Wajeeh
Apr 05, 2012 | #1
African-American Experience and Race Relations in Literature
Race relations in the United States are tumultuous, to say the least, having been born from a history of violent suppression and oppressive exploitation. Slavery and Jim Crow laws are an integral part of the African American experience and intrinsic to both their historical memories and their formation as a people. While the inference here is that African American literary figures, amongst which we may name Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and Richard Wright, explored racial identity and relations in their works, it does not imply that they did not locate the positive in the negative or highlight hope in the midst of despair. Indeed, Toni Morrison's Beloved stands out as a quintessential example of the location of a positive outlook within the context of a tumultuous racial experience.
Paradoxically, Toni Morrison exposes that which was worst in the African American experience while, simultaneously, portraying a positive outlook for the future of racial relations. How she does so is partially answered by the historical setting of Beloved, in which Morrison explores how the historical context of women's interracial relationships situates the interplay of race, class, and bodies. Sethe's and Denver's brief relationships with white women, particularly the story of Sethe's encounter with the whitegirl Amy Denver, a recently freed indentured servant, both evoke and interrogate the traditional structures of women's interracial relationships. While Mrs. Garner and Mrs. Bodwin represent two typically-portrayed privileged white women in nineteenth-century America, the southern slave mistress and the northern reformer, Amy Denver represents not only those white women without class privilege but also the potential of political coalition between black and white women. Through Amy's relationship with Sethe, Morrison attempts to relocate politics in physicality and thereby connect political to bodily experience. In so doing, she locates reasons for greater optimism about race relations in the United States.Primarily the story of an escaped slave's recovery of her sense of self, Beloved is also very much the story of mothers and daughters. Sethe's surviving daughter Denver is born before Sethe reaches Ohio and freedom; while this event (like so much of the drama) precedes the narrative time of the novel, it is narrated several times by Sethe and later Denver. The first, brief mention of the events of this birth come when Sethe is telling Paul D., who has just arrived, of her and her baby's survival; Sethe "lowered her head and thought, as he did, how unlikely it was that she had made it. And if it hadn't been for that girl looking for velvet, she never would have." Paul D. is "proud that she had done it, annoyed that she had not needed Halle or him in the doing." When Sethe tells him "a whitegirl helped me, " he responds, "then she helped herself too" (8). Narratively, through Paul D's aggravation at Sethe's independence from male help and his acknowledgment that Amy "helped herself too, " Morrison establishes in the beginning of the novel the interconnectedness of black and white women's history in America. Trudier Harris addresses the improbability of Amy and Sethe's interaction.
The first account of Denver's birth, however, comes from Denver herself. Arriving home from her secret spot in the bower, she sees the ghost for the first time, kneeling beside her mother, who is praying: "The dress and her mother together looked like two friendly grown-up women-one (the dress) helping out the other. And the magic of her birth, its miracle in fact, testified to that friendliness as did her own name" (29). Denver's perception of this scene testifies to her faith, amidst her pervasive loneliness, in the sustenance of women's friendship. That faith, which will enable her eventually to reach out to the larger community, is rooted in the story of her birth. The story is also predicated on Denver's agency. Sethe tells Paul D that Denver is a "charmed child" who, when Sethe thought they both were going to die, "pulled a whitegirl out of the hill. The last thing you'd expect to help" (41-42). In the story Denver remembers, she figures as "the little antelope [that] rammed her [Sethe] with horns and plowed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves" when Sethe is still (30). Sethe's choice of the image of an antelope came from the dance she saw the adults, including her mother, do when she was a child: "They shifted shapes and becalne something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like this one in her stomach" (31).
Both the dance and the as-yet-unborn Denver promise a future freedom and strength, symbolised by the antelope. Sethe had given up and believed she was going to die when she heard what she took to be a white boy and prepared to attack him. But what turns up instead is a white girl, "the raggediest-looking trash you ever saw" (31-2). Amy Denver is searching for food; finding none, she turns to leave, but Sethe asks her questions to get her to stay.
Amy was born into a condition of servitude, just as Sethe's Denver would have been born into slavery had not her mother run away. Because Amy's mother died following her birth, Amy was forced to work off the cost of her mother's passage. Amy's status as an indentured servant shows that the institutions of servitude created class divisions that are often construed as solely racial divisions. This circumstance gives Amy and Sethe an atypically similar economic class alignment, despite Amy's racial privilege. The women's marginalised status-they are both literally and figuratively on the outskirts of society - opens a space for their interaction. As Marianne Hirsch argues.
Fleeing the roles in which society has placed them has at least partially freed them from both the demand and the habit of ritualised social engagement between black and white women. Amy helps Sethe not out of obligation or guilt but out of a sense of shared circumstances and suffering. She repeatedly states that she cannot risk being caught with a runaway slave, and her first concerns are her hunger and her need to get to Boston where she intends to find carmine velvet. Nevertheless, she leads Sethe to a lean-to and bandages the wounds on her back as best she can. She tells Sethe as she massages her feet, "It's gonna hurt, now. ... Anything dead coming back to life hurts, " a statement which Denver thinks is "a truth for all times" (35).
The next time Denver narrates the story of her own birth, it is to Beloved's eager ears. Though Denver acknowledges that her mother "never told [her] all of it" (76),
"... she anticipated [Beloved's] questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her - and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved ... Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy's voice, her breath like burning wood. ... How recklessly she behaved with this whitegirl-a recklessness born of desperation and encouraged by Amy's fugitive eyes and her tenderhearted mouth." (78)
Beloved's audience enables Denver to experience the story anew, "to see what she was saying and not just to hear it" (77). She narrates the story of how Amy Denver helped her mother give birth to her, "the part of the story she loved ... because it was all about herself; but she hated it too because it made her feel like a bill was owing somewhere and she, Denver, had to pay it. But who she owed or what to pay it with eluded her" (77). That debt turns out to be the responsibility to restore her mother to the larger community, including the white elements of it.
Amy's role as caretaker of and midwife to Sethe reverses the conventional role of black women's tending to white women's bodies. By giving Amy a past of indentured servitude, Morrison diffuses the power dynamic underlying the historical paradigm of white and black women's relationships. Morrison then rewrites the history of women's interracial touch through Amy's bringing Sethe back to feeling through her touch. That history is represented by "the sycophancy of white identity" that Morrison finds in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, in which the white woman Sapphira perversely and vicariously reroutes aspects of her own identity through her" absolute power over the body of another woman [Nancy, her slave)" (Playing in the Dark 19, 23).
Morrison describes Sapphira's sycophancy:
"She escapes the necessity of inhabiting her own body by dwelling on the young, healthy, and sexually appetizing Nancy. She has transferred its care into the hands of others. In this way she escapes her illness, decay, confinement, anonymity, and physical powerlessness ... The surrogate black bodies become her hands and feet, her fantasies of sexual ravish and intimacy with her husband, and, not inconsiderably, her sole source of love." (Playing in the Dark 26).
Amy's care for Sethe, by contrast, heals her not only physically but mentally. She convinces Sethe that she can physically endure, and she also helps Sethe reimagine her past by narrating the scars on her body as a beautiful image. As Amy bandages the wounds on Sethe's back, she describes the scars as a chokecherry tree, an act of imagination she no doubt developed as a survival skill for her own situation. She tells Sethe [who has said her name is Lu],
"It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk-it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got a mightly lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dem if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don't remember nothing like this. Mr. Buddy had a right evil hand too. Whip you for looking at him straight. Sure would. I looked right at him one time and he hauled off and threw the poker at me. Guess he knew what I was a-thinking." (79)
While Amy's actions may contribute to Denver's ability to reach out to larger community for help, her role contrasts sharply with that of the benevolent white woman Mrs. Bodwin, who teaches Denver but who also, as Denver says, is "experimenting" on her. Denver is, then, in some sense a project to Mrs. Bodwin. Barbara Christian points out that "Denver-whose name is specifically American and related to a white woman- is the one who encounters, in the home of the liberal abolitionist Bodwin, a portent of the future" in the form of a black figurine with his head thrown back and his mouth open unnaturally wide to hold money, with the words" At Yo Service" (Beloved 255) painted on the bottom ("Beloved, She's Ours" 46). Denver's role as the one who reconnects her family to the community thus signifies an ambivalent future of both hope and prejudice.
Both these works, then, seem to suggest the obvious: that race is not in fact primary to identity but that in America we interpret race as if it were primary, which causes interracial relationships to be fraught with tension. By using ambiguously raced characters and overturning readers' racialised expectations of characters, Morrison calls into question the operation of racial meanings in American culture and literature.
References
Carther, Willa. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. New York: Knopf.
Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Hirsch, Marianne. "Maternity and Rememory: Toni Morrison's Beloved." Representations of Motherhood. Ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 92-110.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993.