Black and white, white or black. However you position those two words in relation to one another there is no way around an immediate comparison of their differences. They are in fact polar opposites of each other. No one argues that, but what is often less discussed is how one would function without the other. This is where Morrison’s second essay in Playing in the Dark has led me. Romancing in the Shadow is yet again a critical look at how the role of the African has been portrayed in the literature of new America. I refer to new America loosely as the period of time when America was a relatively young country, painfully trying to assert it’s differentness from it’s European heritage. This essay has several important factors which I would like to discuss here; the concept of the other, and the codependency a white America has on blackness in respect to it’s national identity.
Morrison begins her discussion by examining the creation of America as a nation attempting to be independent of it’s roots, one which is trying in earnest to not behave as it’s European counterpart. Morrison goes on to explain the ideology which was behind many of the immigrants who came to this new land. The ideas of freedom and possibility in contrast to the oppression and limitations which many of the immigrants faced if they were to have stayed in their country of origin. It was of fresh starts, freedom, and clean slates which early Americans dreamed of, these beliefs created what we now know as the “the American dream”. It is this freedom of creating a new persona for oneself which is at arms with the entirely dominated slave population which enabled new American to be built. We will return to this thought briefly. First, I would like to include an excerpt from Morrison’s article in which she discusses new American author’s usage of romance.
Romance offered writers not less but more; not a narrow a-historical canvas but a wide historical one; not escape but entanglement. For young America it had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics of the search for self-valorization and validation-above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror- and terror’s most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all the connotative value it awakened. (37)
Within this description and use of romance in new America’s writers we find once again the employment of America’s black population as a tool to look at culture and society. Morrison takes a term from Herman Melville when she states that there is no romance free of “ the power of blackness”. She discusses the slave population of America in terms which enable it to become a microcosm which could be analyzed as a surrogate self. Here once again I find her words stronger than my own to articulate this concept:
The slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and its elusiveness. This black population was available for meditations on terror- the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed. In other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man. (37-8)
It is from this brief description of the slave population being used as a substitute for the new white population of America that one can enter into the discussion of the other, which in this essay is the keystone concept. In her discussion of the slave as a literary tool, she articulates her thoughts using the term “ the not-me”. Due to the slave populations lack of freedom and their noted difference in skin color they were capable of being used as a projection which the white population could place any number of ideas or concerns upon. It is the constant fear white Americans had of failure, lack of freedom and security that led them to need the black population in their creation of a national selfhood. Power and any of the other key thoughts associated with a new country cannot easily be discussed without a counterpart. The African population of America acted as an “ego-reinforcing presence...” (45). Morrison’s thoughts on the other are heavily intertwined with her relationship to literature. It seems difficult at times to understand that these abstractions are not beliefs held simply in literature but that the literature of the time was actually a reflection of the populations opinions. This creation of the other is significantly noticeable when you begin to realize that even the word American connotes white. To be American is to be white, something that Morrison points out in our languages usage of the hyphen when describing African-Americans or any other notable non white population living in America. To understand this better I want to return to Morrison’s employment of literature. In her opinion it was not expressedly the slave which enabled the American to see them as the other, it was also directly influenced by their skin color a skin color loaded with historical relationships. Morrison states:
It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color “meant” something. That meaning had been named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment, in the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the same scholars started to investigate both the natural history and the inalienable rights of man- that is to say, human freedom... the subjective nature of ascribing value and meaning to color cannot be questioned this late in the twentieth century. The point for this discussion is the alliance between visually rendered ideas and the linguistic utterances.(49)
The color of the slaves skin being so different from their white dominators enabled the whites to create a meaning for why it existed. White is light, black is dark. White is pure and clear, black is dangerous and hard to see. The American psyche set up a stark contrast of what these two colors represented. A representation that they placed upon the darker skinned black population. Morrison finishes her essay with a discussion of several areas where further research needs to be undertaken to fully understand the complexities of the black figure in American literature. She poses the questions of how the Africanist characters purpose as a surrogate or enabler works. Secondly a discussion needs to be had about how “...an Africanist idiom is used to establish difference or, in a later period, to signal modernity.” (52). Finally she argues that an investigation into how the Africanist character enforces and supports the invention and suggestions of whiteness. A subject we have yet to really discuss other than how it is affected by blackness. Morrison closes the article with a brief description of the relationship shown between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. A discussion that is based in the concepts discussed above. From Morrison’s words it is clear to see how an American identity and one that is solely white was and still is completely reliant on the image of the other, of the Africanist or black character. It is a relationship which does not enable the black character to be fully realized as it is used for a purpose to validate whitness. Before I finish I would like to leave you with one last passage from Morrison as it has stimulated me to begin to research from the other side;
In that sense the book may indeed be “great” because in its structure, in the hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates an describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.(57) (Italics are my own, and the book she is referring to in this passage is Huckleberry Finn.)
I must start to look at how whiteness solidifies blackness, because certainly while this may be a bumpy road it certainly cannot be a one way street.
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