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  • “Looking Back is Tricky Business . . .”
  • Frances Smith Foster (bio)

I title this essay “Looking Back is Tricky Business” because I want an economy of familiarity to offset what might prove to be an excessively ambitious presentation. Ultimately, I am reaffirming the acute significance of studying narratives, long and short, historical, future, and contemporary, factual or imagined, regardless of source, intent, or immediate impact.1 But, along the way I want to (entertainingly) demonstrate something of the kinds of pleasures that reward those who strive to explore new areas of history but continue to reexamine familiar territory as well. I want to encourage the Huck Finn in us to go ahead, exercise independence, follow intuition and curiosity.2 However as educated adults, as responsible scholar/teachers, we must not knowingly manipulate the facts we find, nor oversimplify the complexities of the truths we know in order to satisfy our own desires. So I want to encourage you to continually expand your repertoire of texts, to light out for new narrative territories sometimes ahead of the rest, courageously but carefully. For, as is often a problem in exploring new territory, we must be cautious in assuming that similarities to our known world are repetitions or equivalencies.

To that end, I will introduce to some and present to others two published writings by Americans of African descent almost one hundred fifty years apart, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee (1998) and “Matrimony” by Daniel A. Payne (1859). Comparisons of the two are instructive and each is an example of a narrative genre to which more scholarly attention should be paid. I will also make a pitch for the occasional revisit to narratives so familiar that we tend to ignore the need for review and reassessment, not merely as contrastive [End Page 19] context for discoveries in new texts but also for rediscoveries of aspects of familiar stories the ambiguities of which we may have forgot or overlooked. Finally I endeavor to celebrate the importance of historical narrative study by reaffirming the relevance of narratology’s art and science for times such as these in which we live.

As narratologists we pursue the past. The economy of familiarity that my title intends comes from knowing that, for folks like us, the difficulty of getting a story right is a given. We know that narratives are not created in cultural vacuums and narratives are always in some way “after the fact.” As we construct and interpret the facts of a narrative, we are also creating another narrative; we are making history. Even what appears to be the most basic explication or structural analysis comes in some context. As scholar/teachers we sometimes forget that what we read and write is not necessarily the same as what others see and say. Too often, the fault is ours because we forget the wise words of ancient storytellers such as Habakkuk, that we should “write the vision and make it plain so that a runner may read it” (2:2). Other times, we simply have to argue more persuasively, maybe more forcefully, for the redeeming social value of our work. We must do this even when we know that our confrontations of questions of ethics, accuracy, relevance, and worth produce no absolute, universal answers. Sometimes we have to refuse to provide definite answers just because students or colleagues demand a yes or no, right or wrong, first or not at all conclusion or interpretation. We have to profess what is unpopular or incomplete. And, we need to do this without losing our jobs or relinquishing our authority.

“Looking Back Is Tricky Business,” Say Ossie and Ruby

My title tells a tale of common sense but it comes with quotation marks and ellipses. These are not my words. They are a quote from With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together, a personal narrative related by a married couple renowned as actors, elocutionists, and directors for stage and screen. In other words, from a “celebrity memoir.” But, I hasten to assure you, it is not a ghost-written hagiography or gossip sheet. With Ossie & Ruby is a personalized history woven from—and...

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