Slavery in American Children's Literature, 1790-2010

Epilogue

210 Epilogue Sometimes it’s better to forget. —Eleanora E. Tate, The Secret of Gumbo Grove (1987) Sometimes people need to remember the pain, so they won’t forget. —Eleanora E. Tate, The Secret of Gumbo Grove (1987) I n Eleanora Tate’s The Secret of Gumbo Grove, that Miss Effie recounts otherwise lost lives to young Raisin Stackhouse who writes them down as a recovered history argues the importance of memory, story, and historical reclamation. History, for Raisin, becomes personal and a means of making sense of her world. It is also conflicted, unresolved, problematic, painful , and liberating. The representation of recovering history in The Secret of Gumbo Grove offers a metaphor of the rewriting and retelling of slavery’s history that has occurred in America for over the past two hundred years, although in that two-­ century time period authors’ motivations for their retellings of slavery have varied drastically . Nonetheless, there has been in the American psyche something essential in trying to define what slavery has meant for the nation. In some sense, retellings of slavery explore not merely what slavery was in American history, but rather what slavery is (in the present tense) to American society and identity. Embedded with issues of cultural trauma, racial fear and anger, debates about citizenship, and more fundamentally, definitions of humanity and personhood, slavery is the “pre-­ history” or “pre-­ text” (Carby 126) of black/white racial politics in America, inextricably bound to designations of race and prescriptions of racial characteristics that often posit “black” and “white” as “utterlye contrary” (qtd in Jordan 7), irrevocable opposites both defined by the other and separated by that opposition. In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville argued that “the real inequality that is produced by fortune or by law is always succeeded by an imaginary 211 Epilogue inequality” (222); stories about slavery variously interrogate or reaffirm “imaginary inequality” in a system defined by racial difference . As much as by the end of the nineteenth century slavery is “reconstituted [. . .] as the primal scene of black identity” in America (Eyerman 16), it is also oppositionally constituted as the primal scene of white identity in America (Rushdy, Remembering 27). In sum, the story about slavery is a story about race—racial oppression, conflict, and meaning. What the study of U.S. literature about slavery offers is an opportunity to disentangle racial myths that have been reconstructed for over two hundred years in America, and in so doing, to examine the ways slavery “haunts the peripheries of the national imaginary” (Rushdy, Remembering 2). That successive generations have reframed representations of slavery by—consciously or not—­ drawing upon the antebellum genres of the slave narrative, abolitionist novel, and plantation story, reveals a recursive dialectic about race in America. Literature shows us as a culture that is inextricably bound to antebellum tropes even as authors seek to rewrite them. In its exploration of how images of slavery are borrowed, reframed, and reshaped from antebellum literature, Slavery in American Children ’s Literature shows the literary recasting of slavery as a documentary fiction of sorts, as authors attempt to tell of the past by reflecting the anxieties and hopes of their present time. Children’s literature, in these expressions of race and slavery, is particularly important because it functions as an ideological primer for adult citizenship, a forum that would lay the groundwork for the country’s racial future. In many ways, children’s literature exposes what adults consider most important, what they hope to pass on to children as a way to bring about their own vision of futurity. While the prefatory epigraph of A Sequel to Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book (1844) by William Webster, son of Noah Webster, extols the power of republican childhood in its admonition to “educate your children and the country is safe” (u.p.), one could easily argue the question is how one’s children should be educated and what versions of slavery and race provide for a “safe” country. In American literary history, the country’s “safety” has been variously constructed in the protection of a stringent racial hierarchy, the acknowledgment of racial equality, slavery, and emancipation. How purviews of sentience, subjectivity, agency, and citizenship are defined by racial tropes offers an education that encourages not only Epilogue 212 an “imaginary” equality or inequality, but fundamentally, an “imaginary America,” a cultural means of creating ourselves and our political realities. Despite the...