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18 1 Turning around Jim Crow W. T. LHAMON JR. I am convinced that we shall overcome because the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. —Martin Luther King Jr., Addresses to the AFL-CIO, 1961 “If you pass Hepzibah’s cent-shop,” wrote Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne after reading The House of the Seven Gables, “buy me a Jim Crow (fresh) and send it to me by Ned Higgins.”1 In 1851, when Melville asked his friend Hawthorne for a Jim Crow cookie, the phrase, figure, and behavior had a different sense than they do today. My subject is that difference, how it came about, and its implications. I begin with Melville’s enthusiasm for Jim Crow tokens not because they return us to an origin for Jim Crow. That origin is a process begun long ago in Africa (where blackface very like the American version is still performed ) and continually adapted since crossing the Atlantic in chains. I begin with Melville’s note because it returns us to a specific phase in the flip-flopping rites of faux blackness in the United States that, despite our present-day meaning of the phrase “Jim Crow,” in this case is positive. Melville’s postscript inserts us into a different feeling about Jim Crow that we have forgotten, if we ever knew it, but that Melville could well remember and that his friend Hawthorne had first noticed a decade and a half before in Williamstown, Massachusetts. On the Fourth of July, 1838, Hawthorne saw gingersnaps stamped out in the shape of a dancing Jim Crow for sale during the local celebration of freedom. Was this an early inkling of the radioactive kitsch—lawn jockeys and handkerchief -headed Jemimas, spittoons and coin banks—that would become black memorabilia? Yes, and more. It also encodes a cluster of counter-meanings that pivot on Jim Crow. Turning around Jim Crow 19 These compounded meanings are already responding to and, in turn, exciting the other sides’ positions. These included the urge of white people (and, in the case of Hawthorne’s Ned Higgins, Irish) to take in, digest, black gestural charisma. Jim Crow promoted this cross-racial affiliation among the ragged low majority. That constitutionally disfranchised connection threatened privileges ensconced in the representative democracy of the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Melville was quick to see the provocative irresolvability of this issue that has, indeed, grown all the more intractable as time has passed. It was a perfect topic for a novelist, as for all cultural expression in a country trying to understand its emerging amalgam, and he would increasingly fasten on it almost as tightly as American popular culture has through the intervening years. Melville’s request to Hawthorne reflects processes of cultural history and social change that intervening activists make taboo at considerable cost. That’s because top-down prohibition does not quickly, and may never, change the country’s consciousness. If the question is whether it takes formal sanction, including law and social taboo, on the one hand, or practice, on the other hand, to make change, the one-syllable answer is: both. They are both necessary. But outlawing Jim Crow is not an easy intervention, because the racism that people of goodwill wish to purge is knotted up in social processes that we must sustain if we hope to bring emotions in line with intentions. What’s at stake is how to admit, then narrate, the relationship between intervention and inflection of deep social rehearsal. Getting that right was what Martin Luther King Jr. had in mind when he told the labor movement that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. How to bend it—that’s the question. The year after Melville’s letter, Hawthorne would write the campaign biography for Franklin Pierce. There he tried to explain how, if elected president, Pierce would hold the line on slavery. While they were neighbors in the Berkshires , perhaps Hawthorne and Melville discussed how slavery could not be legislated out of existence, how it had to “vanish like a dream.” That is what Hawthorne wrote that Pierce believed, and it is also what Hawthorne’s own fatalism seemed to accept. Melville himself held a more robust attitude toward this change. He understood that cultural rehearsal could work on that dream. Melville would soon finish Moby-Dick, and then “Benito Cereno,” increasingly pushing readers toward racial interpretation. Americans, however, didn’t need Melville or Hawthorne to tell...

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