The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews

14. Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved

14 Runaway Tongue r esistant o rality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved. The mainstream appeal of Harriet Beecher stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin catalyzed literary as well as political activity in the nineteenth century. Leaving aside the numerous attacks, defenses, adaptations, imitations, and parodies the book inspired among white writers, let us note that stowe, through the unprecedented popularity of her sympathetic black characters, had an impact on black writers so immediate that Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be regarded as an important precursor of the a frican a merican novel. Through the broad influence of this fictional work, stowe almost single-handedly turned the interests of black readers and writers to the political, cultural, and economic possibilities of the novel. r ecognizing the value of their personal and collective experience, black writers of both fictional and nonfictional works were influenced by stowe’s exploitation of subliterary genres, her provocative combination of sentimental and slave narrative conventions, and her successful production of a text at once popular and ideological.1 Certainly stowe provided an enabling textual model, especially for fledgling writers struggling to represent the subjectivity of black women; yet another way of looking at the response of black women writers in the nineteenth century to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is to notice the diἀerent ways their texts “talk back” to stowe’s novel. stowe’s grafting of the sentimental novel, a literary genre associated with white women and the ideology of female domestication , onto the slave narrative, a genre associated with the literary production of black men that links literacy with freedom and manhood, is countered by black women writers who produced texts that question the location of the black woman caught between these two literary models. stowe uses the slave narrative as a reservoir of fact, experience, and realism, while constructing black characters as objects of sentimentality in order to augment the emotive power and political significance of her text. r esistant o rality 103 Harriet Jacobs, the only black woman author to publish a book-length fugitive slave narrative, and Harriet Wilson, the first published black woman novelist, place the slave narrative and the sentimental genre in dialogue, and often in conflict, in order to suggest the ideological limits of “true womanhood ” or bourgeois femininity, while they also call into question Frederick d ouglass’s paradigmatic equation of literacy, freedom, and manhood in his 1845 Narrative. a s Harriet Jacobs’s text Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and numerous dictated narratives of ex-slaves also suggest, slaves countered institutionalized illiteracy with a resistant orality. n ot everyone found opportunities to steal literacy or successfully escape slavery as a fugitive , but oral transmission passed on the verbal skills of runaway tongues: the sass, spunk, and infuriating impudence of slaves who individually and collectively refused to know their place. n ineteenth-century black women writers struggled in their texts to reconcile an oral tradition of resistance with a literary tradition of submission. Jane t ompkins, while arguing in favor of reading sentimental novels for the “cultural work” they accomplished, nevertheless reads them as texts that instruct women to accept their culturally defined roles in order to exercise the power available to bourgeois white women operating within the ideological limits of “true womanhood.”2 slave narratives, on the other hand, do not advise submission to a higher authority imagined as benign; they celebrate flight from overt oppression. Having neither the incentive of cultural rewards available to some white women nor the mobility available to some male fugitives, slave women in particular and black women more generally would have found both the slave narrative and the sentimental novel deficient representations of their experience as black women. For this reason the texts of nineteenth-century black women writers concentrate not only on reconciling the contradictions of disparate literary conventions, but also on grafting literacy onto orality. Their texts, by focusing on a continuum of resistance to oppression available to the illiterate as well as the literate, tend to stress orality as a presence over illiteracy as an absence. The oral tradition often permitted a directness of expression (particularly within family networks in less europeanized slave communities) about matters of sex, violence, and sexual violence that literary convention, particularly the indirection and euphemistic language of sentimental fiction in its concern with modesty and decorum, rendered “unspeakable .” it is in the oral tradition (itself preserved through...