Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002

CHAPTER TWO: Stealing Themselves Out of Slavery: African American Southerners in Richard Wright, William Attaway, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston

Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. jamaica kincaid, A SMALL PLACE In his “Economy of Manichean Allegory,” Abdul JanMohamed describes the perverse, exploitative energies that keep colonial subjects locked in a narcissistic struggle with their oppressors: By allowing the European to denigrate the native in a variety of ways, by permitting an obsessive, fetishistic representation of the native’s moral inferiority, the [Manichean] allegory also enables the European to increase, by contrast, the store of his own moral superiority; it allows him to accumulate “surplus morality,” which is further invested in the denigration of the native, in a self-sustaining cycle. (23) While it is not his primary concern in this passage, the economic language suffusing JanMohamed’s description of the colonial dyad is by no means unremarkable. In JanMohamed’s view, the elite white may “increase” and “accumulate” his own “‘surplus morality ’” in contrast to, and at the expense of, the fetishized inferiority of the native. As we have seen, this process depends fundamentally on the “denigration” of the regional other upon whose bodies and labor the colonial master historically acquires and “invests” 59 Chapter Two Stealing Themselves Out of Slavery: African American Southerners in Richard Wright, William Attaway, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston 60 ChapterTwo his extravagant superiority. As Baker observes in Turning South Again, the fact that blacks were “tallied as three-fifths persons in matters of ‘representation’” accomplishes a “fracture of the black body [that] enables a sustainable southern mind” (23). The fetish of surplus value entertained by the southern white can be maintained only by deriving some of that worth over and against the darker, lesser “other.” For postslavery southerners, this metaphorical debiting retained real economic impact well into the twentieth century. In The Fire in the Flint Walter White’s black protagonist asks a local white why he won’t stand up against the practice of lynching: “‘Who? Me? Never!’ Mr. Ewing looked his amazement at the suggestion. ‘Why, it would ruin my business’” (70). Ewing cites other reasons for his hesitation, but the health of his “business” is his instant, primary rationale for condoning the radical torture and extermination of black bodies in his midst; and he names several other local businessmen who would be “out for the same reason” (70). Such moments are disturbing because they expose the deeply material basis for the continued suppression and often the extermination of African American southerners whose denigration—if not their outright extermination—remains vital to the prosperity, order, and coherence of southern society and particularly for its grasping white aristocracy and proletariat. In his thousand-plus-page sociological study, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal suggests that the American white psychology might eventually exorcise its racist preoccupations by force of morality and religion; while he considers economics and employment patterns as part of his analysis, these factors are not nearly as critical to the formation of racism as are psychological ones. Yet colonial societies routinely display that materiality and psychology cannot be easily disentangled : Aimé Césaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism that the native Bantu of the Congo desire “not the improvement of their economic and material situation, but the white man’s recognition of and respect for their dignity as men, their full human value” (58). In the modern South, these twin desires cannot be separated (and I suspect they could not for the Bantu either). In this chapter I explore the manner in which African American southerners retain a disturbingly literal sense of “human values” and thus endeavor to improve both their economic and their psychological health simultaneously; yet in their conditioned responses to the South’s own Manichean allegory, we find not liberation but ineluctable participation in the “self-sustaining cycle” that infects, interpellates, and fractures their minds and bodies. Indeed, as Walter Johnson shows, the paternalism used to make slavery appear more caring than calculating was nonetheless “sometimes best measured in cash” (26); that is, the prosperity of a plantation directly influenced how kindly owners appraised their human investments: StealingThemselves Out of Slavery 61 Slaveholders . . . could track their fortunes in Affleck’s Planter’s Annual Record, which provided a convenient table by which slaves’ annual increase in value could be tracked in the same set of tables as their daily cotton production, and a page at the back where the “planter...