I saw them [African Americans] hedged for centuries by prejudice, intolerance, and brutality; hobbled by their own ignorance, poverty, and helplessness; yet, notwithstanding, still brave and unvanquished. . . . The situation in which they were might have seemed hopeless, but they themselves were not without hope.
—James Weldon Johnson (1933, 120)
Multiculturalism suspends the traumatic kernel of the Other, reducing it to an aseptic folklorist entity.
—Slavoj Zizek (1998, 168)
Our subjectivity is objectively intended.
—Kaja Silverman (2000, 133)
To ask and begin to answer autobiographical questions requires, then, con- necting the subjective to the social, and vice versa. There is, perhaps, no more powerful example of such connection that the traditions of African-Ameri- can autobiography. African-American autobiographical practices racialize, politicize, and historicize self-narration. Racial politics and violence in Amer- ica have been undergone as subjective as well as civic experience (Pinar 2001). Whereas both white and black literary traditions in the United States begin with autobiographical accounts, black accounts reveal aspects of early Amer- ican life absent in the early colonial journals of William Bradford, Cotton Mather, and Jonathon Edwards. African-American autobiographies sup- ported psycho-political struggle against a predatory and enslaving white re- gime. This reverberating fact affects the entire tradition of African-American literature, not to mention the history of the United States (Morrison 1992). African-American identities have been created, in no small measure, in resis- tance to murdering white masters, and lived, at times, with seemingly unbear- able intensity (Butterfield 1974). In the context of racial politics in America, as Stephen Butterfield (1974, 284) observes, “autobiography . . . becomes both an arsenal and a battleground.”
Autobiography, Butterfield (1974) believes, has been an especially appeal- ing form to many African-American writers because, as a genre, it inhabits two worlds: history and literature. Many African-American writers, he notes, have also tended to live in two worlds: white and black, “public mask and pri- vate face” (1974, 285). Autobiography, Butterfield (1974, 284) suggests, “af- fords the greatest opportunities to combine the two perspectives because it develops like a village on the crossroads between the author’s subjective life and his social-historical life.”
Making the case to European-American readers for the significance of this genre, Butterfield (1974) argues that African-American autobiographies fill in many of the blanks of the nation’s self-knowledge. They document what has been ignored in American life by many white writers and critics. Further, they show how white critical judgment has been limited, indeed deformed, by racial blind spots. “I have begun to wonder,” Toni Morrison (1992, 5) fa- mously writes,
whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature—individu- alism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isola- tion, an acute and ambiguous moral problematics, the juxtaposition of inno- cence with figures representing death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signifying Africanistic presence.
It is a powerful point differently made by Leslie Fiedler (1966).
In key ways, the African-American experience informs the American iden- tity; in one sense, it constitutes the cultural “unconscious” of the nation (Castenell and Pinar 1993). African-American autobiographies provide in- spiration and hope for all Americans; as Butterfield asserts, African-Ameri- can autobiographies are the American conscience. But among many Euro- pean Americans, especially among those in the South, a strong if false sense persists that the African-American experience has no point for them, that what happened “before” has nothing to do with the “now.” Stephen Butter- field (1974, 4) knows: “Knowledge of the sins of the fathers is a terrible bur- den for the children of pirates, murderers, kidnappers, rapists, for the chil- dren of those who received the benefits of stolen labor and genocide and closed their eyes, perhaps with a humanitarian shudder, to its effects.” This is, Deborah Britzman (1998) might say, “difficult knowledge.” But, Butter- field (1974, 4) continues,
The price of ignoring it is to smother the intelligence, with all the consequences this racism implies: to become divorced from one’s humanity, to reduce oneself to a thing, a consumer, a machine for generating or appropriating surplus value, an obstacle to the growth of others. But, as so many black autobiogra- phies demonstrate, one is never required to remain a thing. The humanity won
by the slave and his descendants belongs to humanity everywhere. The door of the white prison is opened, not closed, by his story. If the very worst effects of oppression have been unable to wipe out intelligence, compassion, honor, faith, hope, and the courage to resist in the mass of its black victims, then these quali- ties are preserved for all, including the children of the ruling culture. The slave’s victory is the victory of the best in ourselves.
Whiteness has deprived whites of their history just as it had deprived Afri- can Americans of theirs. Whites must work through the defensive assertions of their (guilt-laden) innocence, assertions which take aggressive counter- allegations of “black racism” and “discrimination in reverse” when African Americans make small, long-overdue advances (see Savran 1998). At the other extreme, whites must avoid being paralyzed by guilt, which results in nihilism, or slavish imitations of black culture, becoming, in Norman Mailer’s (1957) famous phrase, “the white negro,” visible today in white (es- pecially male) suburban co-optation of hip-hop culture. Pummeled by 30 years of white political reaction to the civil rights movement, it sometimes feels as if the journey has yet to begin. But in the 1960s, it did begin: “there is more day to dawn. The revolutionary self is but a morning star” (Butterfield 1974, 287).
Possibly more than any other form in African-American letters, autobiog- raphy has been acknowledged and celebrated since its appearance. From slave narratives to contemporary writing, African-American autobiography has functioned as a powerful means of addressing and contesting social, po- litical, and cultural realities in the United States. In the ante-bellum period, abolitionists published slave narratives to mobilize northern indignation. Au- tobiographical narratives of 1960s black revolutionaries compelled many literary critics to reconsider conventional assumptions about literature’s de- tached relationship to social struggle (Andrews 1993). But black autobiogra- phy’s engaged relationship with social struggle was established long before the activists and leaders of the 1960s civil rights struggle, often from prison, articulated their experience of being in America (see Cleaver 1968; Seale 1978; Cummins 1994).
Slave narratives were often male slave narratives, the best known of which is Frederick Douglass’ masterpiece. While testifying to suffering and thereby mobilizing abolitionist sentiment in the North, male slave narratives also functioned to encode masculinity. Valerie Smith (1987) pointed out that “by mythologizing rugged individuality, physical strength, and geographical mo- bility, the [slave] narrative enshrines cultural definitions of masculinity.” Smith understands that racial struggle in the United States has been gen- dered: “the plot of the standard narrative may thus be seen as not only the journey from slavery to freedom but also the journey from slavehood to man- hood” (quoted passages in McDowell 1993, 44). What can it mean than
emancipation was conceived as “manhood”? Was it a fantasy of freedom as- sociated with white male privilege? Did slavery and racism contain a buried and emasculating homoerotic, rendering the gender of racial violence in America, as Katherine M. Blee (1991) perceptively observed, masculine?
In Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Deborah Gray White (1985) reads southern patriarchal culture as consolidating its symbolic power over both women and blacks in a single rhetorical move, making, in Michelle Wallace’s (1990, 138) fine phrase, a “symbiotic relationship [be- tween] sexism and racism.” White concludes her study by narrating an occa- sion in the life of Sojourner Truth (see 1968 [1878]). In October 1858, So- journer Truth was speaking in Silver Lake, Indiana. Men in the audience challenged her to prove she was a woman. She responded by baring her breasts. White (1985, 162) comments:
Truth’s experience serves as a metaphor for the slave woman’s general experi- ence. . . . Slave women were the only women in America who were sexually ex- ploited with impunity, stripped and whipped with a lash, worked like oxen. In the nineteenth century when the nation was preoccupied with keeping women in the home and protecting them, only slave women were so totally unprotected by men or by law. Only black women had their womanhood so totally denied. Michelle Wallace (1990, 140) adds that “Truth herself used the occasion to present further evidence of her sexual labor and exploitation; she told the au- dience that her breasts had fed many a white infant.” Moreover, Wallace (1990, 140) suggests, Sojourner Truth understood, after her experience as both slave and abolitionist lecturer, that “the condition known as ‘woman- hood’ was man-made.” Sojourner Truth was not alone. Many black women understood the symbiotic relationship between racism and sexism, a relation- ship most white women would perceive only later, as the case of Jesse Daniel Ames illustrates (Hall 1979).
What possible defenses could black female slaves employ to defend them- selves and their children from white abuse? “Sass” and invective functioned as verbal weapons (Braxton 1989). Derived from West Africa, sass is associ- ated with the female elements of the trickster, a concept found in Gates’ (1988) discussion of African mythology and Lemelle’s (1995) discussion of contemporary African-American men. The Oxford English Dictionary as- cribes the word’s origin to the poisonous “sassy tree.” A decoction of the bark of this tree was used in West Africa as an ordeal poison in the trial of ac- cused witches. Such women were described as being wives of Exu, the trick- ster god. In this mythic sense, sass could kill (Braxton 1989).
Webster’s Dictionary defines sass as talking impudently or disrespectfully
to an elder or a superior, as in “talking back.” In Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl—which Hazel Carby (1993) characterizes as the most sophisti-
cated, sustained narrative exposition of womanhood by an African American before Emancipation—whenever Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent is her pseud- onym) is sexually threatened, she uses sass to defend herself (Braxton 1989). Through sass she “returns” a portion of the poison the master has injected into her. When her master hits her, Brent retaliates, not with her fists, but with sass: “You have struck me for answering you honestly. How I despise you.” When he threatens to send her to jail, she responds, “As for the jail, there would be more peace for me than there is here” (1987/1861, 39, 40; quoted in Braxton 1989, 31).
In this way sass protects something of her self-esteem, partly by increasing the psychological distance between herself and her white master. Braxton (1989, 32) notes that Linda Brent employed sass as Frederick Douglass did fists and feet, as a means of “resistance.” Jacobs/Brent says: “Even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized” (1987/1861, 113; quoted in Braxton 1989, 36). No one knew better what “snakes” white men could be than Ida B. Wells.
Ida B. Wells was a larger-than-life figure in the civil rights movement from the 1890s until her death in 1931. She was the chief architect of the anti- lynching movement in the late 19th century, a cause to which she came after a brief but memorable career of militant journalism in the black community. Before working as a journalist, Wells had been a schoolteacher. In my view, Wells remained a teacher, if imagining her classroom more expansively to in- clude the American and British publics. Through her brilliant manipulation of white assumptions regarding gender, race, and civilization, Wells taught European Americans that lynching was barbaric (Bederman 1995).
This was no small accomplishment for a Memphis schoolteacher who had to battle not only white racism, but misogyny and even occasional envy from her fellow black reformers. John Hope Franklin (1970, x) summarizes her ac- complishment this way:
Her zeal and energy were matched by her uncompromising and unequivocal stand on every cause that she espoused. She did not hesitate to criticize south- ern whites even before she left the South, nor northern liberals, or members of her own race when she was convinced that their positions were not in the best interests of all mankind. She did not hesitate to go to the scene of racial distur- bances, including riots and lynchings, in order to get an accurate picture of what actually occurred. She did not hesitate to summon to the cause of human dignity anybody and everybody she believed could serve the cause.
Ida Wells is “a giant of the [autobiographical] form,” Stephen Butterfield (1974, 201) asserts. Her autobiography is important for several reasons. First, Wells’ Crusade for Justice is significant as a historical source. In my study of lynching, for example, I found it essential to quote from it extensively (Pinar
2001). Wells visited the scenes of race riots and lynchings, obtained informa- tion from eyewitnesses, and published accounts which corrected racist distor- tions in the white press. She organized relief and defense efforts for the vic- tims. From Ida B. Wells one learns firsthand not only the intensity of the violence directed at African Americans from Reconstruction on through the second decade of the 20th century, but the intensity of black resistance to that violence as well. Individually and through organizations such as women’s clubs, discussion groups, mutual assistance leagues, black-edited newspapers and pamphlets, African Americans contested Jim Crow.
Butterfield (1974) suggests that Wells’ style exhibits the righteous force of a mother protecting her children, recalling Joanne Braxton’s characterization of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth as “outraged mothers.” Given her concern for her brother and for young black men generally (she formed the Negro Fellowship League, in part to deal with problems associated with the migration of southern black men to Chicago), I suggest that her style also ex- hibits the righteous force of a sister protecting her brothers (see Decosta- Willis 1995; Wells 1970).
Wells’ autobiography is the testament of a feminist, an early civil-rights activist, and, most specifically, an anti-lynching crusader. Born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Wells became first a schoolteacher in Memphis, then a journalist, always a woman of extraordinary courage. Imagine investigating incidents of lynching in the postwar South. Imagine yourself a black woman surrounded by, sometimes, thousands of white (mostly) men, asking direct questions about the black man who was being tortured. Wells’ forthrightness is evident in the following passage:
I found that white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and con- sorting with Negro women were still doing so whenever they could; these same white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women; even when the white women were willing victims. (1970, 71; quoted in Braxton 1989, 126)
The unifying symbol of Wells’ autobiography and her life, Braxton (1989) suggests, is “crusade,” and this motif reflects—as Butterfield also suggests— the outraged mother and sister defending the life of her people. “Crusade” provides the central metaphor for Wells’ autobiographical experience, just as “education” functions for Henry Adams. “Carry on alone” is a central motif of the Wells autobiography (Braxton 1989). As powerful women still do, Ida B. Wells threatened her male contemporaries. For instance, Wells’ assertive demands for justice were too much for Booker T. Washington, who disasso- ciated himself from her “radical” views (Butterfield 1974, 114).
Taken together, the slave narratives, Henry Louis Gates (1992) has ar- gued, represent courageous attempts to write African Americans into being. This being, as Ida B. Wells’ autobiography underscores, is social and subjec-
tive. As Ralph Ellison defined the autobiographical project: “We tell our- selves our individual stories so as to become aware of our general story” (quoted in Gates 1992, 57). This idea has been described in musical terms as well. Braxton (1989) compares black autobiography to the blues. Like the blues singer, the autobiographer incorporates communal values into the au- tobiographical performance, sometimes rising to serve as the “point of con- sciousness” of her people (Braxton 1989, 5).
Nikki Giovanni has pointed out that black women’s autobiographies have been inextricably linked to changing political conditions. Giovanni rejected the idea “that the self is not part of the body politic,” insisting, “there’s no separation” (quoted in Fox-Genovese 1988, 69). This point is made by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, who, writing about Maya Angelou, argued that African- American autobiography “as a form tends to be bereft of any excessive sub- jectivism and mindless egotism.” Instead, African-American autobiographies tend to present the experience of the individual “as reflecting a much more im-personal condition, the autobiographical subject emerging as an almost random member of the group, selected to tell his/her tale.” Consequently, African-American autobiography is “a public rather than a private gesture, me-ism gives way to our-ism and superficial concerns about the individual sub- ject usually give way to the collective subjection of the group” (quoted passages in Fox-Genovese 1988, 70). Such characteristics distinguish black autobiogra- phy as collective and political, not narcissistic or socially withdrawn.
Especially European Americans must study African-American autobiog- raphy, for expressed in this genre are not only our sins and those of our “fa- thers,” but spiritual and psychological powers of which we are ignorant, which we probably cannot readily (or, perhaps, ever) know in our cultural condition, but the personifications of which we can discern in many black students in public-school classrooms. Those our ancestors chained and later disdained continue to emerge from their time in Egypt. African Americans are not whom we European Americans have taken them to be. “They” are not the “other” (Morrison 1989, 9). We whites must reclaim our projections and fantasies, and in such reclamation reconfigure the subjective and social structures of whiteness, especially white men. Perhaps then we can begin to see ourselves, and then others, more clearly.
In African-American autobiography, we discern not mindless egoism or asocial subjectivism (characteristics sometimes associated with European and European-American autobiographical practices), but, rather, first- person accounts composed by remarkable individuals whose subjective strug- gles were simultaneously collective ones. In our time of trial and tribulation, teachers might respectfully mime these autobiographical practices, declining politicians’ insistence on our “gracious submission,” becoming, instead, “outraged mothers,” “talking back” in protection of our children, their edu- cation, and everyone’s future.
Especially during this time when the public sector does not invite our iden- tification, indeed, when it seems to require our cynicism, even bitterness, what possibility there is of being influenced, of influencing—of doing peda- gogical/political work—may reside in the subjective spaces of our lives. (In a different context, Dewey [1991 (1927), 50] observed: “In general, behavior in intellectual matters has moved from the public to the private realm.”) Under such circumstances, autobiography represents an important strategy of cul- tural politics and the reconstruction of the public sphere. At this historical moment, autobiography may have more political potential, possibly more in- tegrity, than running for state senate, signing a petition, even voting, al- though I am hardly opposed to conventional political action. We teachers must begin to “talk back,” to ourselves, to colleagues, to politicians, and to parents.
It is we the people—the “multitude” as Hardt and Negri (2000, 47) have