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CHAPTER 5. Jim Crow Faulkner: Suzan-Lori Parks Digs Up the Past, Again
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chapterfive Jim Crow FaulkNer Suzan-Lori Parks Digs Up the Past, Again So far I have concentrated on how literary writers return to the Jim Crow South to track what remains of him in the contemporary moment, in other locations,and in post–civil rights political and philosophical debates.What about interventions into literary history itself? The neo–slave narrative is a good orienting point because it is very concerned with literary history. We can see this in direct intertextual revisions, such as Ishmael Reed’s sendup of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) in Flight to Canada (1976) or Alice Randall’s similar take on Gone with the Wind (1939) in The Wind Done Gone (2002). This approach is also evident in the neo–slave narrative’s origins as a literary rebuke of white writer William Styron’s right to tell a story in the first person about Nat Turner and his slave rebellion.Neo–segregation narratives tend to be less inclined toward overt intertextuality, though they still also engage literary history and rebuke texts that harbor Jim Crow sensibilities. For instance, in George Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum (1985) viewers board a plane to ride back in time to visit exhibits filled with iconic props and stereotypes from various eras of black history. One such exhibit, “The Last-Mama-on-the-Couch Play,”is a takeoff on the pervasive mammy trope up through Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975). Another good example, this time from popular culture, is the delightful and enduring industry of signifying on Black Like Me, that earnest 1961 experiment in crossing the color line. Examples include Eddie Murphy’s white-faced sketches for Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, scholar-activist Tim Wise’s White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (2004), and David Ehrenstein’s 2008 lampoon of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in his LA Weekly article “Off-White Like Me.” The best example of a neo–segregation narrative consciously engaging literary history, especially its upper echelons, is Getting Mother’s Body (2003), the Pulitzer Prize–winning first novel by experimental playwright Suzan-Lori Parks.1 For a raucous,irreverent story of Jim Crow segregation and small town dreams,Parks reinvents As I Lay Dying (1930),William Faulkner’s modernist 134 Chapter Five story about the Bundrens, a poor white family in the rural South on a long, hot journey to bury their matriarch.For her reinvention,Parks offers instead the Beedes,a poor black family in 1960s rural Texas on a long,hot journey to unbury their matriarch.The Beedes head west to LaJunta,Arizona,in search of treasure: a diamond ring and pearl necklace that may—or may not!—have been buried with Willa Mae, whose makeshift grave will be plowed up for a supermarket parking lot. Faulknerian access to interior monologues reveals the logic, concerns, and ambitions of each character as they race to exhume Willa Mae in time.What is the significance of revising Faulkner in 2003 for a story about African American experience around the official end of de jure segregation and signal civil rights successes in the 1960s? For Parks, it is partly a question of what literary model best captures dynamic history. In a 1996 interview, Parks ruminates, “Faulkner has this great thing: he talks about what is and was, or was and is. History is not ‘was,’ history ‘is.’ It’s present, so if you believe that history is in the present, you can also believe that the present is in the past.”2 By using Faulkner for a contemporary novel about 1960s segregation, Parks gets at how Jim Crow “is,” not “was.” She thus joins African American traditions that turn to literature, not just legislative reform, to reclaim and signify on an American history with the lives of black people at the center, what John Ernest might describe as “liberating historiography.” She revisits not only a modernist classic but also the hallowed ground of civil rights,including the famed 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.The novel thereby queries the legacy of civil rights and long-standing promises of black enfranchisement, which remain subjects of vigorous debate. By using a canonical white host text to narrate the lives of black subjects of Jim Crow,Parks raises questions of literary lineage, history’s present, and the present...