-
Two Characterand History, or “Chloroformin Print”
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Two Character and History, or “Chloroform in Print” Walker02.indd 57 Walker02.indd 57 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM Walker02.indd 58 Walker02.indd 58 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:46 GMT) In this chapter I focus on how the pre- and post-DNA discussions of Jefferson and Hemings have shaped and been shapedbyourunderstandingoftheracialoriginsandnational identityoftheAmericanrepublic.Icommentonandcritiquewhat both the pre- and post-DNA Jeffersonian hagiographers (those whomGoreVidalhascalled“theMountRushmorebiographers”)1 have had to say in their denials of the Jefferson-Hemings affair. What does their persistent refusal to accept what was already believed by some white Americans and by blacks generally, even before DNA corroboration, tell us about the state of contemporary American race relations? Equally important, what does it reveal about the way our nation’s history, and that of its founders, has been constructed? Nations require both myths of origin and mythic founders. Commenting on the difference between myth and history, Roland Barthes observed, “In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics , with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful charity: things appear to mean something by themselves.”2 In retrospect we can see how the mythic history of the United States was constructed around the identification of primitive “others,” blacks and Native Americans, who could be presented,iftheywerementionedatall,asacounterfoiltocivilized Walker02.indd 59 Walker02.indd 59 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM 60 | mongr el nation white nation builders. Either ignored or marginalized, blacks and Native Americans thus posed no threat to the dominant fiction of progress and divine mission that was central to the history of the United States. As François Furstenberg has brilliantly shown, not only history but “popular writing shaped ideas of citizenship and nationalism.”3 In this literature, as Furstenberg shows, blacks passively accepted slavery and thus did not participate in the creation of the United States.4 The absence of black people in the master narrative of the nation ’s past was described by the black abolitionist and novelist William Wells Brown as resulting from white historians’ having “thrown the colored man out.”5 Brown well understood that when the Founding Fathers created the American republic they framed a historical narrative for the nation that exclusively equated whiteness with progress, civilization, and citizenship. As Chief Justice Taney proclaimed in the Dred Scott case in 1856, “The founders knew that it [the Declaration] would not, in any part of the civilized world, be supposed to embrace the negro race, which by common consent, has been excluded from civilized governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.”6 Because they were not part of the nation’s genealogy, blacks had no place in its history. Black people, to quote the late Nathan Huggins, “did not exist in the world that mattered.”7 Here, for example, is the blunt pronouncement made in 1902 by the Atlanta editor John Temple Graves: “This is our country . . . we made it. We molded it. We control it, and we always will. We have done great things. We have mighty things yet to do. The Negro is an accident—an unwilling, a blameless, but an unwholesome, unwelcome, helpless, unassimilable element in our civilization. He is not made for our times.”8 It is instructive to compare how American blacks were cast (or not cast) in the white-authored pageant of American history with how the Aborigines were perceived in another former British colony, Australia. There the master narrative, like that of the Walker02.indd 60 Walker02.indd 60 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM 10/24/08 11:40:16 AM Character and History | 61 United States, was constructed around the achievements of white settlers of British ancestry. In both cases the colonists or new people “fought the hierarchical order of the Old World to found a new egalitarian one.”9 Both tales of national origin were selective and racially referential in their depiction of the past based on historicist representations of nonwhites. The remarks of the Australian educator Walter Murdoch in a school primer...