​vis Griggs as offering us a metacritical analysis in advance of the right relationship between optimism and pessimism as politico-​temporal methodologies. Sexton explains that with his elaboration of black optimism, Moten seeks to “reposition the premises of afro-​pessimism by holding the force of black agency to be logically and ontologically prior to the construction of a social order characterized by anti-​blackness.”82 Sexton here refers to Moten’s claim that “freedom is in unfreedom as the trace of the resistance that constitutes constraint.”83 If it is the causal and logical priority relationship between resistance and constraint—​the freedom drive of blackness and the bondage it runs up against—​that composes the conceptual contretemps between Afro-​pessimism and black optimism, then Chesnutt and Griggs traverse this debate by focusing their energies on a more fundamental question. While each interrogated in his own way the links between freedom and unfreedom, subordination and agency, Griggs and Chesnutt, writing in a moment that itself seemed to mark the failure

 

160

Untimely Democracy

of at least one hoped-​for future, wondered what would be the best way for their politically engaged aesthetic productions to proceed. Whereas for Griggs the task was to represent this future in the present even as he marked its limitations, Chesnutt found a power in representing its failure in order, ultimately, to bring into being a future that might not fail.

Coda By concluding on this note, I  do not mean to diminish the ongoing debate between Sexton and Moten, though I  do hope to have offered a bit of the nineteenth-​century backstory for this conversation. Instead, in pairing these two thinkers with Chesnutt and Griggs, I seek to point out that for Chesnutt in particular the relationship between pessimism and optimism was not an either/​or proposition but rather a both/​and: the only way to sustain the untimely democratic hope I treated in the Introduction. Indeed, for Chesnutt, we might say that Afro-​pessimism is the necessary path through which black optimism must pass. It is the one that gets you to the other; it is the one that subtends the other. Or, to return to my previous figure: we must first confront the constraint of the wall in order to seek an exit that is something other than an evasion. This is surely what Chesnutt thought in his own time, where he felt it crucial to stage a confrontation with the present-​past of slavery in order to stave off the desire to make the race problem vanish, as if by magic. In adopting such a strategy, Chesnutt assumed the risk of being designated as “pessimistic,” according not simply to the discursive norms of his own era, but also, as I have argued, those (more optimistic?) norms of our twenty-​first-​century critical moment. His prescience on this score is worth noting, but it is not what ought to motivate us to continue rereading him. Rather, his embrace of the prospect of the failed future marks him as one of the most perceptive thinkers of the nadir, an author whose insights serve as some of the foundational philosophical fodder for Pauline Hopkins’s theory of untimely democracy, which the next chapter unfolds.

 

5

Pauline E. Hopkins’s Untimely Democracy Stasis, Agitation, Agency Let us compare the happenings of one hundred—​two hundred years ago, with those of today. The difference between then and now, if any there be, is so slight as to be scarcely worth mentioning. The atrocity of the acts committed one hundred years ago are duplicated today, when slavery is supposed no longer to exist. —​Pauline E. Hopkins, preface to Contending Forces (1900) The present is another name for the political organization of existence. —​Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past (1989) Stasis. Noun of action derived from the verb histēmi. Synonymous with kinēsis, movement or, more specifically, agitation. … Here, between agitation and motionlessness, everything becomes more complicated. —​Nicole Loraux, The Divided City (2002)

In December 1905, the same year that Charles W. Chesnutt failed to prophesy a better future, Pauline E. Hopkins used the William Lloyd Garrison Centenary to underscore the troubling resemblance between past and present. Delivered in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Hopkins’s speech on this occasion is remembered today for its attempt to infuse a radical equality into American historical memory: “you do not acknowledge black daughters of the Revolution,” Hopkins told the audience, “but we are going to take that right.” However, a more striking assertion appears when, seemingly innocuously, Hopkins sums up her speech:  “Let us hope that this timely review of the noble words and deeds of Garrison and his followers, may rekindle within our breasts the love of liberty.” Hopkins elaborates the need for “this timely review” of abolitionism when she remarks that the “effects of the stern policy of these giants of an earlier age” have been “neutralized” by “the rise of a younger generation” and “an unconquered south.”1 Here, the forward movement of time represented by the coming of a new cohort 161

 

162

Untimely Democracy

of citizens has not brought the fulfillment of Garrison’s legacy but has instead stagnated its force. And yet, Hopkins does not recoil before this temporal stasis. Drawing on the language of reinvigoration, she deploys it as a resource in the fight for black civil rights. Accordingly, Hopkins’s “timely review” is also necessarily “untimely,” for the function of this recall of the past is to show how little it differs from the present. In this speech, Hopkins telegraphs the abiding concern of her work: across her fiction, journalism, and drama, this writer relentlessly emphasizes the legacy of racial bondage that is alive in the disenfranchisement and violence of Jim Crow. By doing so, she refuses to grant that substantive improvement in the condition of black Americans can be measured by change in “outward forms” only, as she puts it in Winona (1902).2 Indeed, as Daylanne K. English has observed, one of the signature formal strategies of this novel and Hopkins’s other writings is to return to the past of chattel slavery and forge uncanny connections between then and now. But even as her novels “argue for progress,” they do so in a way that puts pressure on our sense of this keyword.3 That is, Hopkins’s aim is not to make her readers arrive at the conclusion articulated by Charlie Vance, who while on an excursion to Meroe, the fantastical locale that represents an ancient African past in Of One Blood (1902–​1903), remarks that he “missed the march of progress” he associates with America; in Meroe, Vance notes, “there was no future,” only “the monotony of past centuries dead and forgotten.”4 With the temporal dislocations she enacts, Hopkins seeks to disaggregate the “march of progress” from the precepts of progressive time underwriting Vance’s assertion. In Hopkins’s corpus, then, we witness an attempt to (re)construct America into a democratic nation by shifting its privileged temporal interval from the present and future to the present-​past.5 Nowhere does she unfold this project more vividly than in her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Inaugurating her work with a preface that features the troubling temporal declaration reproduced in this chapter’s first epigraph, Hopkins collapses the distance between the “then” of slavery and the “now” of freedom.6 In so doing, she effectively declares null and void the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, if not also the impact of formal emancipation itself. To understand this statement as the “thesis” that serves as “a cornerstone of Contending Forces,” as Hazel Carby does, is at once to recognize this text’s nonlinear temporal imaginary and to understate its significance.7 For the porous boundary between the epochs of slavery and freedom articulated in this passage refers to much more than the traumatic personal histories and familial genealogies of the novel’s characters or even the work’s recursive structure, which always points backward to slavery even as the plot moves forward chronologically. In declaring indistinguishable the dawn of the twentieth century from the era of bondage, this opening assertion telegraphs

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

163

the radical revision to the standard story of democratic progress that emerges from the repetitions and returns that mark the plot and structure of Contending Forces. Simply put, it establishes Hopkins’s literary work as political theory in narrative form. Having been rescued from what one scholar less than five decades ago characterized as “obscurity,” Hopkins has come to occupy her rightful place in the canon.8 Yet the expansiveness of her work’s political vision, especially its implications for democratic theory, remains largely unexplored, as evidenced by the remarkable fact that this passage from the preface to Contending Forces has gone all but unanalyzed.9 One explanation for this state of affairs lies in the circumstances surrounding Hopkins’s entrance into literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Seeking to bring her out of the shadow of Booker T.  Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Carby, Claudia Tate, and Ann duCille produced groundbreaking scholarship that revealed Hopkins’s oeuvre as a generative site for studying African American women’s negotiations with domesticity in the context of their struggles to attain full citizenship.10 But by so convincingly placing her publications within turn-​of-​the-​twentieth-​century politics of patriarchy, motherhood, and sexual autonomy, this approach—​originally intended to insert Hopkins into conversation with her black male contemporaries—​has had the paradoxical effect of removing her from a dialogue with Du Bois on conceptual (too often still a code for “male”) questions.11 Indeed, whereas the author of The Souls of Black Folk has become central to discussions of the intersection of political theory and blackness, Hopkins’s name is nowhere to be found in such colloquy, whether carried out in the field of political philosophy traditionally defined or in work in literary and cultural studies that takes the political as a key concern.12 Extending this critical cohort’s foundational scholarship in a new direction, I argue in this chapter that Hopkins should be understood as Du Bois’s coequal: a philosopher working in narrative form to reimagine the temporality of democracy. Hopkins makes this ambition clear in her preface to Contending Forces. Initiating a three-​paragraph series that forms the core of her novel’s political vision, and that leads to the concluding declaration in which Hopkins asserts that she can discern no significant difference between the epoch of racial bondage and the present of freedom, the writer makes this crucial remark: “In these days of mob violence, when lynch-​law is raising its head like a venomous monster, more particularly in the southern portion of the great American republic, the retrospective mind will dwell upon the history of the past, seeking there a solution of these monstrous outbreaks under a government founded upon the greatest and brightest of principles for the elevation of mankind” (14). Beginning with the author’s present moment (“these days of mob violence”), this passage turns to the future (“will”) only to slow the forward movement of time with the

 

164

Untimely Democracy

verb “dwell,” before arriving at its destination: the “past.” With the polyvalent term “solution,” Hopkins at once posits that we seek in this past an explanation for, an answer to, and perhaps the end—​the termination—​of the violence of her day.13 And while the invocation of the “greatest and brightest of principles for the elevation of mankind” initially might suggest that the nation’s founding documents function as the referent for the “history of the past” at the center of these lines, neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution appears in the prefatory matter. Rather, as the subsequent paragraphs—​and the entire first section of the novel, set in the pre-​emancipation era—​make clear, Hopkins finds a “solution” in the much darker “history” that both of these texts glossed over in their pronouncements of liberty: slavery, that past which, in the world of Contending Forces, is by definition also always present.14 That it is this principle—​slavery persists in the era of freedom—​that lies at the foundation of Hopkins’s political vision is confirmed by the end of our entrée into the novel. Noting in the subsequent paragraph, “Mob-​law is nothing new,” Hopkins asserts that “Southern sentiment has not been changed” (14–​15). The most significant reference point for this nondevelopmental claim is not the Civil War. Instead, it is “the spirit of the buccaneers,” those “first settlers of the Southland” whose colonial project is inextricable from the history of racial bondage and whose “old ideas” “break forth clothed in new forms” in the present day (15).15 When, a paragraph later, Hopkins again elides the distinction between then and now, she brings into full relief the foundational tenet of her political theory: a politics of racial progress must come to terms, paradoxically, with repetition, those “duplications” of the supposedly bygone days of slavery that, in their return, seem to stop time’s forward momentum. Or, as she put it in a 1902 essay that once again brings the abolition movement to the present, here in the form of Wendell Phillips’s words, “Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated. We cannot live without the voice crying in the wilderness—​troubling the waters that there may be health in the flow.”16 For Hopkins, that is, to strive for progress—​for “health” in the “flow” of the body politic—​is to let the perpetual persistence of the past orient political action. This notion emerges most powerfully in what might be considered the political center of Contending Forces:  a meeting of the American Colored League organized in an attempt to curb antiblack violence. Accordingly, in this chapter, I focus on this scene, in which the participants’ protest takes the form of silence and motionlessness, a posture that embodies the temporal stillness engendered by what Du Bois called a “second slavery.”17 To unravel the significance of this stance, I place this segment in relation to the less politically charged (though no less political) meditations on time that span the narrative: from a private conversation between Hopkins’s black female protagonists on the risks of taking a

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

165

narrow view of the present, to a negotiation between two male politicians that dramatizes the danger that such a strategy represents, to the narrative’s closing tableau, which features the main characters embarking on a transatlantic journey that retraces the voyage with which the novel begins roughly a century earlier. Putting these scenes into dialogue with ideas about political movement advanced by Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and with conceptual accounts of agency in critical race and democratic theory, I  argue that Hopkins offers a striking redefinition of the meaning and stakes of stasis. Her agitation does not turn away from the eddies that trouble Du Bois in Souls, for in Hopkins’s vision, the stillness of time does not imply paralysis, a hopeless determinism about which nothing can be done. To the contrary, Hopkins claims stasis as an alternative form of political action in what is for her a crusade against present problems that are not new phenomena but rather repetitions of the past, which call for old strategies and weapons: for a recognition of how little has changed. A formalization of Frederick Douglass’s incipient conception of a politics of perpetual agitation, and a bolder articulation of Du Bois’s reflections on temporality and slavery, this position represents nothing less than a rewriting of Jeffersonian democracy, for Hopkins replaces the interval of the present in the third president’s future-​oriented paradigm of the ideal polity with the present-​ past. The unending progress Jefferson sought is to be achieved not through a break with the past but through the vigorous engagement with its persistence. Most broadly put, in what I  designate as Hopkins’s untimely democracy, the porous boundary between the past and the present becomes a foundation for a reinvigorated politics; and the stillness that results from this overlap between then and now, slavery and freedom, emerges as the privileged site that must guide and regulate any course toward progress precisely because it does not flee confrontation with the present-​past.18

Hopkins’s Present-​Past The narrative proper of Contending Forces begins with the prospect of an end to slavery—​not in America but in the British Empire. Constituting a pre-​ emancipation prequel to the events that will unfold in the 1890s present tense of the novel, the opening four chapters chronicle the journey of Charles Montfort, an English planter who moves his family and livelihood (that is, slaves) from Bermuda to North Carolina amid the abolitionist sentiment on the rise in his home country. Montfort’s course is motivated primarily by an economic, rather than moral, investment in the system of racial bondage. As he explains his rationale to a neighbor, “How can we submit tamely to the loss of our patrimonies

 

166

Untimely Democracy

without an effort to reimburse ourselves when a friendly land invites us to share its hospitality?” (28). In a pamphlet he published in 1823, Sir Henry William Martin framed the matter in starker terms. Issuing his Counter Appeal in response to the arguments put forth by leading British abolitionist William Wilberforce in An Appeal in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, appearing that same year, Martin vigorously defended racial bondage on the grounds that the institution is neither “displeasing to God” nor “contrary to humanity.” But equally central to his apology were the “rights of private property,” by which he meant that if Parliament intended to deprive him of his human assets, justice demanded that he be remunerated. As he reminded his readers at more than one point, “without indemnity it is impossible to seize upon private property for any public purpose, without a breach of the most solemn and sacred rights.”19 Wilberforce’s Appeal ultimately prevailed, but Martin could claim partial victory. For while the Abolition Act of 1833 ended slavery in the British colonies as of August 1, 1834, it also compensated owners for the loss of property they incurred, which totaled twenty million pounds.20 Significantly, this emancipation was hardly unconditional. In fact, the freedmen were subject to a six-​year apprenticeship in which they labored for their former masters in conditions that often differed little from those under which they lived as legal slaves. Bermuda and Antigua bypassed this transitional phase, adopting full emancipation at the outset; further protests brought this period to an official end in the remainder of the colonies by 1838. Nonetheless, the financial exploitation endured by the ex-​slaves at the hands of the planter class continued.21 In the novel, Montfort’s gambit to enact his own emancipation adopts the staggered approach pursued by the majority of islands in the British Caribbean, save his own. As the narrator explains, after relocating to Newbern, North Carolina, the planter “would gradually free his slaves without impoverishing himself; bestow on each one a piece of land, and finally, with easy conscience, he would retire to England” (24). Slaves subjected to gradual emancipation in the United States often fared no better than their Caribbean counterparts.22 Hopkins understood the limitations of such approaches to abolition. In her Faneuil Hall speech, for example, she mocked gradual emancipation, comparing this tactic to the “startling propaganda of disfranchisement, or gradual enfranchisement after the Afro-​American has proved himself fit for the ballot.”23 If Montfort’s design scarcely represents a decided break with bondage, it is worth wondering why Hopkins depicts the planter as posing such a threat to the Southern white men among whom he makes his new home. A conversation between Bill Sampson and Hank Davis, the two lower-​class men who, along with the aristocratic Anson Pollock, police the borders of white supremacy in Newbern, is revealing in this respect. As he watches the arrival of

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

167

the Bermudan émigrés along with his colleague, Davis justifies the recent execution of a “few” slaves as a preemptive response to “talk” of black rebellion, telling Sampson that “we jes don’t spec’ to hav’ no foolin’ ’bout this yer question of who’s on top as regards a gentleman’s owning his niggers, an’ whomsoeveder goes ter foolin’ with that ar pertickler pint o’ discushun is gwine ter be made a eggsample of, even ef it’s a white man” (36, 35, 36). Where the British plantation master sees in the United States a temporary haven for the perdurance of servitude—​the place where he can strike a balance between the attainment of an “easy conscience” and the retention of his wealth—​his new neighbors have a markedly different vision of slavery’s extension: it must chart an uninterrupted course through time, as implied by Davis’s anticipatory disciplinary move and the emphatic use of the prospective form (“spec’ to hav’,” “gwine ter be made”). Grasping the centrality of legally enforced black subordination to their identity as whites, Davis and Sampson see in the slightest potential cracks in the architecture of the slave system the dissolution of their status and way of life. Accordingly, they cannot allow Montfort to realize his end, for “gradual” or not, the plan portends emancipation—​the end of slavery, which in their eyes is tantamount to the unmaking of their world.24 Seeking to avert such a fate, Davis pays a visit to Montfort to offer his services as overseer. Less a bid for actual employment than a kind of perverse welcome, Davis’s gesture is primarily his attempt to teach the British planter that, as he explains it, “we have certain rules in this commoonity that we all mus’ ’bide by ef we want t’void trouble.” The “trouble” to which the native North Carolinian alludes is Montfort’s plan to emancipate his slaves, which, as we have seen, is the reason he immigrated to the United States in the first place. Montfort discerns in the offer an encroachment on what Martin deemed among the “most solemn and sacred rights” in his Counter Appeal. Sensing his interlocutor’s displeasure, Davis changes course and cloaks his proposition in the rhetoric of mutual self-​interest: “I want the job of drivin’ yer niggers, an’ you’ll want me to keep the commoonity fren’ly to yer now it’s got out thet yer a-​gwine ter set the gang free byme by.” Confirming Montfort’s sense that Davis indeed intends to interfere with his “will,” these comments enrage the British planter, who grasps the would-​be overseer “by the collar” and “administer[s]‌a sound flogging to the offender” with a “riding whip” before banishing him from his home (57). The type of weapon Montfort deploys—​a “whip”—​invests the violation in this scene with a significance that reaches far beyond the personal assault suffered by Davis. As the narrator explains in a passage focalized through the dejected white man, “not only had he met with a refusal of his request but at the same time had received personal violence of a character that was most galling to the spirit of any free-​born Southern man—​an ordinary cowhiding, such as he would mete out to his slave” (59). Although the word remains unspoken here, as

 

168

Untimely Democracy

if an additional qualifier would prove superfluous given the implication of “free-​ born” and “Southern,” it is of course Davis’s identity as a white man that is most damaged as a consequence of his beating. For in treating the North Carolinian to the violent abuse inextricably linked to the disciplinary apparatus of the peculiar institution, the planter degrades Davis not simply in that he dishonors him; he also lowers his status in the more literal sense of “degrade,” effectively placing him on the same level as the bondsmen whom the white man seeks to police. If we note that it is a “riding whip” that Montfort selects as his weapon, the full force of this violation becomes clear. In beating Davis with the same tool used to discipline horses, Montfort symbolically places the Newbern resident in the position of slave, the subhuman whose animal-​like status marks him as the kind of “property” over which the two men quarrel in the first place. The flogging is thus both an instance of corporal punishment and a political power play. Its lasting sting takes the form of a reminder that the planter’s wish to do as he pleases with his slaves—​to emancipate them—​has a very real consequence for Davis, whose superiority depends on the abjection of blacks. In the final analysis, this episode crystallizes what the arrival of Montfort upon the shores of the American South in the opening scene all but predicted: a slave master transporting the “property” he intends to free simply could not be tolerated, especially in light of the unrest already troubling white-​slave relations. From the vantage point of Davis and his cronies, that is, it is not slavery but Montfort himself who must come to an end. The planter meets his fate in “The Tragedy,” a harrowing chapter that constitutes the conclusion to the pre-​emancipation portion of the novel. Using the recent confrontation between Davis and Montfort as an opening, the “committee on public safety” (53), a Klan-​like organization of which Anson Pollock is a member, executes a raid on the slave owner’s home; Davis, still reeling from his encounter with Montfort, takes the lead. He quickly assassinates the British planter. With this task accomplished, and while Pollock pillages the family’s property, Davis turns his attention to Grace, the master’s wife. Recounted in excruciating detail, the violence that unfolds in the ensuing scene deserves a place alongside Frederick Douglass’s famous depiction of the beating of Aunt Hester in his 1845 narrative. Grace is dragged by Davis and Sampson to a “whipping post,” where she suffers what we can only read as a thinly veiled rape: “She was bound to the whipping post as the victim to the stake, and lashed with rawhides alternately by the two strong, savage men” (68–​69).25 With his “vengeful thirst” satisfied, Davis releases Grace, but the wife’s suffering is not yet over (69). For when she regains consciousness, Grace witnesses the burning of her house, into which the “dead body of her husband [is] flung” (70). Thus dispossessed, the woman becomes the property of Pollock. Faced with the prospect of captivity and surely more sexual abuse, Grace elects to end her life,

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

169

leaving her two children, Charles and Jesse, and their surrogate mother, Lucy (the family’s black slave), in Pollock’s custody. In explaining what befalls Grace and Charles Montfort, critics have emphasized these characters’ ambiguous racial identities.26 Hopkins more than once intimates that Montfort’s wife—​and even the planter himself—​might be of mixed race: Grace’s complexion is described as “creamy in its whiteness,” and the narrator notes that “there might even have been a strain of African blood polluting the fair stream of Montfort’s vitality, or even his wife’s” (40, 23). But the novel offers a more complicated priority relation between the threat posed by the Montforts in their capacity as irresolute slave owners and as potentially mixed-​race beings. As the narrator explains in a passage that appears just after the scene of Grace’s violation, “In those old days, if accused of aiding slaves in a revolt, a white man stood no more chance than a Negro accused of the same crime. He forfeited life and property. This power of the law Anson Pollock had invoked; and to add to the devilishness of the plot, had used Bill Sampson’s suggestion of black blood in Mrs. Montfort, to further his scheme for possessing the beautiful woman” (70–​71). That is, the rumor of Grace’s black blood occupies a secondary, if nonetheless crucial, role in the justification for the committee’s actions; it “adds” to the force of the plot, functioning as a kind of supplement to the primary threat: the specter of slaves emerging from their bondage. The point here is not to discount the Montforts’ possible mixed-​race status in explanations of their fate but rather to suggest that this ambiguous whiteness cannot be understood apart from the family’s vexed relationship to slavery. Indeed, their racial identity might be understood, most precisely, as a kind of “probationary whiteness,” to draw on the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson’s term for the position of certain immigrant groups in the nineteenth-​century United States that could make a claim to being “white” but whose hold on this designation was always precarious.27 Adapting this notion to Contending Forces, we can see that whether or not Grace and Charles in truth are of African descent matters less than the fact that they enjoy the status of whites, however provisionary and tenuous, in their neighbors’ eyes as long as they submit to slavery—​ which, Davis implies, must have no end. Consider, in this regard, the racial epithet the collaborators use to describe Montfort as they lay the groundwork for the attack in the chapter just prior to “The Tragedy.” Encountering Davis, who recently has been turned away by the planter, Sampson listens to his colleague’s account, and appealing to his self-​ conception as a white man as much as to his wounded pride, Sampson opines, “Wall, wall … these ar’ great times when a d—​West Ingy half-​white nigger can raise his hand agin a white man” (61). This remark captures Montfort’s liminal whiteness even as it names the crucial racial distinction that will spell his doom, embodied in the gap that inheres between “half-​white nigger” and “white

 

170

Untimely Democracy

man.” While Montfort may have been granted tentative access to the privileges of the latter category upon his arrival, even in light of his commitment to gradual emancipation, his treatment of Davis—​the real “white man”—​as if he were a slave marks the end of his probation. The émigré is now described as a “nigger.” An exchange between Pollock and Sampson, recounted a few pages earlier, underscores the stakes of this shift. Sampson affirms that he has assented to his employer’s demand and announced to the community that the Bermudan plans to liberate his bound blacks. But when asked by Pollock whether he also has propagated the “other report”—​the rumor that Grace is of mixed racial heritage—​ Sampson demurs, explaining that he is not eager to participate in a personal attack on such a “nice ’ooman” (54). Pollock’s response is revealing: “if niggers are tolerated in any way, it will end in weakening the law, and then good-​by to our institutions” (54–​55). That the referent for “niggers” here is ambiguous—​the term could cite Montfort’s slaves or the planter and his wife—​subtly captures the racial logic that brings about the events narrated in “The Tragedy.” For, as we have seen, while Sampson is correct that the accusation of aiding slaves in insurrection is enough to justify the coup, Pollock knows that the charge of disloyalty to the “institution” and that of disloyalty to whiteness logically require one another: to “disturb” the unimpeded duration of slavery is necessarily—​and permanently—​to abdicate one’s status as a member of the white race. Read against this backdrop, the full significance of “The Tragedy” comes into focus. In their murderous raid, the mob makes the Montfort family submit to the system it threatens to unsettle in the most extreme sense, effectively transforming the slave owners into slaves themselves. Hence, as my earlier allusion to Douglass implied, Hopkins installs one of the characteristic forms of racial subjugation as the centerpiece of the scene. “Bound to the whipping post” and assaulted by a “snaky leather thong” (68, 69), Grace suffers the paradigmatic violation recounted in nineteenth-​century slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs’s: sexual abuse at the hands of the master. And while the Montfort boys are not the product of this assault, Jacobs’s claim that the children “follow the condition of the mother” nonetheless holds true for Grace.28 Falling to the “lot” of Pollock, Charles Jr. and Jesse become his slaves until a kindly British mineralogist “purchase[s]‌” the former, liberating him, and the latter escapes to the North, first to Boston and then to New Hampshire (71, 74). The incidents recounted in “The Tragedy” are central to making sense of Contending Forces, both conceptually and structurally. As we shall see, this double act of violence—​rape and murder at the hands of a mob—​recurs in the second portion of the novel, which is set in Boston after the legal abolition of slavery. Like Grace Montfort, the female protagonist of this section, Sappho Clark, is a victim of sexual assault and exploitation. And the legacy of racial bondage plays a crucial role in this violence, for, as we learn from the African

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

171

American character Luke Sawyer in a speech to which I  will turn below, perpetrator and victim are linked together in an instance of what Jacobs calls slavery’s “tangled skeins”:  Sappho suffers at the hands of her uncle.29 Her father, Monsieur Beaubean, is the product of a sexual union between slave owner and bound black, and thus he claims as his half sibling the white man who violates his daughter. When Beaubean demands justice from his kin, he is assassinated in a manner that recalls Montfort’s fate: a mob attacks his home, burning it to the ground and shooting its inhabitants as they attempt to escape. Sawyer is no mere narrator of these crimes. Indeed, he delivers Sappho from the scene and carries her to “the colored convent at New Orleans” where she bears a child (261). Significantly, this act is made possible because of Sawyer’s own (similar) trauma. He is left orphaned after a “posse” of white men hang his father, a successful black businessman, “whipp[ing]” his mother and “otherwise abus[ing]” his sisters in the process (257). It is Monsieur Beaubean who comes to the aid of the parentless child and adopts him. The congruence between the fate of Grace and Charles, on the one hand, and the plight of Sappho and Sawyer, on the other, entreats us to ask: what, precisely, is the relationship between the acts of violence these characters suffer, which function to bridge the first and second portions of the novel, and, accordingly, the pre-​and postslavery epochs?30 Hopkins offers a resource for theorizing the link between the two narrative sections of Contending Forces in the scene of Grace’s violation. The author concludes the description of the whipping by effectively not concluding it: “Again and again was the outrage repeated” (69). Hopkins inaugurates her novel with a variation of essentially the same phrase when in the preface she remarks that the “atrocity of the acts committed” before emancipation “are duplicated today” (15). Considered from this vantage point, “again and again” might be read as a heuristic device for the narrative and political project of Contending Forces more generally. That is, the “outrage” of slavery recurs through time, duplicating itself not just on the bodies of Grace and Charles Montfort, but also on those of Sappho Clark and Luke Sawyer—​which is to say, across the temporal break that separates the first and second portions of the novel: the superannuation of slavery supposedly inaugurated in 1865.31 Indeed, it is difficult to take the opening line of the initial chapter of the postemancipation section of the novel as anything but an ironic double entendre: “Thank heaven that is done,” Dora Smith declares, referring to the task of cleaning the lodging house she owns and operates with her mother in Boston (80). Coming as it does just after the tragedy, Dora’s “that” also refers to slavery, which for Hopkins is anything but over. This seemingly inconsequential remark raises crucial questions. What can be done about an event that is not “done”? What are the political means by which we can come to terms with a wrong like slavery that is not complete and finished,

 

172

Untimely Democracy

but recurrent and ongoing? Posed thus, such queries might elicit a kind of despair engendered by the prospect of an endless reprisal of the same that spells the end of the democracy’s promise. But as Contending Forces powerfully shows, repetition—​and the stasis to which it gives rise—​might also serve to reinvigorate democracy in America. For Hopkins, whether the outcome is the former or the latter rests largely on how we configure time in relation to political agency.

“Temporizing” Hopkins unfolds this crucial relationship in a conversation between Dora and Sappho. Homebound as a result of a snowstorm, the women enclose themselves in Sappho’s room for the day, engaging in an extended exchange on subjects ranging from the question of true love to politics. The dialogue takes a polemical turn when Sappho inquires about the racial uplift work of Dr. Arthur Lewis, Dora’s childhood friend and the man she ultimately will marry. Explaining that Lewis has founded a technical school in Louisiana, Dora notes that “his argument” is that “industrial education and the exclusion of politics will cure all our race troubles” (124). Issuing a quick “I doubt it” in response, Sappho elaborates, “That reasoning might be practically illustrated with benefit to us for a few years in the South, but to my mind would not effect a permanent cure for race troubles. … The time will come when our men will grow away from the trammels of narrow prejudice, and desire the same treatment that is accorded to other men” (124–​25). For Hopkins’s female protagonist, any concession made by African Americans on the subject of the franchise to secure a temporary lessening of racial strife represents a fatal flaw in their quest for the status of genuinely free citizens. As she puts it, “Temporizing will not benefit us; rather, it will leave us branded as cowards, not worthy a freeman’s respect” (125). Critics generally have understood this passage as Hopkins’s commentary on the exclusion of females from politics, whether in the shape of their segregation from the male-​dominated sphere in which the fight for the franchise was waged or, more radically, in the form of women’s own exclusion from the right to vote itself.32 One need look no further than Sappho’s response when in the scene discussed above Dora divulges Lewis’s belief that “women should be seen and not heard, where politics is under discussion” to realize that Contending Forces supports such a reading: “‘Insufferable prig!’” Hopkins’s leading lady declares “with snapping eyes” (126). While much has been said about the author’s choice of the name “Sappho” for her protagonist, this last remark prompts at least one more speculation on this score.33 For among the manifold “fictions” that circulated about the Greek poet from the early modern period to the twentieth century (and beyond) was

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

173

the notion of a “political Sappho.” Invented by French Hellenists in the eighteenth century, this account held that the figure sought asylum in Sicily after participating in a revolution in her native Lesbos. Though this version of Sappho seems to have run its course in the period just before the final decades of the century, at least in France, it nonetheless possessed staying power.34 In an essay on “Sappho” that appeared in the July 1871 Atlantic Monthly, for example, Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted that the poet fled Lesbos “to escape the political persecutions that prevailed in the island.”35 Hopkins’s Sappho may not qualify as a political refugee of precisely this order; but there nonetheless is a subtle sense of exile implicit in the spatial topography of the novel: men like Lewis occupy the role of speaker at protests and public gatherings, while women reserve the expression of political commitments for the domestic space. But approaching the wrong at issue in Sappho and Dora’s discussion as an exclusion that cries out for remedy primarily by means of inclusion misses the full political significance of this scene and the novel more broadly. For as the political theorist Anthony Bogues explains, we must resist the impulse to attribute racism and its persistence “to a lack of formal procedural equality that can be solved with different procedures of representation.” In other words, it is one thing to attempt to counter antiblack prejudice by working for greater political inclusion; but if we understand this very racism as “one consequence of racial slavery”—​and, by extension, a mode of its endurance—​ then the political task at hand is quite different. For Bogues, what is needed is attention to “forms of structural legacies,” or what we might construe as the crucial temporal dimension inherent in any instance of race-​based exclusion, political inequality, or injustice—​in short, in any impediment to realizing democracy.36 Hopkins’s Sappho points us in this direction when in the passage cited above she invokes “temporizing,” a term that means to reconcile oneself to one’s present conditions, effecting a temporary compromise in the hopes of perhaps achieving a better future.37 This was precisely the policy of accommodationism associated with the historical analogue for Lewis, Booker T. Washington. Articulating a politically quiescent stasis that Hopkins abhorred, Washington declared in his famous Atlanta Exposition Address of 1895, “Cast down your bucket where you are,” entreating his fellow black Americans to pursue the “opportunities” immediately available to them and not ruminate on their personal and political “grievances.” Elaborating his position in his autobiographical narrative Up From Slavery (1901), in which he reprints the address, Washington clarifies that his recommendation is not that “the Negro” abandon the franchise but rather that he “deport himself modestly in regard to political claims,” trusting that the “full recognition of his political rights” would surely “proceed” from material success.38

 

174

Untimely Democracy

As we saw in c­ hapter  1, for Du Bois such a position was nothing short of an apology for “injustice.”39 But in this scene the female protagonist does much more than pledge her allegiance to the author of Souls in his contemporaneous struggle for ascendancy in the (male) leadership of the race. Sappho’s critique of “temporizing” also invites us to consider the possibility that Du Bois’s opposition to Washington might be understood, most profoundly, through the analytical lens of the concept contained in the term’s Latin root: tempus, or time. Here, the gloss of “to temporize” as “to trim” offered by the Oxford English Dictionary is suggestive, for in asserting that one bear the burdens of the present moment in the expectation that doing so will open a more favorable future, Lewis’s/​ Washington’s position effectively severs the present from the past, disavowing its dogged endurance.40 Such a maneuver is on full display in the final pages of Up From Slavery, where Washington is forced to deem the lynching and mob violence that continued to plague black Americans as “superficial and temporary signs” in order to support his declaration that “there was never a time when I felt more hopeful for the race than I do at the present.”41 Sappho’s personal history makes her particularly averse to such a myopic temporal vision. After being exploited at the hands of her uncle, the protagonist finds refuge in a black convent in New Orleans, where she is aided by the sisters in refashioning her identity: Mabelle Beaubean becomes our Sappho Clark, and her child, Alphonse, is raised by Sappho’s Aunt Sally, believing that his mother is dead. It is not until her background is exposed late in the novel that Hopkins’s protagonist is forced to come to terms with her painful past, which Dora attributes to the “sting of degradation” visited upon black women—​a testimony that the “terrible curse of slavery” lives (330). Fleeing the Smith home, and abandoning her relationship with Dora’s brother, Will Smith, Sappho returns to the convent. During this second trip to New Orleans, Sappho resolves to engage in “no more deception” (352). By the novel’s end, Hopkins’s main female character claims a relationship with her son and finds an accepting mate in Will, to whom she confesses her story. Thus, in a second act of self-​making she again reinvents her identity—​but this time in a way that at least recognizes, if it does not yet fully assimilate and work through, the past. Mabelle Beaubean and Sappho Clark, then and now, begin to coexist, albeit uneasily.42 Confirming that the personal is political more than half a century before this phrase would become the mantra of second-​wave feminism, Hopkins implies that Sappho’s experiences uniquely position her to understand the costs of “temporizing” both for her own identity and for the pressing problems confronting African Americans. As Sappho puts it in her conversation with Dora, to adopt Lewis’s approach is to acquiesce to the “trammels of narrow prejudice.” Through the figure of the “trammel,” an allusion to the shackles of slavery, this phrase forges a connection between racial bondage and antiblack racism, echoing

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

175

Du Bois in his response to Washington as well as Bogues in his call to introduce “structural legacies” into democracy. But Sappho also pushes these thinkers’ insights to their logical end, for she implies that any political program that obscures the ways this past endures in present crises of disenfranchisement and violence runs the risk of submitting to re-​enslavement. In this regard, recall Sappho’s claim that “temporizing” will “leave us branded as cowards, not worthy a freeman’s respect.” The pun on “branded” holds a disturbing implication: the ultimate consequence of adopting a narrow vision of time in the fight for black freedom is the perpetuation of the literal and figurative “brand” of bondage. To hold that temporizing will not benefit African Americans is thus to understate the case, for such a strategy will get them nowhere. It will leave black citizens locked in a cycle of slavery’s repetition, which, insofar as it goes unrecognized as such, constitutes a problem that will be impossible to address let alone redress. Hopkins provides a troubling illustration of Sappho’s insight in a chapter entitled “A Colored Politician,” which centers on John Langley. The novel’s unambiguous villain, he exposes Sappho’s tragic history in an attempt to coerce her into a sexual relationship with him even as he remains engaged to Dora. As the narrator tells us, “Langley’s nature was the natural product of such an institution as slavery” (221)—​an assessment that seems to register on both the literal and figurative levels in light of the revelation sentences later that Langley is a descendant of Anson Pollock, who orchestrates the destruction of the Montfort family in the inaugural section of Contending Forces. But in this chapter, Hopkins makes clear that no less offensive than her character’s base sexual mores are the political negotiations he engages in with Colonel Herbert Clapp, a white politician and the local party boss who regularly buys the interests of his black colleague. On the particular day recounted in this chapter, the reports of yet “another lynching” in the South have reached the North: Jim Jones, having been accused of raping a “beautiful white woman,” is murdered along with the three men deemed accomplices (223). Langley, it seems, is poised to break free from the power Clapp and his party have over him, demanding attention to the crisis facing black Americans. Speaking with the white politician, who has paid him a visit in an attempt to regulate the response of the American Colored League, he says, “You can’t expect us to stand this sort of thing always, and not strike back” (229). Langley sketches out the contours of what such a “strike” might look like when he suggests the formation of a coalition that is substantively committed to the needs of black Americans. Listening to this vision with great anxiety, Clapp responds by putting into action what Sappho earlier defines as the strategy of “temporizing”: he entreats Langley to counsel his “people to go slow,” asking them to realize that “it is the duty of every one of us to wait for justice” (233, 234). The white politician’s

 

176

Untimely Democracy

ensuing remarks confirm that “go slow” translates as “never.” Elaborating a vision of perpetual white supremacy that recalls the anxiety felt by Bill Sampson and Hank Davis, Clapp asserts that “the white man rules in this country every time, John, because he’s born for the business, and it’s just as well for you to keep the few friends you’ve got, and not drive them away because you’re sore over your disappointments.” Reminding his crony that black citizens have “no capital, no money”—​as if those realities have nothing to do with men like him—​Clapp concludes by affirming, again, “we’ve got you every time” (233). The white politician’s refrain holds true, at least in the context of this chapter. For Langley surrenders when Clapp essentially promises him a position as city solicitor. In response, Langley, who is a member of the executive committee of the American Colored League, agrees to keep the meeting the group is planning to “a calm level” (238). If this final move makes it clear that Langley is a corrupt politician whose self-​interest trumps all, this fact alone does not explain the political crime he perpetrates. His more radical threat suggesting the formation of a new party notwithstanding, Langley’s demands primarily focus on inclusion within the system: an elected office for himself or a civil service position for his peers. Here, then, we witness an instance of the claim I  advanced in the opening chapter, where the dialogue between Jefferson and Du Bois revealed that any attempt to reconstruct democracy must endeavor to alter the form of this political system, not just enlarge its content. In accepting this compromise for the present—​in “temporizing” to keep the political peace, that is—​Langley simply ensures the persistence of the status quo. An image that appears at both the opening and the close of the meeting gives powerful visual expression to this state of affairs. After offering his guest a “fragrant Havana,” the narrator recounts, Langley “helped himself to a cigar, and was now contemplating the ceiling through rings of curling smoke. Apparently he watched a belated fly trail its body slowly over the white space” (228, 228–​ 29). At the conclusion of the interview, and just as the two men arrive at their agreement, they strike a similar pose: “Each man … helped himself to another cigar, and again contemplated the ceiling through rings of smoke. John noticed that the fly had made the circuit of the ceiling, and was moving toward him from the opposite side of the room” (237). A comment made by Langley at the height of his resistance—​that “it is as natural for you to cheat us and maltreat us as it is for boys to pull out the wings and legs of flies” (235)—​invites an allegorical interpretation of the tableau, with the fly playing the role of the vulnerable African American citizen and the smoke the part of white power. Accordingly, the threat facing the fly would appear to be the risk of stepping into the “white space”: integration, the allure of access, is a kind of entrapment within the “ring” of Clapp’s power.

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

177

And yet, the temporal diction that pervades this pair of passages suggests another possibility. Note that despite its “slow” movement, the “belated fly” does indeed advance across the ceiling and through the smoke; in doing so, however, it seems only to follow a circular path. Entrapment, then, might not manifest itself as imprisonment within the “rings of smoke,” but rather in acceding to a movement—​the promise of progress, however slight—​that ultimately takes the form of a “circuit,” the shape of the “ring” itself. (Think here, again, of Clapp’s remark that “we’ve got you every time.”) If the fly’s movement actually guarantees that it will only make a “circuit,” might the insect have fared better by not embarking on its flight in the first place? What if it had remained “belated” or even so “slow” that it effectively went nowhere? These questions would seem to do little more than lead us back to the hopeless circuit that Sappho associates with temporizing. But Hopkins sees in the smoke rising from Langley’s and Clapp’s ashes a politically productive version of stasis: a form of agitation that emerges from and recognizes the transformative power inhering in the stillness of slavery’s present-​past. I turn now to this vision.

Untimely Democracy Spanning three chapters in the narrative, the meeting of the American Colored League (ACL) constitutes the political core of Contending Forces. As the narrator describes it, the event, held in a Boston church, was a “protest against the wrongs of down-​trodden manhood” to which “every class sent its representative” (243). These details, along with the ACL’s decision to invite a range of speakers, from “conservative” whites to “men imbued with the old abolition spirit,” so that “each side could have a chance to represent the subject as seen from its point of view” (241), would seem to confirm Houston A. Baker Jr.’s thesis that in novels like Contending Forces, the characters “do not act, they talk,” staging “polemics” that amount to little more than a “conservative appeal to white public opinion.”43 But the event might also be understood as an exercise in racial democracy. For the ACL seems to be an example of one of the voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville described in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840) as the means by which citizens combined to “proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling.”44 Furthermore, the leadership’s decision to feature multiple perspectives suggests a commitment to deliberation, the considered debate on matters of political importance facilitated by the organizations Tocqueville surveyed and in which Hopkins herself was active. Indeed, a prospectus for Contending Forces announced that Hopkins “will be glad to give readings before women’s clubs in any section of the country.”45

 

178

Untimely Democracy

If with the ACL scene Hopkins breaks down barriers between the novel’s content and its material contexts, she makes a similar move in her treatment of the issue at the center of the discussion: lynch law. Each of the speakers reflects on this practice, which, aided and abetted by the North’s complicity, reigns supreme in the South. Herbert Clapp, Arthur Lewis, and John Langley inaugurate the program proper. Clapp draws upon the figure of the African American male as rapist that was ubiquitous in justifications of antiblack violence at the turn of the century.46 Lewis’s assertion that his fellow citizens “may expect … prosperity … in the years to come” so long as they are “patient, docile, harmless” in the present exemplifies the dangerous compromise inherent in “temporizing” that Sappho underscores (250). Blending Clapp’s call for African Americans to endure their struggles and Lewis’s optimism, Langley counsels the audience to have “faith” in “party leaders” to “push our claims and redress whatever grievances we may have, at a seasonable time” (253). As we know from “A Colored Politician,” of course, the “party leaders” will do no such thing, and thus Hopkins encourages us to reject Langley’s stance and that of the other two speakers. Indeed, by grouping these men within a single chapter, she suggests that their positions are merely versions of one another. It is not until Luke Sawyer and Will Smith take the podium, each delivering an oration that occupies the space of an entire chapter, that more substantive positions emerge. Just as Langley steps back from the rostrum, Sawyer interrupts the meeting—​ and its trajectory—​and demands an opportunity to address the assembly despite the fact that he is not one of the scheduled speakers. Remarking that “I am thirty years old and look fifty” (255), he reveals the reason for his condition by chronicling his traumatic history as well as that of Sappho Clark. Sawyer identifies the former as his “first experience of lynching” and prefaces his account of the latter as “another” story in the same vein (258; original emphasis), implying that the wave of lynchings that the ACL meeting takes up ought to occupy a place in this same series, whose temporal extension exceeds even the individual life spans of Sappho and Sawyer. For, as the novel’s structure holds, the acts of violence these two characters suffer are themselves repetitions of the fate visited upon the bodies of Montfort and his wife in the era of legal bondage. Will Smith makes this point explicit when, in the closing section of his remarks, he declares, “My friends, it is going to take time to straighten out this problem; it will only be done by the formation of public opinion. … We must agitate. As the anti-​slavery apostles went everywhere, preaching the word fifty years before emancipation, so we must do to-​day” (272; original emphasis). If Lewis functions as the fictional stand-​in for Washington, then, with this overt call for political engagement, Smith is Hopkins’s figure for Du Bois. But it is worth considering Douglass as a model here as well.47 For Smith’s call for

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

179

persistent “agitation” echoes Douglass even as his remark that it will “take time to straighten out this problem” invokes the imagery of linearity and recursivity in Ecclesiastes (“Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?”) that informs Du Bois’s “crooked marks”—​the narrative figure for the present-​past in Souls.48 At once a representative of Douglass and Du Bois, Smith himself conjoins the eras of slavery and freedom, embodying his call to confront racist violence just as the “anti-​slavery apostles” struggled to end bondage. In this regard, Smith’s salvo, when read against the remarks issued by the speakers who inaugurate the forum, implies that the point of contention under discussion in the ACL meeting may have less to do with lynching per se than the configuration of temporality with which this wrong is conceptualized and, accordingly, addressed. Whereas Clapp, Lewis, and Langley all articulate some version of “temporizing,” proposing that African Americans must reconcile themselves to the strife of the present while holding on to the promise of a better (if endlessly deferred) future, Smith, like Sawyer, resists such a vision on the grounds that it fails to recognize the current problem as the repetition of racial bondage. To take such a position is not to deny the possibility of a future different from the past: Smith’s phrase “straighten out” suggests that he does not completely foreclose the prospect of some resolution to come. Rather, it is to maintain that such a future will only ever be realized by deploying a strategy of political agitation that identifies the violence and discrimination that mark the dawn of the twentieth century as what they are: the past “duplicated” in the present, to invoke the novel’s preface (15). Put differently, if the “present” is open to a number of possible modes of organization, then the ACL meeting might be understood as a contest between competing configurations of this seemingly singular temporal interval.49 The scene thus stages an instance of what Jacques Rancière has identified as the “essence of politics”: dissensus. For Rancière, this term does not designate a clash between parties, persons, or ideological positions—​not Smith against Clapp, Du Bois against Washington, black against white. Rather, dissensus refers to a break in the sensible order that designates and delimits the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible: an interruption, that is, in the very “perceptual coordinates” according to which a certain individual or group gets assigned to a position of inclusion or exclusion, power or oppression, in the first place. Therefore, “political demonstration” deserving of the name “makes visible that which had no reason to be seen; it places one world in another—​for instance, the world where the factory is a public space in that where it is considered private, the world where workers speak … in that where their voices are mere cries expressing pain.”50

 

180

Untimely Democracy

These examples privilege the spatial and the sonic, but as my discussion of the miscount in ­chapter 3 began to suggest, Rancière’s theory holds important temporal dimensions. Indeed, he explains that politics invents “new distributions of space and time,” suggesting that the “two worlds” to be conjoined in dissensus might be the temporal domains of the present and past.51 It is precisely this possibility, which Rancière does not fully develop, that Hopkins pursues in the ACL meeting. Here, recall Smith’s recommendation for the course African Americans must chart in the face of lynching and mob rule, for read alongside Rancière’s formulation its full significance becomes clear: “As the anti-​slavery apostles went everywhere, preaching the word fifty years before emancipation, so we must do to-​day.” This is no facile analogy between the abolitionist crusade and the current fight against antiblack violence. Instead, Smith’s directive forges a relation of identity between these two eras via “preaching,” a participle that cannot neatly be identified as belonging either to a present or past progressive verbal construction. Hovering between the first and final clauses of the sentence, as if to flout the boundary of “emancipation” that divides them, the word claims as its subject both the “anti-​slavery apostles” and the “we” that is Smith’s turn-​of-​the-​century audience. The work the speaker leads from the podium of the ACL gathering, this structure suggests, is the work of abolition continued in the present. This notion receives powerful visual expression in the narrator’s description of the platform on which the presenters stand as dressed with “pictures of the anti-​ slavery apostles”—​William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Lenox Redmond—​that “peered out at the audience” (243), implying that the voice that speaks here is as much Douglass’s or Redmond’s as it is Smith’s. But it is Judge Watson, the ACL president, who frames the task at hand most poignantly in a declaration that Smith echoes. “Agitation and eternal vigilance in the formation of public opinion were the weapons which broke the power of the slaveholder and gave us emancipation,” Watson proclaims at the opening of the meeting, adding, “I recommend these methods to you today, knowing their value in the past” (245; original emphasis). If the president’s formulation initially seems to posit emancipation as an accomplished task, putting him at odds with Smith, his second sentence suggests otherwise. Like the final speaker, Watson uses the progressive “knowing” to draw together the “past” and “today” in a kind of paratactic construction that suggests the coexistence of these two eras. In this respect, the “eternal vigilance” he cites in the prior line holds out an insight whose implication goes beyond even the political course offered by Smith; indeed, it constitutes what might stand as the most potent verbal expression of the novel’s vision of untimely democracy. For Watson’s point is not simply that African Americans must take up the “weapons” of the antislavery struggle, claiming their forebears’ crusade as

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

181

their own. It also, and more importantly, recalls Callie House’s sense that this fight allows no certain victory. As an “eternal” project bridging past, present, and future, its end is defined by the possibility that it might not—​perhaps must not—​reach an end. After all, seeking such a conclusion was precisely the mistake the (first) antislavery warriors committed; himself a veteran of this battle, Watson explains, “we thought that with the abolishment of slavery the black man’s destiny would be accomplished, and fixed beyond a peradventure” (244). In the face of the present circumstances, which prove, to invoke Douglass, that emancipation was a “stupendous fraud,” the only way to avoid repeating such an error, paradoxically, is to bear witness to the repetition of slavery:  that is, to mark the present as the present-​past, without end.52

“Still Suffering” But what, precisely, does it mean to participate in such a process? What does citizenship in untimely democracy look like? Hopkins offers a response to these questions in the form of what the audience says and does. Or more precisely, what it does not say or do—​for across the ACL meeting, Hopkins describes the gathered assembly as generally quiet and motionless, and at times completely silent and still. Consider this account of the crowd at the outset: “The stillness was intense as the gray-​haired president of the League and chairman of the meeting arose in his seat and passing to the desk, rapped for order” (244). This pose is not constant; at the close of Lewis’s speech, for instance, the audience begins to “grow restless” (251), and the people greet Langley’s address with “suppressed murmurs of discontent” (254). Sawyer, too, moves his auditors, but for different reasons; his chronicle of Sappho’s suffering produces a “weeping, grief-​convulsed audience” (261). But we cannot simply construe animation and stillness as indices of the group’s assent or dissent.53 For Sawyer, who clearly wins over the audience, ends his speech “amid universal silence” (262), and at the conclusion of the event, having been moved to tears by Smith’s call to action, the people exit the edifice “slowly,” their minds “filled with thoughts that burn but cannot be spoken” (273), a pose that differs little from the “stillness” that marks the meeting. There is something more at stake in the audience’s response. A key phrase near the end of Sawyer’s oration offers some interpretive purchase on this score. Having completed his double account of rape and murder, Sawyer issues the following question to his listeners, who by this point are completely silent: “A tax too heavy placed on tea and things like that, made the American Colonies go to war with Great Britain to get their liberty. I ask you

 

182

Untimely Democracy

what you think the American Colonies would have done if they had suffered as we have suffered and are still suffering?” (262; emphasis added). This passage turns on the double meaning of “still.” On the one hand, the word captures the temporal extension of the unfreedom endured by African Americans; as the reference to the colonists’ fight for “liberty” implies, this subjugated state has been constant, spanning from the founding of the nation, through the long era of legal slavery, and into the present moment. The sequence of verbal constructions in Sawyer’s second sentence reinforces this idea: the transition from “we have” to “we are” should suggest movement and change, but the fact that both phrases are paired with the same root word, “suffer,” frustrates this expectation. The present progressive conjugation of this term in its final appearance gestures toward the second sense of “still.” Insofar as the plight of African Americans stretches from the incarnation of the United States to the present of the ACL meeting, it constitutes a recurrence of the same that gives rise to stasis, the effect that no time has passed at all. Understood not just as a metaphor for slavery’s temporal extension but as a figure for the painful experience of this duration, “still suffering” opens a consideration of the audience’s posture as something more than a measure of their lack of engagement (or sympathy) with the various speakers’ messages. For in their general inactivity the audience seems to give physical form to the temporality that Smith, Sawyer, and Watson articulate: slavery’s present-​past. That is, what if the crowd’s apparent lack of response—​its seeming stasis—​is an embodiment of the course of action on which Sawyer entreats his listeners to meditate? Or, to paraphrase a line from John Milton, a poet whose work Hopkins knew well, might the crowd “also serve” even though they only seem to sit and listen?54 An article that Hopkins published in her Colored American Magazine one year after the publication of Contending Forces is instructive here. In “Edwin Garrison Walker,” Hopkins surveys the life of this antislavery apostle, son of the famous author of the Appeal. As she reconstructs the formative events of the young Walker’s life, she turns to Boston in the spring of 1854, where Anthony Burns was one of the first escaped bondsmen remanded to slavery under the Compromise of 1850. Hopkins dwells on the scene in which Burns is perversely paraded through the streets of the city en route to the ship that would return him to Virginia: Silent the great crowd stood, while down the historic street swung the marines in hollow square within which walked the prisoner—​one helpless Negro, whose chains clanked at every step, and whose manacled hands were useless to their owner. A sigh came from the crowd in one long-​drawn breath, then was hushed again into unbroken silence.55

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

183

Hopkins’s description is as striking as it is strange. Burns, whose hands belong to an ambiguous referent (“their owner”), is described as “helpless.” This condition seems to be shared by the crowd, whose own “unbroken silence” is interrupted only by an unmotivated agent (“then was hushed”). Indeed, given that it starts with “silent” and ends with “silence,” the entire passage has a sort of static shape. Hopkins’s rendering of this episode grows more curious if we note that the Burns affair had set the abolition stronghold of Boston into a frenzy. Indeed, Boston Slave Riot (1854) was the title given to a pamphlet that documented the episode. The term “riot” was hardly inappropriate: in a confrontation that occurred shortly after Burns’s arrest, protesters attacked the courthouse door, breaking it down with a “long plank” that they deployed as a “battering-​ram,” and used bricks to shatter the building’s windows. The melee resulted in the death of one member of the team of marshals defending the courthouse. That Hopkins chooses not to depict this scene, with its more spectacular resistance, is worth wondering about. But even Burns’s return to slavery was not as serene as her essay would suggest. According to contemporaneous accounts, cayenne pepper and sulfuric acid were used as “missile[s]‌” and launched into the procession, and at least two military horses were killed in confrontations with crowd members.56 If Hopkins wants us to take her translation of this scene as a protest, either of its contemporaneous moment or the post-​Reconstruction period into which she imports it, it is difficult to discern where political agency lies. Indeed, when Walt Whitman represents Burns’s return to bondage in Leaves of Grass (1855), he too paints the assemblage as still but offers a very different reading of this posture. In the poem that would come to be entitled “A Boston Ballad,” Whitman lambasts nineteenth-​century Bostonians—​and, by extension, all Americans—​whom he depicts as shamefully allowing the federal crime of slavery to triumph. The poem recounts the resurrection of “Yankee phantoms,” Revolutionary War heroes who emerge from death to behold a disturbing tableau: “Here gape your smart grandsons . … their wives gaze at them from the windows, /​See how well-​dressed . … see how orderly they conduct themselves.” Issuing the command to “Dig out King George’s coffin,” Whitman’s speaker suggests that such a response stands as evidence that America needs another Revolution, for it clearly has been sapped of the fervor this first political uprising epitomized.57 But where Whitman can discern nothing but abhorrent passivity in this episode, Hopkins asserts that it was “amid such scenes as this” that “Walker was trained to fidelity to his race.”58 As Hopkins reconstructs it, that is, this affair served as the ideal education for Walker’s future. In Embodying Black Experience, the performance studies theorist Harvey Young unsettles the active-​passive binary in a way that begins to illuminate Hopkins’s thinking. In a reading of the daguerreotypes of seven South Carolina

 

184

Untimely Democracy

slaves taken by Joseph T. Zealy for the natural scientist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who likely wanted this visual material to support his sense that the European and the African belonged to two different species, Young probes the immobilization that pervades these images and their mode of production. First claimed from the plantation, where they were already detained, the subjects in the portraits were then compelled to strike a series of poses while maintaining the sustained stillness that was required for this early photographic technology to produce a clear picture. For Young, these images index individuals who “actively perform stillness”; they force viewers to witness the servant who sits at the master’s bedside or the chattel that stands on the auction block. Young understands these performances as “atemporal”; however, if we read this model through Hopkins, we can see that such a posture is not outside of “time” altogether but that it simply exceeds the realm of linear, progressive temporality.59 In fact, such a slippage between “time” and “progressive temporality” was at the heart of the discourse of scientific racism from which these images were inextricable. For Aggasiz was an important figure in the development of polygenesis, a theory holding that blacks and whites had different origins and were biologically distinct.60 Though scientific racism had various incarnations, it held as one of its central assertions that black people represented the specter of “backward movement,” which imperiled “the progress narrative of the ‘superior race.’”61 The Scottish anatomist Robert Knox provides an especially forceful articulation of this line of thought in The Races of Men (1850), an influential contribution to Western biological racism, when he declares, “Look all over the globe, it is always the same; the dark races stand still, the fair progress.”62 Such notions were alive and well at the dawn of the twentieth century in, for example, social Darwinist proclamations about the regression of African Americans and in the figure of the savage black male rapist, which, as we know from Clapp’s speech, was often deployed in justifications of lynching.63 In light of the fact that Hopkins vocally opposed biological explanations of black inferiority in her 1905 pamphlet A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants, it is worth considering whether her depiction of the audience in Contending Forces might function as a sort of counterdiscourse to these pejorative connotations of black stasis.64 Here we observe an assemblage of African Americans whose stillness is not a sign of impending extinction but rather a posture of protest. In this regard, the fact that the group is in effect an undifferentiated mass—​anonymous bodies, not individual faces—​works to emphasize rather than diminish their potential agency: standing still and silent, the “vast” crowd stages a collective confrontation with one of the doctrines that validates their destruction (272). But the assembly’s stasis might be understood most productively as an act of political agency that forces us to rethink the very meaning of this term. Recent

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

185

work in critical race studies has inaugurated just such a project by bringing traditional liberal accounts of “agency,” meaning the self-​willed action of an autonomous individual, into tension with the experiences of racialized subjects that so often exceed this framework.65 A central insight emerging from this body of thought is that any rethinking of this key term in relation to race will also require a concept of temporality that refuses to hew to a linear and progressive rhythm. As the literary theorist Anne Cheng brilliantly summarizes it, the aim is to resist the telos of a “cure” and dwell instead in a “stuckness” that “may do more important political work for the future than the rhetoric of willful progress.”66 At the dawn of the twentieth century, Hopkins was already sounding this skepticism of “progress.” And perhaps the most articulate theorist in this regard is her Sappho Clark. As we have seen, Hopkins’s protagonist issues an incisive account of the relation between politics and time in her tête-​à-​tête with Dora. It might come as no surprise, then, that in the public space of the ACL meeting she appends a commentary on agency to her previous manifesto. And yet, what is remarkable is that Sappho does so not verbally but by way of a gesture, a type of the nonverbal contributions that Iris Marion Young has argued constitute a crucial but undervalued form of democratic engagement.67 Just as Sawyer concludes his chronicle of the assault on Mabelle Beaubean, we witness Sappho as she is “borne from the auditorium in a fainting condition” (261).68 If the swoon identifies the protagonist as an exaggerated version of the stasis that everywhere marks the scene, it also installs her as a kind of (silent) speaker whose political message is tantamount to and perhaps even rivals that of Watson, Smith, and Sawyer. Note that Hopkins describes her heroine not as having “fainted” but in a “fainting condition,” using the very participle form featured in the exposition of untimely democracy issued by the male orators (and in Sappho’s earlier critique of “temporizing”). Recall, too, that Grace Montfort repeatedly falls unconscious throughout the scene depicting her violation. In fainting upon hearing the chronicle of Mabelle Beaubean, then, Sappho relives not only her own assault; she also reenacts that of Grace Montfort. From the reader’s perspective, Sappho collapses (as it were) past and present, slavery and freedom, literalizing the proclamation in the novel’s preface.69 Understood thus, the protagonist’s swoon indicates no deficiency in political agency, as some have read the gesture; rather, it constitutes the most eloquent expression of untimely democracy in Contending Forces.70 In fact, in staging this scene, Hopkins recovers a meaning of stasis that has largely been lost. While modern English usage privileges the sense of the word that signifies lack of movement, in the ancient Greek, stasis also denotes precisely the opposite:  movement. This is the case because the verb from which stasis derives, histēmi, itself can signify either “make to stand”—​that

 

186

Untimely Democracy

is, to “set up” or “raise”—​or “to stand still,” “to be stationary.”71 As a noun, that is, the term captures the negation of motion, or “rest” as it appears in Plato’s Sophist.72 But, given that among the meanings of its verbal root is to “stir up strife,” stasis also indicates faction and discord.73 In the History of the Peloponnesian War, for instance, Thucydides refers to the Athenians’ internal quarrels that ultimately bring about their defeat as “a state of sedition at home.”74 It was this latter meaning of stasis that seems to have predominated in ancient Greek, and as the example from Thucydides suggests, with a decidedly political charge. Indeed, taken in this sense, the term signifies civil strife and revolution—​the “‘movement’ of the body politic.”75 According to the classicist Nicole Loraux, stasis “introduces disorder” and “unsettles established models”: it is in the havoc of war that women and slaves emerge from the margins and take up arms. Hence Loraux renders stasis not just as “movement” but “agitation.”76 Hence, too, why political theorists have transvalued the term, using it to designate not the devastation of the polity (as it did for the Greeks, who desperately sought to avoid stasis), but rather the activation of the demos that results from the revolutionary overturning of established forms and structures.77 Here, we are quite close to Rancière’s concept of dissensus as a challenge to the sensible order on which the hierarchy of included and excluded, oppressor and oppressed, is itself built. Indeed, if one way of defining dissensus is as the installation of the past in the temporal domain of the present, then Sappho’s swoon might be understood as stasis that is also dissensus. In her silence and stillness, it is not simply that she, like the assembly, insists on placing the world of slavery in the epoch of freedom. More important, in so doing, Sappho holds that stasis—​this paradoxical form of “action through inaction”78—​is the political gesture best suited to protest a phenomenon that is nothing new at all but rather a manifestation of a “second slavery,” to invoke Du Bois, that stops time in its linear tracks. Accordingly, Sappho, like her creator, is no citizen of Jeffersonian democracy. Indeed, in Winona Hopkins would revise Jefferson’s formulation from Notes on the State of Virginia, replacing his first-​person singular pronoun with an inclusive and transformative “we” when her narrator declares, “we tremble for our country when we reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”79 But the stasis that made Jefferson tremble induces no such state in Hopkins. Indeed, as Contending Forces already makes clear, the “revolution of the wheel of fortune” that Jefferson feared is in important ways a temporal revolution: a “revolution” that unites both the nonlinear and the political senses of the term to arrive at the conclusion that so disturbed the president. For Sappho does not “keep pace with the times,” marching along with the steady forward movement that is crucial to Jefferson’s democratic vision.80

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

187

And yet, if Sappho is no Jefferson, she is also not a fictional Du Bois. For, as we have seen, the stillness of time produces in the author of Souls an anxiety that the repetition of slavery will be endless, a fear perhaps best articulated in the enjambed closing lines of “The After-​Thought,” where Du Bois’s plea that “these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed /​THE END” seems at once to embrace and disavow the stasis of slavery’s present-​past.81 Hopkins, via Sappho, understands the stillness of time as both the source of and a crucial resource for political struggle. As if to revise in advance the notion Du Bois would express two years later on the final page of Souls, Hopkins includes at the outset of the ACL sequence a passage that similarly deploys a kind of prose enjambment. Upon learning of the lynching, the author explains, “the executive committee of the League met and asked themselves what could be done. ‘Nothing,’ was the final decision after debating the question, ‘but to agitate’” (241; original emphasis). Reading the two sentences all the way through reveals the primary point of this passage: agitation is the only possible course of action—​that is, “nothing” else “could be done.” If, however, we pause after the “nothing,” which Hopkins sets off from the rest of the clause, forcing us to slow down for a moment, this word seems to function as the answer to the question implicit in the previous sentence: nothing at all “could be done.” Whereas the break in Du Bois’s line indicates a possible hopelessness that, perhaps, nothing could stop slavery’s repetition, in Hopkins these two readings amount to the very same thing. For in the untimely democracy Contending Forces elaborates, to agitate is to stand still in protest of the fact that African Americans are still suffering slavery, years after the institution came to a legal end.

Recrossing Of course, Contending Forces does not conclude with the ACL meeting; and accordingly, we do not leave Sappho in (precisely) this static position. The female protagonist reclaims her son and returns to New Orleans, where on Easter Sunday Will finally locates her, after all but resigning himself never to see his beloved again. In being “borne” from the hall, then, Sappho sets out on the path to what clearly is a sort of rebirth that culminates in her marriage to Will and the realization of the traditional family unit she and Alphonse never had. In the closing scene of the novel, we find Sappho, together with the adopted father of her child, standing on the deck of a steamship bound for Europe, “watching the receding shores” of America (402). Along with the now-​married Dora and Arthur Lewis, as well as Mrs. Smith, Will and Sappho embark on a transatlantic journey to visit the Smiths’ long-​lost relative, Charles Montfort-​Withington.

 

188

Untimely Democracy

As Hopkins reveals in her penultimate chapter, Montfort-​Withington is the son of Charles Montfort, the child of Grace and Charles Sr., who was rescued from captivity in the novel’s pre-​emancipation portion by a British mineralogist by the name of Withington. Whereas Jesse Montfort fled to New Hampshire, marrying the black Elizabeth Whitfield and producing many children—​ Mrs. Smith, née Montfort, among them—​his brother married the daughter of his British patron. It is thus the function of this latter couple’s son, Charles Montfort-​Withington, to stitch these two main narrative threads together in an explicit way at the conclusion of the novel and thereby offer a kind of closure. Significantly, this newly restored family tree affords another, more material sort of closure, for it enables Mrs. Smith, as the direct heir of Jesse Montfort, to collect her share of the inheritance resulting from the successful suit filed by the elder Withington against the US government for the “outrages perpetrated against” the Montforts (73). Even as these concluding incidents suggest a neat resolution, they forge a recrossing of the two main strands of the story, implying that slavery’s disruptions have yet to cease.82 Consider the vexed nature of the “justice” garnered from the suit against the government. Given that much of Montfort’s property was in the form of humans, we have to wonder whether this remuneration, at least in part, is payment for the loss of slaves—​hardly the kind of settlement that would constitute a restoration of the “moral balance.”83 That Hopkins chooses the conspicuously measured phrase “justice was appeased” in announcing this inheritance seems to point in this direction (384). But more important is the fact that this transaction recalls an earlier attempt at redress. When Monsieur Beaubean finally confronts his half brother and demands justice for the abuse he has inflicted on Sappho, the perpetrator crudely responds, “Now, I am willing to give you a thousand dollars and call it square” (261). Hopkins encourages us to loathe this gesture, not simply for its crass reduction of suffering to monetary value, but because, as she puts it later in reference to Sappho, “We may right a wrong, but we cannot restore our victim to his primeval state of happiness. Something is lost that can never be regained” (332). The Smiths may have profited in the short term, but placed in the context of Hopkins’s entire novel, this settlement does little to atone for the misery of Grace Montfort, not to mention that of her slaves. There is also a more subtle, though no less haunting, way that Contending Forces renders slavery’s return in what otherwise might appear to be its sanguine final pages: the journey on which Will and Sappho embark is the “final leg of the triangular trade route,” the path by which persons were turned into profit.84 This is precisely the course that Charles and Grace Montfort intended to follow, for recall that after the end of slavery—​after, that is, emancipating their chattel—​ they would “retire to England” (24). In setting out for Europe, then, the recently

 



Pauline E .  Hopk ins's Untimely De moc rac y

189

wedded pair belatedly completes the voyage mapped by this earlier couple. The circuit they trace here functions as a kind of ideographic figure for the recursive temporality the novel everywhere enacts. Indeed, as if to avert any implication that in leaving the United States Will and Sappho move us beyond the harrowing past of slavery that the Montforts so powerfully represent, Hopkins stages this departure as nearly an exact repetition of the arrival of Charles and Grace on the shores of America in the opening chapter of Contending Forces: “Silently they gazed upon the fair scene before them, each longing for the land so recently left behind them, though no word of regret was spoken” (31). More than a century later, as they stand upon their deck, Will and Sappho are likewise silent, their “hearts filled with emotion too deep for words” (402). It is difficult not to discern in this final tableau, which itself repeats a previous scene in the novel, a silent echo of Sawyer’s “still suffering”: the admonition that while the coastlines upon which Sappho and Will fix their gaze may recede into the past, slavery will obey no such course.

 

Epilogue Democracy’s Plunges Nobody, black or white, wants to revisit this stuff. I know there’ll be a resistance to this film, like, “Why is Spike bringing this stuff back? That was the last century; we’re in a new century, a new frontier.” I think it’s important that we look at this stuff. It has to be confronted. Blackface is part of American history. —​Spike Lee, in a 2000 interview about Bamboozled Deny it or not, we live simultaneously in the past and the present, but all too often while looking to the future to correct our failures, we pretend that the past is no longer with us. —​R alph Ellison, Address at the Whiting Foundation, October 23, 1992 Great are the plunges and throes and triumphs and falls of democracy. —​Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

Late in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, the uncanny figure of Abraham Lincoln in blackface steps forward onto the stage of Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, the all-​black cast variety television program at the center of the 2000 film. Dressed in Lincoln’s traditional hat and suit, Honeycutt (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), The New Millennium Minstrel Show’s African American emcee, declares, “Four score and seven years ago, they was kicking our black asses. Boy, I mean, they had a whip, and they was kicking our black asses from can’t see in the morning until can’t see at night. But this is the new millennium!”1 As he sustains the final syllable of his last phrase—​“this is the new millennium”—​Honeycutt strikes a haunting pose: he leans backward toward the stage’s rear curtain, which displays the larger-​than-​life image of a minstrel character, whose distorted face, twisted nose, crimson lips, and gaping mouth threaten to engulf Honeycutt and overtake the screen (Figure E.1). Approaching the audience assembled in the studio for the show as the segment continues, the emcee extends both of his arms horizontally, tilts his head back, and assumes a posture that invokes the specter of a nearly falling body, a visual echo of Honeycutt’s descent into the stage backdrop we saw a 190

 

Ep ilog ue

191

Figure E.1  The emcee of The New Millennium Minstrel Show, Honeycutt (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), performs in blackface as Abraham Lincoln; in this frame, he leans back as he declares, “This is the new millennium!” Bamboozled (2000), dir. Spike Lee.

few frames earlier. From the aerial view that the camera provides as it lingers on this tableau, it seems as if we witness Honeycutt, his movement suspended in time and space, in the moment before he will fall backward. Phantasmagorically raising Lincoln from the dead, this scene in Bamboozled signifies on the lines and likeness of the sixteenth president, deploying the form of entertainment he himself enjoyed. But here minstrelsy serves as a vehicle that reworks Lincoln’s conventional image as the political figure who, so the official narrative goes, instituted black freedom and, instead, makes him suffer the nation’s (still very much open) “wounds” of slavery, which the president sought to “bind up” in his Second Inaugural Address, even as he made clear that an end to internecine conflict would constitute divine mercy, not justice.2 In its overlaying of touchstone chapters in the racial history of the United States—​ Civil War, emancipation, and, most significantly, the centuries of bondage that prepared the way for these events—​Honeycutt’s blackface Lincoln challenges any facile celebration of racial progress, testifying that to be black in the “new millennium” is still to be subject to physical and psychological abuse, to have one’s “ass kicked” and psyche wounded by the “master,” who, in the case of the film, assumes the guise of the white media establishment that coerces African American actors to perform in blackface in order to earn a living in the entertainment industry. Just as Honeycutt’s figure continually threatens to fall in this scene, Bamboozled stages what we might think of as a figurative fall back into history: a collapsing of the temporal boundaries between the nineteenth century

 

192

Ep ilog ue

and the new millennium, between the eras of slavery and freedom—​in short, between the past and present. Given this claim, Bamboozled might be dismissed as an anomaly, the excessive expression of its director’s warped political agenda.3 But I hope the foregoing chapters have made clear that the film’s perspective, while certainly provocative, is hardly unique. In training its sights on the present-​past of slavery, here in the form of blackface, Bamboozled makes an important (if belated) contribution to the literary and political tradition this book has traced.4 Indeed, in light of the fact that its central characters reveal little awareness that their participation in Mantan finally functions not to parody but rather to re​enact the racist caricatures of the putative “past,” we might further understand Bamboozled as a reflection on the risks of retreating too soon from the vision of untimely democracy Pauline Hopkins elaborated. In this sense, Lee’s film surely stands as a cautionary tale for our new millennium. And yet, if we look closely at the conceptual implications of the central trope marking the film’s diegesis, we must also recognize that its critique of racial progress is bereft of Hopkins’s sense of the agential powers of stasis.5 For in Bamboozled’s falls, we find only paralysis, a traumatic return that arrests time but provides no opening to activate a response. In this way, Lee’s film erases a crucial dimension of the vision not just of Hopkins and her contemporaries but of what I contend is its silent source: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). For if both works deploy the falling body as a potent emblem for the recursive temporality of racial servitude, Bamboozled’s treatment of this figure moves in a different—​decisively backward—​direction that betrays Lee’s willful suppression of Ellisonian influence.6 Indeed, it is Ellison alone who finally offers a sense of how nonprogressive temporal models can facilitate political progress—​and he does so, as we will see, by engaging in a crucial revision of his own:  he reworks Walt Whitman’s sense of the privileged temporality of democracy. Whereas Lee leaves us locked in the past of racial subjugation that his film’s treatment of blackface minstrelsy represents, Ellison’s version of the fall back into history is marked by the multidirectional trajectory that Whitman wrote out of his democratic vistas. Emerging not just in his published writings and talks but also in excised manuscript fragments from Invisible Man, his use of “fall” and its cognate “plunge” point to the possibility of agency and engagement, not just stuckness. Accordingly, Ellison, like the figures surveyed in the foregoing chapters, offers sustained attention to the politically productive energies of progress and regress, movement and stasis, that encourages us to meditate on how the living past of racial wrong might motivate the emergence of a democratic future.

 

Ep ilog ue

193

Blacking Up in The New Millennium At the core of Bamboozled is Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show. The brainchild of Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a Harvard-​educated, African American writer who works for CNS, one of the major networks in the white-​ dominated television industry, the show is the result of Pierre’s frustration at having his proposals for programming that features black middle-​class family life consistently rejected by the white executives at CNS for not being “hip” enough. Seeking to prove just how racist the entertainment industry is, and, in so doing, to get fired from his job and avoid the financial penalty he would incur were he to resign, Pierre resolves to give his bosses precisely what he believes they want: “a coon show.” Though the logic behind his plan is never fully developed, in conceiving of The New Millennium Minstrel Show as a “satire,” Pierre strives to rationalize what ultimately is his self-​serving endeavor by imagining that the objective of the program is “to destroy” the “stereotypes” of blackness the show will parade. Expecting the audience to loathe and reject these images, Pierre says he hopes to “move this country to change”—​as if just one more recycling of these representations is all that is needed to excise them from the national racial imaginary. The ironic distance from the program’s racist iconography that Pierre envisions, however, is lost on both the audience and the network. The New Millennium Minstrel Show is shockingly successful: viewers love it; corporations pay premium rates to purchase advertising time; and CNS executives celebrate Pierre’s “genius.” Underlying Pierre’s belief that his proposed program will serve as a progressive political project is a particular attitude toward “history,” specifically, the place of the past in relation to the film’s present-​tense moment. At the outset, Pierre and his assistant Sloan Hopkins ( Jada Pinkett Smith) study the history of blackface in an attempt to achieve an accurate portrayal of the minstrel types the program will display. Pierre reviews archival footage of old minstrel performances, selecting Mantan as the title of the show, and requesting that its lead actor Manray (Savion Glover) take this name as his television persona in order to invoke the legacy of Mantan Moreland, one of the most famous African American comedic actors of the early twentieth century.7 Likewise, Sloan, in an effort to make the cast appear as historically authentic as possible—​to “keep the ritual the same,” as she puts it—​locates the formula for the blackface paint (burnt cork and water “mixed to a thick paste”) used in the nineteenth century, and demands that the show’s actors “black up” just as their counterparts did in the past. Sloan’s gesture here is significant, for, never fully comfortable with her complicity in Pierre’s plan but unable, if not unwilling, to enunciate an efficacious dissent, she is perhaps for this very reason especially invested in the historical

 

194

Ep ilog ue

dimension of the undertaking. Indeed, later in the film, when Sloan gives Pierre a “Jolly Nigger Bank,” one of the trappings of blackface entertainment that Steven Dubin has identified as a form of “symbolic slavery,” she admonishes him to keep the figurine—​which, she notes, is not a “repro” but “circa turn of the century”—​ as a reminder of “a time in our history in this country when we were considered inferior, subhuman,” a time we should “never forget.”8 Sloan’s use of “history” in conjunction with her past-​tense verb in this scene is telling. For if Sloan is seeking to articulate a kind of sub rosa critique of the program by her wielding of the “Jolly Nigger Bank,” what animates her complaint is not an intuition that The New Millennium Minstrel Show continues the “tradition” of blackface entertainment. Rather, it is her sense that Pierre’s project is an offensive anachronism—​ something from the past (the “time in our history” she invokes) unmoored from its proper temporal domain and inappropriately placed in the present.9 Read in this way, the episode casts Sloan less as Pierre’s rival than as his collaborator. For in their attempts to treat their creation as historical research—​ as something belonging to the “past” whose re-​presentation they can control, even if their assessments of this re-​presentation differ—​both misread how far the nation has progressed beyond the nineteenth-​century world from which the minstrel show derives. To borrow a phrase from Michel Rolph-​Trouillot, Pierre and Sloan erroneously subscribe to the notion of a “fixed past” that exists “independently from the present.” Accordingly, they miss the way the past in fact persists through time precisely because its structures of domination—​the presumed superiority of whites over blacks that was given official state sanction in slavery, for instance—​are “renewed” in the series of historical “presents” that follow the “past” of legal black bondage.10 In this regard, if minstrelsy is a cultural form that derives from the “material relations of slavery,” then the popularity of blackface on the stage in the nineteenth century and on the screen in the twentieth century (and beyond) was one of the basic means by which the ideology of white supremacy was perpetuated in the postslavery era.11 From this vantage point, Sloan’s wielding of the “Jolly Nigger Bank” as a sign to “never forget” the “time in our history” when blacks were subhuman takes on an even deeper irony. In the “new millennium” in which Pierre and Sloan live and labor, what the CNS executives and audiences alike want is a neominstrel show. But this fact gives credence not to the imperative “never forget,” as Sloan would have it; rather, it testifies to the utter impossibility of forgetting the caricatures of blackness trafficked by minstrelsy precisely because they have endured through time.12 Indeed, long before The New Millennium Minstrel Show becomes a national media phenomenon, Bamboozled points insistently, if at first subtly, to the ways that, against its protagonists’ beliefs, the borders between the historicity and the contemporaneity of the minstrel show break down. Early in the film, when

 

Ep ilog ue

195

Pierre introduces his supervisor Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) to Manray and his co-​star Womack (Tommy Davidson), the network executive requests an impromptu performance from the show’s soon-​to-​be dancing star. Taking the conference table as his stage, Manray executes an impressive tap routine for Dunwitty, whose laughter and overzealous applause communicate not merely his approval of Manray’s casting but also something much more disturbing: his conceptualization of blackness as what Saidiya Hartman has identified as a “vehicl[e]‌for white enjoyment.”13 As Pierre pitches the premise for The New Millennium Minstrel Show in his introduction of Manray and Womack, Dunwitty makes it clear that this is what he has in mind, explaining with excitement to Pierre his vision that each week the program’s characters will “make us laugh” and “make us cry.” Significantly, this tableau, in which the white Dunwitty takes in an extemporaneous, but coerced, performance by Manray, almost exactly replays the opening scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Mr. Shelby demands that one of his slave children, Harry Harris (or “Jim Crow” to Shelby), entertain the slave trader Haley:  “Now, Jim, show this gentleman how you can dance and sing.” Without protest, Harry immediately responds with “one of those wild, grotesque songs common among the negroes, in a rich, clear voice, accompanying his singing with many comic evolutions of the hands, feet, and whole body, all in perfect time to the music.” Haley and Shelby are delighted by Harry’s performance—​“Both gentlemen laughed uproariously”—​ as is Dunwitty by Manray’s exhibition-​on-​demand.14 As Hartman points out, it is precisely these seemingly “innocent amusements,” these “gentler forms” of white power over blacks such as Shelby’s request for a performance from Harry or Dunwitty’s desire for an impromptu viewing of Manray’s tap dancing acumen that, by way of “euphemism and concealment,” “extended and maintained the relations of domination” more overtly on display in the scene of a slave’s whipping or sale in the marketplace.15 These rhyming tableaux from Bamboozled and Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrate how the material relations of slavery are renewed and perpetuated even after the institution’s official end: Dunwitty seems to step into the role of a current-​day Shelby, with Manray playing the part of an updated Harry Harris, working not for the “quarter of an orange” as in Stowe’s vision, but for the prospect of economic security and fame that Dunwitty promises Manray he will acquire through his role in The New Millennium Minstrel Show.16 Yet the historical convergence taking place in this scene between, on the one hand, Haley, Shelby, and Harry in the nineteenth century and, on the other, Dunwitty and Manray at the dawn of the twenty-​first, is lost on Pierre. No less invested in his plan to satirize and thereby expose the racism of the television industry, he steps into his boss’s chair in the segment’s closing moment as Dunwitty quickly exits his office to

 

196

Ep ilog ue

convey the proposal to the executives upstairs, triumphantly declaring, “Well, I think he bought it.” With this renewed appeal to satire to justify The New Millennium Minstrel Show in a scene that already seems to signal that the program will be received as anything but, Bamboozled brings into full relief a small but significant visual detail from its opening sequence, which is marked by Pierre’s voice-​ over definition of “satire” as “irony, derision, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity.” As if to undercut its protagonist’s belief that the time is ripe for a satire of blackface even before he can articulate it, the film’s opening features a shot of the massive timepiece that serves as the window of Pierre’s Manhattan clock-​tower apartment. The view the camera provides is one of an inverted clock: we see its face from the inside of the wall, indeed, from the vantage point of a shot that is already markedly skewed by its oblique aerial perspective in this initial frame. Equally significant is the tracking shot used to capture Pierre as he introduces himself and continues his exposition of the film’s premise. Positioned on the dolly on which the camera is mounted, Pierre moves along the circular path the shot traces, passing by the backward clock that looms behind him with each revolution. Time, Bamboozled thus suggests, is already somehow disjointed.17 Just as the past of slavery explodes into the present in Manray’s performance in Dunwitty’s office, time, this scene implies, does not run forward. Instead, it moves recursively, by the logic of repetition and return that is at the core of Lee’s film, here given visual expression by the retracing of the already-​traced path of the opening tracking shot. Womack articulates the verbal counterpoint to this visual detail in a powerful monologue late in the film, just before he resigns from The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Berating Manray for his continued participation, even pride, in the venture, Womack sardonically asks, “New millennium, huh?” Then, answering his own question, he continues, “It’s the same bullshit, just done over.” In this bald encapsulation of Bamboozled’s primary claim, Womack argues that the blackface types that he and his colleagues are enacting in the “new millennium”—​that is, in both the eponymous television program and the historical era in which the film is set—​are repetitions, living reproductions, of the minstrel roles that black actors performed into the 1900s. They are the present-​past given human form.

Falling Back Bamboozled explores the disturbing implications of Womack’s complaint in a haunting scene—​haunting because it replays an earlier episode. As Manray

 

Ep ilog ue

197

walks onto the stage of The New Millennium Minstrel Show for the last time—​ wearing no blackface and dressed in his everyday clothes—​he declares, “I am sick and tired of being a nigger, and I  am not going to take it anymore.” Significantly, Manray here alters the lines he utters in the pilot episode of the program when he exclaims in blackface, “I am sick and tired of niggers.” If the distance between Manray’s first statement and his protest at the end of the film tempts us to read his actions as a gesture of resistance, an attempt to extricate himself from the show and distinguish himself from the character that has come to define him, Manray’s retention of the word “nigger” should give us pause. For in so declaring he repeats and reifies the racist system that this pejorative term invokes. Dunwitty’s appropriation of the word in the very next moment confirms this point.18 Escorting Manray out of the studio, Dunwitty, maddened by his employee’s insubordination, shouts, “Niggers like you are a dime a dozen.” This phrase reveals a chilling vision of an inexhaustible supply of Manrays/​Mantans; it portends an endless series of minstrel types of which Manray himself is just one iteration—​burn cork, add water, and mix, we might imagine Dunwitty’s formula for producing a replacement. The film finally undercuts any latent revisionist force that might inhere in Manray’s attempt at a repetition with a difference by replaying the figure of this character’s falling body immediately after he speaks the final word of his protest. Just after he says “nigger,” Manray falls backward, almost exactly repeating the fall he comically performs in the pilot, when he utters the prior version of his monologue (Figures E.2 and E.3). In an effort to emphasize that this fall is in fact a repetition, in this moment Bamboozled edits together three images of Manray’s falling body and replays them in quick succession. The implication is disturbing: even when he is not in blackface, even when he tries to fashion a nonblackface version of himself, Manray nonetheless falls backward, just as he does in his first performance of The New Millennium Minstrel Show. As if to suggest that the racist caricatures the program has replayed are beyond his control, and the line dividing past and present is now completely blurred, he repeats the fall back into history despite his attempts at resistance. But Manray’s is not the last falling body that marks Bamboozled’s narrative, which in its dénouement questions the possibility of putting an end to both The New Millennium Minstrel Show and the images it has unleashed. Indeed, Manray himself falls once again in the film’s closing moments, and this time the fall leads to his death. Immediately after he is ejected from the set for his refusal to perform in blackface, and just after we see him repeat the fall from the first episode of the television program, Manray is apprehended by the Mau Maus, a self-​proclaimed revolutionary group of rappers who execute Manray for his perpetuation of racist stereotypes. Wearing plastic blackface masks in mockery

 

Figure E.2  Having shed his usual costume, Manray (Savion Glover) appears on the stage of The New Millennium Minstrel Show; he recreates the fall he performed in the pilot episode. Bamboozled (2000), dir. Spike Lee.

Figure E.3  Manray (Savion Glover), in costume as Mantan, in the pilot of The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Bamboozled (2000), dir. Spike Lee.

 

Ep ilog ue

199

of his role as Mantan, the Mau Maus force the erstwhile star to perform what they term the “dance of death.”19 If Manray’s exhibition for Dunwitty earlier was compelled by his bid for a livelihood as an actor, then this scene literalizes the stakes of the previous one. Here, Manray dances for his life as the Mau Maus fire their guns at his feet. Marketing the execution as a cybervisual spectacle, the Mau Maus broadcast Manray’s murder on the internet and on television for the entire world to witness. Like The New Millennium Minstrel Show, it is an event that cannot be missed. Significantly, just before it provides us with the real-​time footage of the execution, the film interposes an animated image of a classic minstrel scene: the white master shooting at his slave’s dancing feet. The tableau is familiar, for it recalls another from earlier in Bamboozled. Manray has performed this set piece before in an episode of The New Millennium Minstrel Show in which he and Womack, in the roles of plantation slaves, flee from the bullets of their master’s gun. Thus, the image of Manray dancing for his life at once recalls and repeats two other images within the course of the film—​the scene in which Manray and Womack race from the bullets of their owner’s rifle and the animated version of this tableau that occurs just before the execution—​even as it anticipates the historical images of slaves running from overseers that mark the final montage. Having witnessed Manray’s execution on television like the rest of the world, an enraged Sloan goes to Pierre’s office, bringing a gun with her. As Sloan approaches Pierre—​who himself now wears blackface, a sign of his complicity in the venture—​she declares her power over him. “This is Listen to Sloan Day,” she screams. After making this pronouncement, Sloan orders Pierre to watch the video panorama of blackface images from film and television that she has produced; brandishing her gun, she directs him, “Look to what you contributed to.” Sloan’s command, especially her use of the word “contributed,” is significant, for it betrays her sense (conscious or otherwise) that Pierre’s show is not, despite its title, a “new” creation, but rather a kind of continuation of the history of blackface media. Even more intriguing is the causal logic implied by “contributed.” In its standard usage, this term posits a relation between cause and effect, impetus and result, means and end, in which the former term in these pairings chronologically precedes and logically gives rise to the latter. Here, however, the images to which Sloan refers are in fact minstrel scenes that are already in circulation, footage from the historical archive, whose source could not be Pierre, at least not in any conventional temporal order. Thus Pierre has, according to Sloan’s curious turn of phrase, “contributed to” something that already exists. He is, paradoxically, cause and effect, production and reproduction; and his creation is not merely grounded in the present or future of blackface, but also in its past. In this regard, he has “contributed” merely another installment to the long, unfinished

 

200

Ep ilog ue

history of blackface, a history whose narrative may be impossible to write precisely by virtue of its interminability.20 This is the insight Pierre is forced, quite literally, to face at the conclusion of the film. As Sloan shoots him, Pierre falls to his death, his body resting in such a position that he is physically unable to turn away from the montage of blackface minstrelsy Sloan has prepared for him. Pierre’s vantage point soon becomes our own as the images that are displayed on his office television overtake our screen, and we witness the haunting history of racial representation in the form of rapidly transitioning clips of blackface and neominstrel performances culled from film and television sources dating from as early as the late nineteenth century.21 Not only do the representations in the montage rhyme with the forms Bamboozled has reproduced; as Michele Wallace has noted, the clips that constitute this panorama are sutured together in a nonchronological order: a frame from turn-​of-​the-​twentieth-​century footage of a laughing man gives way to a segment from the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, which then morphs into an excerpt from D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation.22 Thus, as we watch images that strike us as hauntingly familiar, we are forced to consider why this is so. Do these representations resonate because they are repetitions—​visual echoes—​of scenes we have seen throughout Bamboozled? Or, are they familiar by virtue of their very ubiquity, their enduring legacy in American culture, despite the particular temporal moment or historical era to which, most narrowly construed, they belong? To answer this question, it seems, we have to return to Bamboozled, to consume it again in order to track its repetitions—​and then repeat the process again, and then once more, perhaps thereby enacting a potentially endless cycle of playing and replaying the images of blackface minstrelsy whose source, whether in the recent past of our viewing of The New Millennium Minstrel Show or in a more distant past, is uncertain. As if to corroborate the uncanny sense engendered by the visual montage that is its final scene, Bamboozled frames this closing segment with two comments from Pierre. Before the mosaic of minstrel images first overtakes our screen, the camera focuses on the dying protagonist, lying on the floor of his office, the television still playing the series of clips we just viewed. Speaking by way of voice-​ over as the camera lingers on his expiring body, Pierre promises that the show will go on: “Please tune in next week for the best of Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show.” As the film cuts back to the office after we watch the lengthy visual interlude on the history of blackface Sloan has prepared, Pierre, now surely dead, delivers his last line: “always keep them laughing,” an imperative that the protagonist communicates just as an extreme close-​up of Manray in costume as Mantan, striking the stock pose of the smiling minstrel, fills the screen. These voice-​over ruminations from a dead Pierre reveal that, considered from his point of view as narrator, the whole of the film has been a retracing

 

Ep ilog ue

201

of something that has already happened. Thus, whether or not we take seriously Pierre’s closing prediction that The New Millennium Minstrel Show will in fact continue, and whether it will do so in new episodes or reruns—​itself a vexed question, given that the “original” New Millennium Minstrel Show was not “new” at all—​is beside the point: the images the program traffics have already re-​circulated at least once by the time we get to the narrative’s close. Our viewing of the film has already been the show’s initial repetition, and Bamboozled has already secured the program’s first replaying even before the film’s final credits—​themselves superimposed over images of the trappings of blackface minstrelsy—​commence.

Falling Before cutting to its minstrel montage, Bamboozled focuses on the fallen (and dying) protagonist as he quotes James Baldwin. “People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become,” Pierre proclaims, signaling his own complicity even as he calls for a more general atonement.23 But what if Lee had concluded with a line from Ellison, whose Invisible Man provides the template for the film’s trope of the fall? “Fall” appears in various forms (most often as a verb) nearly one hundred times across Ellison’s novel. A cognate term, “plunge,” occurs in different iterations more than thirty times. More important, these words surface at crucial junctures in the plot. For example, the first chapter recounts a dream in which the narrator, at his grandfather’s orders, “endlessly” opens a series of envelopes, finally finding the message, “Keep This Nigger-​Boy Running”; the narrator confesses that he feared he “would fall of weariness,” to which the grandfather seems to reply, “Them’s years.” In the closing chapter, amid the chaos of the Harlem riot, we witness the nameless protagonist “plunge down” into the “manhole” that he has announced as his “home” in the prologue.24 While this last example, like the first, presents the image of a body falling downward, Ellison encourages a more sophisticated sense of these moments when he comments that the narrator’s “movement vertically downward … is a process of rising to an understanding of his human condition.”25 This remark rhymes with a passage that Ellison would delete from the final Invisible Man, in which the narrator challenges the “feudal wisdom” that “all that goes up has to come down.” Instead, he asks, “What if it goes so high that it breaks the so-​called law of gravity?”26 If upward movement need not imply a reciprocal return, and if ostensibly downward movement can signify a kind of “rising,” then a crucial subset of this enriched perspective—​this higher/​lower learning—​is the narrator’s temporal consciousness. After all, the grandfather seems to equate the act of

 

202

Ep ilog ue

repeatedly opening the envelopes with the passage of time, and it is in his “hole” that the narrator first articulates his philosophy of historical movement: “Not like an arrow, but a boomerang” (6). While Ellison’s “boomerang” may be more elliptical than illuminating, the image clearly emphasizes multiple forms of motion that unsettle any rectilinear path.27 Accordingly, “plunge,” signifying both the disruption of a linear trajectory and immersion into a sociopolitical reality, perfectly pairs with the various falls that appear in the novel, which cannot finally be reduced to any one movement—​ downward, forward, or backward—​and often precipitate the narrator’s epiphanies.28 Indeed, in Invisible Man, falling and plunging function as the privileged terms for tracing the narrator’s emergent sense of time, and they ultimately serve as a figurative embodiment of Ellison’s democratic theory. Surely the paramount episode in this vein is Tod Clifton’s departure from the ranks of the Brotherhood that the narrator terms his “fall outside of history” (434; original emphasis).29 The phrase originates in a line delivered by Clifton himself: after a disruptive encounter (physically and conceptually) with Ras the Exhorter, Clifton explains this character’s aggressive black nationalism by remarking that “I suppose sometimes a man has to plunge outside history.” Prompted by the protagonist’s confused “What?” Clifton tries to clarify: “Plunge outside, turn his back … Otherwise he might kill somebody, go nuts” (377; original emphasis). The narrator struggles to place the phrase within the mode of historical progression offered by the organization for which he has become a spokesperson. But if here he can conceive of “plunge” only in opposition to this model, his response to the circumstances surrounding Clifton’s exit from the Brotherhood—​and, more pointedly, to Clifton’s eventual death at the hands of a white police officer—​ registers a more complex sense of the political implications of marking time. Consider Ellison’s staging of his protagonist’s first encounter with Clifton after his break with the Brotherhood. Once the leader of the organization’s youth movement, the character becomes a peddler of the materials of blackface minstrelsy that hold such a prominent place in Bamboozled: he sells dancing “Sambo” dolls on the streets. When the narrator comes upon his former colleague, it is the “grinning doll of orange-​and-​black tissue paper” that captures and horrifies him (431). Physically immobilized by the sight (“I was paralyzed”), the protagonist cannot bring himself to name the salesman as Clifton for another two pages (432). When he registers the connection (“our eyes met and he gave me a contemptuous smile”), the narrator spits on the doll, and his saliva “splatter[s]‌like heavy rain striking a newspaper.” He reports the impact: “I saw the doll go over backwards, wilting into a dripping rag of frilled tissue, the hateful head upturned on its outstretched neck still grinning toward the sky” (433). In a sort of origin story of the failed satire of Bamboozled, we witness the narrator attempting to destroy what he considers an “obscenity” (438); like Sloan, he tries to push it

 

Ep ilog ue

203

back into the historical past in which he locates it. But where Clifton is utterly vulnerable to death, his Sambo doll will not die, as we learn from Lee’s film—​ and as Ellison himself predicts in a brilliantly subtle detail in the novel’s final chapter, when the protagonist sets flame to the objects in his briefcase and mentions that “Clifton’s doll … burned so stubbornly” (568).30 While during the initial encounter the narrator reads his ex-​colleague’s career change as an act of treason, his language registers the temporal protest underwriting Clifton’s work. When he first spots the doll, he notes that it is “throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public” (431). A chapter later, after Clifton has been killed by the officer who patrols the street where he vends, the narrator, still holding the object in his possession, recognizes that a “fine black thread” controls the puppet’s movement, and he grasps that “Clifton had been making it dance all the time” (446). This realization recalls the strange tempo he observes when he watched the street performance and remarked that Clifton’s “voice didn’t go with the hand.” Here, the narrator witnesses the sort of control over the reproduction of minstrelsy that the characters in Lee’s film seek but never secure. And, significantly, this nonsynchronous sensation makes the nameless protagonist feel as if he were falling—​indeed, plunging: “It was as though I had waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head” (432). Where this feeling of the bottom dropping out compels the narrator to force the doll to fall backward, to attempt to destroy it, Clifton’s protest portrays another dimension of falling. His performance shows how the term collapses a progressive historical vision, whose concatenation of past, present, and future allows the narrator to refer to the object as an “obscenity”—​the offensive anachronism about which Sloan warns Manray. Put differently, there are at least two senses of falling on display in this moment: on the one hand, the narrator’s gesture indexes the idea of falling back that is consonant with an understanding of time that presumes a division between past and present; on the other, Clifton’s action depicts falling and plunging as modes of challenging the temporal model that animates the narrator’s attempt to exterminate Sambo. This “fierce defiance” of falling is what eludes the characters in Bamboozled. What exactly differentiates Ellison’s fall from Lee’s? Significantly, Ellison wrestled with these terms and how to convey their complexity. Excised fragments from the manuscript of Invisible Man suggest that he considered including an extended interlude on the word “plunge.” In one of the draft pages, Ellison has his narrator critique the turn of phrase “plunge into reality,” which “from the perspective of my hole seems a gross inaccuracy”: It’s like saying that Bessie Smith awoke one morning and plunged into the Backwater Blues, when obviously the blues was in her all the time.

 

204

Ep ilog ue

One doesn’t plunge into reality, reality does the plunging and unless your skin is thicker than this invisible skin of mine, it eventually penetrates. You may deny it and try to save face by pretending that you did the plunging, but nevertheless it is reality’s initiative, it does the plunging.31 Here, the narrator uses “plunging” in the sense of immersion into a social and political order, and he emphasizes the violence of the process. Indeed, this force is underwritten by the second sense of the term, made available via the reference to Smith’s 1927 song “Backwater Blues,” whose lyrics Ellison appears to have typed out (and corrected) as he drafted the novel. The song tells the tale of “five days” of rain, which render the singer a refugee: “Cause my house fell down and I cain live there no mo.” In the final chorus, Smith’s “cain live there no mo” becomes “cain move no mo,” as if to suggest that a possible terminus for Ellison’s redefinition of “plunging into reality” is the paralysis experienced by the characters in Bamboozled.32 Of course, for Ellison, the blues do not finally signify tragedy but the possibility of transformation; as he put it, this cultural form represents “a transcendence of those conditions created within the Negro community by the denial of social justice” (CE, 287). In this regard, the appearance of the verb “fall” near the end of the song (“my house fell”) serves as a potential key for understanding the rich lexical range and conceptual complexity of the term. For while only the title of the song appears in the novel’s final form (the narrator hears Mary Rambo crooning it), Ellison suggests that he retains the multiple—​and ostensibly contradictory—​senses of falling that the “Backwater Blues” holds out: on the one hand, stuckness and immobility; on the other, a transcendent perspective, the possibility of improvising on one’s conditions, embodied by this form.33 Intriguingly, though in the novel “falling” generally is accompanied by “back” or “forward,” in his drafts Ellison appears to have toyed with which, if any, of those adverbs to use. For instance, in Invisible Man, the narrator, meditating on Clifton, asks himself, “And why if he had to fall back did he try to carry the whole structure with him?” (434). In an earlier iteration of this sentence, Ellison seems to have deleted “back”; the word is crossed out in pencil (Figure E.4). In yet another draft, only “fall” appears.34 The description of Clifton’s death reveals a similar alteration. While in the book the narrator explains that “he fell forward on his knees, like a man saying his prayers” (436), Ellison contemplated not including “forward.” In at least one draft, he wrote that Clifton “fell to his knees like a man praying,” inserting “forward on” in pencil (Figure E.5).35 In elaborating the various falls that punctuate the plot, that is, Ellison seems to have gone back and forth between “fall back” and “fall forward.” This makes sense if we recall Ellison’s comment that the narrator’s fall at the end of the book is a sort of rising. But this alternation also allows us to understand “fall” as a more capacious term, one that may or may not be accompanied by a directional marker,

 

Figure E.4  Ralph Ellison, manuscript of Invisible Man. In the third paragraph, Ellison appears to have deleted “back.” Ralph Ellison Papers, Part I, Box 143, Folder 2. Courtesy of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission of the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust.

 

Figure E.5  Ralph Ellison, manuscript of Invisible Man. In the first sentence, Ellison replaces “to” with “forward on” in his description of Clifton’s fall. Ralph Ellison Papers, Part I, Box 143, Folder 2. Courtesy of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission of the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust.

 

Ep ilog ue

207

and accordingly, may indicate indeterminate movement: its apparent absence or a movement in various directions. Clifton’s fall signifies his death at the hands of the police, but it also represents the possibility that his dissent might engender some of the change indexed by the “fierce defiance” of the Sambo doll he sells. For the narrator at least, Clifton’s fall has an immediate impact. It is his death that precipitates the novel’s famous meditation on “history”—​which, not coincidentally, unfolds in a subway station where “the trains” are “plunging in and out” (439). Read against this backdrop, falling, like plunging, emerges as a mode of navigation, of coping with a distressing social and political reality, and perhaps as a way of transforming the landscape. It is a mode that allows for, even requires, forward and backward movement; to fall in the novel is to be aware of the present-​past, of those moments in which time seems not to move at all. This is precisely what Lee’s characters lack, and it is what Ellison’s narrator announces in the prologue as one of the crucial insights of the condition he has come to embrace: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time” (8).

Democratic Movements Ellison pursued the political implications of this temporal posture in the work he produced in the wake of Invisible Man. In his essays, lectures, and the second novel he would never finish, the writer continued to consider the temporal properties of democracy, which was his abiding project. Ellison believed that democracy was “the ground-​term for our concept of justice” (CE, 31); but, like the authors surveyed in this study, he knew that “democracy” and “justice” would not align without a change in the temporal models underwriting this political and cultural form. As he put it in a 1964 essay that telegraphed the concerns of the book on which he was laboring, “Americans have been locked in a deadly struggle with time, with history. We’ve fled the past and trained ourselves to suppress, if not forget, troublesome details of the national memory, and a great part of our optimism, like our progress, has been bought at the cost of ignoring the processes through which we’ve arrived at any given moment in our national existence” (CE, 280). Echoing Charles Chesnutt’s critique of racial optimism and Pauline Hopkins’s elaboration of the powers of stasis, Ellison here seeks to realize democracy by wresting it from a linear, progressive time that limits its possibilities. He challenges readers to transform this deadening “struggle” into a productive one that seeks to recognize and grapple with the present-​past. The real struggle is to conceive of a democracy that is, by definition, untimely.36 In this way, Ellison’s statement might stand as a gloss of the story Untimely Democracy has told. If Lee necessarily looks back to Ellison in his twenty-​first-​ century treatment of the processes of racial progress, then the author of Invisible

 

208

Ep ilog ue

Man glances backward toward the postbellum writers who sought to reinvigorate the meaning of democracy amid the wreckage of the nadir. That is, Du Bois’s present-​past is Ellison’s and also (if in a different way) Lee’s. This trajectory of literary history is akin to the trajectory of falling. It is a path that resists rectilinear movement in its attempt “to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal,” as Ellison wrote in the introduction to the thirtieth-​anniversary edition of Invisible Man (CE, 487). Framed within this genealogy, the “falling” and “plunging” of Invisible Man sound not simply the voices of Chesnutt, Hopkins, Douglass, Du Bois, and the others in their cohort, but also the figure with whom this book began: Whitman. For in the final poem of his 1855 Leaves of Grass, which would come to be called “Great Are the Myths,” Whitman declared, “Great are the plunges and throes and triumphs and falls of democracy.” With this phrase, Whitman celebrates the agitation of political action—​“the reformers with their lapses and screams,” as the next line reads.37 After changing “falls” to “downfalls” in the 1860 Leaves, as if to clarify the vector of the movement he describes, Whitman cut the line about the “plunges” of democracy from the 1867 edition. He would delete the poem itself after the 1871 Leaves.38 This is the same year that his Democratic Vistas appeared, in which, as we have seen, the author was hesitant to praise the vicissitudes of this political form and instead sought to secure its future by paving a progressive path that ignored the afterlife of slavery. In the vision of Democratic Vistas, the nation’s black citizens are invisible. It is unclear whether Ellison read this poem or Democratic Vistas, though his personal library includes an edition of Whitman’s prose works as well as Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy, a 1941 monograph that mentions “Great Are the Myths.” Such traces of textual history are intriguing. But they are not necessary to appreciate this lineage, for the poet’s impact on Invisible Man is unmistakable.39 Indeed, if Ellison would include Whitman among those nineteenth-​century writers who took “responsibility for the condition of democracy” (CE, 153), as he put it in his National Book Award acceptance speech, the author of Invisible Man also continued the literary practice my study has traced in reconfiguring the premises of Whitman’s tract. Where Democratic Vistas offers a determinate temporal movement in its definition of this political form, declaring as binary postures “to lean back and monarchize” or “to look forward and democratize,” Ellison teaches us that to lean back is a crucial democratic gesture.40 For if the “American tendency” is “toward historical forgetfulness as we move toward and away from our national ideals,” as Ellison maintained, then we must remember that “looking to the future to correct our failures” is a posture that, struck in isolation, surely will fail (CE, 856). In his unfinished novel, published posthumously as Three Days Before the Shooting … , Ellison gave voice to something like this principle when Alonzo Hickman declares that “the deliberate rejection of memory

 

Ep ilog ue

209

which is practiced in this country can be most deadly”—​a threat he figures as “a misguided leap, stumble, or fall.” But the African American preacher-​protagonist goes on to assert that if “forgetfulness can kill,” so too can “memory.” The fall of forgetting is just as risky as “staring at one point … as we look backwards while travelling ahead.”41 If “we live simultaneously in the past and the present,” as Ellison put it elsewhere (CE, 856; original emphasis), then the position required for democratic life is one we might construe as falling back and forward—​or, returning to the revisions to Invisible Man, perhaps just as falling. And yet, Hickman’s formulation also suggests something that we have seen in the foregoing pages: this is a precarious posture to maintain. Representing necessity but also risk for democratic life, falling cuts both ways. With this truth in mind, it is intriguing to consider the action that animates the narrative present of Three Days: the attempted assassination of Adam Sunraider, an ostensibly white man who was reared by Hickman but has fled his past and transformed into a race-​baiting senator. In a mise-​en-​scène that symbolically enacts the democratic problem of generations, Sunraider is shot by his estranged son, Severen, who himself was raised by a black woman. As Severen fires at his father from the balcony of the Senate chamber, Sunraider tries to “fall backwards” to protect himself; strangely, however, he struggles to do so. Offering an inversion of Cliftonian mastery, the narrator notes that “it was as though he were being held erect by an invisible cable.”42 In a section of this scene that Ellison drafted multiple times but never finished, and seems finally to have discarded, we witness this moment from the son’s perspective—​and it is a haunting vista, indeed. As he “plunge[s]‌” himself over the “visitor’s gallery” after firing his last shot, Severen trains his sights on a “shield embossed with eagle and flag” affixed to the balcony (“I must not catch on the seal,” he repeats). While he “anticipated the great shattering and rending that would occur when he struck the floor below,” he realizes that “oddly enough there was no sense of hurry about it.”43 As with the father, the son’s plunge provides not protection but terror. Bringing no final closure, no grand finale that would vindicate his vengeance, the fall only offers temporal confusion (“rendering an orderly succession of impressions impossible”) and induces the anxiety that attends “indefinite suspension”—​or, what Ellison would term in another draft, “the agony of an indefinitely extended moment.”44 In this striking phrase, we can hear the fear of paralysis expressed by Jefferson and Du Bois, and we can sense, too, Whitman’s worry about the “downfalls” of democracy. It accordingly seems easy enough to divine at least one reason that Ellison never finished this fragment, and perhaps also why he seems to have moved away from these two characters more generally as he labored on his novel.45 For even as it foregrounds the terror of temporal disorientation, this episode violates what it finally means to fall in Ellison’s view of democratic life. As he writes of

 

210

Ep ilog ue

Severen’s plunge, there would be “no turning, curving trajectory of flight back.”46 The backward and forward movement that characterizes the falling and plunging of Invisible Man gets stuck in this section about son and father struggling—​and failing—​to confront their pasts, and a nation wrestling with its own. Such a fall, for Ellison, is finally (and essentially) incomplete. For if falling is a motion that has no determinate position, then, as Judge Watson articulates in Contending Forces, it also has no certain end.47 Like those writers whose efforts he continued, Ellison believed that to democratize is to lean back and forward—​looking in both directions always. For only in falling back can we ever hope to fall forward. This may be the most crucial democratic movement of all.

Plunging toward a New Millennium? What might we make of this posture as we enter another decade of the new millennium, the historical epoch that serves as the untimely present tense of Bamboozled? How do we imagine the movement of democracy in our own time? Surely the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency would loom large in any attempt to answer this question: the November 2008 election was widely described as a “new day,” and Obama’s campaign took “change” as a keyword. If Ellison’s own warning against the risk of “looking to the future to correct our failures” suggests one way to read these pronouncements, we might expect the creator of Bamboozled to remain agnostic, at the least, about the prospects promised by this development. But on the morning after the election, in an interview on MSNBC (a network that at one point adopted “lean forward” as a slogan), Lee declared that we are now in a “new day” and a “new America.” Significantly, neither Lee nor the anchor with whom he spoke made reference to Bamboozled, even though Lee seems to have lifted his claim about the nation’s “new dawn” almost directly from the script of his film, muting the irony that inflects the term in that context, if not also implicitly inserting the nation’s first black president into the narrative of steady racial progress so potently probed through the figure of Honeycutt’s blackface Lincoln.48 The historical overlay implied in this image is particularly rich. For it was Lincoln with whom Obama forged a special identification throughout his campaign, from his announcement in Springfield, Illinois, to his emphasis on perfectibility that figured so prominently in the pivotal March 2008 address that we have come to know as “the speech on race.” Prompted by the controversy surrounding his relationship with his longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and delivered amid an intensely competitive Democratic primary, “A More Perfect Union” offered a synoptic account of racial exclusion in the

 

Ep ilog ue

211

United States, beginning with the founding, where, as Obama put it, the “original sin of slavery” “stained” the Constitution.49 This lecture was widely understood as a watershed moment not only in the 2008 presidential campaign but also in the public discourse on race. In a laudatory editorial entitled “Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage,” which appeared the morning after the speech, the New York Times placed the address in the line of pivotal political orations by the likes of Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.50 Whatever we make of such assessments, it seems clear enough that within the context of a nation reticent to speak about race as a socially significant category, let alone about structural racism, “A More Perfect Union” did indeed signal a departure from the status quo. Most important in this regard was the way Obama underscored the explanatory significance of the nation’s history of legally sanctioned white supremacy and black subordination. “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past,” Obama remarked, invoking William Faulkner’s oft-​quoted line to illuminate the uneven topography characterizing the contemporary racial landscape.51 In perhaps the politically riskiest move of the speech, he went on to assert that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-​American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”52 Read from another perspective, however, the historical vision proffered by “A More Perfect Union” hardly broke new ground; indeed, it fits neatly into the tale that Lee and many others told in the wake of the 2008 election. For even as he emphasized the persistence of the racial past, Obama hewed to an utterly conventional narrative of perfectibility, progress, and improvement telegraphed in the iconic lines he selected for his speech’s title. In this story, America, despite its flaws, over time advances ever closer to the realization of a democracy that can secure liberty and equality for all citizens. This is the “long march” of which Obama speaks—​a turn of phrase that conjures not just a connection between his own campaign and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights crusade but the telos to which both these moments in history point.53 The candidate acknowledged that this work is not without its detours and setbacks—​a point he continued to make as president. At the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, for instance, Obama described “America” as “a constant work in progress.” “It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo,” as the leaders of the Civil Rights movement did. But he reminded those assembled in front of the Edmund Pettis Bridge that the idea of a “fair America, an inclusive America … ultimately triumphed.” Offsetting the finality of that past-​tense verb just slightly, he went on, “Our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer.”54 If Ellison has influenced Obama, as the latter’s Dreams from My Father (1995) indicates, the temporal insights of Invisible Man have rarely informed the public comments

 

212

Ep ilog ue

made by candidate and President Obama; Ellison’s warning about the “processes” behind pronouncements of “progress” seems more apt.55 For in Obama’s narrative, the march may not yet be over, but it is always progressing—​and this fact is both inevitable and essential. Against this backdrop, the threat that the Reverend Wright represented in 2008—​ and not just to Obama’s presidential bid—​ comes into relief. Notwithstanding the sophisticated portrait of the (not necessarily linear) relationship between past and present he painted in the speech, Obama nonetheless rested his denunciation of Wright’s racial epistemology on the pastor’s irreverent, even distorted, concept of time. Wright’s “profound mistake” was “not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Obama explained. “It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.” In giving voice to the afterlife of slavery, Wright conveyed what, in Obama’s rendering, was an anachronistic vision.56 Refusing to allow the tempos of linear time to propel his political agitation, Wright expressed a haunting stasis that constituted the underside of Obama’s narrative of democratic progress. If the complicated intersections among race, politics, and temporality manifested themselves with a particular (albeit passing) clarity in the course of the 2008 presidential primary, reaching their polemical peak in “A More Perfect Union,” Untimely Democracy has shown that they have a long backstory. As we have seen, Pauline Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Callie House, and others navigated the territory into which Obama was thrust as they struggled to underscore the living past of slavery when the end of Reconstruction in 1877 officially closed the book on this chapter of history. Collectively, their writings ask what the story of American democracy might look like if we were to heed the troubling temporality that Wright articulates, attending to those moments when the march of racial progress seems to slow, stutter, or even cease. What prospects exist for democracy when the very notion of a prospect—​a present and future different from the past—​is uncertain? To put the question most broadly, can we imagine the movement of democracy following something other than the regularized rhythms of progressive time? Hopkins, House, Douglass, and their contemporaries therefore have much to teach us not just about the postbellum politics of racial progress but also about the political system that structures our own present-​past. To be sure, Barack Obama’s election to the presidency eight months after he delivered “A More Perfect Union” is itself now history, if not yet a mundane date in the national timeline. But whether his victory also signaled the triumph of his narrative of democracy’s progress (and whether we would want it to) remains an open question. As the forerunners of Wright, if you will, the figures populating the previous pages can help us to imagine a potential response. For their writings point toward an alternative vision of the relation between temporality and democratic possibility that we would do well to contemplate—​still—​in this new millennium.

 

NOTES

Introduction 1. [Walt Whitman], Leaves of Grass, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1855; repr., New  York:  Penguin, 1986), 48; Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, ed. Ed Folsom (1871; repr., Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 26, 37, 4, 37. Further references to Democratic Vistas are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Carlyle’s essay first appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1867 and was published in the New York Tribune on August 16, 1867, from which the quoted passage comes. 3. In his introduction to Democratic Vistas, Ed Folsom calls it a “stunning avoidance” (xliv). While this omission is striking, it is not altogether uncharacteristic of Whitman’s approach. As Folsom has argued elsewhere, although Whitman often contemplated race in private conversations and in his manuscripts and notebooks, he “systematically erased race from his published writings”; see “Erasing Race: The Lost Black Presence in Whitman’s Manuscripts,” in Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, ed. Ivy G. Wilson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 3–​31, quoted phrase on 3. 4. Ivy G. Wilson, in Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 80–​99, engages the nationalistic dimensions of Whitman’s elisions, whereas Thomas F. Haddox, in “Whitman’s End of History:  ‘As I  Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shore,’ Democratic Vistas, and the Postbellum Politics of Nostalgia,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 22 (2004): 1–​22, underscores their temporal contours. Betsy Erkkila notes Hegel’s influence on the pamphlet’s historical vision in Whitman the Political Poet (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1989), 248–​49. On the postwar “conservative turn” in Whitman’s thinking about black Americans, see David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 468–​74; for the position that the poet maintained white supremacist assumptions across his career, see Martin Klammer, “Slavery and Race,” in A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings (Malden, MA: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2009), 101–​21. Luke Mancuso’s analysis of Democratic Vistas in the context of legislative debates produces a more positive reading of Whitman’s engagement with questions of racial equality; see The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman, Reconstruction, and the Emergence of Black Citizenship (Columbia, SC:  Camden House, 1997), 51–​76. Wilson’s Whitman Noir assembles important critical and creative reflections on the writer’s fraught relationship to African Americans; see especially Christopher Freeburg’s essay, “Walt Whitman, James Weldon Johnson, and the Violent Paradox of US Progress,” 82–​103. 5. Erkkila’s claim that the vision of the future in Democratic Vistas paradoxically rests on Whitman’s call for a “return” to the “ideal republic of Jefferson” is especially intriguing; as we will see, a distinguishing feature of both thinkers’ political philosophies is the relentless futurity they associate with democracy, especially when they contemplate bondage. Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet, 256. Also noting Hegel’s influence on Whitman, Cody Marrs 213

 

214

Note s to pag e s 3 – 5

argues that the “Civil War threatened to destroy” the poet’s “vision of a harmonious present,” so he “shifted this harmony off to the future,” fashioning the war as “the prime moment in democracy’s historical advance.” See Marrs, Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 50, 42. 6. Frederick Douglass, 1880 speech on West Indian Emancipation, in Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 930, 937. 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; repr., New York: Norton, 1999), 27. For this formulation, I thank Chris Hager. 8. I owe this account of a “third way” to my anonymous reviewer. 9. See Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York: Viking, 1990). See also Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 10. On the technical innovations involved in clock manufacturing, see David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 339–​46. Alexis McCrossen details the relationship between public timekeepers and government authority in “‘Conventions of Simultaneity’:  Time Standards, Public Clocks, and Nationalism in American Cities and Towns, 1871–​1905,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 2 (2007): 217–​53; and Marking Modern Times, 114–​42. For an analysis of the cultural work of clock time in the nineteenth-​century United States, see Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century America (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 59–​113; and O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 172–​99. On the relationship between clock time and capitalism, see E. P. Thompson’s classic essay, “Time, Work-​Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–​ 97. Unsettling the conception of the antebellum South as premodern and precapitalist, Mark M. Smith investigates timekeeping practices in the context of the slave plantation in Mastered by the Clock:  Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 11. O’Malley, Keeping Watch, ix. For an extended treatment of the cultural and scientific forces at work in this transformation, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–​1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 12. McCrossen, “‘Conventions of Simultaneity,’” quote on 221; see also McCrossen, Marking Modern Times, 149–​51. 13. The emergence of standard time in 1883 occurred without congressional intervention; it received legal sanction only in 1918. See O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 61–​70, 73–​98, 100–​ 130; and Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-​Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1–​2, 20, 24–​31. Still, McCrossen shows that the government, along with corporations, supported this process of time standardization. “‘Conventions of Simultaneity,’” esp. 223. 14. On opposition to standardized time, see O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 130–​44. Allen emphasizes that even as clocks became widely available commodities in this era, they did not necessarily underwrite the consolidation of a homogenous national temporality but instead enabled multiple ways of imagining time. Republic in Time, 61. 15. Allen, Republic in Time; Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-​ Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). See also Jeffrey Insko’s book in progress, The Ever-​Present Now: Time, History, and Antebellum American Writing. 16. Pratt, Archives of American Time, 41; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 17. Notable exceptions include Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties:  Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-​Century America (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2013); and Marrs, Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Long Civil War. In Time, Tense, and American Literature: When Is Now? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Cindy Weinstein reads across literary history, forging striking connections between periods and authors; see in particular her examination of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World in relation to nineteenth-​ century slave narratives (108–​36). With its focus on “occult time,” Susan Gillman’s Blood

 



Note s to pag e s 5 –9

215

Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) might well be deemed a forerunner of the temporal turn. 18. See Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought:  The Nadir, 1877–​1901 (New  York:  Dial Press, 1954); and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race:  Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 19. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion:  The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 63. See also Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 126–​29. 20. Blight, Race and Reunion, 107. 21. Ibid., 138; see also Eric Foner, Reconstruction:  America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–​1877 (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), 582–​93. 22. Rutherford B. Hayes, Inaugural Address, March 5, 1877, in Rutherford B. Hayes, 1822–​1893, ed. Arthur Bishop (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1969), 31, 30, 31. 23. As Smith aptly articulates it, “the standardization of time in America represented the temporal destruction of sectionalism based on the North-​South axis, replacing it with, if not a wholly homogenized America, at least an America where the differences between East and West were greater, by about three hours, than the time difference between North and South.” Mastered by the Clock, 178. 24. Logan, Negro in American Life and Thought. 25. Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard, eds., Post-​Bellum, Pre-​Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–​1919 (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2, 1, 2. As McCaskill and Gebhard write, this period has been referred to variously as “the Age of Lynching and Jim Crow,” the “Age of Accommodation,” “the Age of Du Bois,” and the “Age of Washington” (2–​3). They take their volume’s title from a 1931 essay by Charles W. Chesnutt, “Post-​Bellum—​Pre-​Harlem,” in Stories, Novels, and Essays, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Library of America, 2002), 906–​12. In the preface to his 1954 study, Logan himself noted the applicability of another phrase: “The Dark Ages of Recent American History.” Negro in American Life and Thought, x. He similarly offered other possibilities in the preface to the revised edition of his book, which appeared in 1965: “a low, rugged plateau” and “The Long Dark Night.” Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), 11. The precise historical parameters of the “nadir” have also been differently defined. Indeed, already in 1965, Logan contemplated whether the periodization he originally proposed warranted expansion. Betrayal of the Negro, 11. 26. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “nadir,” http://​www.oed.com. 27. Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. 28. My gratitude goes to Daylanne English for some of this language. 29. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 8. 30. On this point, see Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” symplokē 6, no. 1 (1998): 40. 31. Alex[ander] Crummell, Africa and America: Addresses and Discourses (Springfield, MA: Wiley & Co., 1891), 14. 32. Ibid., 18, 17; original emphasis. 33. Benjamin Harrison, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1889, in Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, comp. Charles Hedges (New York: Lovell, Coryell & Company, 1892), 197. 34. Crummell, Africa and America, 18. 35. As Peter J. Bowler explains, one consequence of such developmental scales was the notion of “living fossils,” a term used to designate, and dismiss as destined to disappear, groups of humans that supposedly had not advanced at the same pace as the white race. The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 83–​84. On the emergence of geology in the nineteenth-​century United States, see Allen, Republic in Time, 150–​56, 165–​73. Dana Luciano helpfully glosses the specifically racial implications of geological time when she notes how this modality came to “support an emergent temporalization of racial difference.” “Tracking Prehistory,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 3, no. 1 (2015): 176. For a survey of scientific racism, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black

 

216

Note s to pag e s 9 – 1 2

Image in the White Mind:  The Debate on Afro-​American Character and Destiny, 1817–​1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 228–​55. 36. Crummell, Africa and America, 13, iv. 37. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 132–​33; see also Blight’s reading of the speech on 129–​31. Wilson Jeremiah Moses offers an extended treatment of the complicated relationship between Douglass and Crummell in Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T.  Washington, W.  E. B.  Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103–​20. 38. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-​Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 200–​201, quoted passage on 200. 39. My definition here draws on Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 4–​5, quoted phrase on 4; Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 110; and Dona Richards, “European Mythology: The Ideology of ‘Progress,’” in Contemporary Black Thought: Alternative Analyses in Social and Behavioral Science, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Abdulai S. Vandi (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), 65. 40. See Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation:  African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 7–​8. 41. For a survey of “progress” in nineteenth-​century African American politics and letters, with a focus on Douglass’s and Crummell’s uses of the term, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 96–​135. On slavery and progress at the founding of the United States, see William M. Wiecek, “‘The Blessings of Liberty’:  Slavery in the American Constitutional Order,” in Slavery and Its Consequences:  The Constitution, Equality, and Race, ed. Robert A. Goldwin and Art Kaufman (Washington, DC:  American Enterprise for Public Policy Research, 1988), 23–​44. 42. See Richards, “European Mythology,” 65. 43. David Scott, Omens of Adversity:  Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2014), 5; original emphasis. For an examination of the moral and the temporal in historiography, see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 84. 44. W. H. Crogman and H. F. Kletzing, Progress of a Race; or, the Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-​American, from the Bondage of Slavery, Ignorance and Poverty to the Freedom of Citizenship, Intelligence, Affluence, Honor and Trust (Atlanta: J. L. Nichols & Co., 1898); Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams, and N. B. Wood, A New Negro for a New Century: An Accurate and Up-​to-​Date Record of the Upward Struggles of the Negro Race (Chicago: American Publishing House, 1900); G. F. Richings, Evidences of Progress among Colored People, 12th ed. (Philadelphia: Geo. S. Ferguson Co., 1905). On these and similar studies, see Blight, Race and Reunion, 332–​34; and John S. Haller Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–​1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 207–​8. 45. Kletzing and Crogman, Progress of a Race, 605. 46. See Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 221. 47. John G. Jones, Some Foot-​Steps of the Progress of the Colored Race (Chicago, 1899), 89. 48. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, ed. William L. Andrews (1901; repr., New York: Norton, 1996), 145; “epistemology of ignorance” comes from Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 97. 49. John Ernest, Chaotic Justice:  Rethinking African American Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25; M. Giulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Gillman, Blood Talk. In The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2011), James Smethurst places the literature of the nadir into dialogue with works by both black and white modernists. Eric Gardner, Unexpected Places:  Relocating Nineteenth-​ Century African American Literature ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009) and Wilson, Specters of Democracy are also signal contributions to the project of rethinking nineteenth-​century black writing. Much of

 



Note s to pag e s 1 2 – 15

217

this work, especially that which focuses on late nineteenth-​century African American literature, is indebted to Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–​1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 50. My phrasing here riffs on Frances Smith Foster’s claim that we too often treat early African American literature as if it were “more valuable as artifact than artistry” and Caroline Gebhard’s challenge to critics of nineteenth-​century black America not to divide “women’s activism” from “men’s art.” See Foster’s introduction to her edited volume, Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1994), xx; and Gebhard, comment delivered at “Post-​Bellum, Pre-​ Harlem at 10: Unsettling Nineteenth-​Century African American Studies,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists, State College, PA, March 17, 2016. 51. For instance, in his foundational study, Bruce somewhat tentatively praises these dimensions as the intriguing “tensions and ambiguities” that “defy systemization.” Black American Writing from the Nadir, xi. 52. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15; emphasis added. Attending to this passage, Daylanne K. English argues that Hopkins “connects repetition, regression, and oppression to state power.” As I will explain more fully in c­ hapter 5, my interest lies in recovering how Hopkins deploys those first two terms—​“repetition” and “regression”—​as conceptual and narrative tools for political empowerment. See English, Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 73. 53. W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 131. The memory of slavery has been a central topic in African American literary and cultural studies over the past few decades, particularly in work that focuses on the post–​Civil Rights period. The bibliography is vast, but Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s contributions are crucial; see his Neo-​Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). In her important Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–​Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), Salamishah Tillet analyzes the politics and aesthetics of contemporary African American authors and artists’ renderings of chattel servitude. Elegantly extending scholarship by Rushdy, among others, Tillet shows how recalling the memory of bondage validates the political status of black Americans and thereby writes these individuals into the discursive and visual privileges of citizenship. 54. Du Bois, Souls, 15; emphasis added. 55. In Crafting Equality:  America’s Anglo-​African Word (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1993), Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites encourage an understanding of political rhetoric as a “distinct contributor or innovative participant” in political deliberation rather than merely an “effect of political philosophy” (xvi). 56. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 4. 57. Callie House to Harrison Barrett, acting assistant attorney general of the Post Office Department, April 5, 1900, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Office of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, “Fraud Order” Case Files, 1894–​1951, File 1321, April 1900. 58. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2004), 58–​59, 58. 59. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 262, 263. 60. Luciano, Arranging Grief, 186; Benjamin, “Theses,” 261. 61. See, for instance, Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic:  Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Luciano and Pratt also deploy the model of messianic time in their readings of African American literature; see Luciano, Arranging Grief, 180–​87; and Pratt, Archives of American Time, 178–​86. 62. My formulation here is indebted to Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 156–​68.

 

218

Note s to pag e s 1 6 – 2 3

63. Benjamin, “Theses,” 263. 64. I allude to Lee Edelman’s interrogation of the image of the child as it is deployed in political debate; see No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Queer studies has been one of the temporal turn’s most vibrant subfields. See, for instance, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–​3 (2007): 177–​95; and Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For examples of how these commitments have been taken up in nineteenth-​century Americanist scholarship, see Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties; Luciano, Arranging Grief; and Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). 65. Pratt’s important observation that antebellum black Americans “experienced time as simultaneously progressive and recursive” thus holds true for the postbellum texts I examine. Archives of American Time, 185. 66. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Colored American Magazine, November 1900, and “Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges,” Colored American Magazine, October 1902, in Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, ed. Ira Dworkin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 22, 195. 67. Frederick Douglass, “At Last, at Last, the Black Man Has a Future,” in A Just and Lasting Peace:  A  Documentary History of Reconstruction, ed. John David Smith (New  York:  Signet, 2013), 374; “In Law Free; In Fact, a Slave,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1992), ser. 1, 5:363. 68. Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics:  Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2009), 49. 69. Scott, Omens of Adversity, 36; original emphasis. 70. Sutton E. Griggs, The Hindered Hand: or, The Reign of the Repressionist, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Orion Publishing Company, 1905), 285; emphasis added. On the political stakes of “stuckness,” see Anne Anlin Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” differences:  A  Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2009): 91. On this score, though I share Dorothy Stringer’s interest in attending to elisions between “expressions of anti-​black racism and the deathly dehumanizations of slavery,” our projects diverge in the senses of stasis we deploy. Where Stringer argues that “when … distinction fails, narration freezes, individuals lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and politics fail,” I hold that it is precisely those static moments where the potential for untimely democracy begins. See Stringer, “Not Even Past”:  Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 3. 71. Brown, Politics out of History, 150. 72. Exchanges with Peter Carafiol and Dominic Mastroianni have enabled me to articulate this piece of my project. Gillman pursues a parallel emphasis on the relationship among past, present, and future in her account of “occult time” in Blood Talk, 204. 73. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 42. 74. See Freeman’s critique of the progressive temporality implicit in generational paradigms in Time Binds, 65. 75. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60. My formulation also draws on Samuel A. Chambers, Untimely Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 3. 76. Du Bois, Souls, 32. 77. Ibid., 33. 78. Anthony Reed, Freedom Time:  The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 209. Though Reed focuses on a different period, his attentiveness to the way literature, through its formal techniques, engenders alternative modes of thinking and being in the world offers a useful template for creating a more complex sense of the politics of the late nineteenth-​century works I study here. Perhaps the primary difference between Reed’s “freedom time” and my sense of “untimely democracy” is these concepts’ relation to the future. Where the former conjures the “projected time of the

 



Note s to pag e s 2 3 – 25

219

encounter,” a “place that is always just out of reach and away from view until the advent of genuine human freedom,” in Reed’s words (9, 10), the latter holds that the best way to secure a better future is to remain skeptical of its arrival. 79. Luciano, Arranging Grief, 211. See also Calvin Warren, “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness,” in The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, ed. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-​Hussen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 55–​68. 80. Elizabeth Duquette, Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-​Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 4; see also Duquette’s meditation on 219–​22. For more on this neglect of the second half of the century, see my “Post Transbellum?,” Common-​place 17, no. 1 (2016), http://​common-​place.org/​book/​post-​ transbellum/​. 81. Marrs, Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, 152. In what is perhaps one of his study’s most important contributions, Marrs offers a concise institutional history of how the prefixes “ante” and “post” have influenced periodizing practices. Pointing us first to the etymology of “antebellum” and “postbellum” within the field of “international law,” where they served to regulate claims of property and land transfer in the context of martial conflict (1), Marrs goes on to assert that the terms accordingly “promoted fictions of erasure that enabled both sides to pretend either that the war had never really happened, or that history began anew with its completion” (2). When the designation “antebellum” was deployed after the Civil War in the American context, Marrs writes, it tended to “describe something that was both Southern and outmoded” (159n3). It was not until the twentieth century and the founding of American literature as a field of study in the Cold War era that the concept of a “national antebellum literature” emerged. Indeed, “antebellum” gained traction as a result of the New Americanist critique of the narrow canon promulgated by F. O. Matthiessen and the other founders of the field. As Marrs puts it, “the New Americanists effectively replaced an authorial canon with a periodic canon, encapsulated by the terms ‘antebellum’ and ‘postbellum’” (160n3; original emphasis). On this topic, see also Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (2013): 259–​84. 82. Marrs, Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, 131. 83. Jeffrey Insko, “Anachronistic Imaginings: Hope Leslie’s Challenge to Historicism,” American Literary History 16, no. 2 (2004): 182. 84. The work of Jennifer L. Fleissner and Jeffrey Insko stands out in this regard. See Fleissner, “When the Symptom Becomes a Resource,” American Literary History 20, no. 3 (2008): 640–​ 55; and “Historicism Blues,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (2013):  699–​717; Insko, “Anachronistic Imaginings”; and “The Prehistory of Posthistoricism,” in The Limits of Literary Historicism, ed. Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), 105–​23. See also Russ Castronovo, “Death to the American Renaissance:  History, Heidegger, Poe,” ESQ:  A  Journal of the American Renaissance 49, nos. 1–​3 (2003):  179–​ 92; Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents:  American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 123–​41; and Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others, 127–​30. 85. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History:  The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 91. 86. Insko, “Prehistory of Posthistoricism,” 107, 108; Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-​Century United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 221. 87. Jeffrey Insko, “Prospects for the Present,” American Literary History 26, no. 4 (2014): 847. 88. Freeman, Time Binds, xi. 89. Weinstein, Time, Tense, and American Literature, 8. Weinstein’s method participates in the return to close reading that (happily) characterizes much recent work in literary criticism; Marjorie Levinson issues a lay-​of-​the-land report on the various dimensions of this movement in “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 558–​69. For examples of this sort of work focused on historical and temporal concerns, see Peter Coviello’s Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University

 

220

Note s to pag e s 2 5 – 2 7

of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Tomorrow’s Parties. See also Freeman, Time Binds. The essays collected in Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) make a compelling case for how this mode of reading intersects productively with historical and political concerns; see especially Nancy Bentley’s contribution, “Warped Conjunctions: Jacques Rancière and African American Twoness,” 291–​312. See also Ivy G. Wilson and Dana Luciano, eds., Unsettled States: Nineteenth-​Century American Literary Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 90. See Mark Currie, About Time:  Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), as well as his Postmodern Narrative Theory (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), esp. 1–​6, 73–​95. 91. Wilson, Specters of Democracy, esp. 6–​7. 92. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus:  On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Steven Corcoran (London:  Continuum, 2010), 136–​40. In addition to Rancière, see C.  Douglas Lummis’s important arguments about democracy as “a creative enterprise” in Radical Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 156–​60, quote on 160. Reed nicely articulates a core principle animating my approach to the politics of aesthetics when he notes in Freedom Time that “literature produces its own acts of theory” (9). 93. Luciano, Arranging Grief; Pratt, Archives of American Time; Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others. See also Insko, “Anachronistic Imaginings.” 94. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race:  Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in Nineteenth-​Century America (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1997); and Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2000). See also Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies:  Making Post-​Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010). Recent work in performance studies has also taken up the relationship between race and temporality; see, for example, Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). See also the brilliant interrogation of what it would mean to “get over slavery” that takes place across the chapters of Colbert, Patterson, and Levy-​Hussen’s edited volume, The Psychic Hold of Slavery; especially trenchant is Levy-​ Hussen’s “Trauma and the Historical Turn in Black Literary Discourse,” 195–​211. 95. See English, Each Hour Redeem, 158–​69, esp. 161. 96. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance:  Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), ix. 97. See, in order, Christopher Castiglia, Interior States:  Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2008); Wilson, Specters of Democracy; Castronovo, Necro Citizenship; Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Jennifer Greiman, Democracy’s Spectacle:  Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2010). Castronovo’s Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) moves the discussion of democracy beyond the antebellum period on which the above works focus. Three excellent recent books will ensure that the conversation about democracy in the nineteenth century continues in vibrant fashion: Stacey Margolis, Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century America (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015); Nelson, Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); and Lloyd Pratt, The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See also the contributions to my J19 forum, coedited with D. Berton Emerson, “‘Democracy’ in the American Nineteenth Century,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 5, no. 2 (2017).

 



Note s to pag e s 2 7 – 30

221

98. Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2006), 47. 99. Nick Bromell, The Time Is Always Now:  Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 149. 100. Stephen Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2012): 472; emphasis added. 101. Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness:  Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 25. 102. Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” 454; Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 103. Wright, Physics of Blackness, 8, 14, 23. Invoking some of the late nineteenth-​century authors I examine, Wright notes that defining racial identity “through a linear progress narrative and thus underscoring Black achievement and drive makes good sense, especially when one considers the oppressively racist conditions under which ‘Blackness’ was first invented by Western thinkers” (43). But when Wright holds that figures like Crummell, Du Bois, Griggs, and others articulate a “Middle Passage epistemology” in an effort to “graph the antiprogressive thrust of white Western politics and practices,” constituting a “history of defiance and collective uplift” (43–​44), the twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century focus of her book necessarily limits her ability to flesh out the complexities of “progress” as an idea and rhetorical practice within the richly complicated historical moment of the nadir. Indeed, in my reading, many of these authors share Wright’s important interest in proliferating the timelines through which we conceive the category of blackness, even as they remain committed to the “Middle Passage epistemology” that she challenges as an exclusive frame for reflections on this topic.

Chapter 1 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; repr., New York: Norton, 1999), 17. Further references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Henry Louis Gates Jr., preface to Souls, vii. 3. In an important departure from this trend, Russ Castronovo, in “Within the Veil of Interdisciplinary Knowledge? Jefferson, Du Bois, and the Negation of Politics,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 781–​804, casts these writers as the key figures in a critique of the interdisciplinary interpretive methods associated with American Studies. In Castronovo’s estimation, Jefferson and Du Bois are finally more different than alike, with Notes representing the foreclosure of dissensus and Souls embodying the possibility of a more liberatory democratic politics. My thanks to him for his generous feedback on this chapter. The historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses briefly compares the political philosophies of Du Bois and Jefferson, arguing that the author of Souls has more in common with Alexander Hamilton on the basis of their shared theory of strong federal government; see Creative Conflict in African American Thought:  Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T.  Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 205. Michael Hardt has turned to Jefferson’s work as a resource for his theorization of radical politics; see his “Jefferson and Democracy,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2007): 41–​78; and “Thomas Jefferson, or, the Transition of Democracy,” in The Declaration of Independence, ed. Michael Hardt (London: Verso, 2007), vii–​x xv. For important responses to Hardt, see Betsy Erkkila, “Radical Jefferson,” American Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2007): 277–​89; and Barry Shank, “Jefferson, the Impossible,” American Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2007): 291–​99. The political theorist Anthony Bogues identifies in Du Bois’s work, specifically Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–​1880 (1935), an opportunity to “rethink race and democracy in America” by focusing on the traumatic legacy of slavery. Bogues pairs Du Bois with Alexis de Tocqueville in his analysis of Black Reconstruction in Empire of Liberty:  Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 38–​65, quote on 47. 4. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom:  The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975; repr., New York: Norton, 1995), 6.

 

222

Note s to pag e s 3 1 – 3 4

5. Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past:  Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1. 6. Salamishah Tillet pursues a parallel set of questions in her Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–​Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), which focuses on how contemporary black writers and intellectuals confront the afterlife of bondage. 7. For the classic statement, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey:  A  Theory of African-​American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). On the aesthetics and politics of abolitionism, see Michael Bennett, Democratic Discourses: The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2005). 8. Roumiana Velikova, for example, argues that the Declaration’s “universality only opens an empty political space which is there to be claimed,” and so Du Bois “claims its lofty ideals for his people.” See “W. E. B. Du Bois vs. ‘The Sons of the Fathers’: A Reading of The Souls of Black Folk in the Context of American Nationalism,” African American Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 439. For an account of American literary history in which willful contestations of the Declaration’s meaning occupy a central role in the realization of democracy, see Frank Kelleter, “A Dialectics of Radical Enlightenment,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 98–​103. 9. Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1061, 1068. See, in addition, Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2006). In “Death to the American Renaissance:  History, Heidegger, Poe,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 49, nos. 1–​3 (2003): 179–​92, Russ Castronovo also explores temporality in relation to the democratic powers of literature. 10. Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question:  Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10, 39; original emphasis. On the idea of “democratic openness” in Du Bois in particular, see Melvin L. Rogers, “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect:  On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (2012): 188–​203. 11. On this point, see Keenan’s meditation on the “risks” of “backward-​looking responsibility or accountability for past injustices.” Democracy in Question, 232n44. On the productive political functions of “stuckness,” see Anne Anlin Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2009): 91. 12. Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2011), 146, 1, 146. 13. Ibid., 84. As Warren explains in a companion piece, the claim that the black literary tradition has concluded “should occasion no lament … because the society that gave us what we know as African-​American literature is a society that black Americans did not want then and certainly don’t want now.” “Does African-​American Literature Exist?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 24, 2011, http://​chronicle.com/​article/​Does-​African-​American/​ 126483/​. 14. Warren, What Was African American Literature?, 147. Despite the productively provocative questions Warren raises about the intersections of literature and politics, the various responses to his study curiously have overlooked the temporal presumptions underwriting his sense of “democracy.” For helpful gestures in this direction, see the comments by John Ernest and Sharon P. Holland in “Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, the State of the Field in the New Millennium,” the forum Melissa Asher Daniels and I coordinated in African American Review 44, no. 4 (2011): 567–​91. See also Avram Alpert, “Epochs, Elephants, and Parts: On the Concept of History in Literary Studies,” diacritics 42, no. 4 (2014): 26–​42. My thanks to Daylanne English for giving me the language to clarify my claims in this section. 15. Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1068. 16. Jefferson includes the draft of the Declaration in his 1821 Autobiography; for the quoted passage, see Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New  York:  Library of America, 1984), 19, 22. Unless otherwise noted, future references to Jefferson’s work are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

 



Note s to pag e s 3 5 – 40

223

17. Du Bois does discuss the draft in his doctoral thesis, which was published as The Suppression of the African Slave-​ Trade to the United States of America, 1638–​ 1870 (1896; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34. 18. See Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 19. Eric Foner, Reconstruction:  America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–​ 1877 (1988; repr., New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), 278–​80, 528, 579–​82, 587–​88. 20. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, ed. William L. Andrews (1901; repr., New York: Norton, 1996), 107. 21. Arnold Rampersad reads the chapter on Washington as “the key to the book’s political intent”; see The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 81. 22. I  echo the legal scholar Jed Rubenfeld’s claim that Jefferson authors a “second declaration of independence.” However, I read Jefferson as seeking liberation not from “time itself,” as Rubenfeld puts it, but more specifically from the burdens of previous generations. That is, Jefferson is not so much invested in living outside time as he is in a particular vision of time. See Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-​Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 18. 23. Judith N. Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 138. 24. My understanding of this dimension of Jefferson’s political philosophy has been shaped by the following sources: Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball, introduction to Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), xxv; Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1984), esp. 19–​29; Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time, 18–​22; Frank Shuffelton, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank Shuffelton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–​11; Herbert Sloan, “‘The Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living,’” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 1993), 281–​315; Janna Thompson, Intergenerational Justice: Rights and Responsibilities in an Intergenerational Polity (New York: Routledge, 2009), 6–​7; and Maurizio Valsania, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 61. Garrett Ward Sheldon does not attend to the theory of generational autonomy in his otherwise comprehensive survey of Jefferson’s political thought, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 25. W. James Booth, “The Work of Memory: Time, Identity, and Justice,” Social Research 75, no. 1 (2008): 256–​57. 26. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1776; repr., New  York:  Penguin, 1986), 120. 27. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (1840; repr., New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 2:507. 28. On the shifts in Du Bois’s thinking about race and democracy in the latter part of his career, see Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World:  W.  E. B.  Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Hannah Spahn traces Jefferson’s meditations on temporality throughout his career in Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2011). Spahn offers an insightful analysis of Jefferson’s understanding of the “timing of abolition” on 13, 178–​84. 29. Marbois circulated the questions to members of the Continental Congress in 1780. Joseph Jones, a representative from Virginia, forwarded the Frenchman’s questionnaire to Jefferson, who was serving as the state’s governor. On the complex publication history of the book, see William Peden’s introduction to his edition of Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), xi–​x xi. For the original list of questions, see “Marbois’ Queries concerning Virginia,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 4:166–​67. Hereafter cited as PTJ. 30. See Robert A. Ferguson, “‘Mysterious Obligation’: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” American Literature 52, no. 3 (1980): 388.

 

224

Note s to pag e s 4 0 – 4 5

31. On Jefferson’s attachment to “sentimental” time—​his desire to “prolong and retain moments of lived experience for their own sake”—​see Spahn, Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, 77. On Jefferson’s “critical optimism” about the future, see Valsania, Limits of Optimism, from which I take the phrase “assured faith” (56). My thanks to Ben Railton for pointing me to this source. Appleby and Ball underscore the significance of a linear, progressive view of temporality to Jefferson’s thinking in their introduction to Political Writings, xxv. For a general treatment of temporality in Jefferson’s era, see Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 32. On the importance of this section of Notes to antebellum African American texts, see John Ernest, Liberation Historiography:  African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–​1861 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 88–​89; and Gene Andrew Jarrett, Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 21–​47, esp. 38–​45. 33. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black:  American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–​1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 53–​54, 60, 73, 98. 34. Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief:  Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-​Century America (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2007), 50; original emphasis. In bringing the question of temporality to the much-​discussed subject of Jefferson’s position on slavery, Luciano usefully departs from critical approaches that seek to condemn the author of Notes for his commitment to democratic ideals, on the one hand, and his complicity with racial bondage, on the other. See, for instance, Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders:  Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), esp. 129–​96. For a more charitable reading of the role of slavery in Jefferson’s private and public lives, see John C. Miller, “Slavery,” in Thomas Jefferson:  A  Reference Biography, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), 417–​35. But note that Miller’s claim that Jefferson did not carry on a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings has been disproven. 35. In a letter to his nephew (and son-​in-​law) John Wayles Eppes dated June 24, 1813, Jefferson uses the language of rights and natural law to describe the principle of generational autonomy: “The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead. The will and the power of man expire with his life, by nature’s law. … We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country” (1280–​81). 36. Here I draw on and modify Sloan’s formulation in “‘Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living,’” 281, 282. 37. Among these, Madison included the potential instability of such a “mutable” government and the problem of public debts incurred for “improvements” made by a previous generation but enjoyed by its successor. See James Madison to Jefferson, February 4, 1790, in PTJ (1961), 16:147–​50, quotes on 148. 38. Ecclesiastes 1:9 (King James Version). 39. Spahn, Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, 190. 40. My thinking here is influenced by Rubenfeld, who interprets Jefferson’s thesis as suggesting that present citizens ought to act in a way that respects the fact that “the earth … will belong to future generations tomorrow just as it belongs to [them] today.” See Freedom and Time, 22. 41. See Valsania, Limits of Optimism, 85–​113; and Spahn, Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, 177. 42. This is not to suggest that Jefferson was opposed to rebellion per se; to the contrary, the right of the people to resist authority was a crucial dimension of his political philosophy and a power that Jefferson believed should be exercised regularly. See, for instance, Jefferson to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787, in Writings, 889–​90; and Jefferson to William S. Smith, November 13, 1787, in Writings, 910–​12. Hardt examines Jefferson’s conception of periodic rebellion as a vital source that continually renews democracy in “Thomas Jefferson, or, The Transition of Democracy,” vii–​x xv. 43. See John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Free Press, 1977), 61–​62, 102. 44. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “convulsion,” http://​www.oed.com.

 



Note s to pag e s 4 6 – 50

225

45. See John S. Haller Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–​ 1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), ix; and Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose:  Natural History in Early America (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2009), 78, 110. Katy L.  Chiles explains that Jefferson’s concept of race was an outlier amid eighteenth-​century environmentalist accounts in her Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–​30, esp. 16–​17. Luciano notes that for Jefferson “the difference of the black body was a matter of time,” though her focus is on his comments about the irregular temporal patterns of black mourning and loss that appear later in this query; see Arranging Grief, 48–​49, quoted passage on 48. Sylvester Johnson’s account of the “political body” in Jefferson’s thought illuminates the relationship between politics and race in Notes; see “Monstrosity, Colonialism, and the Racial State,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 3, no. 1 (2015): 187. Thanks to Marcy Dinius, Michael Drexler, and Katy Chiles for helpful comments on this dimension of Notes. 46. Jefferson to St. George Tucker, August 28, 1797, in Appleby and Ball, Political Writings, 486. Spahn notes the gap between Jefferson’s apocalyptic rhetoric and his political inaction on abolition; see Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, 179. 47. I  add a focus on the future threat posed by African Americans to Catherine A.  Holland’s important formulation in The Body Politic:  Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2001), 39. 48. Peter Coviello understands the reasons motivating Jefferson’s plan to colonize black Americans after emancipation differently. According to Coviello, blackness in Notes functions as a mark of the “stigma of innate dependence,” a mark that the African American cannot escape, “regardless of circumstance,” “because the mere fact of his blackness will always announce it.” “And since the dependent citizen is an infection, a sore on the healthy body of the virtuously republican nation, it makes a tortured kind of sense for Jefferson to banish all blacks.” See Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 42, 42–​43. It is true that Jefferson could not imagine blacks as future citizens for this reason, but I would interpret the dynamic Coviello identifies as a subset of Jefferson’s much larger concern. For the writer could foresee no future at all—​or at least no future constituted by a series of successive presents, each of which pushes the polity forward in time—​if Africans were to have an abiding place in America. On the politics of Jefferson’s plan for black removal, see David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 115–​24. 49. My reading here is influenced by Betsy Erkkila’s analysis of this final section in Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 61. See also Ferguson, “‘Mysterious Obligation,’” 393–​99; and Holland, Body Politic, 22. 50. See “Marbois’ Queries concerning Virginia.” 51. The phrase is from Ebenezer Hazard’s proposal for a collection of documents relating to the founding of British North America. Hazard sent a prospectus for this project, along with a request for the “Use of such suitable Papers, relating to your Colony, as it may be convenient for you to procure,” to Jefferson in August 1774. For Hazard’s letter, as well as Jefferson’s initial draft of the “chronological catalogue” that appears at the end of Notes, see PTJ (1950), 1:144–​48, quotes on 144. See also Peden’s summary of the backstory of this list in his edition of Notes, 296n8. 52. The bureau derived from the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, an initiative launched by the War Department in 1863. One of the most vocal opponents of the 1865 legislation was Andrew Johnson, who believed that the congressional initiative was unconstitutional and a form of discrimination against white Americans. See Foner, Reconstruction, 68–​69, 247–​48. 53. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-​Williams, eds., The Souls of Black Folk (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 200n25. 54. On the myriad functions of the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Foner, Reconstruction, 142–​53. As Foner explains, the task of securing equality under the law proved particularly challenging.

 

226

Note s to pag e s 5 0 – 5 6

While the bureau created its own network of courts in which African Americans could issue complaints against whites, the judicial power of the agency was relatively weak. In seeking justice for ex-​slaves, then, bureau agents mainly had to work within the existing Southern judicial system, plagued as it was by antiblack prejudice. 55. Taking a similar approach to the function of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Souls, Moses calls it Du Bois’s “ideal of American government.” But for Moses, neither this chapter nor Souls more generally has much to say about democracy. As he explains, Souls “did not support democracy in the sense of majority rule or one person, one vote.” In defining “democracy” exclusively in terms of the principles of equality and majoritarianism, Moses overlooks the way Du Bois’s political meditations probe the crucial temporal dimensions of democracy. See Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought, 205, 201. 56. Blight and Gooding-​Williams, eds., Souls, 198n3. 57. Thomas D. Eliot, “Freedmen’s Bureau,” speech delivered in the House of Representatives, May 23, 1866 (Washington, DC: Congressional Globe, 1866), 15, 1. 58. Fernando Wood, “Continuance of the Freedmen’s Bureau,” speech delivered in the House of Representatives, March 19, 1868 (Washington, DC: F. & J. Rives & Geo. A. Bailey, 1868), 4. 59. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein rightly points out that the two paradigmatic figures in this excerpt (whom he refers to as an “Adam and Eve”) “bequeath a complex legacy to their children,” but he argues that Du Bois depicts the “genesis of the new order.” See Wolfenstein, A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 55; emphasis added. Hazel V. Carby attends to the gendered dimensions of this excerpt in Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 37–​38. The political theorist Lawrie Balfour offers a wonderful reading of the passage, on which I  build here; see Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11–​13. 60. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1901, 360. 61. “Haunting presenc[e]‌” is Priscilla Wald’s phrase in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 210. 62. My formulation draws on Samuel A. Chambers, Untimely Politics (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2003), 3. 63. Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction, 13. 64. Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2012), 18, 17, 18, 19; original emphasis. 65. For an overview of this key concept, see Dickson D. Bruce Jr., “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature 64, no. 2 (1992): 299–​309. For a historical approach to Du Bois’s theory, see Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107–​25. 66. Shamoon Zamir treats time in this passage by focusing on Du Bois’s theological language; see Dark Voices:  W.  E. B.  Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–​1903 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29. Anthony Reed attends to the temporal dimensions of double consciousness in Freedom Time:  The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 15–​16, 124. On this score, see also Frank M. Kirkland, “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black,” The Philosophical Forum 24, nos. 1–​3 (1992–​93): 155–​57. Daylanne K. English uses the phrase “temporal double consciousness” in her discussion of Walter Mosley’s detective fiction; see Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 143. 67. Kirkland suggests Du Bois here seeks a “reflective stance toward the past” and a “reflective stance toward the future”; see “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black,” 154. 68. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; repr., New York: Plume, 1988), 180. I thank Betsy Erkkilä for stimulating my thinking on this point. 69. Zamir contends that Du Bois here meditates on a “personal loss that has little to do with the history or politics” of racial inequality and injustice; see Dark Voices, 190. On the sense of dejection that pervades this chapter, see Arnold Rampersad, “Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 120–​21.

 



Note s to pag e s 5 7 – 62

227

70. In Creative Conflict in African American Thought, Moses contends that Du Bois “showed confidence in a teleological view of history, a mystical confidence in the inevitability of progress” (215). While this may hold true in the context of a general survey of Du Bois’s worldview, the sections of Souls under discussion here complicate this claim. Charles Lemert also notes Du Bois’s vexed relationship to progress, but he implies that this posture only emerged in his later work, specifically Black Reconstruction; see “The Race of Time:  Du Bois and Reconstruction,” boundary 2 27, no. 3 (2000):  215–​48. For interpretations of Souls that are attentive to its nonprogressive rhythms, see Adalaine Holton, “To ‘tell again in many ways’:  Iteration and Translation in The Souls of Black Folk,” Arizona Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2010): 23–​43; and Kelley Wagers, “Race, Nation, and (Re)Form in The Souls of Black Folk,” Arizona Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2008): 77–​108. 71. Ecclesiastes 3:15, 7:13 (King James Version). 72. While I  share Robert Gooding-​Williams’s sense of Du Bois’s “anxiety” that the future will repeat the past, I  depart from his claim that if this “fear is to be allayed, then the reason of his readers must straighten the tangle of time” and “look beyond” his “crooked marks.” See Gooding-​Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-​Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 127–​30, quoted lines on 128. 73. In their edition of Du Bois’s book, Blight and Gooding-​Williams include a period after “indeed” so that the conclusion of “The After-​Thought” reads, “Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed.” “the end” thus seems to function primarily as an announcement of the text’s conclusion. See Blight and Gooding-​Williams, eds., Souls, 195. I have not encountered any other version of Souls in which the “The After-​Thought” is punctuated in this way. 74. Thomas Dumm notes the absence of a period, but he does not comment on the enjambed structure that Du Bois’s lack of punctuation forces. See Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 165. Departing from the scholarly tendency to focus on “The Sorrow Songs” at the expense of “The After-​Thought,” Shamoon Zamir offers an extended reading of this section in “The Souls of Black Folk: Thought and Afterthought,” in The Cambridge Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Shamoon Zamir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7–​36. On the function of black spirituals in Souls, see Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993), 457–​539; and Cheryl A. Wall, “Resounding Souls:  Du Bois and the African American Literary Tradition,” Public Culture 17, no. 2 (2005): 226–​28. For interpretations of the temporal implications of Du Bois’s use of the sorrow songs, see Homi K. Bhabha, “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity,” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 193–​219, esp. 216–​ 17; and Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies:  Grooves in Sonic Afro-​Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 92–​105.

Chapter 2 1. “Frederick Douglass at His Old Home,” Baltimore Sun, June 19, 1877. Unless otherwise indicated, all further citations of the Sun’s coverage come from this report. 2. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892), in Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 855. Unless noted otherwise, all further references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text as LT. Occasionally, passages that I cite from Life and Times differ between the Gates edition and the scholarly edition of the autobiography published as part of the Frederick Douglass Papers; in these few instances, I defer to the latter source. See the Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John McKivigan, ser. 2, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999–​2012). Hereafter cited as FDP. 3. In employing “home” in my discussion of this event, I am aware of the vexed meanings of this term. Indeed, particularly within the context of the Sun’s coverage, the word conjures the pernicious plantation romance. And yet, I retain the term not simply because Douglass deployed it, but because the author’s ancestors, the Bailey family, resided in Maryland since the colonial era. Importantly, then, the state is a home for Douglass, in all the complicated senses that this designation represents. On the origins of the Baileys, see Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 3–​10.

 

228

Note s to pag e s 6 3 – 6 5

4. See William L. Andrews, “Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative:  Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley,” Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 1 (1989): 6, 12. 5. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 186. William S. McFeely offers a similar summary in Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 294. 6. Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 240–​94, quote on 245. 7. For literary-​ critical interpretations, see David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1989), 108–​34; and Arthur Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-​Century American Literature (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006), 169–​79. For political-​philosophical approaches, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993), 60–​64; Robert Gooding-​Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois:  Afro-​Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009), 173–​84; and Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana:  Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 55–​61. 8. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely (1845; repr., New York: Norton, 1997), 50. Hereafter cited parenthetically as N. Valerie Rohy offers a wonderful account of the complex temporality of this moment that holds implications for my reading of Life and Times; see Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 26–​29, esp. 27. 9. Levine, Lives of Frederick Douglass, 283. Levine reminds us of “Douglass’s triumphal act of resisting Covey’s authority” as he inaugurates his treatment of the Auld-​Douglass reunion (250). 10. Ibid., 5–​25. 11. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations:  Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993), 86. Sundquist is not alone. Houston A. Baker Jr. calls the book “a verbose and somewhat hackneyed story of a life.” Thomas De Pietro notes that “Life and Times was ignored in its day and is rightly overlooked by historians and critics today.” And James T. Olney asserts that “the revolutionary fervor of his first two exercises in autobiography was largely spent by the time Douglass wrote his postbellum third autobiography.” See Baker, The Journey Back:  Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 45; De Pietro, “Vision and Revision in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass,” CLA Journal 26, no. 4 (1983):  395; and Olney, “The Founding Fathers—​Frederick Douglass and Booker T.  Washington,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination:  Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 19. See also David L. Dudley, My Father’s Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men’s Autobiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 42–​43; James Matlack, “The Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass,” Phylon 40, no. 1 (1979): 15–​28; and James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2007), 276. 12. Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time:  Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 157–​58, 168. Pratt brilliantly complicates our sense of this imperative in The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), esp. 5, 44–​62. 13. This speech, delivered at a celebration of West Indian Emancipation, appears in the 1882 and 1892 Life and Times, and in abbreviated form in the 1881 edition. 14. Pratt, Archives of American Time, 168. 15. See Levine, Lives of Frederick Douglass, 240–​94; Cody Marrs, Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 83–​89; and the essays in “Rediscovering the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” a special forum edited by John R. McKivigan that appeared in the Journal of African American History 99, nos. 1–​2 (2014): 4–​88. See also Edward Tang, “Rebirth of a Nation: Frederick Douglass as Postwar Founder in Life and Times,” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 1 (2005):  19–​39; and Kenneth W. Warren, “Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the

 



Note s to pag e s 6 5 – 69

229

Problem of Constituency,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 253–​70. 16. I thank Ivy Wilson for this insight. 17. See Gates’s “Note on the Texts,” in Life and Times, 1080–​82; and Robin L. Condon, “‘Finished by the Hand by which it was Begun’: Who Wrote the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass?,” in “Rediscovering the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” 12–​19. Condon and the editors of the FDP Life and Times do not see the 1892 version brought out by DeWolfe, Fiske, and Company as a genuine third edition according to the standards of textual scholarship, because it merely appends a new section to existing parts. I understand the 1892 work as another edition in a narratological sense, in order to foreground Douglass’s continual unfolding of what he thought was his finished story. 18. Much has been written about the continuities and fissures between Douglass’s ante-​and postbellum political positions. The philosopher Charles W. Mills argues that Douglass’s “progressivism and social optimism” function as “weaknesses” that inhibit him from responding appropriately to the plight black Americans faced after abolition; see “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent,’” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed. Frank M. Kirkland and Bill E. Lawson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 106. See also John P. Pittman, “Douglass’s Assimilationism and Antislavery,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, 64–​81; and Ronald Sundstrom, “Frederick Douglass’s Longing for the End of Race,” Philosophia Africana 8, no. 2 (2005): 143–​70. For a synoptic vista, see Nicholas Buccola, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 2012). On Douglass’s postbellum conservatism, see Michael Bennett, Democratic Discourses: The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 116; Gooding-​Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois, 116; Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 81; and Olney, “The Founding Fathers,” 14. Two recent readings of Douglass as reactionary marshal Life and Times as central evidence; see John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” Raritan 25, no. 1 (2005): 114–​36; and Zoe Trodd, “A Hid Event, Twice Lived: The Post-​War Narrative Sub-​Versions of Douglass and Melville,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): 51–​68. Neither account attends to the formal elements of Life and Times that challenge its explicit “progressive” project. For readings of the more radical dimensions of Douglass’s postbellum career, see David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), esp. 219–​39; and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), esp. 43; and Gene Andrew Jarrett, Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), esp. 67–​71. 19. See “Fred. Douglass in Maryland,” New  York Times, June 20, 1877; “Douglass at His Old Home,” New York Tribune, June 20, 1877; and the untitled account of Douglass’s speech in Harper’s Weekly, July 7, 1877. See also the brief mention of Douglass’s visit in the Washington Evening Star, June 19, 1877. 20. Harold A. Williams, The Baltimore Sun, 1837–​1987 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 65–​66, quote on 66. 21. Blight, Race and Reunion, 220. 22. “Frederick Douglass in Maryland,” Baltimore Sun, June 19, 1877. 23. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 417. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as BF. 24. The Aulds took Douglass’s indictment of Thomas (and his relatives) quite seriously. McFeely notes that he uncovered in the Maryland State Archives a nineteenth-​century edition of the 1845 Narrative, which includes marginal commentary by a member of the Auld family underscoring errors or perceived misrepresentations in the fugitive slave’s account of the clan. Frederick Douglass, 159–​60. 25. The Frederick Douglass Papers uses the Sun article as its source text; see “Coming Home: An Address Delivered in St. Michaels, Maryland, on 17 June 1877,” in FDP, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), ser. 1, 4:477–​80.

 

230

Note s to pag e s 6 9 – 7 6

26. Levine hypothesizes that Douglas collaborated with the Sun to send a reporter to cover his trip; such a reality illuminates this mode of address, but, given the shape of the article, it also raises questions about the degree of coordination between Douglass and the correspondent. Lives of Frederick Douglass, 271. 27. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “eulogy,” http://​www.oed.com. 28. “Douglass at His Old Home.” 29. See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 294–​95; and Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 188. 30. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 291. Stauffer offers a more pointed assessment, arguing that Douglass relinquished his advocacy for “racial equality.” Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” 134. 31. Douglass first delivered the lecture in 1859 and went on to read it more than fifty times prior to his death, often before African American audiences. See “Self-​Made Men,” FDP (1992), ed. Blassingame and McKivigan, ser. 1, 5:545–​75. While this lecture might initially be taken as a sign of Douglass’s detachment from the plight of black Americans, Peter C. Myers reads the emphasis on self-​making in the context of Douglass’s belief in the natural rights conception of self-​ownership, a principle that was indispensable to the thinker’s abolitionist and racial justice philosophy; see Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 113–​19. 32. See Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 187. 33. While I focus on the political and social dimensions of this episode, there is also a way to interpret the former slave’s meeting with his master that recognizes the possibility that a genuine, though certainly not uncomplicated, emotional attachment existed between these two men. McFeely emphasizes such mutual affective bonds in Frederick Douglass, esp. 41. Levine is rightly critical of the ways the rhetoric of love is deployed in readings of the scene; see Lives of Frederick Douglass, 243–​46. 34. Frederick Douglass, “Our National Capital,” FDP, ser. 1, 4:446, 467. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 35. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–​1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 6, 9. On the conflation between “American” and “white,” see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 47. 36. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–​1880 (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998), 700; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness:  Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999), 13. 37. Ottilia Assing to Frederick Douglass, July 12, 1877, Manuscripts/​Mixed Material, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, https://​www.loc.gov/​resource/​mfd.04012/​?sp=4. 38. “A Gratuitous and Studied Insult to Washington,” National Republican, May 11, 1877. 39. “The Attacks on Mr. Douglass,” New York Times, May 13, 1877. 40. See “The Douglass Lecture,” Washington Evening Star, May 14, 1877; “The Douglass Pother,” Baltimore Sun, May 14, 1877; “Fred Douglass Explains,” New  York Herald, May 13, 1877; “Marshal Fred Douglass,” New York Times, May 12, 1877; “The Storm against Mr. Douglass,” New  York Tribune, May 14, 1877; “U.S. Marshal Fred. Douglass on the National Capital,” Baltimore Sun, May 9, 1877; an untitled article in the Washington Evening Star, May 11, 1877; and an editorial in the New York Times, May 12, 1877. 41. “Douglass and the National Capital,” Baltimore Sun, May 12, 1877. 42. “An Insulted City,” Washington National Republican, May 12, 1877. The National Republican tried not to characterize the injured party in explicitly racialized terms, using the phrase “Washingtonians” to refer to the object of Douglass’s assault. But aside from seeking interviews with prominent black residents, the article primarily treated the incident from the real or imagined perspective of whites. 43. The National Republican elsewhere articulated these dynamics much more boldly: “If it were fred. douglass, the individual, who had spoken, his low vulgarity might be passed by in silent contempt. But it was the Marshal of the District of Columbia who offered the insult.” “Fred. Douglass Again,” Washington National Republican, May 12, 1877. 44. Ibid.; Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:  Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 2. My thinking also draws on Saidiya

 



Note s to pag e s 7 6 – 83

231

V. Hartman’s notion of “indebted servitude”; see Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​ Making in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 126. 45. Blight, Race and Reunion, 316. 46. “A Gratuitous and Studied Insult to Washington.” This phrase does not appear in the version of the speech collected in the FDP. But Douglass confirms that he uttered the line in an interview with the Washington National Republican, in which he characterizes the comment as an “isolated remark.” See “What Mr. Douglass Says,” Washington National Republican, May 13, 1877. 47. Grace Greenwood [Sarah Jane Clarke], “Washington Notes,” New York Times, May 19, 1877; emphasis added. A black Washingtonian adopted a similar strategy in his defense of Douglass in a May 15 letter to the editor of the New York Times, which notes, “In speaking of the present, the Marshal spoke in the highest terms of the schools in the District.” “‘Insulted’ Washington,” New York Times, May 18, 1877. And in a letter to the National Republican published on May 13, Douglass himself sought to emphasize that the lecture on the whole was optimistic. “What Mr. Douglass Says.” 48. “Quiet in Washington,” New York Times, June 1, 1877. 49. “Frederick Douglass in Maryland.” 50. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–​ 1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 8. 51. See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 296. 52. Greenwood [Sarah Jane Clarke], “Washington Notes.” 53. Indeed, Douglass’s “correction” to this claim hardly exonerates Auld. Revisiting the account in Life and Times, Douglass blames his grandmother’s fate on the “grandson” of Aaron Anthony, “her present owner” (LT, 547). As Robin L. Condon and Peter P. Hinks explain, this “rhetorically subversive” revision rests on the knowledge that Thomas Auld had only one child, a daughter; accordingly, the “grandson” Douglass invokes “could not have been the child or direct heir” of Auld. See introduction, FDP, ser. 2, 3:xlvi. 54. John Ernest understands this section as a theatrical affair directed by Douglass, arguing that it marks a transition from the “dated” dramatis personae of “master and slave” to “their new roles”; see Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-​Century African-​American Literature:  Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 175. For similar approaches, see Elizabeth Duquette, Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-​Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 154; and Levine, Lives of Frederick Douglass, 243–​44, 279–​86. 55. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing Co., 1881), 487. Further references to the 1881 edition of Life and Times will be cited parenthetically in the text as LT 1881. 56. See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending:  Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1966; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17. 57. See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-​American Character and Destiny, 1817–​1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 228–​55. 58. J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread:  Story Lines (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1992), 17. 59. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; repr., New York: Norton, 1999), 164, 15. 60. Kimberly W. Benston, “Facing Tradition: Revisionary Scenes in African American Literature,” PMLA 105, no. 1 (1990): 100. As my use of Benston’s paradigm suggests, the Douglass-​Auld reunion can stand as the illuminating obverse of the democratic encounter that Pratt develops in his treatment of the antebellum Douglass; see The Strangers Book, 44–​46. 61. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 336. 62. Douglass goes even further, asserting that Auld “was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit” (LT, 875). This line recalls Douglass’s assertion in his 1845 Narrative that after his battle with Covey “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact” (N, 50). The meaning of “fact” and “form” has been much debated. In his analysis of Douglass’s 1855 autobiography, the philosopher Robert

 

232

Note s to pag e s 8 3 – 8 9

Gooding-​Williams glosses “form” as “social conventions” and “fact” as “deeds.” Gooding-​ Williams asserts that the author’s above-​cited statement in Life and Times “supports my interpretation of ‘in fact’ in Bondage, for again it shows Douglass using that phrase to refer to deeds and, more precisely, to assert that while Auld had long ago through his deeds (both good and evil) sustained the relation of master to him (‘to me’), Douglass no longer through his deeds sustains that relation to him (‘He was to me no longer a slaveholder’).” In the Shadow of Du Bois, 179, 180, 310n65. Given that “spirit” often signifies slavery’s remainder in Life and Times, I think there is good reason to treat Douglass’s claim about Auld with more skepticism. 63. On the difference between atonement and settlement, see Charles P. Henry, Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 177. 64. “Douglass’s Old Master Dead,” New York Times, February 11, 1880. 65. Levine, Lives of Frederick Douglass, 283–​84. 66. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5. 67. A version of this phrase appears in Douglass’s 1845 and 1855 works, but it is presented alongside a much more elaborate and personal exposition of the author’s grief. 68. On Douglass’s treatment of his genealogy, see Deborah E. McDowell, “In the First Place:  Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-​American Narrative Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston:  G. K.  Hall & Co., 1991), 192–​214; and Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-​ Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 209–​61, esp. 248–​61. 69. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 22–​40. See also Levine, Lives of Frederick Douglass, 247. Aaron Anthony, the master Douglass made infamous in his Narrative for the beating of “Aunt Hester,” was manager of the Wye House, the estate of Edward Lloyd. Anthony inherited Douglass’s grandmother, Betsey Bailey, when he married Ann Catherine Skinner, granddaughter of Richard Skinner, who owned Betsey’s forebears. Thomas Auld first came to know the Anthony family by virtue of his role as captain of the Lloyd family boat. Auld would finally inherit Douglass, becoming his legal owner, through his marriage to Lucretia, Anthony’s daughter. 70. Adding a final turn of the screw, McFeely observes that “master,” in the context of the Narrative, usually refers to Auld, not Anthony, and so when the author declares in 1845 that “my master was my father,” he may be implying that he believed Auld to be his father. Frederick Douglass, 13–​14. On the rhetorical and biological dimensions of paternity in Douglass, see Levine, Lives of Frederick Douglass, 247, 256. 71. Ironically, according to Preston’s research, 1818 is in fact most likely the actual year of Douglass’s birth. Young Frederick Douglass, 31. Yet it seems that Douglass would doubt the veracity of the information he receives from Auld until his death; as McFeely explains, Douglass’s gravestone marks his birth year as 1817. Frederick Douglass, 382. 72. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 99–​100. 73. This scene therefore might be read as a kind of wish fulfillment: a moment of “phantasied actualisation” in which Douglass achieves the (imagined) communion with his mother that slavery denied him. See J. Laplanche and J.-​B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-​Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith (New York: Norton, 1967), 484. 74. In the 1892 edition, Douglass inserts the word “same” before “great cause,” so the final clause reads, “And if I had forty years more they should all be sacredly given to the same great cause” (LT, 914). 75. Warren emphasizes the personal circumstances that encouraged Douglass to issue a third edition of his autobiography in “Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times,” 258. Readings aligned more closely with my own include Ernest, Resistance and Reformation, 154; Marrs, Nineteenth-​ Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, 86; and Wayne Mixon, “The Shadow of Slavery:  Frederick Douglass, the Savage South, and the Next Generation,” in Sundquist, Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, 240. 76. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 21 (1883). 77. Ibid., 25. In his dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan took issue with his colleague’s characterization of the supposedly privileged place of African Americans under the law, and posed

 



Note s to pag e s 8 9 – 95

233

a different picture of the future. Whereas Bradley implies that the future (which for him had already arrived) guarantees the fading away of race-​based discrimination, Harlan leaves open the possibility that such prejudice may continue to haunt the nation, and not just its black citizens. The purpose of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, then, is to assert a kind of eternal vigilance, guarding against any type of “subjection” of one “class” to another, whether now or later (62). 78. See Documents of American Constitutional and Legal History, Volume I: From the Founding to 1896, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 368–​70, 399–​409. 79. Marrs, Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, 64. 80. See Thomas E. Hachey, Joseph M. Hernon Jr., and Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Experience: A Concise History, rev. ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 108–​36. 81. My formulation reconfigures Myers’s account of the role of past and present that underwrites Douglass’s “faith”; see Frederick Douglass, 148–​49. 82. Frederick Douglass, “In Law Free; In Fact, a Slave,” FDP, ser. 1, 5:363, 359. 83. Frederick Douglass, “Speech on Emancipation Day, Rochester, N.Y.,” 18–​19, Manuscripts/​ Mixed Material, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, https://​www.loc.gov/​ item/​mfd.24005/​. 84. Frederick Douglass, “Our Destiny is Largely in Our Own Hands,” FDP, ser. 1, 5:65, 66. 85. Douglass uttered these words to Joseph Winthrop Holley, who would go on to found the Albany Bible and Manual Training Institute in Albany, Georgia. Holley recorded this exchange in his memoir You Can’t Build a Chimney from the Top: The South through the Life of a Negro Educator (New York: William-​Frederick Press, 1948), 41. Holley reports that four years later he posed the same question to Booker T. Washington, who responded: “Work! Work! Work! Be patient and win by superior service” (41). 86. See Myers, Frederick Douglass, 143. 87. Among the nineteenth-​century meanings of “agitate” is “to move to and fro.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “agitate,” http://​www.oed.com. I thank Julia Stern for this reading.

Chapter 3 1. Frederick Douglass, “The Blessings of Liberty and Education,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), ser. 1, 5:623. 2. Ibid., 5:624. 3. Frederick Douglass to W.  R. Vaughan, July 25, 1891, in Walter R. Vaughan, Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill”:  Being an Appeal in Behalf of Men Released from Slavery, A  Plea for American Freedmen and a Rational Proposition to Grant Pensions to Persons of Color Emancipated from Slavery (Chicago, 1891), 183. See also Frederick Douglass, “Extract,” Miscellany, Folder 7, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, http://​www.loc.gov/​ resource/​mfd.33007/​?sp=1. On Douglass’s engagement with the problem of redress more broadly, see Peter C. Myers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 143–​47. 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; repr., New York: Norton, 1999), 33; emphasis added. 5. Ibid., 33, 27. 6. Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-​Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 125–​46. 7. On these nonmaterial stakes, see Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 194–​230; and Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–​ Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 133–​68. 8. See Lawrie Balfour, “Act and Fact:  Slavery Reparations as a Democratic Politics of Reconciliation,” in The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 110.

 

234

Note s to pag e s 9 5 – 9 7

9. Robert Westley, “The Accursed Share: Genealogy, Temporality, and the Problem of Value in Black Reparations Discourse,” Representations 92 (2005): 82. 10. The bibliography on reparations is extensive, but for an overview of the basic stakes of the debate, see Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” Representations 92 (2005): 1–​15; Alfred L. Brophy, Reparations: Pro & Con (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto, “On Redress for Racial Injustice,” the introduction to their edited volume Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–​27. On the imaginative dimensions of reparations, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 110–​34. For an important exploration of the relation among reparations, history, and politics, see Thomas McCarthy’s linked essays:  “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA:  On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery,” Political Theory 30, no. 5 (2002): 623–​48; and “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II:  On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery,” Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004): 750–​72. On reparations and democracy, see Balfour, “Act and Fact,” and Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Ariela Gross, “When Is the Time of Slavery? The History of Slavery in Contemporary Legal and Political Argument,” California Law Review 96, no. 1 (2008): 283–​321; and Westley, “The Accursed Share,” offer legal analyses. Jeffory A. Clymer’s Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95–​122, represents an important exception to the contemporary focus of many of these studies. 11. McCarthy, “Coming to Terms with Our Past,” 759. 12. See, for example, John Cleman, “Blunders of Virtue: The Problem of Race in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” American Literary Realism 34, no. 2 (2002): 119–​34; and Stanley Wertheim, “Unraveling the Humanist: Stephen Crane and Ethnic Minorities,” American Literary Realism 30, no. 3 (1998): 65–​75. 13. John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 163. Elizabeth Young points the way toward an alternative understanding of racial politics in the narrative; however, she remains conflicted about whether Johnson functions as an ironic “exposure” of black stereotypes or “an enactment” of them. See Black Frankenstein:  The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 87. 14. Anthony Reed, Freedom Time:  The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 5–​6, 209, quoted passage on 5; original emphasis. 15. Hence one of the most common moves in the criticism is to identify the “real” Henry Johnson—​ the source on whom Crane might have drawn in developing this character—​and analyze the novella accordingly. As Susan Schweik has it, for instance, Johnson stands in for Levi Hume, a laborer in Crane’s childhood home of Port Jervis, New York, who was afflicted by facial cancer; and, consequently, the text is an unraveling of the sociolegal construction of disability. See “Disability Politics and American Literary History: Some Suggestions,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–​2 (2008): 217–​37. Or, according to Jonathan Tadashi Naito, Johnson is the fictive incarnation of William Kemmler, the first person to be executed in the electric chair (an event that took place in New York state); and, therefore, The Monster is a meditation on the social implications of modern technologies. See “Cruel and Unusual Light:  Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane’s The Monster,” Arizona Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2005): 35–​63. For similar approaches, see Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious:  American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 208; Linda H. Davis, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 217; Alice Hall Petry, “Stephen Crane’s Elephant Man,” Journal of Modern Literature 10, no. 2 (1983):  346–​52; and Paul Sorrentino, Stephen Crane:  A  Life of Fire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 54–​55. 16. Elaine Marshall, “Crane’s ‘The Monster’ Seen in the Light of Robert Lewis’s Lynching,” Nineteenth-​Century Literature 51, no. 2 (1996):  205–​ 24; Price McMurray, “Disabling Fictions: Race, History, and Ideology in Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” Studies in American Fiction 26, no. 1 (1998): 51–​72; Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life

 



Note s to pag e s 9 7 –102

235

and Literature (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2006), 105–​63. Goldsby’s brilliant treatment surely constitutes the richest example of this mode. 17. Stephen Crane, The Monster (1898), in The Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 1969), 7:23; emphasis added. Further references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically. On the “monster” as a trope for slaves and the peculiar institution, see Young, Black Frankenstein, 47–​55. 18. Randall Robinson’s The Debt:  What America Owes to Blacks (New  York:  Plume, 2001) is perhaps the most provocative articulation of the argument for a model of collective responsibility. See also J.  Angelo Corlett, “Reparations to African Americans?,” in Martin and Yaquinto, Redress for Historical Injustices, 170–​98, esp.  187–​90; and Charles W. Mills, “Contract of Breach: Repairing the Racial Contract,” in Contract and Domination, by Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills (Cambridge:  Polity, 2007), 106–​33, esp.  126–​32. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), esp. 17–​21, demonstrates how liberal individualism disavows responsibility for historical racial injustices. 19. Brophy outlines the complications surrounding issues of cause in Reparations, 106–​9, 153–​55. 20. Jacques Rancière, Dis-​agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 88. 21. Ralph Ellison, “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction” (1960), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 127. Goldsby explains that the author’s reference is to lynching in Spectacular Secret, 355n26. But “fresh” and “timely” might also be taken as adjectives that describe one of the novella’s abiding subjects:  temporality. Though not focused on Crane’s text, Dana Luciano’s comments on “monstrous time” as an “interrupted historiography” are also germane here; see “Tracking Prehistory,” J19:  The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 3, no. 1 (2015): 174. 22. Thaddeus Stevens, “Damages to Loyal Men,” March 19, 1867, in The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 2:284. 23. A Bill Relative to Damages Done to Loyal Men, and for Other Purposes, H.R. 29, 40th Cong. 1st sess., March 11, 1867. On Sherman’s order, see Jeffrey R. Kerr-​Ritchie, “Forty Acres, or, an Act of Bad Faith,” in Martin and Yaquinto, Redress for Historical Injustices, 221–​37. 24. Stevens, “Damages to Loyal Men,” in Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, 2:283. 25. Ibid., 2:285. 26. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:333. 27. Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True:  Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-​Slave Reparations (New York: Knopf, 2005), 4. Berry’s groundbreaking work has been a vital guide in my examination of this movement’s primary documents. See also Tillet, Sites of Slavery, 157–​63. 28. Berry, My Face Is Black Is True, 34–​ 35; Walter B. Hill Jr., “The Ex-​ Slave Pension Movement:  Some Historical and Genealogical Notes,” Negro History Bulletin 59, no. 4 (1996): 7–​11. 29. A Bill to Provide Pensions for Freedmen, and so forth, H.R. 11119, 51st Cong., 1st sess., June 24, 1890. 30. The bill was introduced, without modification, nine times between 1890 and 1903; throughout its life cycle, the sponsor’s name changed. See Hill, “Ex-​Slave Pension Movement.” 31. The quoted lines appear in a circular disseminated by the Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association announcing “The Maury County Ex-​Slave Convention” from March 24–​27, 1899, National Archives and Records Administration Microfilm Publication M2110, Correspondence and Case Files of the Bureau of Pensions Pertaining to the Ex-​Slave Pension Movement, 1892–​1922, digitized and available online in the National Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief Association of the US Case File, http://​www.ancestry.com. Further references to this source will be abbreviated as NARA M2110, followed by the name of the case file or correspondence period from the digital archive. 32. A Bill to Provide Pensions for Freedmen.

 

236

Note s to pag e s 1 0 2 – 1 11

33. Berry, My Face Is Black Is True, 33–​34; Walter R. Vaughan, Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” Being an Appeal in Behalf of Men Released from Slavery, A Plea for American Freedmen and a Rational Proposition to Grant Pensions to Persons of Color Emancipated from Slavery (Omaha, NB, 1890). The detail about the print run appears in the 1891 publication of Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” vii. Further references are to the 1890 edition unless otherwise indicated. 34. Vaughan, Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” 7, 8. 35. Ibid., 7. 36. Ibid., 5, 29. 37. Ibid., 8. 38. Ibid., 54, 51, 29, 30. 39. Vaughan, 1891 Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” 155. 40. Vaughan, Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” 32. 41. Ibid., 56. 42. Robert Fullinwider, “The Case for Reparations,” in Martin and Yaquinto, Redress for Historical Injustices, 122–​23; original emphasis. 43. Vaughan, 1891 Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill,” 154–​55. 44. Ibid., 126. 45. Ibid., 134. 46. Ibid., 136. 47. Berry, My Face Is Black Is True, 34, 6. 48. Callie House to Harrison Barrett, acting assistant attorney general of the Post Office Department, September 29, 1899, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Office of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, “Fraud Order” Case Files, 1894–​1951, File 1321, September 1899. Further references to this archive will be abbreviated as NARA RG 28, followed by the corresponding file number. In transcribing House’s writings, I have tried to be as faithful as possible to her rhetorical style. In some instances, for clarity, I have modified her prose using brackets, and I have silently regularized capitalization and spelling throughout. 49. Berry, My Face Is Black Is True, 82. The membership data varies depending on the source, but Berry reports that in the early decades of the twentieth century, the MRB&PA claimed approximately six hundred thousand members. See Mary Frances Berry, “In Search of Callie House and the Origins of the Modern Reparations Movement,” The Journal of African American History 91, no. 3 (2006): 325. See also Miranda Booker Perry, “No Pensions for Ex-​Slaves: How Federal Agencies Suppressed Movement to Aid Freedpeople,” Prologue 42, no. 2 (2010), http://​ www.archives.gov/​publications/​prologue/​2010/​summer/​slave-​pension.html. On one of the MRB&PA’s rivals, see James M. Davidson, “Encountering the Ex-​Slave Reparations Movement from the Grave: The National Industrial Council and National Liberty Party, 1901–​1907,” The Journal of African American History 97, nos. 1–​2 (2012): 13–​18. 50. The leaders of the movement seemed to emphasize the latter aim more strenuously as the MRB&PA came under scrutiny. 51. See the membership certificates reproduced in NARA M2110, National Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief Association of the US Case File, http://​www.ancestry.com. 52. The document, which is dated September 23, 1897, contains a sketch of Vaughan and bears the headline “Caution”; original emphasis. NARA M2110, Walter R.  Vaughan Case File, http://​www.ancestry.com. 53. House to Barrett, September 29, 1899. 54. House to H.  Clay Evans, commissioner of pensions, December 13, 1900, NARA M2110, Chronological Correspondence, 1899–​1904, http://​www.ancestry.com. 55. “National Ex-​Slave Convention,” NARA RG 28, File 1321, October 1899. 56. Lucy A. Delaney, From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom, in Six Women’s Slave Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 63–​ 64. Eric Gardner has produced remarkable research on this text; see, for instance, “‘Face to Face’: Localizing Lucy Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 24, no. 1 (2007): 50–​71. 57. T. Starr Murfree, “Please Listen to My Plea,” NARA RG 28, File 1321, n.d.

 



Note s to pag e s 1 1 1 – 119

237

58. H.  Clay Evans to Eliakim Torrance, commander in chief, Grand Army of the Republic, February 7, 1902, NARA M2110, Chronological Correspondence, 1899–​1904, http://​www. ancestry.com. 59. Minutes of the Third Convention of the National Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (Nashville:  National Baptist Publishing Board, 1899), 25, NARA M2110, National Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief Association of the US Case File, http://​www.ancestry.com. 60. House to Barrett, September 29, 1899. 61. House to Barrett, December 18, 1899, NARA RG 28, File 1321, December 1899. 62. House to Barrett, April 5, 1900, NARA RG 28, File 1321, April 1900. 63. Perry, “No Pensions for Ex-​Slaves”; Berry, My Face Is Black Is True, 212, 218. 64. House to Barrett, September 29, 1899. 65. House to Barrett, December 18, 1899; House to Barrett, September 29, 1899. 66. Harry Smith, Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States of America (Grand Rapids:  West Michigan Printing Co., 1891), 178, North American Slave Narratives, Documenting the American South, http://​docsouth.unc.edu/​neh/​smithhar/​menu.html. 67. William L. Andrews, “Slave Narratives, 1865–​1900,” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 219. 68. Berry, My Face Is Black Is True, 26. 69. Teresa A. Goddu, “The Antislavery Almanac and the Discourse of Numeracy,” Book History 12 (2009):  129–​55, esp.  130. See also Goddu, “The Slave Narrative as Material Text,” in Oxford Handbook, 149–​64, esp. 154–​55. 70. William J. Anderson, Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-​four Years a Slave; Sold Eight Times! In Jail Sixty Times!! Whipped Three Hundred Times!!! or the Dark Deeds of American Slavery Revealed. Containing Scriptural Views of the Origin of the Black and of the White Man. Also, a Simple and Easy Plan to Abolish Slavery in the United States, together with an Account of the Services of Colored Men in the Revolutionary War–​Day and Date, and Interesting Facts. Written by Himself (Chicago: Daily Tribune Book and Job Printing Office, 1857), 3, North American Slave Narratives, Documenting the American South, http://​docsouth.unc. edu/​neh/​andersonw/​andersonw.html. 71. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-​York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River, in Louisiana (1853; repr., New York: Penguin, 2012), 165; emphasis added. 72. I  am grateful to Betsy Duquette and Coleman Hutchison for helping me to appreciate this point. 73. Using the texts collected in the North American Slave Narratives section of Documenting the American South, I have calculated that thirteen numerically titled works (defined as those containing a discrete quantitative unit in their titles) appeared before 1865 and ten such works appeared after. Given that fifty-​four narratives by ex-​slaves appeared between 1866 and 1901, the persistence of this titling convention is not insignificant. See Andrews, “Slave Narratives, 1865–​1900,” 219. 74. Andrews, “Slave Narratives, 1865–​1900,” 220. 75. Rancière, Dis-​agreement, 7, 28, 27, 26–​27. 76. Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 104. 77. Smith, Fifty Years of Slavery, 12, 44. 78. Henry Clay Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-​Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-​Nine Years a Free Man (York, PA: P. Anstadt and Sons, 1895), iii, North American Slave Narratives, Documenting the American South, http://​docsouth.unc.edu/​fpn/​bruce/​bruce.html. 79. Ibid., 116, 116–​17, 117. 80. Ibid., 126. 81. Samuel Hall, 47 Years a Slave: A Brief Story of His Life before and after Freedom Came to Him (Washington, IA: Journal Print, 1912), 38, North American Slave Narratives, Documenting the American South, http://​docsouth.unc.edu/​neh/​hall/​menu.html. 82. See Best and Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” 1. 83. Rancière, Dis-​agreement, 39. 84. See, for example, Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 142; and Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 153.

 

238

Note s to pag e s 1 2 0 – 1 23

85. See Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-​Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1, 19–​31. 86. Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 141. Goldsby attends to causality in her reading of this passage, but she focuses primarily on the language of the elder Trescott. 87. Routinely acclaimed for its artistry, the fire sequence has long attracted the attention of critics, who have read the scene variously as a fictive representation of the outbreak of the Civil War, a meditation on the figure of writing in Crane’s work, and a reflection on the gap between act and intention that informs moral judgments. See, respectively, Malcolm Foster, “The Black Crepe Veil: The Significance of Stephen Crane’s The Monster,” International Fiction Review 3, no. 2 (1976): 88; Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 94–​101; and Michael D. Warner, “Value, Agency, and Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” Nineteenth-​Century Fiction 40, no. 1 (1985): 76–​ 93. For analyses that underscore the episode’s racial dimensions, see, in addition to those by McMurray and Rowe, Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 157–​59; Nick LoLordo, “Possessed by the Gothic: Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” Arizona Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2001): 41–​45; and Jacqueline Wilson-​Jordan, “Teaching a Dangerous Story:  Darwinism and Race in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 8, no. 1 (2007): 48–​61. 88. As the often-​contradictory interpretations of this episode indicate, the presence of these details and what they signify are two different matters. Whereas for Jacqueline Wilson-​Jordan the fire sequence functions as a “clear indictment of slavery,” John Carlos Rowe insists that this section makes just the opposite point. “Tempting” as it may be to understand this scene as staging an “insurrection against slavery and racism in America,” Rowe explains, such a reading will not hold, for the narrative aligns the fire with the force of slavery. But while Rowe rightly notes that the flames throw a decidedly slavish cast on the servant, The Monster does not traffic uncritically in representations of black inferiority. Indeed, far from foreclosing the possibility of racial critique in the text, the work’s denigrating depictions of Johnson constitute a vital element of that critique. This possibility falls into Rowe’s blind spot, however, because he overlooks the temporal dimensions of this scene in particular and of the narrative in general. See Wilson-​Jordan, “Teaching a Dangerous Story,” 55; Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 152, 151. Goldsby ascribes this sequence’s racist depictions to the narrator as opposed to Crane, but her reading aligns with Rowe’s. Spectacular Secret, 144. See also Sorrentino, Stephen Crane, 267. 89. McMurray, “Disabling Fictions,” 65. 90. To take just one example, Douglass describes Edward Covey, the “negro breaker,” as “the snake.” My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 265; original emphasis. 91. My account of this image and its history draws on Irma B. Jaffe, John Trumbull: Patriot-​Artist of the American Revolution (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), 318–​19; Jaffe, Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence (New York: Viking, 1976), 64, 94–​96; and Jules David Prown, “John Trumbull as History Painter,” in John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter, ed. Helen A. Cooper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982), 22–​92. Engravings of The Declaration circulated widely, and it is likely that Crane encountered the image. Indeed, given that Crane was named after an ancestor who his parents believed was a Revolutionary War hero and signer of the Declaration, and in light of the fact that Crane’s mother, Mary Helen Peck Crane, was an aspiring painter, it seems possible that the author’s family even counted a reproduction of the image among its possessions. On Crane’s genealogy, see Davis, Badge of Courage, 5; on his family’s personal relationship to the Declaration, see Sorrentino, Stephen Crane, 266–​67. Mrs. Crane describes her interest in art in a series of letters to her parents, all of which are in the Stephen Crane Papers, accession #5505, the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia; see in particular Mary Helen Peck Crane to George and Mary Helen Myers Peck, September 1, 1853, box 4, folder 27; and Mary Helen Peck Crane to George and Mary Helen Myers Peck, November 19, 1855, box 4, folder 28. 92. McMurray, “Disabling Fictions,” 63. 93. Jaffe, John Trumbull, 117. 94. Prown, “John Trumbull,” 76.

 



Note s to pag e s 1 2 3 – 127

239

95. After consulting with Jefferson and John Adams, Trumbull resolved to include in his work not simply the actual signers of the document but also those who abstained, such as John Dickinson. See Jaffe, John Trumbull, 106–​7, 242–​43. 96. More than two drafts of the Declaration exist, but the changes made to the document before it was presented to Congress were not significant—​hence my focus on the original and final versions here. See Julian P. Boyd, The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text, ed. Gerard W. Gawalt (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 16–​38. 97. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 22, 18. 98. Brown, Material Unconscious, 229. Sorrentino notes that Crane’s family was “well aware” of the condemnation of slavery in Jefferson’s draft, but he does not see this scene as a critique of the exclusion of black Americans from the promises of liberty and equality. Stephen Crane, 267. 99. For a parallel reading, see Nan Goodman, Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-​Century America (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1998), 121. 100. David Halliburton offers a different take on the racial implications of this moment in The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 186. 101. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 78. 102. My formulation paraphrases Saidiya Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 759. 103. Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1997), 199. 104. See, in order, John R. Cooley, “‘The Monster’—​Stephen Crane’s ‘Invisible Man,’” Markham Review 5 (1975): 10–​14; and Brown, Material Unconscious, 213. See also Lee Clark Mitchell, “Face, Race, and Disfiguration in Stephen Crane’s The Monster,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (1990): 174–​92. 105. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “What’s Wrong with Slavery?,” in Buying Freedom: The Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 254. 106. Ibid., 254–​55, 256, 255. Appiah is drawing on a central thesis of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), esp. 386. 107. Appiah, “What’s Wrong with Slavery?,” 255. 108. Frances E.  W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892; repr., New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1988), 78. See also Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 14–​15. 109. Before the fire, for example, the town lawyer refers to Johnson as a “coon,” and as he travels to visit his betrothed, a group of young men asks him if he plans to perform a cakewalk (14). If the fire sequence marks the point in which Johnson’s degraded status most clearly and disturbingly manifests itself, then the episode merely literalizes the social shame he already had been enduring in less extravagant modes. On the parallels between the pre-​and postaccident incarnations of Johnson, see Cooley, “‘The Monster,’” 12; James Nagel, “The Significance of Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” American Literary Realism 31, no. 3 (1999): 56; Catherine Prendergast, “And Now, a Necessarily Pathetic Response: A Response to Susan Schweik,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–​2 (2008): 240; and Wilson-​Jordan, “Teaching a Dangerous Story,” 49. 110. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 78. 111. I am not engaging here with the historical question of whether blackness (understood as phenotype) or some other kind of difference such as religion was the first cause of African slavery. Such a question is likely not answerable, even if we wanted to pursue it; on this topic, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–​1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 91–​98. The more important conceptual point, as Bryan Wagner puts it, is that blackness is “an adjunct to racial slavery” and thus it “indicates” “existence without standing in the modern world system”; see Disturbing

 

240

Note s to pag e s 1 2 7 – 1 31

the Peace:  Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009), 1. 112. Bernard R. Boxill, “A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations,” Journal of Ethics 7, no. 1 (2003): 67. 113. In this regard, Boxill is hardly alone. Philosophers have taken various approaches to dealing with the challenges of counterfactuals in the context of reparations scholarship. For a few significant entries into the debate, see Stephen Kershnar, who argues that the very existence of the descendants of slaves depends upon racial bondage and thus it is impossible to imagine a world in which these descendants are no worse off and slavery did not exist. Justice for the Past (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 69–​91. For a persuasive debunking of this objection, see Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Reparations for U.S. Slavery and Justice Over Time,” in Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem, ed. Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman (New York: Springer, 2009), 333–​39. Derrick Darby seeks to sidestep the causality problem by shifting the discussion “away from the normative ideal of corrective justice and toward the normative ideal of freedom as self-​development.” The latter model stakes its claim for racial justice not on the basis of establishing a causal relationship but rather on the commitment of a “truly liberal society” to “eradicating racial inequalities—​whatever their causes—​in the interest of achieving a greater realization of individual freedom.” “Reparations and Racial Inequality,” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 1 (2010): 64. One might wonder about how the legacy of slavery—​with its degradation of the black self, indeed the very idea of black selfhood—​complicates Darby’s reliance upon the precepts of liberal individualism. For an analysis of counterfactualism that emphasizes its legal and formal dimensions with respect to race, see Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 203–​67. 114. Boxill, “Lockean Argument,” 87, 70. 115. Ibid., 86. 116. Albion W. Tourgée, Is Liberty Worth Preserving? (Chicago: Inter Ocean, 1892), 15. The pamphlet supported the work of The National Civil Rights Association, founded by Tourgée in 1891. See Carolyn L. Karcher, “The National Citizen’s Rights Association: Precursor of the NAACP,” Elon Law Review 5, no. 1 (2013): 107–​69. 117. See, in order, Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 140; Mitchell, “Face, Race, and Disfiguration,” 188; and James Hafley, “‘The Monster’ and the Art of Stephen Crane,” in Stephen Crane’s Career:  Perspectives and Evaluations, ed. Thomas A. Gullason (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1972), 445. 118. Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 188–​89. 119. W. James Booth, Communities of Memory:  On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2006), 40. See also Marina A.  L. Oshana, “Moral Taint,” Metaphilosophy 37, nos. 3–​4 (2006): 353–​75. 120. Booth, Communities of Memory, 40. 121. Ibid., 41, 41–​42. 122. Molly Hiro reads the novella through the conceptual lens of shame, but her definition and analysis differ from mine; see “How It Feels to Be without a Face: Race and the Reorientation of Sympathy in the 1890s,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39, no. 2 (2006): 200. Of course, just how to conceive of this obligation is open to debate. For example, Fullinwider argues that the strongest case for reparations relies not on a conception of one’s identity as white or black but rather on a model in which the idea of “equal citizenship” implies the obligation of all “to support government reparations.” “Case for Reparations,” 125. 123. Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel” (1898), in The Works of Stephen Crane (1970), 5:170. 124. In his reading of “The Blue Hotel,” Halliburton notes that “what Crane envisages is something like a continuum of responsibility,” though he later argues that the Easterner “makes all the actors seem equally guilty when it was he, and he alone, who held the power of validating the Swede’s position.” Color of the Sky, 224, 226. It is important to clarify that coresponsibility does not necessarily imply that each actor is equally responsible, that is to say, responsible in the same way or to the same degree.

 



Note s to pag e s 1 3 1 – 139

241

125. On February 7, 1898, Crane wrote to Paul Revere Reynolds that “it would be absurd to conjoin ‘Death and The Child’ with ‘The Monster.’ They don’t fit. It would be rotten. Now, ‘The Blue Hotel’ goes in neatly with ‘The Monster’ and together they make 32,000.” The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1988), 1:336. “The Blue Hotel” appeared in The Monster and Other Stories, published by Harper and Brothers in the United States in December 1899. 126. Commenting on the doctor’s curious sense of indebtedness to his servant, Michael Warner notes that “Crane has put in question the kind of relation between those agents and their acts that we must assume in order to understand our machinery of valuation.” According to Warner, that is, Johnson’s attempt to save Jim may seem to recommend the label of “moral courage,” but on close inspection there is “no basis for that value,” for one cannot directly tie his efforts to the act of salvation that would warrant such praise. “Value, Agency, and Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” 85–​86, 85. Warner’s reading holds only if we presuppose that the concept of the moral requires a tight causal connection between agent and act, doer and deed—​premises The Monster does not necessarily accept. 127. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 543, 542 (1896). 128. Ibid., 551. The idea that laws that discriminated against black Americans constituted “badges of servitude” was articulated by Senator Lyman Trumbull, sponsor of the 1866 Civil Rights Acts. See David Skillen Bogen, Privileges and Immunities:  A  Reference Guide to the United States Constitution (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 40. 129. Plessy v. Ferguson, 555, 562, 560. 130. The phrase appears in the Louisiana statute under discussion and in the Fifteenth Amendment, which is cited by Harlan but was not at the interpretive center of the decision. See Brook Thomas, ed., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 11–​18, 31–​38; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection:  Terror, Slavery, and Self-​ Making in Nineteenth-​Century America (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1997), 191–​ 201; and Best, Fugitive’s Properties, esp. 251–​52. 131. Plessy v. Ferguson, 554, 555. 132. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), in Writings, 264–​65; Du Bois, Souls, 10. 133. Brown, Material Unconscious, 208. 134. Schweik, “Disability Politics and American Literary History,” 228. 135. Thanks to Sarah Lahey for helping me to articulate this idea.

Chapter 4 1. Walter Gorman to Hon. James N.  Tyner, assistant attorney general for the Post Office Department, August 30, 1899, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Office of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, “Fraud Order” Case Files, File 1321, August 1899. 2. Gorman to Tyner, June 20, 1899, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Office of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, “Fraud Order” Case Files, File 1321, June 1899. 3. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity:  The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2004), 29, 44. Scott takes “futures past” from Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past:  On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2004). Peter Coviello pursues a version of this question in Tomorrow’s Parties:  Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 4. David Scott, Omens of Adversity:  Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2014), 108, 87, 108. 5. Ibid., 36; original emphasis. 6. Booker T. Washington, The Future of the American Negro, 4th ed. (1899; repr., Boston: Small, Maynard, & Company, 1907), 243. 7. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Richard Brodhead (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 139, 140.

 

242

Note s to pag e s 1 3 9 – 1 42

8. On Chesnutt’s writerly vocation and on the contexts for his reception, see Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters:  Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-​Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 177–​210, esp. 206–​10. Francesca Sawaya has revised Brodhead’s approach in The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 134–​60. 9. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Post-​Bellum—​Pre-​Harlem,” in Stories, Novels, and Essays, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Library of America, 2002), 908. 10. Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir:  The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–​1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 178. 11. William L. Andrews notes Chesnutt’s “mounting pessimism” at the time he composed The Colonel’s Dream in The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 233. Reading French as a “figure” for “Chesnutt himself,” Paul R. Petrie contends that The Colonel’s Dream “enact[s]‌Chesnutt’s mounting pessimism about the possibility of achieving meaningful Southern reform”; see Conscience and Purpose: Fiction and Social Consciousness in Howells, Jewett, Chesnutt, and Cather (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2005), 136, 110. For Ryan Simmons, in Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), it is “as a consequence of Chesnutt’s growing pessimism” that his 1905 book is “the least tightly structured” and “symmetrical” of his works (118). Matthew Wilson offers the darkest assessment, noting that “Chesnutt’s deep pessimism made the novel a demonstration of loss of faith in the fairness and impartiality of his white audience”; see Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 149. Developing a slightly different reading in Charles W.  Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2002), Dean McWilliams finds “strained optimism” at the end of the novel, pointing to the text’s “unconvincing” turn to “the Christian’s tragic vision of regeneration through suffering” (180, 179). Seeing in The Colonel’s Dream a “bitter pessimism,” R. J. Ellis argues in the introduction to his new edition of the novel that Chesnutt may be revising some of his more hopeful meditations on the race problem. See Ellis, introduction to The Colonel’s Dream, by Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. R. J. Ellis (1905; repr., Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2014), 57–​58, quoted phrase on 58. Further references to The Colonel’s Dream are to this edition and are cited parenthetically. For treatments that probe questions of failure in the novel even as they do not deploy “pessimism” as a term, see M. Giulia Fabi, “Jim Crow and the House of Fiction: Charles W. Chesnutt’s and Sutton E. Griggs’s Last Novels,” in Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs, ed. Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 214–​53; Gary Scharnhorst, “‘The Growth of a Dozen Tendrils’:  The Polyglot Satire of Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream,” in Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Joseph R. McElrath Jr. (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999), 271–​80; and Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 12. Chesnutt, Journals, 140. See also Elizabeth Hewitt, “Charles Chesnutt’s Capitalist Conjurings,” ELH 76, no. 4 (2009): 931–​62. 13. Raymond Hedin, “Probable Readers, Possible Stories:  The Limits of Nineteenth-​Century Black Narrative,” in Readers in History: Nineteenth-​Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, ed. James L. Machor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 181–​82. 14. George Shulman, American Prophecy:  Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), x, 2, 4, 5; original emphasis. 15. My gratitude to M. Giulia Fabi for her generous assistance here. 16. Shulman, American Prophecy, xiii. 17. David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (1830; repr., University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 67, 78, 45; original emphasis; Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 7. For a brilliant reading of the textual and material dimensions of Walker’s text, see Marcy J. Dinius, “‘Look!! Look!!! At This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal,” PMLA 126, no. 1 (2011): 55–​72. 18. Sandra M. Gustafson explores the possibilities and limits of prophetic language for forging multiracial coalitions in a democratic context in Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early

 



Note s to pag e s 1 4 2 – 148

243

American Republic (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011), 125–​51, quoted phrase on 137. 19. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind:  The Debate on Afro-​American Character and Destiny, 1817–​1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), xii, 239–​40n22. 20. Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Future American: What the Race Is Likely to Become in the Process of Time,” in Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath Jr., Jesse S. Crisler, and Robert C. Leitz III (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 123. References to this volume are hereafter cited parenthetically as ES. 21. SallyAnn H. Ferguson, “Chesnutt’s Genuine Blacks and Future Americans,” MELUS 15, no. 3 (1988): 111. For a reading of this prophecy that is closer to my own, see McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, 56. See also Ryan Jay Friedman, “‘Between Absorption and Extinction’:  Charles Chesnutt and Biopolitical Racism,” Arizona Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2007): 39–​62. 22. Washington, Future of the American Negro, 26. 23. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 33. I owe this insight and many others in this chapter to Francesca Sawaya. 24. Washington, Future of the American Negro, 25. 25. Ibid., 93, 13, 181. 26. Ibid., 69. 27. “A Modern Jeremiah,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 3, 1906. 28. “Mr. Watterson on Tuskegee,” New York Daily Tribune, January 18, 1908. 29. Seattle Republican, July 31, 1908. I rely on the Republican for the quoted passage from the Statesman, as the archives of this black weekly are incomplete. While I have not been able to locate this particular declaration, my examination of the extant issues of the Statesman suggests that such a claim is characteristic of the paper’s pronouncements. 30. Edward E. Wilson, “The Joys of Being a Negro,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1906, 246, 249, 250. 31. See “The Negro’s Optimism,” Walla Walla Evening Statesman, March 22, 1906; “The Negro’s Optimism,” Vermont Phoenix, July 20, 1906. 32. R. W. Thompson, “Tuskegee Solving the Problem,” The Colored American, November 3, 1900. 33. “A Ringing Address to the Country,” Richmond Planet, August 11, 1906. 34. Mary Church Terrell, “The Bright Side of a Dark Subject,” The Papers of Mary Church Terrell, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Speeches and Writings File, Box 32, Microfilm Reel 23. In quoting from Terrell’s manuscript of this speech, I  have silently corrected clear typographical errors and regularized punctuation. On Terrell and this address, see Beverly Washington Jones, Quest for Equality:  The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863–​1954 (Brooklyn:  Carlson, 1990); “The Bright Side,” The Colored American, December 2, 1899; and “Mary Church Terrell,” The Freeman, July 1, 1905. 35. Terrell, “Bright Side of a Dark Subject.” 36. Manning C. Jones, “Negro’s Future in Politics,” Washington Herald, December 17, 1906; Betty Nyangoni, “Brownsville (Texas) Riot of 1906,” in Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, ed. Walter Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton (Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press, 2007), 1:77–​83. 37. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Charles W. Chesnutt’s Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition,” in Stories, Novels, and Essays, 873. 38. “What Dr. Landrum Wrote on the Negro Question,” Atlanta Constitution, June 7, 1903. 39. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. 40. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, ed. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning (1901; repr., Boston: Bedford/​St. Martin’s, 2002), 223, 246. 41. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1991), 185. On the future perfect, see also Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 22–​23, which introduced me to Bowie’s work. 42. Writing to Walter Hines Page of Houghton, Mifflin, the publishing house that would bring out The Colonel’s Dream, on June 29, 1904, Chesnutt declared, “I have almost decided to foreswear the race problem stories, but I should like to write a good one which would be widely

 

244

Note s to pag e s 1 4 8 – 1 53

read, before I quit.” “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–​1905, ed. Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Robert C. Leitz III (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 214. 43. Andrews, Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, 222. 44. My reading of the novel and Chesnutt’s career thus contrasts that of Ernestine Williams Pickens, who finds Chesnutt “less bitter” and more optimistic in The Colonel’s Dream than in Marrow; see Charles W. Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement (New York: Pace University Press, 1994), 120. Exploring Chesnutt’s stories, John Levi Barnard comments on the writer’s “skepticism” toward “the notion of progress” in the postbellum era in “Ruins amidst Ruins: Black Classicism and the Empire of Slavery,” American Literature 86, no. 2 (2014): 369. 45. Sawaya, Difficult Art of Giving, 150; Fabi, “Jim Crow and the House of Fiction,” 223. See also Elizabeth Duquette’s account of the “limits” of French’s vistas in Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-​Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 160. 46. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 174. 47. See, for instance, Wiley Cash, “The Colonel’s Dream Deferred: A Reconsideration of Chesnutt’s Liberal Racist,” American Literary Realism 37, no. 1 (2004): 24–​36; and Fabi, “Jim Crow and the House of Fiction.” 48. On these affinities, see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History:  Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 84. 49. Ellis, introduction to The Colonel’s Dream, 60–​61, quoted phrase on 60; Matthew 7:16, 24:8–​ 13, 13:1–​23 (King James Version). 50. Matthew 13:23 (King James Version). 51. For Andrews, “This hopeful rhetoric notwithstanding … the real message of The Colonel’s Dream remains one of disillusionment and failure.” Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, 255. See also McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, 179–​80; Scharnhorst, “‘Growth of a Dozen Tendrils,’” 280; and Wilson, Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, 181. Christine A. Wooley offers a reading of the ending that mutes Chesnutt’s irony in “The Necessary Fictions of Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream,” Mississippi Quarterly 65, no. 2 (2012): 196. Refusing the optimism-​pessimism binary, Sawaya argues that Chesnutt dispenses with the corporate philanthropy embodied by French and returns to a “premodern philanthropy” based on the “principles of democratic liberty and justice.” Difficult Art of Giving, 158. 52. Matthew 13:7 (King James Version). 53. On choking in Marrow, see Michael T. Gilmore, The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 257–​69. 54. Shulman, American Prophecy, 5; original emphasis. 55. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4, 5, 4. 56. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds:  Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010), 62. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of the etymology of “queer” in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), xii. Deploying this definition and extending Edelman’s critique in a special issue of GLQ on queer posthumanism, Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen consider the intersections between queer temporalities and the nonhuman; in their words, they seek to explore the “turn away from the demand for full humanity.” This is a point at which their project would depart from Chesnutt’s. See Luciano and Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–​3 (2015): 184. 57. Shulman, American Prophecy, 5. 58. Review of The Colonel’s Dream in “Reviews of Books,” Knoxville Sentinel, October 28, 1905, Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, http://​www.chesnuttarchive.org/​Reviews/​ ColonelReviews/​colonels27.html; W. D. Howells, “A Psychological Counter-​Current in Recent Fiction,” North American Review, December 1901, 882. 59. “Dream Doesn’t Come True,” The Globe and Commercial Advertiser, September 9, 1905, Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, http://​www.chesnuttarchive.org/​Reviews/​ ColonelReviews/​colonels25.html.

 



Note s to pag e s 1 5 4 – 158

245

60. In an illuminating reading of the extant reviews of Marrow, Sydney Bufkin examines the various imaginative contortions in which Chesnutt’s readers, Southern and Northern, liberal and conservative, engaged in order to envision someone other than themselves as the work’s public. I think we can extend this mode of analysis to account for the ways discourses of optimism and pessimism inflected both the reviews of The Colonel’s Dream and Chesnutt’s strategy in composing the novel. See Bufkin, “Beyond ‘Bitter’: Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition,” American Literary Realism 46, no. 3 (2014): 230–​50. 61. Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back:  The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 240–​41. 62. Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death:  On Afro-​Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (2011): 4, 15, 24; original emphasis, http://​www.yorku.ca/​intent/​issue5/​articles/​pdfs/​jaredsextonarticle.pdf. For Wilderson, “Blackness cannot disentangle itself from slaveness,” a position he defines as the “anti-​Human … against which humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence.” See Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010), 52, 11. On social death, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). The influence of Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection:  Terror, Slavery, and Self-​ Making in Nineteenth-​ Century America (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1997) on Afro-​pessimism is clear from Wilderson’s exposition of the term’s genealogy. 63. Jared Sexton, “Ante-​Anti-​Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Lateral 1 (2012), http://​csalateral.org/​ issue1/​content/​sexton.html. 64. Wilderson, Red, White, & Black, 58. 65. Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death,” 15. 66. My language here draws on Bowie’s description of Lacan’s early meditations on time; see Lacan, 182–​85, quoted phrase on 182. While Sexton does not dwell on this theoretical debt in this particular essay, his notes and bibliography suggest that he is playing with a Lacanian formulation. 67. Thanks to Rickey Fayne for help with this part of my argument. 68. Sutton E. Griggs, The Hindered Hand: or, The Reign of the Repressionist, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Orion Publishing Company, 1905), 285; emphasis added. 69. Bruce, Black American Writing from the Nadir, 178. 70. Arlene A. Elder, The “Hindered Hand”: Cultural Implications of Early African-​American Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), 102. 71. Fabi, “Jim Crow and the House of Fiction,” 233. For other studies that read Chesnutt and Griggs together, see Susan Gillman, Blood Talk:  American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert Nowatzki, “‘Sublime Patriots’: Black Masculinity in Three African-​American Novels,” Journal of Men’s Studies: A Scholarly Journal about Men and Masculinities 8, no. 1 (1999): 59–​72; and Andreá N. Williams, Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). On the recent attention to Griggs, see Chakkalakal and Warren, Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs; and Finnie D. Coleman, Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007). 72. Sutton E. Griggs, Pointing the Way (Nashville: Orion Publishing Company, 1908), 184, 81, 31. Further references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically. 73. Gérard Genette, Paratexts:  Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. Andreá Williams offered a helpful comment that set my thinking on this course; for her analysis of Griggs’s “narrative endings,” see “Moving Up a Dead-​End Ladder: Black Class Mobility, Death, and Narrative Closure in Sutton Griggs’s Overshadowed,” in Chakkalakal and Warren, Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs, 88–​110. 74. Sutton E. Griggs, Overshadowed: A Novel (Nashville: Orion Publishing Company, 1901), 217, 218, 219. 75. Sutton E. Griggs, Unfettered: A Novel (Nashville: Orion Publishing Company, 1902), 225. 76. Ibid., 219, 220.

 

246

Note s to pag e s 1 5 8 – 1 63

77. Beth A. McCoy, “Race and the (Para)Textual Condition,” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 156–​ 69. McCoy usefully extends Genette’s definition beyond front matter such as prefaces and epigraphs. 78. Griggs, Hindered Hand, 290, 292. 79. Ibid., 332. Griggs’s paratextual strategy has its origin (and arguably also its climax) in Imperium in Imperio, which uses a complex set of prefaces, epilogues, testimonies, and other declarations to introduce a counterfactual history of a black shadow republic as old as the United States itself, with its own government and constitution. Since this first novel is the most discussed of Griggs’s works, I have chosen to focus on his other texts here. On Imperium, see, for instance, Stephen Knadler, “Sensationalizing Patriotism: Sutton Griggs and the Sentimental Nationalism of Citizen Tom,” American Literature 79, no. 4 (2007): 673–​99; and Kalí Tal, “‘That Just Kills Me’: Black Militant Near-​Future Fiction,” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 65–​91. 80. Fred Moten, “Black Op,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1747, 1746. 81. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 72, 64. 82. Sexton, “Ante-​Anti-​Blackness”; original emphasis. 83. Fred Moten, “Uplift and Criminality,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 318.

Chapter 5 1. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Address at the Citizens’ William Lloyd Garrison Centenary Celebration” (1905), in Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, ed. Ira Dworkin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 355, 356. 2. Pauline E. Hopkins, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 385. 3. Daylanne K. English, Each Hour Redeem:  Time and Justice in African American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 9, quoted phrase on 76. 4. Pauline E. Hopkins, Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self (1902–​1903), in Magazine Novels, 526. 5. On Hopkins’s theatrical work, see Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent:  Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–​1910 (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2006), 287–​89. On the importance of the legacy of slavery to Hopkins’s creative production generally, see Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins:  Black Daughter of the Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 163; and Hanna Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 2–​3. 6. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 7. Hazel V. Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’:  Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 337. 8. Ann Allen Shockley, “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity,” Phylon 33, no. 1 (1972): 22–​26. 9. Scholars have been more interested in Hopkins’s comments in the preface about the “value” of “fiction” (13). These oft-​quoted lines inform the manifold readings of Contending Forces that discuss its relationship to the “romance” genre as well as analyses of the work’s status as “race literature.” See, for example, Carla L. Peterson, “Unsettled Frontiers: Race, History, and Romance in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 177–​96; and Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins, 135–​54. English brings needed attention to the passage with which I engage here, interpreting this prefatory remark as a meditation on the oppressive force of the law; see Each Hour Redeem, 73. 10. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood:  The Emergence of the Afro-​American Woman Novelist (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1987); Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories

 



Note s to pag e 1 6 3

247

of Political Desire:  The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1992); Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention:  Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 11. This method has had a remarkable influence on Hopkins scholarship. See, for instance, Allison Berg, “Reconstructing Motherhood: Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces,” Studies in American Fiction 24, no. 2 (1996): 131–​50; Kristina Brooks, “New Woman, Fallen Woman: The Crisis of Representation in Turn-​of-​the-​Century Novels by Pauline Hopkins and Edith Wharton,” Legacy:  A  Journal of American Women Writers 13, no. 2 (1996):  91–​112; Vanessa Holford Diana, “Narrative Patternings of Resistance in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” in Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, ed. Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2007), 173–​ 91; Kate McCullough, “Slavery, Sexuality, and Genre: Pauline Hopkins and the Representation of Female Desire,” in The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 21–​49; Venetria K. Patton, Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 93–​119; Jennifer Putzi, “‘Raising the Stigma’:  Black Womanhood and the Marked Body in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” College Literature 31, no. 2 (2004):  1–​21; Gloria T. Randle, “Mates, Marriage, and Motherhood: Feminist Visions in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18, no. 2 (1999): 193–​214; Vincent Woodard, “Deciphering the Race-​Sex Diaspora in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 8, no. 1 (2006): 72–​93; and Teresa Zackodnik, “Little Romances and Mulatta Heroines: Passing for a ‘True’ Woman in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” Nineteenth-​Century Feminisms 2 (2000):  103–​24. Siobhan Somerville has moved this line of inquiry in a new direction with her focus on same-​ sex desire in “Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” in No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 209–​35. In Hopkins criticism, attention to gender often intersects with attention to space but less so with a concern for time. For approaches that take space as an analytic, see Debra Bernardi, “Narratives of Domestic Imperialism:  The African-​ American Home in the Colored American Magazine and the Novels of Pauline Hopkins, 1900–​1903,” in Separate Spheres No More:  Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–​1930, ed. Monika M. Elbert (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2000), 203–​24; Judith Madera, Black Atlas:  Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-​Century African American Literature (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2015), 151–​89; and Francesca Sawaya, “Emplotting National History: Regionalism and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, ed. Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 1997), 72–​87. For work on temporality in Hopkins’s oeuvre, see Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003), 32–​72; Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 73–​97; Mikko Tuhkanen, “‘Out of Joint’: Passing, Haunting, and the Time of Slavery in Hagar’s Daughter,” American Literature 79, no. 2 (2007):  335–​61. Recently, Holly Jackson has offered an incisive reading of Hopkins’s recursive narrative forms in the context of postbellum discourses of racial atavism; see American Blood:  The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850–​1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 132–​52. 12. See Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction:  Thinking Politically with W.  E. B.  Du Bois (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011); Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty:  Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, NH:  Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 38–​65; and Robert Gooding-​Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois:  Afro-​Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009). Robert Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-​American and West Indian Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 95; and Barbara McCaskill, “Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, and the African American Feminization of Du Bois’s Discourse,” in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, ed. Dolan Hubbard (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 70–​84, offer welcome treatments of Hopkins’s politics.

 

248

Note s to pag e s 1 6 4 – 1 69

13. “Solution” signifies a “method of solving,” the “fact of being solved,” and “dissolution.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “solution,” http://​www.oed.com. 14. Though English rightly notes that Hopkins’s central “focus on the slave past” serves as “a political statement about the retrograde state of black civil rights in the post-​Reconstruction era,” I want to suggest that, with this particular preoccupation, Hopkins at once points out a problem and points toward a potential “solution.” In other words, I mean to take up, from a slightly different angle, English’s contention that Hopkins “sounds the alarm about any possible return to the social and economic practices or epistemologies of the past.” In the sense that English wields this phrase—​as a contrast to the “plantation tradition” perpetuated by Thomas Dixon and others—​it is absolutely apt. But the “slave past” as political epistemology stands as a crucial component of Hopkins’s democratic theory. See English, Each Hour Redeem, 9, 52. 15. My reading is indebted to Peterson’s gloss of this line in “Unsettled Frontiers,” 183. 16. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Munroe Rogers” (1902), in Daughter of the Revolution, 276. Hopkins draws on Wendell Phillips, “Public Opinion” (1852), in Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: Life and Shepard, 1884), 53. For a provocative treatment of Hopkins’s borrowings, see Geoffrey Sanborn, “The Wind of Words: Plagiarism and Intertextuality in Of One Blood,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 3, no. 1 (2015): 67–​87. 17. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; repr., New York: Norton, 1999), 15. 18. I am grateful to Soyica Diggs Colbert for helping me to frame this argument. 19. Sir Henry William Martin, A Counter Appeal, in Answer to “An Appeal” from William Wilberforce, Esq. M. P. Designed to Prove that the Emancipation of the Negroes in the West Indies, by a Legislative Enactment, without the Consent of the Planters, Would Be a Flagrant Breach of National Honour, Hostile to the Principles of Religion, Justice, and Humanity, and Highly Injurious to the Planter and to the Slave (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1823), 2, 29, 43; William Wilberforce, An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1823). 20. See A Collection of the Public General Statutes Passed in the Third and Fourth Year of the Reign of His Majesty King William the Fourth, 1833 (London: J. Richards, 1833), 729–​53. 21. On this history, see Demetrius L. Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 51; Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom:  Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 14–​19; and John Stauffer, “Abolition and Antislavery,” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 569. 22. Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 240. 23. Hopkins, “Address at the Citizens’ William Lloyd Garrison Centenary Celebration,” 356. Hopkins offers a much more measured critique of gradualism in Contending Forces, where she notes that “certain conditions” qualified the 1833 Abolition Act (20). As Brown remarks, Hopkins has a penchant for “romanticizing … the British empire.” See Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 242. 24. On the relation of whiteness to slavery in this opening section, see Beth McCoy, “Rumors of Grace: White Masculinity in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” African American Review 37, no. 4 (2003): 569–​81, esp. 570. My reading is also informed by Walter Johnson’s account of the relation between slavery and futurity in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 83–​84, 101–​2. Laura H. Korobkin attends to the nativist and class-​based dimensions underlying this episode in “Imagining State and Federal Law in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 28, no. 1 (2011): 1–​23, esp. 12–​14. 25. See Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 132. 26. Ibid., 132, 131; Julie Cary Nerad, “‘So Strangely Interwoven’: The Property of Inheritance, Race, and Sexual Morality in Pauline E.  Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” African American Review 35, no. 3 (2001): 360. Korobkin claims that in this episode race “is not the point but the pretext.” This formulation approximates my own, but where Korobkin emphasizes the “ultimately private, non-​racial objectives” of the members of the committee such as “greed” and “lust,” I maintain that these aims cannot be extricated from the system of slavery that

 



Note s to pag e s 1 6 9 – 177

249

shapes these white characters’ subjectivities; accordingly, such desires are fundamentally racialized. See “Imagining State and Federal Law,” 12. 27. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 57, quote on 95. 28. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster (1861; repr., New York: Norton, 2001), 37. 29. Ibid., 65. 30. Sandra Gunning briefly probes the novel’s temporal contours in Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–​ 1912 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1996), 98–​99. 31. By contrast, Woodard has argued that “structurally” the novel ends with this first section. “Deciphering the Race-​Sex Diaspora,” 76. 32. See Peterson, “Unsettled Frontiers,” 186–​87; Randle, “Mates, Marriage, and Motherhood,” 201; Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 149; and Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives:  Narratives of Black Women, 1860–​1960 (New  York:  Doubleday, 1987), 79. More recently, English has read this moment as Hopkins’s revision of “temporal damage,” a legal concept deployed by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his study of tort law. See Each Hour Redeem, 73–​74. 33. See Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories:  American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), 80; Houston A. Baker Jr., Workings of the Spirit:  The Poetics of Afro-​American Women’s Writing (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1991), 24; Somerville, “Passing Through the Closet,” 216–​23; and Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 148–​49. 34. Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–​1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 120, 157–​60, 167, quote on 120. Yopie Prins traces the nineteenth-​century reception of this ancient persona in both England and America; see Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 227. 35. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Sappho,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1871, 84. Somerville notes that while there is no evidence to suggest that Hopkins read this article, Higginson was an important “literary influence” for the novelist. “Passing Through the Closet,” 232n23. 36. Bogues, Empire of Liberty, 47, 46, 47. See also Devon W. Carbado, “Racial Naturalization,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 639. 37. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “temporize,” http://​www.oed.com. 38. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, ed. William L. Andrews (1901; repr., New York: Norton, 1996), 99, 100, 107. On this dimension of Washington’s philosophy, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141–​65, esp. 149–​50. 39. Du Bois, Souls, 45. 40. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “temporize.” 41. Washington, Up From Slavery, 145. 42. See Stephen Knadler, “Traumatized Racial Performativity:  Passing in Nineteenth-​Century African-​American Testimonies,” Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 87–​95. 43. Baker, Workings of the Spirit, 32. Baker refers to Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy here, but he understands Hopkins’s novels as engaged in the same cultural project. See also Washington, Invented Lives, 80. Thomas Cassidy offers a perceptive reading of politics in this episode in “Contending Contexts: Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” African American Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 667. 44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (1840; repr., New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 2:513. 45. On deliberation, see Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6, 26. “Prospectus of the New Romance of Colored Life, ‘Contending Forces,’” Colored American Magazine, September 1900. While the details concerning the reception of Contending Forces are fuzzy, it seems that it enjoyed its greatest success in the context of the African American club movement. See Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 193–​94, 278–​79.

 

250

Note s to pag e s 1 7 8 – 1 85

46. See Glenda E. Gilmore, “Murder, Memory, and the Flight of the Incubus,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, ed. David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 73–​93. 47. Hanna Wallinger makes this suggestion in “Agitation in the Family: Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” in The Self at Risk in English Literatures and Other Landscapes/​Das Risiko Selbst in der englischsprachigen Literatur und in anderen Bereichen, ed. Gudrun M. Grabher and Sonja Bahn-​Coblans (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, 1999), 69. 48. Ecclesiastes 7:13 (King James Version); Du Bois, Souls, 164. 49. Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past:  Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1. 50. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus:  On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 38. I borrow “perceptual coordinates” from Gabriel Rockhill’s incisive introduction to Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 3. 51. Rancière, Dissensus, 139; emphasis added. 52. Frederick Douglass, “In Law Free; In Fact, a Slave,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1992), ser. 1, 5:363. 53. Wallinger pursues this reading in Pauline E. Hopkins, 166–​67. 54. John Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (New York: Penguin, 1998), 84. 55. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Edwin Garrison Walker” (1901), in Daughter of the Revolution, 53. 56. Boston Slave Riot, and Trial of Anthony Burns. Containing the Report of the Faneuil Hall Meeting; The Murder of Batchelder; Theodore Parker’s Lesson for the Day; Speeches of Counsel on Both Sides, Corrected by Themselves; A  Verbatim Report of Judge Loring’s Decision; and Detailed Account of the Embarkation (Boston: Fetridge and Company, 1854), 10, 85. See also Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 62–​70, 215. 57. [Walt Whitman], Leaves of Grass, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1855; repr., New  York:  Penguin, 1986), 135, 136. My reading draws on Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance:  Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2003), 49–​51. 58. Hopkins, “Edwin Garrison Walker,” 53. 59. Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience:  Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 26–​32, 38, 43, quoted passages on 27, 44. 60. See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-​American Character and Destiny, 1817–​1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 71–​76, 230–​35. 61. Felipe Smith, American Body Politics:  Race, Gender, and Black Literary Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 33. 62. Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1850), 149. On Knox’s theories and reception, see A. W. Bates, The Anatomy of Robert Knox: Murder, Mad Science and Medical Regulation in Nineteenth-​Century Edinburgh (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 122–​29; Laura Callanan, Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, Racial Conflict, and the Turn to Fiction in Mid-​Victorian English Prose (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006), 51–​70; and Bernard M. Magubane, Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other (Pretoria:  University of South Africa Press, 2007), 122–​25, 129–​31. Rohy connects these theories to the history of sexuality in Anachronism and Its Others, 3–​7. 63. Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 256–​58, 275–​76. 64. Hopkins’s Primer is, among other things, a rejection of polygenesis. Of One Blood is often read along similar lines. See, for instance, Pascha A. Stevenson, “Of One Blood, of One Race: Pauline E. Hopkins’ Engagement of Racialized Science,” CLA Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 422–​43. 65. See Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race:  Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2009): 87–​101; Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113–​24; and “Slavery, Reparations, and the Mythic March of Freedom,” Raritan 27, no. 2 (2007): 41–​67; and Kevin Quashie,

 



Note s to pag e s 1 8 5 – 188

251

The Sovereignty of Quiet:  Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2012). On the vexed relationship between race and liberalism, see Charles W. Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1380–​97. 66. Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” 91. 67. See Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference:  Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 123, 129. 68. As Sean McCann interprets it, the swoon marks the moment in which the protagonist “ceases to work as Hopkins’s ‘political mouthpiece’” and takes up her part as “conveyer of history,” embodying the point at which “history and contemporaneity intersect.” But why presume that these two roles are mutually exclusive? See “‘Bonds of Brotherhood’: Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama,” ELH 64, no. 3 (1997): 791, 792. 69. Prins explains that the standard visual representation of Sappho portrays her “just before her fatal leap from the Leucadian Cliff.” Prins uses this image to make a theoretical argument about history that connects with my own sense of the conceptual function this figure performs in Contending Forces; see Victorian Sappho, 176. 70. See, for instance, Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 80; Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 105; and Sawaya, “Emplotting National History,” 83. Laura Doyle relates Sappho’s swoon to Hopkins’s conception of interiority as “an accretion of a communal history” in Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–​1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 384–​85, quote on 385. 71. I take these definitions from the entry for ἵστημι (or histēmi in its Latin transliteration) from A Greek-​English Lexicon, comp. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, rev. Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 841. See also Dimitris Vardoulakis, “Stasis: Beyond Political Theology?,” Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 127–​33. I thank Reginald Gibbons and Sara Monoson for guidance in unraveling the various meanings of stasis; any errors are my own. 72. Plato, Theaetetus and Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1952), 385; the passage appears in the original Greek on 384. 73. Liddell and Scott, Greek-​English Lexicon, 841. 74. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Charles Forster Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1:379; the passage appears in the original Greek on 1:378. On this sense, see Giorgio Agamben, Stasis:  Civil War as Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 75. Vardoulakis, “Stasis,” 128. 76. Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache with Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 24, 25, 104. 77. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 38. On stasis in its classical context, see Josiah Ober, Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going on Together (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 172–​73. 78. John Zumbrunnen, Silence and Democracy: Athenian Politics in Thucydides’ History (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 36. As Vardoulakis explains, stasis can “denote simultaneously and equally mobility and immobility”; in his evocative turn of phrase, this meaning indicates a “restless repose.” “Stasis,” 129. Agamben intriguingly notes that the related term “stasimos” designates the moment in “the tragedy when the chorus stands still and speaks.” Stasis, 13–​14. 79. Hopkins, Winona, 386; emphasis added. 80. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 289. The second Jefferson quote comes from his letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816. Writings, 1401. 81. Du Bois, Souls, 164. 82. On the resolution offered by the ending, see Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 389–​99; Korobkin, “Imagining State and Federal Law,” 2; Randle, “Mates, Marriage, and Motherhood,” 212; and Richard Yarborough, introduction to Contending Forces, xxxi–​x xxii. For analyses attuned to what is left unresolved, see M. Giulia Fabi, “Taming the Amazon? The Price of Survival in Turn-​of-​the-​Century African American Women’s Fiction,” in The Insular Dream:  Obsession

 

252

Note s to pag e s 1 8 8 – 1 92

and Resistance, ed. Kristiaan Versluys and Charles Altieri (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), 233; Gillman, Blood Talk, 17; and Peterson, “Unsettled Frontiers,” 192. 83. Yarborough, introduction to Contending Forces, xxxii. 84. Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World, 105.

Epilogue 1. Bamboozled, directed by Spike Lee (2000; New Line Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD. 2. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:333. My account of Lincoln’s speech draws on Lucas Morel, “Of Justice and Mercy in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address,” American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture 4 (2015): 462. On Honeycutt as Lincoln, see also Susan Gubar, “Racial Camp in The Producers and Bamboozled,” Film Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2006): 26–​37. Gubar’s Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1997), 53–​54; and Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 177–​78, examine the figure of Lincoln in blackface productions. On Lincoln’s enjoyment of blackface, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft:  Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4. 3. See, for example, Armond White, “Post-​Art Minstrelsy,” Cineaste 26, no. 2 (2001):  12–​ 14. White’s essay is part of “Race, Media, and Money:  A  Critical Symposium on Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” a Cineaste special forum that includes additional commentary by Saul Landau, Michael Rogin, and Greg Tate. See also “Minding the Messenger:  A  Symposium on Bamboozled,” Black Renaissance/​Renaissance Noire 3, no. 3 (2001): 8–​32, a transcript of a November 2000 discussion of Lee’s film held at New  York University featuring Stanley Crouch, Margo Jefferson, Eric Lott, and Michele Wallace. 4. A full account of the complex history of blackface in American culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is beyond the scope of this Epilogue, but suffice it to say that I take as axiomatic Lott’s assertion that, at its most basic level, blackface minstrelsy was a “borrowing” of “black cultural materials for white dissemination” that “ultimately depended on the material relations of slavery.” Love and Theft, 3. See also Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 17, 19. For other important studies of minstrelsy, see Gubar, Racechanges, esp.  53–​94; Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 5. My reading thus departs from the approach of most critics, who privilege the vantage point of the film’s extradiegetic audience and accordingly understand Bamboozled’s repetition of the imagery of blackface minstrelsy as subversive, contending that it is through a strategy of parodic critique that the film exposes, rather than merely repeats and replays, the distorted conceptions of blackness manufactured by the American culture industry. See, for instance, Jamie Barlowe, “‘You Must Never Be a Misrepresented People’:  Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” Canadian Review of American Studies/​Revue canadienne d’études américaines 33, no. 1 (2003): 1–​15; Harry J. Elam Jr., “Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” in Black Cultural Traffic:  Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, ed. Harry J. Elam Jr. and Kenell Jackson (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2005), 346–​62; Michael H. Epp, “Raising Minstrelsy: Humour, Satire and the Stereotype in The Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled,” Canadian Review of American Studies/​Revue canadienne d’études américaines 33, no. 1 (2003):  17–​35; Dan Flory, “Bamboozled:  Philosophy through Blackface,” in The Philosophy of Spike Lee, ed. Mark T. Conrad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 164–​83; Susan Booker Morris, “Bamboozled: Political Parodic Postmodernism,” West Virginia University Philological Papers 50 (2003): 67–​76; and Robert Nowatzki, “‘Blackin’ Up Is Us Doin’ White Folks Doin’ Us’: Blackface Minstrelsy and Racial Performance in Contemporary American Fiction and Film,” Literature Interpretation Theory 18, no. 2 (2007): 115–​36. These accounts suggest that Bamboozled provides its viewers with an opportunity to confront the visual trappings of minstrelsy that is at the same time an occasion to rework and thus resist the racist imaginings that Lee’s film reminds us endure. As persuasive as such readings may be

 



Note s to pag e s 1 9 2 – 196

253

when considered from the point of view of Bamboozled’s audience, they are less convincing, if not untenable, if we take an intradiegetic approach to the work. I pursue an extended version of this argument in “Falling Back into History: The Uncanny Trauma of Blackface Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 33, no. 4 (2010): 1093–​115. For approaches to the complex relation between past and present in the film that rhyme with my own, see Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 175–​207; Gubar, “Racial Camp in The Producers and Bamboozled”; Kara Keeling, “Passing for Human: Bamboozled and Digital Humanism,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (2005): 237–​50; and Knight, Disintegrating the Musical, 231–​48. Tavia Nyong’o provocatively situates the film within an exploration of shame and spectatorship in “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (2002): 371–​91. 6. I owe this insight to Michael Hill. Although Invisible Man likely holds a place in Lee’s formation given his undergraduate training at Morehouse, as Hill explained to me, across his career the director has identified with the vision of the Black Arts Movement over and against Ellison’s integrationism. Interestingly, Lee may have come to the figure of the falling body that is so central to Invisible Man via Suzan-​Lori Parks, with whom he collaborated on the film Girl 6 (1996). Parks was the playwright initially considered to adapt Ellison’s novel for the stage, and her own productions The America Play (1994) and Topdog/​Underdog (2001) toy with the idea of a fall and specifically feature a falling black Lincoln. On the Parks and Ellison connection, see Kerry Reid, “Invisible Man world premiere brings classic to life,” The University of Chicago, http://​www.uchicago.edu/​features/​20120206_​invisible_​man/​. On Parks’s use of Lincoln, see Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–​11, 231–​60. Lee’s disidentification with Ellison surely explains in part why so little work has brought these two artists together; for gestures in this direction, see Michael Germana, Standards of Value: Money, Race, and Literature in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 147–​55; and Terri Simone Francis, “Flickers of the Spirit: ‘Black Independent Film,’ Reflexive Reception, and a Blues Cinema Sublime,” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 1, no. 2 (2010): 7–​24. 7. On the significance of this renaming, see Knight, Disintegrating the Musical, 247. 8. Steven C. Dubin, “Symbolic Slavery:  Black Representations in Popular Culture,” Social Problems 34, no. 2 (1987): 122–​40. 9. Heike Toewe understands this episode as Sloan’s attempt to protest the show by implicitly situating it within the “tradition” of white Americans viewing blacks as “objects” for their “exploitation”; see “The Use of Spectatorship in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” in Picturing America: Trauma, Realism, Politics and Identity in American Visual Culture, ed. Antje Dallmann, Reinhard Isensee, and Philipp Kneis (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), 174. 10. Michel-​Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 15, 151. 11. Lott, Love and Theft, 3. 12. Keeling makes a similar point about Sloan’s comments in “Passing for Human,” 245–​46. 13. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 23. 14. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (1852; repr., New York: Norton, 1994), 3. On the relation between minstrel tableaux and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Lhamon, Raising Cain, 96–​99. This scene in Bamboozled also recalls D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, when, early in the film, Ben Cameron, conducting a tour of his Piedmont, South Carolina, family plantation for his Northern guests, makes a visit to the slave quarters, where he and his friends perversely delight in a spontaneous performance put on by his bound blacks. 15. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 42. 16. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 3. 17. Susan Buck Morris also comments on the opening shot of the clock, but reads the image in relation to her argument about Bamboozled’s parodying of the documentary form; see “Bamboozled,” 75. W. J. T. Mitchell understands the clock as a sign of Pierre’s “entrapment

 

254

Note s to pag e s 1 9 6 – 2 03

inside a mechanical system, like the windup figures and automatons he gathers around him.” Mitchell, “Living Color:  Race, Stereotype, and Animation in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 304. 18. On the way racial terms are “reproduced in the expression of resistance,” see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 53. 19. For a richly theorized reading of the film that uses this phrase as its point of departure, see Soyica Diggs Colbert, “Dancing with Death: Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” in The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, ed. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-​Hussen (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2016), 125–​49, esp. 146. 20. My formulation here is influenced by Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 32. 21. On this archive, see Michele Wallace, “Bamboozled:  The Legacy,” Black Renaissance/​ Renaissance Noire 3, no. 3 (2001): 33–​38. 22. For Wallace, this montage is a significant shortcoming of the film. As she argues, “All of these images which show black people in a comedic light are absolutely interchangeable as long as we’re looking ridiculous in some way.” “Minding the Messenger,” 16. 23. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972), 55. Significantly, in this section, Baldwin focuses explicitly on the “sin” and “guilt” of white Americans for their creation of a degraded blackness that underwrites racial supremacy. 24. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 33, 565, 6. Further references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 25. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, rev. ed. (New  York:  Modern Library, 2003), 111; original emphasis. Further references to this volume are cited parenthetically as CE. 26. Ralph Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Part I, Box 146, Folder 4. Further references to this archive will be abbreviated as REP, followed by locators. In quoting from these manuscripts, I have silently corrected clear typographical errors and have only transcribed revisions pertinent to my argument. All materials are reproduced by permission of The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust. 27. In a 1972 interview, Ellison glossed “boomerang” as a “parabola,” before asserting that “you really cannot break down a symbol rationally.” See Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh ( Jackson:  University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 231. On the contradictory nature of this image—​and the textual and political history behind it—​see Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010), esp.  327. Michael Germana reads the boomerang as a figure for the Nietzschean eternal return in his forthcoming book, Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). For a helpful illumination of competing temporalities in the novel, see Marc Singer, “‘A Slightly Different Sense of Time’: Palimpsestic Time in Invisible Man,” Twentieth-​Century Literature 49, no. 3 (2003): 388–​419. 28. See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “plunge,” n.  and v., http://​www.oed.com. Jim Neighbors approaches the term through a Derridean lens in “Plunging (outside of) History:  Naming and Self-​Possession in Invisible Man,” African American Review 36, no. 2 (2002): 227–​42; and Robert J. Butler understands it in relation to Bergson’s philosophy in “The Plunge into Pure Duration: Bergsonian Visions of Time in Ellison’s Invisible Man,” CLA Journal 33, no. 3 (1990): 260–​79. 29. For readings of this episode that have shaped my thinking, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2005), 111–​19; and Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies:  Grooves in Sonic Afro-​Modernity (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2005), 74–​82. 30. It is worth considering the conceptual insight that emerges from the contrast Ellison establishes between Clifton’s death and the Sambo doll’s resistance to death. The implication seems to be that while black Americans will regularly die, the Sambo doll is somehow constitutively—​and permanently—​undead. I owe this insight (and much of this formulation)

 



Note s to pag e s 2 0 3 – 209

255

to Alex Corey. See also Sharon Patricia Holland’s powerful theoretical account of these concerns in Raising the Dead:  Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2000). 31. REP, Part I, Box 146, Folder 4. A shorter meditation on “plunge” appears in Part I, Box 152, Folder 2. 32. REP, Part I, Box 151, Folder 6. There is a less philosophical—​though no less existential—​ sense of “plunge” at work in the novel, and it again emerges from an excised draft. In an episode on “Jazz Music,” the narrator describes an instructor’s tirade against the “so-​called jazz,” specifically the practice of deploying a mute to alter the sound of the trumpet. The professor proclaims, “A toilet plunger stuck into the bell of a trumpet! It is an abomination unto the Gods of music.” He entreats his students to “leave … plungers to clogged commodes.” See REP, Part I, Box 145, Folder 5. The association of “plunging” with excrement is strengthened if we consider Adam Bradley’s argument about a potential source for the quantity of lights (1,369) in the protagonist’s underground home: the number books popular among Harlem gamblers in the middle of the twentieth century. As Bradley notes, some numbers were so infamous that anyone familiar with these texts, which were known as “dream books,” would recognize that 369 signified “excrement.” See Adam Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting … (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 2–​3. The sense of “plunging” that indexes bodily waste might be read sardonically, as a gloss that introduces a sort of gallows humor into this signifying system but nonetheless emphasizes the violent subjugation associated with the more serious senses of the term highlighted by the Smith reference and the Clifton episode. My thanks to Alex Corey for pointing me to this possibility. 33. Here, I  draw on Anthony Reed’s wonderful account of the blues as “a modality of affirming at once the truth of two apparently contradictory statements” in Freedom Time:  The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 137. See also Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 34. REP, Part I, Box 143, Folder 2, Folder 9. On Ellison’s compositional practices, see Bradley’s magisterial Ralph Ellison in Progress, esp. 26. 35. REP, Part I, Box 143, Folder 2. 36. Germane here is C. Douglas Lummis’s examination of democracy’s possible perdurance in his Radical Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Characterizing the modern conflation of “progress” with forward temporal movement that I discussed in the Introduction, Lummis writes of the longing for a moment when “we would hear an earth-​ shaking ‘click,’” when “the great ratchet of history would move to a new position from which it would not go back, and democracy would change from something we have to struggle for into something that is just there” (161). Against this model, Lummis proposes that “democracy appears … at those moments when people fight for it. If you try to achieve democracy by waiting for it, you will wait forever” (17). 37. [Walt Whitman], Leaves of Grass, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1855; repr., New  York:  Penguin, 1986), 142. The poem was untitled in this edition. 38. See Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass:  A  Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1980), 1:155. 39. See Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, Democratic Vistas, and Other Prose, ed. Louise Pound (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1935); Hugh I’Anson Fausset, Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942). These are just two of the multiple Whitman works in Ellison’s personal library, which is held in the Rare Book Room, Library of Congress. On Ellison and Whitman, see Ivy G. Wilson, “Postwar America, Again,” in Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, ed. Ivy G. Wilson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 104–​23. 40. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, ed. Ed Folsom (1871; repr., Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 26. 41. Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting … , ed. Adam Bradley and John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 722; original emphasis.

 

256

Note s to pag e s 2 0 9 – 2 11

42. Ibid., 245. 43. REP, Part I, Box 130, Folder 7. Significantly, Ellison toyed with the tense of “fall” in this scene, at one point changing the phrase Severen “began his fall” to “he fell.” I am indebted to Grant Shreve for alerting me to these fragments and for helping me to place them within my argument. 44. Ibid. 45. On these changes, see Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 45–​46, 126–​27, 140–​44. 46. REP, Part I, Box 130, Folder 7. 47. I riff here on Bradley’s wonderful case for reading Ellison’s second novel as a vital articulation of American democracy precisely because of its unfinished status. Ralph Ellison in Progress, 214–​15. 48. Spike Lee, interview by Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe, MSNBC, November 5, 2008, http://​www.msnbc.msn.com/​id/​21134540/​v p/​27643900#27554336. Importantly, amid his repeated proclamations that America has achieved a “new beginning,” Lee does remark that we must remind ourselves that “400 years of slavery … built this country.” It is not clear, however, how Lee squares these comments with his other statements in the interview, particularly his proposal that history should now be conceived in terms of a “BB/​AB” divide (“Before Barack/​After Barack”). 49. Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” speech, Philadelphia, PA, March 18, 2008, NBC News, http://​www.nbcnews.com/​id/​23690567/​ns/​politics-​decision_​08/​t/​more-​perfect-​ union/​#.UZmYooImbKh. For Obama on Lincoln, see, for example, “Senator Obama’s Announcement,” speech, Springfield, IL, February 10, 2007, New York Times, http://​www. nytimes.com/​2007/​02/​10/​us/​politics/​11obama-​text.html?action=click&contentCollectio n=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article. 50. “Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage,” New York Times, March 19, 2008. The speech already has attracted significant scholarly attention, including, most notably, Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and T. Denean Sharpley-​W hiting, ed., The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). Dylan Rodríguez offers a trenchant critique of the speech’s racial history in “The Black Presidential Non-​Slave: Genocide and the Present Tense of Racial Slavery,” Political Power and Social Theory 22 (2011):  17–​50. In Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 216–​17, Sandra M. Gustafson historicizes the rhetorical styles and political ideologies of Wright and Obama. Gene Andrew Jarrett places the address in the context of the black literary tradition in Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 189–​95. In Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 209–​ 15, James T.  Kloppenberg traces the various dimensions of Obama’s political, intellectual, and personal commitments. Nick Bromell offers a corrective to Kloppenberg’s genealogy by emphasizing the influence of the African American political tradition on Obama’s thinking; see The Time Is Always Now:  Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 129–​44. And in Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 213–​20, Cathy J. Cohen puts the speech into dialogue with Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. 51. Obama, “A More Perfect Union.” In Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, the line reads, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (1951; repr., New York: Vintage, 2011), 73. On the significance of this line within Faulkner’s writing and Obama’s adaptation of it, see Jarrett, Representing the Race, 192–​95; and Dorothy Stringer, “Not Even Past”: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 44–​46. Though neither Jarrett nor Stringer mentions it, Requiem also contains an extended meditation on falling and plunging (and one that surely influenced Ellison’s treatment of these tropes in his second novel). Recounting the commencement of the Civil War in 1861, Faulkner writes, “At which moment the destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State, the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always seem like soar: a weightless deliberation preliminary

 



Note s to pag e s 2 1 1 – 212

257

to a rush not downward but upward, the falling body reversed during that second by transubstantiation into the upward rush of earth” (180–​81). This passage shares much with Ellison’s treatment of the terms in Invisible Man, but the terminus of Faulkner’s fall seems more akin to Lee’s, for, intriguingly, it is a state of stasis: “the plunging body advanced far enough now into space as to have lost all sense of motion, weightless and immobile upon the light pressure of invisible air” (181). What if Obama had quoted this extract, rather than Requiem’s more famous line about temporality? And what would it mean to draw on this passage to insert Obama into the literary historical trajectory of falling and plunging I trace above? 52. Obama, “A More Perfect Union.” 53. Ibid. 54. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches,” speech, Selma, AL, March 7, 2015, The White House, https://​www.whitehouse.gov/​ the-​press-​office/​2015/​03/​07/​remarks-​president-​50th-​anniversary-​selma-​montgomery-​ marches. 55. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father:  A  Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; repr., New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 85. In his second book, near the end of his chapter on foreign policy, Obama offers this intriguing admission: “I wonder, sometimes, whether … we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.” By the start of the next paragraph, however, he proclaims, “I don’t linger on such thoughts.” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 322. Timothy Parrish notes Ellison’s influence on Obama but reads the politics of this connection differently; see Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 230. See also Jarrett, Representing the Race, 194–​95. 56. Obama, “A More Perfect Union.” On the “skewed life chances” that are the material evidence of the legacy of racial bondage, see Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6.

 

 

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abolition Act (Britain), 166, 248n23 accounting for slavery’s wrongs, 19, 20, 54–​55, 94–​97, 115–​18, 128, 132; cross-​ generational, 102; Douglass on, 88–​89, 93–​94, 101, 118, 136; Du Bois on, 94–​95; impossibility of, 114, 118, 127–​28, 136, 188; and the miscount, 115–​16, 118, 180; as moral reckoning, 95, 119, 130; narrative dimensions, 94–​95, 96, 114–​18; quantitative dimensions, 94–​95, 99–​101, 102, 109, 115–​ 16; and social shame, 126, 130, 134, 136; and temporal distance, 116–​18; Vaughan on, 102–​7. See also reparations Adams, John, 42–​43, 122, 123, 239n95 aesthetics: and activism, 12, 217n50; of African American literature, 12–​13, 216n49; in literary studies, 219n89; as political strategy, 20–​21, 26; and temporality, 25–​26 Afro-​pessimism. See under pessimism afterlife of slavery, 11–​12, 19, 125–​29, 132–​35; and Afro-​pessimism, 154; and Civil Rights Cases, 88–​91; Crane on (see Monster, The: afterlife of slavery in); Douglass on, 63, 65–​66, 73–​78, 88–​92; Du Bois on, 52–​54; as extended by temporizing, 175; Hopkins on (see Contending Forces: afterlife of slavery in); in Lee’s Bamboozled, 194; Obama on, 211; and Plessy v. Ferguson, 133–​34; and Whitman, 2–​3, 208. See also present-​past; second slavery Agamben, Giorgio, 251n78 Agassiz, Louis, 184 agency. See political agency agitation. See political agitation Albany Bible and Manual Training Institute, 233n85

Alexander, Columbus, 76 Allen, Thomas M., 214n14 Anderson, Benedict, 5 Anderson, William J.: Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, 114–​15, 116, 119 Andrews, William, 115, 148–​49, 242n11, 244n51 Anthony, Aaron, 85, 231n53, 232nn69–​70 Antigua, 166 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 126–​27, 128 Ariadne (and Theseus), 81 Assing, Ottilia, 76 Auld, Lucretia (née Anthony), 85, 232n69 Auld, Thomas, 229n24, 231n53, 232n69, 232n71; death of, 83; as Douglass’s father, 85–​86, 232n70, 232n73; reunion with Douglass, 62–​64, 66, 66–​69, 79–​86, 122, 230n33, 231n54 Bailey, Harriet, 84–​86, 227n3 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 177, 228n11, 249n43 Baldwin, James, 201, 254n23 Balfour, Lawrie, 53, 226n59 Baltimore Sun: on Douglass-​Auld reunion, 63, 66, 66–​69, 79, 84, 227n3, 230n26; on Douglass’s “Our National Capital” lecture, 76, 78–​ 79; on Douglass’s St. Michaels lecture, 69–​70, 78–​79 Bamboozled (Lee), 21; and Baldwin, 201; blackface Lincoln in, 190–​91, 191, 210; blackface minstrel show as reenacting racist caricatures, 192, 194–​95, 196, 199, 200–​201, 202; blackface minstrel show as satire, 193, 195–​96, 252n5; collapsing of temporal boundaries in, 191–​92, 194–​95, 199, 200–​201; vs. Ellison, 192, 201, 202–​3, 207, 253n6; external audience of, 200, 259

 

260

Ind e x

Bamboozled (Lee) (cont.) 201, 252n5; falling in, 21, 190–​91, 192, 197, 198, 200, 201, 253n6; vs. Faulkner, 257n51; final voiceover of, 200–​201; “fixed past” in, 194; historical research on blackface in, 193–​94, 199–​200; and the “new millennium,” 190, 191, 191–​92, 194, 196; nonlinear causality/​temporality in, 199, 200; present-​past in, 192, 196; recursion in, 191, 196–​97, 198, 199, 200–​201; scholarship on, 252n3, 252n5, 253n17; stasis as paralysis in, 192; vs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 195; video montage of blackface minstrelsy in, 199–​200, 254n22; white enjoyment of blackness as object in, 195, 253n9, 253n14 Barnard, John Levi, 244n44 Barrett, Harrison, 111–​12, 113 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 143 Benston, Kimberly W., 82, 231n60 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 142 Berlant, Lauren, 147 Bermuda, 165, 166 Berry, Mary Frances, 101, 235n27, 236n49 Best, Stephen, 27–​28 Bible: Ecclesiastes, 42–​43, 57, 179; Gospel of Matthew, 152. See also Christianity binaries unsettled by untimeliness: activity/​ passivity, 183–​84; falling/​rising, 201; leaning back/​looking forward, 208–​9; movement/​stasis, 192; optimism/​ pessimism, 149, 159–​60; past/​future, 151; progress/​regress, 192 blackface minstrel shows, 21, 190–​92, 193–​201, 202–​3, 252nn4–​5. See also Bamboozled blackness: historical explanations for, 45–​46, 225n45; Jefferson on, 44–​45, 225n48; and political theory, 163; social devaluation of, 94–​95, 126–​27, 129, 133–​34, 144. See also under slavery; temporality black optimism. See under optimism Blight, David W., 6, 68, 76, 227n73 Bogues, Anthony, 173, 175, 221n3 Booth, W. James, 130 Boston Slave Riot (pamphlet), 183 Bowie, Malcolm, 245n66 Bowler, Peter J., 215n35 Boxill, Bernard, 127–​29, 240n113 Bradley, Adam, 255n32, 256n47 Bradley, Joseph P., 88–​89, 91, 232n77 Bromell, Nick, 27–​28, 256n50 Brooks, Daphne, 79 Brophy, Alfred L., 235n19 Brown, Bill, 124 Brown, Henry Billings, 133–​34 Brown, John, 9 Brown, Wendy, 17 Bruce, Dickson D., Jr., 139, 140, 156, 217n51

Bruce, Henry Clay: The New Man, 115, 116–​17, 132 Bruff, William H., 67, 84 Bufkin, Sydney, 245n60 Burns, Anthony, 182–​83 Butler, Robert J., 254n28 Cabot, John, 47 Caldwell, Charles, 79 Carby, Hazel, 162, 163 Carlyle, Thomas, 2 Castronovo, Russ, 221n3 Chen, Mel Y., 244n56 Cheng, Anne, 26, 185 Chesnutt, Charles W., 17, 21, 25, 207, 242n8; and Afro-​pessimism, 141, 154–​56, 159, 160; and black optimism, 141, 159, 160; and Declaration of Independence, 142; and failed futures, 20, 139, 141, 155, 160; “The Future American” (articles), 142–​43; vs. Griggs, 156, 159–​60; The House Behind the Cedars (novel), 139; and optimism, 140, 147, 149, 159, 160; own thoughts on works, 139, 147, 243n42; Paul Marchand, F. M. C. (novel), 148; and pessimism, 20, 139, 140, 147, 149, 159, 160, 242n11; and prophecy, 20, 142–​43; as prophet of pessimism, 20, 140, 141, 153, 160; The Quarry (novel), 148; scholarship on, 139, 140–​41, 142, 148–​49, 242n11, 244n44; speeches on race, 148, 149, 153, 154; on time as divorced from progress, 148, 154. See also Colonel’s Dream, The; Marrow of Tradition, The Chiles, Katy L., 225n45 Christianity, 107, 111, 113. See also Bible Civil Rights Cases (1883), 8, 65, 83, 91, 131, 232n77; Douglass on, 88–​90, 92 Civil War, 6, 24; danger of repeating, 100; in Douglass, 89; in Du Bois, 52; Lincoln on, 100; in Whitman, 1–​2, 213n5. See also historical periodization Clarke, Lewis: Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 114 Clarke, Milton: Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 114 Clarke, Sarah Jane (pseud. Grace Greenwood), 78, 79 clocks. See under temporality Colbert, Soyica Diggs, 254n19 Colonel’s Dream, The (Chesnutt), 20–​21, 148, 161; Biblical allusions in, 152; vs. Chesnutt’s Marrow, 152–​53; conversation on racial progress in, 149–​50; critical response to, 153, 155, 245n60; “dead past” in, 149, 153; failure in, 140, 149–​51, 154, 242n11; French’s crusade to save city, 149–​52, 154; vs. Griggs’s Pointing the Way, 156; and

 

Ind e x optimism, 149, 150, 152, 242n11; and pessimism, 139, 141, 149–​50, 153; and the present-​past, 151, 153, 155; prophecy in, 152–​53, 155; scholarship on, 139, 148–​49, 152, 242n11, 244n51; temporality in, 150–​51, 152 Committee of Five, 122, 123 Compromise of 1850, 182 Condit, Celeste Michelle, 217n55 Condon, Robin L., 229n17, 231n53 Connell, William J., 101–​2 Constitution, 164, 211. See also individually numbered amendments Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Hopkins), 3–​4, 210; on abolitionists, 178–​79, 180–​81; afterlife of slavery in, 13, 21, 162–​64, 174, 179, 186, 248n14; on agitation, 177, 178–​79, 187; American Colored League (ACL) meeting in, 164, 177–​82, 184, 185, 187; on American Revolution, 181–​82; “A Colored Politician” (chapter), 175–​77, 178; concluding sequence, 187–​89; dissensus in, 179–​ 80, 186; vs. Douglass, 168, 170, 178–​79; vs. Du Bois, 165, 175, 178–​79, 187; gradual emancipation in, 166–​67, 170, 248n23; image of the fly in, 176–​77; vs. Jefferson, 165, 186–​87; on Jim Crow mob violence and lynch law, 163–​64, 175, 178, 180, 184, 187; as political theory, 163–​65, 171–​72, 185, 248n14; postemancipation storyline, 170–​ 71, 172–​73, 174–​82, 184, 185, 186–​89; pre-​emancipation storyline, 165–​71, 175, 188–​89; preface to, 13, 21, 162, 163–​ 64, 246n9; present-​past in, 162, 163–​64, 165, 182, 188–​89; racial subjugation in, 167–​71, 178, 181, 188; reception of, 249n45; recursion in, 162–​64, 170–​72, 175–​76, 177, 178, 179, 180–​81, 182, 185, 188–​89; redress in, 188; scholarship on, 163, 169, 172, 246n9, 248n24, 251n82; silence/​ stillness in, 164, 177, 181–​83, 184–​87, 189; swooning in, 168, 185–​86, 251n68, 251n70; on temporizing, 172–​77, 178, 179, 185; “The Tragedy” (chapter), 168–​69, 170, 171; transatlantic journeys in, 165, 187–​89; untimely democracy in, 179, 180–​81, 185–​ 87; vs. Washington, 173, 175, 178; white status as tied to slavery in, 166–​68, 169–​70, 176, 248n26; vs. Whitman, 165 Continental Congress, 34–​35, 122, 123, 223n29 Corey, Alex, 254n30 counting. See accounting for slavery’s wrongs Covey, Edward, 19, 63–​64, 65, 68, 69, 82, 228n7, 238n90 Coviello, Peter, 225n48 Crane, Mary Helen Peck, 238n91

261

Crane, Stephen, 21, 97, 238n91, 239n98; “The Blue Hotel” (story), 130–​31, 132, 240–​41nn124–​25; “Death and The Child” (story), 241n125; vs. Twain, 22. See also Monster, The critical race theory, 23, 26, 27, 98, 165, 185; Afro-​ pessimism, 20–​21, 141, 154–​55, 159–​60, 245n62; black optimism, 20, 141, 159–​60 Crogman, W. H.: Progress of a Race (with Kletzing), 11, 13, 64, 81, 146 Crummell, Alexander, 8–​10, 12, 13, 16 Cuba, 109 Darby, Derrick, 240n113 Declaration of Independence, 46, 47; as absent in Hopkins, 164; in Chesnutt, 142; in Crane, 121–​24; in Du Bois, 29–​30, 36, 222n8, 222n17; ex-​slave pension movement and, 104, 108–​9; historical trajectory of, 32; Jefferson’s draft of, 34–​35, 104, 123–​24, 222n16, 223n17, 239n96; on slavery, 34–​ 35, 104, 123–​24, 164, 239n98; Trumbull’s painting of, 122, 122–​24, 238n91, 239n95; in Walker, 142 Delaney, Lucy: From the Darkness Cometh the Light, 22, 109, 111 democracy: and American literature, 27, 220n97; defining movements of, 21, 33, 165, 207–​ 10, 212; and dissensus, 179–​80, 186; Du Boisian, 38, 53, 57–​58, 176, 226n55; hope in, 14, 17–​18, 21; Jeffersonian, 37–​38, 43–​45, 47, 165, 176, 186; and the miscount, 115–​16, 118, 180; in the nadir, 33; and the “possible,” 33; and progress, 3–​4, 6, 10, 14, 18, 47, 163, 211, 255n36; and slavery, 39, 41, 47; standard narrative of, 1, 3–​4, 17, 33, 95, 208; as transitional state, 33, 37, 42–​43, 211–​12; and voluntary associations, 177. See also stasis; temporality: and democracy; untimely democracy De Pietro, Thomas, 228n11 Dickerson, Isaiah, 108. See also MRB&PA Dickinson, John, 239n95 Dimock, Wai Chee, 32–​34 Dinius, Marcy J., 242n17 disenfranchisement. See franchise Disraeli, Benjamin, 2 Dixon, Thomas: The Leopard’s Spots, 158, 248n14 double consciousness: defined, 55; temporal version of, 18, 31, 55–​56, 99, 226n66 Douglass, Frederick, 25, 56, 96, 180, 212; on accounting for slavery’s wrongs, 93–​94, 101, 118, 136; on agitation, 92, 93, 165, 233n85; and Auld visit, 62–​64, 66, 66–​69, 79–​86, 122, 229n24, 230n33, 231n54; biography, 10, 62–​63, 84–​86, 231n53, 232nn69–​70; and Covey encounter, 63–​64, 68, 82, 228n7,

 

262

Ind e x

Douglass, Frederick (cont.) 228n9, 231n62, 238n90; and Crummell, 9–​ 10; difficulty in shaping own narrative, 63, 79–​80, 84; and “footprints” of slavery, 72, 74, 75, 78, 89; as former slave, 67–​68, 82–​ 84; vs. Hopkins, 165, 178–​79; “Letter to My Old Master,” 68, 86; and mother, 84–​86, 232n67, 232n73; My Bondage and My Freedom (1855 book), 19, 64, 65, 84–​86, 116, 231n62; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845 book), 19, 64, 65, 68, 84–​ 86, 168, 231n62, 232n70; “Our National Capital” (speech), 71, 72–​79, 77, 80, 89, 91, 230nn42–​43, 231nn46–​47; postbellum conservatism of, 71, 229n18, 230nn30–​31; on racial progress, 63, 69–​70, 72–​75, 78, 91; The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (with Wells), 92; “Self-​Made Men” (speech), 71, 230n31; and slavery’s afterlife, 3, 4, 8, 16, 71, 72, 75; and “spirit of progress,” 72, 73, 90, 231n62; St. Michaels lecture, 69–​71, 78–​79, 80, 89; and unknown date of birth, 63, 84–​85, 232n71; as US Marshal, 62–​63, 64, 72, 76, 78–​79, 82–​84, 91, 230n43; on Washington, DC, 72–​75, 78–​79. See also Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Doyle, Laura, 251n70 Dred Scott decision. See Scott v. Sandford Du Bois, Burghardt, 56–​57 Du Bois, Nina Gomer, 56 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 13, 21, 22, 96; fear of stasis, 38, 57–​58, 165, 187, 209; “The Freedmen’s Bureau” (article), 52–​53; historical moment of, 31; vs. Hopkins, 163, 164, 165, 174, 175, 178–​79; vs. Jefferson, 30–​32, 38–​39, 50, 53, 57–​58, 176, 221n3; personal life of, 56–​57; on whiteness, 74. See also Souls of Black Folk, The duCille, Ann, 163 Dumm, Thomas, 227n74 Duquette, Elizabeth, 23 Durand, Asher B., 122 Ecclesiastes. See under Bible Edelman, Lee, 153, 218n64, 244n56 Elder, Arlene, 156 Eliot, Thomas D., 51 Ellis, R. J., 152, 242n11 Ellison, Ralph: democratic theory of, 202, 207, 208, 210; falling as democratic gesture and as temporal confusion, 208–​10; and Faulkner, 256n51; impact on Obama, 211, 257n55; imperative to grapple with present-​past, 207, 208–​9, 212; later writings of, 207; on The Monster, 99; on music, 204, 255n32; National Book Award acceptance speech, 208; Three Days Before

the Shooting . . . (unfinished novel), 208–​ 10; and Whitman, 208, 255n39. See also Invisible Man emancipation: Douglass on, 16, 91; Du Bois on, 18, 51; gradual version of, 166–​67, 170, 248n23; ineffectiveness of, 126–​27, 162, 171, 180–​81; slave narratives on, 116–​17 English, Daylanne K., 26, 162, 217n52, 246n9, 248n14, 249n32 Eppes, John Wayles, 224n35 Erkkila, Betsy, 213n5 Ernest, John, 12, 231n54 Evans, H. Clay, 111 ex-​slave pension movement, 14, 19, 101–​2; government’s response to, 111–​13, 137–​38; and House, 97, 108–​13, 136; and Vaughan, 102–​7, 103, 106, 124. See also MRB&PA Ex-​Slave Petitioners’ Assembly, 137–​38 Fabi, M. Giulia, 150, 156 facing scenes, 82–​83, 122–​23 failure (conceptual framework), 14, 16, 20, 137–​38, 181; as productive, 65, 138. See also future: as failed/​unfulfilled Faulkner, William, 92, 153, 211, 256n51 Ferguson, SallyAnn, 142 Fifteenth Amendment, 2, 6, 16, 100, 162, 241n130; Du Bois on, 51 Foley, Barbara, 254n27 Folsom, Ed, 213n3 Foner, Eric, 225n54 Foster, Frances Smith, 217n50 Fourteenth Amendment, 6, 88, 90, 162, 232n77 franchise (African American voting rights), 2, 35–​36, 100, 172, 173 Franklin, Benjamin, 122, 123 Fredrickson, George, 142 Freedmen’s Bureau: defunding of, 6, 50; Du Bois on, 18, 50–​52, 57, 94–​95, 226n55; objectives of, 50–​51, 225n54, 226n55; origins of, 225n52; and present-​past, 53; temporality of, 50–​51, 55 Freeland, William, 67 Freeman, Elizabeth, 25, 153 Fugitive Slave Law, 89 Fullinwider, Robert, 105, 240n122 future, 1, 4, 16–​17; Afro-​pessimism on, 155; Douglass on, 75; as failed/​unfulfilled, 20, 138, 140, 142–​43, 155, 156, 160; Jefferson on, 39–​40, 46–​47; reparations and, 100–​ 101, 107, 136; Washington on, 143–​44. See also democracy: and progress Garrison, William Lloyd, 161–​62, 180 Gebhard, Caroline, 7, 215n25, 217n50 generations: arguments against autonomy of, 36, 38, 53, 224n37; autonomy of, 18,

 

Ind e x 36–​37, 42–​44; vs. collective responsibility/​ shame, 18, 20, 98, 105, 117, 119, 127, 129–​ 30, 135–​36, 235n18; and democracy, 42–​43; as incompatible with slavery/​blackness, 41; vs. intergenerational obligation, 53, 56–​57; and linear time, 17 Genette, Gérard, 157, 246n77 George III (king), 34, 123 Germana, Michael, 254n27 Gillman, Susan, 218n72 Goddu, Teresa, 114 Goldberg, David Theo, 254n18 Goldsby, Jacqueline, 234n16, 235n21, 238n86, 238n88 Gooding-​Williams, Robert, 227nn72–​73, 231n62 Gorman, Walter, 137–​38 Grant, Ulysses S., 35 Grenada Revolution, 138 Griffith, D. W.: The Birth of a Nation, 200, 253n14 Griggs, Sutton E., 16, 17, 20, 25, 139, 140; biography, 156; vs. Chesnutt, 156, 159–​ 60; and the future, 156, 157, 158, 160; The Hindered Hand: or, The Reign of the Repressionist (novel), 156, 158, 159; Imperium in Imperio (novel), 156, 246n79; and Jim Crow segregation, 156; and optimism/​pessimism, 156, 158, 159; Overshadowed (novel), 156, 157; and paratexts, 140, 157–​59, 245n73, 246n77, 246n79; Pointing the Way (novel), 156–​ 57; and the present-​past, 156, 158; and prophecy, 157; scholarship on, 156, 245n71; Unfettered (novel), 156, 157–​58 Gustafson, Sandra M., 242n18 Haiti, 91 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 73 Hall, Samuel: 47 Years a Slave, 19, 96–​97, 115, 117–​18, 128, 136 Halliburton, David, 240n124 Hamilton, Alexander, 221n3 Hardt, Michael, 224n42 Harlan, John Marshall, 134, 232n77, 241n130 Harper, Frances E. W.: Iola Leroy, 22, 126–​27, 249n43 Harrison, Benjamin, 9, 91 Hartman, Saidiya, 26, 79, 195, 230n44, 245n62, 257n56 Hayes, Rutherford B., 6, 9, 35; and Douglass, 62, 64, 72, 79 Hazard, Ebenezer, 225n51 Hedin, Raymond, 140 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 82 Henry VII (king), 47 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 173, 249n35 Hill, Michael, 253n6 Hinks, Peter P., 231n53

263

Hiro, Molly, 240n122 historical periodization, 23–​24; contested in Hopkins, 162, 171; contested in Lee’s Bamboozled, 194–​95; Jim Crow era, 32, 33–​ 34; of the nadir, 7, 215n25; postbellum vs. antebellum, 23–​24, 219n81; of Reconstruction, 6; “transbellum,” 24 historicism, 24–​25, 97, 219n84, 234n15; diachronic, 32–​33 Holland, Sharon P., 26, 53–​54, 254n30 Holley, Joseph Winthrop, 233n85 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 249n32 Hopkins, Pauline E., 14, 16, 21, 38, 139, 160, 207, 212; on abolitionists, 161–​62, 164, 182–​183; on Burns affair, 182–​83; and Colored American Magazine, 182; and domesticity, 163, 247n11; vs. Douglass, 165; vs. Du Bois, 163, 165; “Edwin Garrison Walker” (article), 182–​83; Faneuil Hall speech, 161–​62, 166; on gradual emancipation, 166, 248n23; and imperative to recognize the present-​past, 162, 164; vs. Jefferson, 165, 186; narrative structures of, 21, 217n52, 247n11; Of One Blood (novel), 162, 250n64; on political agency, 165, 183, 184–​85; as political theorist, 163–​65; A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race (pamphlet), 184, 250n64; on progress, 162, 164, 185; scholarship on, 22, 162, 163, 246n5, 247nn11–​12; on scientific racism, 184, 250n64; silence as protest in, 148, 181–​83; on stasis, 161–​62, 177, 183, 186–​87, 192; and untimely democracy, 165, 192; vs. Washington, 163; vs. Whitman, 183; Winona (novel), 162, 186; and women’s clubs, 177, 249n45. See also Contending Forces House, Callie, 19, 25, 133, 212; biography of, 108; and the Civil War, 24; on the Declaration of Independence, 109; and expectation of failure, 14, 111–​13, 118, 138, 181; and the ex-​slave pension movement, 97, 108–​9, 111–​13; incarceration of, 112–​13; on political agitation, 108, 112–​13, 128, 136; rhetorical style of, 236n48. See also MRB&PA Howells, William Dean, 153 Hume, Levi, 234n15 Insko, Jeffrey, 25 Invisible Man (Ellison), 8, 21; awareness of present-​past in, 207, 208; Clifton’s break with the Brotherhood in, 202–​3, 254n30; dancing Sambo dolls in, 202–​3, 207, 254n30; vs. earlier drafts of the novel, 192, 203–​4, 205, 206, 254n26, 255n32, 256n43; falling in, 21, 192, 201–​2, 203, 204, 207,

 

264

Ind e x

Invisible Man (Ellison) (cont.) 210, 253n6, 256n43; “fierce defiance” in, 203, 207; vs. Lee’s Bamboozled, 192, 201, 202–​3, 207, 253n6; meditation on “history” in, 207; multivalence of falling/​ plunging in, 201–​4, 207, 254n28, 255n32; nonprogressive temporalities as productive in, 192, 203, 207, 254n27; plunging in, 21, 201–​2, 203–​4, 207, 210, 254n28, 255n32; prologue of, 207; Smith’s “Backwater Blues” (song) in, 204; temporal consciousness of the narrator in, 201–​2, 207, 254n27; trains in, 207; vs. Whitman, 192 Ireland, 89–​90 Jackson, Andrew (enslaved person): Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson, of Kentucky, 114 Jackson, Holly, 247n11 Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 170–​71 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 169 Jaffe, Irma, 123 Jazz Singer (film), 200 Jefferson, Thomas, 20, 21, 122, 123, 209, 213n5, 239n95; Autobiography, 123; on democracy, 37–​38; vs. Du Bois, 30–​32, 38–​39, 50, 53, 57–​58, 176, 221n3; fear of blackness, 38, 45–​46; and generational autonomy, 18, 36–​37, 42–​44, 223n22, 224n35, 224n40; historical moment of, 31; in Hopkins, 165, 186–​87; on monarchies, 43–​44; and progressive view of time, 31, 40, 42–​43, 50, 186, 224n31; on rebellion, 43–​44, 100, 224n42; on slavery, 34–​35, 37–​38, 40–​41, 123, 127, 224n34; A Summary View of the Rights of British America (treatise), 46, 47. See also Declaration of Independence; Notes on the State of Virginia Jim Crow era: as connected to slavery, 162, 174–​75, 211; and Du Bois, 31, 32; injustices of, 18, 31, 32, 98, 145; and Obama, 22, 211. See also nadir Johnson, Andrew, 51, 225n52 Jones, John: Some Foot-​Steps of the Progress of the Colored Race, 11–​12, 64, 75 Jones, Joseph, 223n29 Jones, Manning, 146 Keckley, Elizabeth: Behind the Scenes, 115 Keeling, Kara, 253n12 Keenan, Alan, 33, 222n11 Kelleter, Frank, 222n8 Kemmler, William, 234n15 Kennedy, John F., 211 Kercheval, Samuel, 42 Kershnar, Stephen, 240n113 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 32, 211

Kirkland, Frank M., 226n67 Kletzing, H. F.: Progress of a Race (with Crogman), 11, 13, 64, 81, 146 Klinkner, Philip A., 7 Knox, Robert: The Races of Men, 184 Korobkin, Laura H., 248n26 Lacan, Jacques, 245n66 Landrum, W. W., 147 Lee, Spike, 210, 211, 253n6, 256n48. See also Bamboozled Lemert, Charles, 227n70 Levine, Robert S., 63, 64, 65, 83, 228nn9–​10, 230n26, 230n33 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), 19; aesthetics of, 64, 65, 228n11, 229n18; and afterlife of slavery, 65, 80, 83–​84, 88–​89; Civil Rights Cases in, 88–​90, 92; conclusion of, 87–​92, 94; on date of birth, 84–​85; vs. earlier autobiographies, 64, 65, 84–​86; 1892 edition vs. 1881 and 1882 editions, 19, 65–​66, 79, 80–​81, 86–​88, 91, 229n17, 232nn74–​75; homecoming scene with Auld in, 63–​64, 66–​67, 79–​80, 81–​86, 228n9, 231n62, 232n73; on Ireland, 89–​90; on life’s “work,” 87; linear/​progressive formal structure of, 64, 80, 81, 84, 88; recursion in, 64–​65, 81–​82, 84, 86, 89–​90, 91–​92; scholarship on, 19, 63; stocktaking of achievements in, 64, 91–​92; “The Supreme Court Decision” (chapter), 88–​91; temporalities of, 65, 85–​86, 87–​91; “Time Makes All Things Even” (chapter), 79–​86 Lincoln, Abraham, 100; and blackface, 190–​91, 210, 252n2; and Obama, 210, 211; Second Inaugural Address, 191 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 115 linear time: as dangerous, 120–​21; and democracy, 16–​17; as exceeded by stillness, 184, 186; and historical periodization, 24, 33–​ 34; as illusion, 138; in Jeffersonian thought, 40, 46; and progress (see progress: vs. linear time); vs. racial progress, 10, 75; and railroads, 5, 6, 119–​21, 125, 134; vs. slave narratives, 116. See also temporality; time Lipsitz, George, 235n18 Livingston, Robert, 122, 123 Logan, Rayford W., 6–​7, 215n25 Looby, Christopher, 220n89 Loraux, Nicole, 186 Lott, Eric, 252n4 Lucaites, John Louis, 217n55 Luciano, Dana, 26, 41, 215n35, 224n34, 225n45, 235n21, 244n56 Lummis, C. Douglas, 255n36

 

Ind e x Madison, James, 37, 38, 42, 224n37 Marbois, François, 39, 223n29 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt), 20; carriage ride scene, 147–​48; Chesnutt’s comments on, 147; vs. Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream, 149, 152–​53; critical response to, 245n60; prophecy of racial strife in, 147–​48, 152–​53; “time enough” in, 148 Marrs, Cody, 23–​24, 213n5, 219n81 Martin, Henry William: Counter Appeal, 166, 167 Matthiessen, F. O., 27 McCann, Sean, 251n68 McCaskill, Barbara, 7, 215n25 McClellan, George, 139 McCoy, Beth, 158, 246n77 McCrossen, Alexis, 214n13 McFeely, William, 71, 85, 229n24, 230n33, 232n71 McMurray, Price, 121, 122 McWilliams, Dean, 242n11 Miller, J. Hillis, 81 Miller, John C., 224n34 Mills, Charles W., 229n18 Milton, John, 182 Missouri Compromise, 89 Mitchell, W. J. T., 253n17 Monster, The (Crane), 25, 154; afterlife of slavery in, 97–​98, 121–​27, 129, 131, 133, 135, 238n88; aftermath of fire in, 131–​33, 134–​36; collective shame in, 20, 98–​99, 105, 119, 129–​30, 131, 136, 240n122; counting in, 118–​19, 132–​33, 136, 241n126; Declaration of Independence in, 121–​24, 122, 239n98; degradation of blackness in, 98–​99, 239n109; fire sequence in, 97, 119, 121–​22, 124–​27, 134, 238nn87–​88, 239n109; nonlinearity in, 98, 120–​21, 124–​25, 235n21; peony scene, 119–​20, 125, 129, 132; publication of, 131, 241n125; railroads in, 120–​21, 125; reparations’ impossibility in, 98, 99, 119, 120–​21, 131–​ 32; scholarship on, 97–​98, 119, 121, 125, 129, 234n13, 234nn15–​16, 238nn87–​88, 239n100; the “veil” in, 134 Moreland, Mantan, 193 Morgan, Edmund, 30, 31 Morris, Susan Buck, 253n17 Morrison, Toni, 27, 56, 230n35 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 221n3, 226n55, 227n70 Moten, Fred, 159, 160 MRB&PA (National Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America), 108, 236n49; accounting for slavery’s wrongs, 109; and Declaration of Independence, 108–​9, 111; goals of, 108, 112, 236n50; government’s response to, 111–​13; membership certificate

265

of, 108; National Ex-​Slave Convention, 109, 110; “Please Listen to my Plea” (poem), 111, 112; promotional materials of, 109–​11, 110, 112, 235n31; Vaughan’s opposition to, 108, 236n52. See also ex-​slave pension movement; House, Callie Myers, Peter C., 230n31, 233n81 nadir: and African American literature, 7–​8, 27–​ 28, 33–​34, 115, 140; alternate names for, 215n25; definition of, 7; temporalities of, 7, 66, 82 Naito, Jonathan Tadashi, 234n15 narrative form as political theory, 3, 8, 14, 24–​ 26, 97, 219n89; in Crane, 124–​25, 132; in Douglass, 65, 81, 87, 91–​92; in Hopkins, 163 narrative theory, 19, 25, 80–​81, 84–​86, 92 National Association of Colored Women, 146 National Civil Rights Association, The, 240n116 National Ex-​Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America. See MRB&PA Negro Young People’s Christian and Educational Congress, 145 Neighbors, Jim, 254n28 newspaper accounts/​responses: to Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream, 153; of Douglass–​ Auld reunion, 63, 66, 66–​69, 79–​80; of Douglass’s “Our National Capital” lecture, 76–​79, 77, 230nn42–​43, 231nn46–​47; of Douglass’s St. Michaels lecture, 69–​ 71; to Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, 211; to optimism/​pessimism, 144–​45, 147, 243n29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17 Nisbet, Robert, 10, 14 Northup, Solomon: Twelve Years a Slave, 114–​15 Notes on the State of Virginia ( Jefferson), 18; on blackness, 44–​46, 225n48; catalogue of state papers in, 46–​47, 48, 49, 225n51; on the future, 39–​40, 47; on generational autonomy, 18, 44; genesis of, 39, 223n29; “Histories, Memorials, and State-​Papers” (Query XXIII), 46–​47; “Laws” (Query XIV), 40, 44–​46; “Manners” (Query XVIII), 40, 44; as revised by Hopkins, 186; “Rivers” (Query II), 39; on slavery, 37, 40–​41, 44–​45, 225n48; on veil of blackness, 45–​46, 55, 134 Nyong’o, Tavia, 253n5 Obama, Barack, 37; and Ellison, 211, 257n55; and Lincoln, 210, 211; “A More Perfect Union” (“speech on race”), 21–​22, 210–​12, 256nn50–​51; and Wright, 210, 212 Olney, James T., 228n11

 

266

Ind e x

optimism, 13, 20; black optimism, 20, 141, 159–​60; in the nadir, 140, 141, 145, 150; as opposed to pessimism, 139–​40, 147, 149, 150, 154, 159; temporality of, 149, 159; of Walker, 142. See also democracy: hope in; pessimism Page, Walter Hines, 243n42 page layout. See typography/​page layout Paine, Thomas, 37 paratexts, 25; in Griggs, 140, 157–​59, 245n73, 246n77, 246n79 Parks, Suzan-​Lori, 26, 253n6 Patterson, Orlando, 82, 84, 125, 127, 154 Pension Bureau, 111 periodization. See historical periodization pessimism, 13, 20; accusations of to silence racial grievance, 144–​45, 149; Afro-​pessimism, 20–​21, 141, 154–​55, 159–​60, 245n62; in Chesnutt, 139–​41, 147–​50; in the nadir, 140, 141, 144–​45, 146–​47, 150; as opposed to optimism, 139–​40, 147, 149, 150, 154, 159; as paralysis, 145–​46; temporality of, 149, 154–​55, 159. See also optimism Peterson, Carla L., 248n15 Petrie, Paul R., 242n11 Phillips, Wendell, 164 Pickens, Ernestine Williams, 244n44 Plato: Sophist, 186 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 8, 11, 19, 25, 96, 133–​34, 241n130 political agency: Hopkins on, 21, 165, 172, 183; and MRB&PA, 108; and race, 184–​85; and temporality, 172, 185 political agitation: 17, 26, 36, 164, 233n87; Douglass on, 92, 165, 233n85; Hopkins on, 38, 165, 177, 178–​79, 187; House on, 108, 128, 133, 136; Jefferson on, 45; and MRB&PA, 108, 236n50; stasis as, 186–​ 87, 212; in Whitman, 208 political theory. See narrative form as political theory possibility (critical framework), 3, 10, 27–​28; and democracy, 16, 31, 33–​34 postbellum period: vs. antebellum, 23–​24, 219n81; political action of, 113–​14; racial uplift work during, 5, 10, 144, 146, 172; scholarly neglect of, 23; slave narratives of (see slave narratives) Post Office Department, 111–​12, 137–​38 Pratt, Lloyd, 5, 26, 65, 218n65, 228n12, 231n60 present-​past, 25; in Chesnutt, 151, 153, 155, 160; defined, 4, 18, 38, 52–​54; and despair, 56–​ 58, 146; in Douglass, 63, 66; in Du Bois, 52, 53–​58, 165; in Ellison, 207, 208–​9, 212; as embodied by performed stillness, 182–​84; as enduring through literary history, 208;

and falling, 208; and Freedmen’s Bureau, 53; in Hopkins (see Contending Forces: present-​past in); as paralyzing, 18, 56, 58; as politically productive, 164, 181, 182; Washington’s denial of, 143. See also afterlife of slavery; Souls of Black Folk, The Preston, Dickson, 63, 85, 227n3, 232n71 Priestly, Joseph, 42 Prins, Yopie, 249n34, 251n69 progress: and democracy (see democracy: and progress); as evolution, 151; as inevitable, 37; vs. linear time, 10–​11, 13, 14, 16, 27–​28, 66, 138, 151, 162, 184, 207; as “long march,” 211–​12; racial (see racial progress); in untimely democracy, 21, 164; ways of measuring, 12, 14, 17, 25; Western narrative of, 54 progressive time. See linear time prophecy: of African Americans’ future, 81, 141, 142–​44, 146–​47; Chesnutt and, 20–​21, 142–​43, 147–​48, 149–​50; definition of, 140, 153; Douglass and, 66, 89–​90; Griggs and, 156; Jefferson and, 46, 57; in slave narratives, 114–​15; in Washington, 143–​44; Whitman and, 2 race. See blackness; whiteness racial prognostication. See prophecy: of African Americans’ future racial progress, 216n41; and abolition, 64, 69, 76, 81, 88–​89, 133–​34, 180–​81; Douglass on, 63, 69–​70, 72–​76, 88–​89, 91; and encouragement, 143–​44, 146; imperative for, 4, 81; linear narrative of, 10–​11, 64, 80, 146, 210, 221n103; misaligned with linear temporality, 27, 50, 148; and pessimism, 154; as rooted in the present-​ past, 164; in twenty-​first century, 207, 210–​ 12; unsteady march of, 7, 35, 212 racial subjectivity, 54, 74, 82; in The Monster, 121, 122–​23, 125–​26 railroads, 5, 7, 8, 119–​20, 133–​34, 151, 207. See also temporality: and railroads; time: Standard Railway Raleigh, Walter, 46 Rampersad, Arnold, 223n21 Rancière, Jacques, 26, 115–​16, 118, 179–​80, 186 Reconstruction: African Americans’ status during, 35, 69–​70, 73, 88–​89; antidiscrimination laws of, 88–​89; end of, 6, 35, 96, 212; failure of, 95, 143; reparations during, 19, 70, 99–​100; and temporality, 6, 15 Redmond, Charles Lenox, 180 redress. See reparations Reed, Anthony, 23, 97, 218n78, 255n33

 

Ind e x reparations, 14, 19, 20, 70; and causality, 98, 120–​21, 127–​28, 241n126; and counterfactuals, 127–​28, 240n113; for descendants of slaves, 102; discourse of, 95–​96, 98, 234n10, 235nn18–​19; to enable the forgetting of slavery, 104, 107, 113; as ensuring the future, 100–​101, 102, 104, 113; as the government’s duty, 105, 107, 240n122; imperative to agitate for, 112–​13, 136, 137–​38; impossibility of squaring, 94, 111, 113, 116–​18, 119, 127, 132, 136, 188; and injustice of nonrecovery, 128; legislation for, 99–​102, 111, 235n30; as obligation to repair harms, 132; to silence agitation, 100, 107, 113; temporal dilemma of, 98, 102, 128–​29; as unpaid debt due, 109, 111, 133. See also accounting for slavery’s wrongs; ex-​ slave pension movement revisions of texts: The Colonel’s Dream/​ Pointing the Way (Chesnutt/​Griggs), 156–​57; Declaration of Independence ( Jefferson), 34–​35, 123–​24, 239n96; Invisible Man (Ellison), 192, 203–​4, 205, 206, 254n26, 255n32, 256n43; Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 208; Life and Times (Douglass), 65–​66, 79, 86–​87, 91, 229n17, 232nn74–​75; Notes on the State of Virginia/​ Winona ( Jefferson/​Hopkins), 40, 186; The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 52–​ 53, 58; Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” (Vaughan), 105 Reynolds, Paul Revere, 241n125 Robinson, Randall, 235n18 Rockhill, Gabriel, 250n50 Roediger, David, 74 Rohy, Valerie, 26, 228n8 Rolph-​Trouillot, Michel, 194 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 211 Roosevelt, Theodore, 146 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 27 Rowe, John Carlos, 97, 238n88 Rubenfeld, Jed, 223n22, 224n40 Saint Domingue insurrection, 46 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 248n16 Sappho (Greek poet), 172–​73, 249n34, 251n69 Sawaya, Francesca, 150, 244n51 Schweik, Susan, 234n15 scientific racism, 9, 45–​46, 55, 81, 151, 215n35, 225n45; and view of black race as regressing, 184 Scott, David, 10–​11, 16, 138, 139–​40 Scott v. Sandford (1857), 89 second slavery, 16, 26, 28, 37; defined, 13–​14, 54; in Douglass, 82; in Du Bois, 36, 54–​57; in Hopkins, 186; temporal stillness of, 164,

267

186. See also afterlife of slavery; present-​past; slavery; Souls of Black Folk, The Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 244n56 Sexton, Jared, 154–​55, 159, 160, 245n66 shame: and coresponsibility, 130, 135–​36, 240n124, 254n23; definition of, 129–​30; of slavery, 126–​27, 129–​30, 136; and temporality, 130, 131. See also accounting for slavery’s wrongs: and social shame; generations: and collective responsibility/​ shame Sherman, Roger, 122, 123 Sherman, William T., 99 Shulman, George, 140, 141, 153 Simmons, Ryan, 242n11 slave narratives: antebellum, 64, 114–​15; discourse of numeracy in, 96, 114–​18, 237n73; and paratexts, 158; postbellum, 63, 96, 98, 113, 115–​18; racial subjugation in, 168, 170, 171; tropes of, 63–​64, 82; unsettling temporalities, 116, 118. See also individual authors slavery: and African American literature, 33–​34, 64, 82, 222n13; afterlife of (see afterlife of slavery); and blackness, 20, 41, 46, 94–​95, 98, 101, 126–​27, 133–​34, 141, 154–​55, 159, 174–​75, 194, 239n111, 240n113, 245n62; in the British Caribbean, 165–​66; as country’s “original sin,” 211; and democracy, 39, 40–​41, 47, 58; as heritable degradation, 41, 98, 126–​28, 134–​35, 174; memory vs. recollection of, 9, 13; natal alienation of, 84, 86; necessity of forgetting, 19, 74, 76, 81, 89, 96, 107, 143; recursive time of, 8, 15–​16, 38, 41, 44, 125, 127, 131, 134, 171–​72, 192, 196; scholarship on memory of, 217n53; shame of, 126–​27, 129–​30, 136; slaveowners’ defenses for, 165–​66; symbolic trappings of, 194, 202–​3; and transition out of, 51, 86–​87, 88–​89, 162, 166, 171; and Washington, DC, 73–​75; and white self-​ definition, 73–​76, 166–​68, 169–​70, 176, 194, 248n26. See also accounting for slavery’s wrongs; present-​past; second slavery Smith, Bessie: “Backwater Blues,” 204 Smith, Harry: Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States, 113–​14, 115–​16 Smith, John, 46 Smith, Mark M., 215n23 Smith, Rogers M., 7 Somerville, Siobhan, 247n11, 249n35 Sorrentino, Paul, 239n98 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 13–​14, 18, 20; accounting in, 94–​95; “The After-​Thought” (postscript), 57–​58, 59, 60, 187, 227nn73–​ 74; on chronological time vs. racial progress, 50, 53, 55–​58; closing punctuation of, 58,

 

268

Ind e x

Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) (cont.) 59, 60, 227nn73–​74; color line in, 29–​30, 56; “Of the Dawn of Freedom” (chapter), 50–​54, 94–​95; Declaration of Independence in, 29–​30, 32, 34–​36, 222n8; on democracy, 29–​30, 36; desire for linear progress in, 57–​58, 227n70, 227n72; double consciousness in, 18, 55–​56, 226nn66–​ 67; on the franchise, 35–​36, 51; on the Freedmen’s Bureau, 18, 50–​52, 55, 57, 94–​95, 226n55; intergenerational obligation in, 53; “Of the Meaning of Progress” (chapter), 30; “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (chapter), 36, 223n21; “Of the Passing of the First-​Born” (chapter), 56–​57; plea to the reader, 57–​58; and present-​past, 52, 53–​58, 179; and second slavery, 36, 54–​ 57, 186; and slavery, 47; on son Burghardt’s death, 56–​57; stasis in, 54, 57–​58, 165; veil of color, 55–​56, 134; and Washington, 29–​ 30, 36, 174, 175 Spain, 109 Spanish-​American War, 109 stagnation. See stasis stasis: as agitation, 186–​87; as dangerous to democracy, 21, 33, 46, 172; definition of, 185–​86, 251n78; as dissensus, 186; Du Bois on, 54; of failed futures, 138; vs. linear time, 8, 55, 212; in messianic time, 15, 143; of monarchies, 1, 43–​44, 208; as movement, 185; of the nadir, 7, 15, 35; as paralysis, 9, 31, 38, 44, 138, 152, 165, 192, 209; as passivity, 183; as performed stillness, 184; as political action, 165, 187; as politically productive, 6, 16–​18, 25, 28, 31–​32, 172, 183; as productive for racial justice, 4, 98; as protest, 184; in racist depictions of black regression, 184; as redefined by Hopkins, 165, 172, 177, 182, 183, 185–​86, 187; as simultaneity, 124–​25; of slavery, 9, 16, 46, 136; as stuckness, 16, 33, 185, 192, 218n70; swooning as, 185; and untimely democracy, 31–​32, 172, 182, 218n70 Stauffer, John, 230n30 Steinberg, Stephen, 154 Stern, Julia, 233n87 Stevens, Thaddeus, 96, 99–​101, 108, 113, 136 St. Michaels (Maryland), 62–​63, 66–​69, 78–​79, 80, 85, 86, 89 Storer College (Harpers Ferry, West Virginia), 8–​10 Stout, Jeffrey, 14–​15, 17–​18 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 195 Stringer, Dorothy, 218n70 suffrage. See franchise Sundquist, Eric, 64, 228n11 Supreme Court. See Civil Rights Cases; Plessy v. Ferguson; Scott v. Sandford

Tate, Claudia, 163 temporality, 1; and blackness, 26–​27, 46, 53–​54, 75–​76, 78, 185, 220n94, 221n103, 225n45; and clocks, 4, 5, 196, 214n10, 214n14, 253n17; competing forms of, 39; and democracy, 3, 26, 27, 30–​32, 33, 163; and double consciousness, 18, 31, 55–​56, 99, 226n66; and history/​historicism, 24–​25; nineteenth-​century reconceptualization of, 4–​5, 26, 215n23; and paratexts, 158–​59; and politics, 10, 16, 22, 30, 34, 96; and the “present,” 31, 179; in queer studies, 218n64, 244n56; of racism, 173; and railroads, 5, 6, 7, 8; and Rancière, 180; and shame, 130, 131; of slavery, 41, 88, 95–​96, 127, 131, 134. See also linear time; stasis; time temporizing, 172–​77, 185 Terrell, Mary Church: “The Bright Side of a Dark Subject,” 146, 147 Theseus (and Ariadne), 81 Thirteenth Amendment, 6, 20, 88, 133–​34, 232n77 Thompson, R. W., 145 Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War, 186 Tillet, Salamishah, 217n53, 222n6 Tillman, Benjamin, 144 time: as binary, 151; freedom, 218n78; geological, 9, 215n35; historical, 11; linear/​progressive (see linear time); messianic, 15, 143; natural, 43–​44, 46; Standard Railway, 5, 119–​20, 125, 214n13; static, 7. See also stasis; temporality Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in America, 37, 177 Toewe, Heike, 253n9 Tourgée, Albion, 128–​29, 240n116 trains. See railroads tropes: black boy, 74–​75; confrontations with masters, 82; faithful slave, 67–​68; falling (see under Bamboozled; Invisible Man); monsters, 97, 235n17; plantation romance, 105; Sambo, 202–​3; snakes, 121, 238n90; white master/​dancing slave, 195, 199, 203, 253n9, 253n14. See also slave narratives: tropes of Trumbull, John: The Declaration of Independence, 122, 122–​24, 238n91, 239n95 Trumbull, Lyman, 241n128 Turner, Henry McNeal, 144 Tuskegee University, 144, 145, 146 Twain, Mark, 22 Twenty-​Fifth Infantry, 146 typography/​page layout: in Du Bois, 52–​53, 58, 59, 60, 227nn73–​74; in Jefferson, 47; in Walker, 142, 242n17 untimely democracy: and Chesnutt, 141, 160; and Crane, 99; definition of, 4, 14, 17–​18, 26;

 

Ind e x and Douglass, 90–​91; and Du Bois, 38, 53; in Ellison, 192, 207, 208–​9; eternal vigilance as part of, 180–​81, 192; vs. “freedom time,” 218n78; gestures of, 185–​86, 208; in Hopkins, 21, 165, 172, 175, 177, 179, 180–​81, 185–​87; participation in, 181–​87; possibilities of, 212; and present-​past, 162, 164, 177, 179; and productive stasis, 31–​32, 172, 177, 185–​87, 218n70; and reparations/​ redress, 95–​96, 129, 131; and Wright, 212. See also binaries unsettled by untimeliness; democracy Vardoulakis, Dimitris, 251n78 Vaughan, Walter, 101; and collective shame, 105, 107, 130; and Declaration of Independence, 104, 109, 124; opposition to MRB&PA, 108, 236n52; and reparations as ensuring the future, 102, 104, 107, 113, 136; Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill” (pamphlet), 102–​7, 103, 106, 108 Velikova, Roumiana, 222n8 Wagner, Bryan, 239n111 Walker, David: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 32, 141–​42, 153, 182, 242n17 Walker, Edwin Garrison, 182–​83 Wallace, Michele, 200, 254n22 Wallinger, Hanna, 250n47 Walton, Isaac L., 137 Warner, Michael, 241n126 Warren, Kenneth W., 27–​28, 33–​34, 222nn13–​14, 232n75 Washington, Booker T.: advice to African Americans, 36, 143–​44, 146, 173, 233n85; Atlanta Exposition Address, 173; and Du Bois, 30, 36, 174, 175, 223n21; The Future of the American Negro (book), 138–​39, 143–​45, 146, 155; scholarship on, 249n38; as temporizing, 173–​74, 178; Up From Slavery (autobiography), 12, 13, 173–​74; and view of time as linear/​progressive, 16, 174 Washington, DC, 2; and Douglass, 62, 71, 72–​79, 89, 230nn42–​43, 231nn46–​47

269

Weinstein, Cindy, 25, 219n89 Wells, Ida B.: The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (with Douglass), 92 Westley, Robert, 95–​96 Wheatley, Phillis, 26 whiteness: as liminal, 169; as “probationary,” 169; “psychological wage” of, 74; as tied to institution of slavery, 73–​76, 166–​68, 169–​ 70, 176, 194, 248n26 Whitman, Walt, 21; “A Boston Ballad” (poem), 183; on Burns affair, 183; on democracy, 1–​3, 16, 208; Democratic Vistas (essay), 1–​3, 6, 37, 208, 213n3, 213n5; vs. Ellison, 208, 209, 255n39; falling/​ plunging in, 208; “Great Are the Myths” (poem), 208; in Hopkins, 165, 183; and Jefferson, 213n5; Leaves of Grass (poems), 1, 183, 208; on race, 2, 213nn2–​4 Wilberforce, William: An Appeal in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, 166 Wilderson, Frank, 154, 155, 245n62 Williams, Andreá, 245 Wilson, Edward E.: “The Joys of Being a Negro,” 145, 147 Wilson, Henry, 62 Wilson, Ivy, 26 Wilson, Matthew, 242n11 Wilson-​Jordan, Jacqueline, 238n88 Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor, 226n59 Wolin, Sheldon, 31 Wood, Fernando, 51 Woodard, Vincent, 249n31 Wooley, Christine A., 244n51 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 91–​92 Wright, Jeremiah, 22, 210, 212 Wright, Michelle, 27–​28, 221n103 Young, Elizabeth, 234n13 Young, Harvey, 183–​84 Young, Iris Marion, 185 Zamir, Shamoon, 226n69, 227n74 Zealy, Joseph T., 184