Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind

Conclusion: Beyond Black and White

209 Conclusion beyond black and white his study demonstrates that the contemporary novel of slavery has not torn down a monolithic version of history that ruled unchallenged for two centuries or more. Nonetheless, novels about slavery continue to perform valuable cultural work, as they always have done. They engage knowledgeably , imaginatively, and accessibly with specific interpretations and theories advanced in the discipline of history. Literary scholarship often suggests that recent historical novels possess radical insight that supposedly dull, dusty, and conservative historiography lacks. It is more the case that the depiction of slavery in fiction essentially parallels discourses in the discipline of history. Black Thunder and The Red Cock Crows were almost exact contemporaries of, respectively, James Carroll’s and Herbert Aptheker’s studies of slave rebellion. Even so innovative a work of fiction as Kindred portrays the institution of slavery and its effects upon individuals in similar terms to Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll. The real achievement of such fiction has been to bring debates about slavery out of the academy and into the wider cultural arena. Whether or not Abraham Lincoln really called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who made this big war,” the implications of this legend are clear. Stowe took existing arguments about slavery and explored them in a vivid, critical, accessible , and widely circulated form. Similarly, millions in our own time who are not familiar with such historians as Stanley Elkins or John Blassingame have nonetheless considered questions about slave subjectivities, communities , and resistance via the pages of such novels as The Confessions of Nat T recto calls and responses 210 Turner, Roots, Kindred, and Beloved. Contemporary fiction is not in opposition to historiography; it is often its popular transmitter. The simplistic but pervasive notion in literary studies that the discipline of history is—or was until very recently—characterized by a monolithic, hegemonic orthodoxy obscures this plain fact and encourages the view that contemporary novels challenge rather than participate in the discourses of history. American fiction about slavery is not a rigidly polemical or narrowly didactic literature. It is not a genre that was once essentially supportive of“the status quo” and is now fundamentally oppositional and subversive. Instead, the historical novel has always engaged in imaginative dialogue with nonfiction accounts of the past. It thus enables a broad audience to participate in the same interpretive arguments and debates that historians routinely wrestle over. This is not the only kind of dialogue that characterizes slavery fiction. Novels on the topic not only engage with historiography but also with each other, from the“anti-Tom” novels that responded to Stowe’s famous text to Kindred’s critical allusions to Roots. It is also important to attend to the calls and responses between black and white writers in the cultural conversation about slavery. The emphasis upon fiction by African American authors in current literary scholarship is quite understandable, since writers of color have been responsible for the most notable achievements in American slavery fiction since at least the sixties. In my own pantheon of novels about the institution, Kindred, Beloved, and The Known World are the most prominent . It is a mistake, however, to neglect the contributions of white writers to the cultural discourse about slavery, or to characterize white-authored novels and histories as essentially antagonistic to the black-authored fiction we find so compelling. Even works produced by white novelists that are commonly criticized for their racism have played the important role of inspiring literary responses. Flight to Canada talks back to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s representations of American slaves, while The Wind Done Gone’s primary raison d’être is its intertextual relationship with Gone with the Wind. Furthermore, white-authored texts have often done much more than merely inspire critical countervisions. The Red Cock Crows provides a sympathetic portrait of slave rebels, while Mandingo bluntly dramatizes the callous exploitation of slavery. The same black critics who resented William Styron’s attempts to recreate the character of Nat Turner were impressed by Daniel Panger’s fictionalization of the Southampton insurrection in Ol’ 211 Prophet Nat. Finally, Property’s despairing portrait of the psychology of the plantation mistress complicates the optimism of Dessa Rose’s depiction of a woman slaveholder’s growing enlightenment and interracial friendships. In sum, the cultural conversation about slavery is—and always has been— characterized by intertextual, interdisciplinary, and interracial dialogue. Nonetheless, for...