On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

3. Was Billy Black? Herman Melville and the Captive King

t h r e e Was Billy Black? Herman Melville and the Captive King It sometimes happens, when I am teaching Billy Budd, that a brave student will ask, after a day or so of discussion, ‘‘Is Billy black?’’ How could such a misunderstanding come about? It’s true that Melville’s language is notoriously difficult for students, and Billy Budd especially so, with its ornate vocabulary and dense allusiveness. Consider the following passage: A barbarian Billy radically was—as much so, for all the costume, as his countrymen the British captives, living trophies, made to march in the Roman triumph of Germanicus. Quite as much as those later barbarians, young men probably, and picked specimens among the earlier British converts to Christianity, at least nominally such, taken to Rome (as today converts from lesser isles of the sea may be taken to London), of whom the Pope of that time, admiring the strangeness of their personal beauty so unlike the Italian stamp, their clear ruddy complexion and curled flaxen locks, exclaimed, ‘‘Angles’’ (meaning English, the modern derivative ), ‘‘Angles, do you call them? And is it because they look so much like angels?’’ Had it been later in time, one would think that the Pope had in mind 78 Melville and the Captive King 79 Fra Angelico’s seraphs, some of whom, plucking apples in gardens of the Hesperides , have the faint rosebud complexion of the more beautiful English girls.1 Billy goes through a dizzying set of transformations here: he is first a ‘‘British ’’ captive (that is, slave) of the Romans, and then a ‘‘nominal’’ Christian whose transportation and review before a different leader in the same imperial capital merges imperceptibly with the earlier enslavement; finally, through wordplay that conjoins racial and artistic determinations (as ‘‘Angle’’ turns to ‘‘angel’’ to ‘‘Fra Angelico’’), Billy’s abjection undergoes an overt aestheticization in his appearance as a seraph and a girl. But even if some students do not have ‘‘ruddy’’ and ‘‘flaxen’’ as part of their working vocabulary, how could they fail to see, once they have read about his ‘‘faint rosebud complexion,’’ that Billy is being described as especially beautiful because especially white? It may be that what students pick up on here, amid the complexly shifting frames of reference, is simply that being a ‘‘barbarian ’’ and being a ‘‘captive’’ both have something to do with race. Billy’s transformation from captive slave to pretty girl turns around the pope’s admiring gaze, a gaze that, like Behn’s toward Oroonoko, both dominates and exalts its object on the basis of its racial difference. Race casts a shadow over the whole passage. Perhaps students grasp this structure of racial domination , but for them such a structure would ‘‘normally’’ have a black person in the dominated position. The question ‘‘Is Billy black?’’ in other words, correctly registers Melville’s focus on the relation between domination and racialization, and misrecognizes it at the same time. Somewhat like Amasa Delano, these students’ intuitive grasp of a deep structure both grants them access to a profound truth and makes them unable to see what is right before their eyes. ‘‘Was Billy Black?’’ The question might be rephrased, in order to make its implications clearer: to what extent is there what Toni Morrison called an ‘‘Africanist presence’’ structuring Melville’s text?2 That is, how does the full meaning of Billy’s whiteness depend on the complex racializing ideologies born from new world slavery? In this chapter, I argue that Melville summarizes a figurative tradition begun with Behn and continued in the work of Equiano. He circulates the figure of the black sovereign—in Daggoo , in Atufal, in a certain ‘‘black pagod’’ encountered on the Liverpool docks—as part of a lifelong attempt to think through the antinomies of the modern self and its ensnarement in the mysteries of domination and 80 Melville and the Captive King subjection. Like Aphra Behn, Melville takes the problem of sovereignty as one of his basic themes. But what must be discerned around the edges of Behn’s new world texts, namely, the knowledge, unhappily discovered, that in the post-absolutist modernity in which she found herself, sovereignty had become subordinated to an ideology of individualism, is for Melville the starting point: sovereignty, for this intense individualist, is first and foremost a trait, or difficult achievement, of the self. Political realities, or what he calls the...