Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South

Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them.

—J. W. C. Pennington

Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American history—and stories about that remaking as well. "[W]e have reached a great crisis in American history," he declared at the 1968 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, "and we are now going to have a full American history. . . . Here in the United States we have had a political system which wouldn't allow me to tell my story officially. Much of it is not in the history textbooks" (qtd. in West 125). African Americans resorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memories and histories "even as," Ellison added, "they were forced to accommodate themselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned by official history." The result in black writing, he noted drily, was "a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing" and "a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like" (126).

These are words that anticipate to a startling degree our current debates over memories and histories of slavery and race, from controversies over Confederate flags and memorials to Brown University's recent directive to study its own history of complicity with the Atlantic slave trade. Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the antebellum white South's systematic blockade of abolitionist literature, then by charges of fraud and imposture by proslavery apologists, and finally by what art historian Kirk Savage calls "the erasure of slavery" in public history—in Confederate monuments, museums, and sites of historic preservation (129). Toni Morrison, for one, has seen it as her specific charge to search out those silences "for the unspeakable things unspoken" and finally to retrieve them from the realm of the forgotten and give them voice ("Unspeakable" 210). But there are also issues that have generated furious arguments since the publication of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner: that is, what is it that stories and histories of slavery should say, what narrative forms should they take, who should write them—and for what audiences? These are questions that have provided much of the impetus for new categories of writing about slavery, the most notable of which are novels like Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Morrison's Beloved, often referred to as "neo-slave narratives." Two 2003 novels, Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning The Known World and Valerie Martin's Orange Prize-winning Property, suggest yet another category: that of post- or anti-plantation tradition novels drawing inspiration in part from the tradition of slave narratives, especially those by Solomon Northup, Henry Box Brown, and William and Ellen Craft, but also from the necessity of responding to and writing against the long shadow cast by Gone with the Wind on popular memories of slavery, the antebellum South, and the Civil War era. Indeed these two novels cast their sights farther afield by interrogating mastery itself, and by implication master narratives of history, by exposing the daily operations and limits of power and domination, excavating the counternarratives blocked by those operations, and ultimately revising both the content and the form of the historical record.

The Known World and Property, then, are not just historical novels. They are postmodern novels written for a postmodern South and a postmodern age—with all the connotations of a loss of mastery that term "postmodern" carries. For if all of our current debates on slavery reparations, Confederate flags, and historical monuments tell us anything, it is that the white South and white America, for that matter, have been suffering a crisis of authority and legitimacy ever since the civil rights revolution, a crisis that has seen the demise of master narratives that justified and acquiesced to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy and rendered African Americans virtually silent and invisible...