The Color of Prison: Shared Legacies in Walter Mosley’s The Man in My Basement and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude

No general consensus seems to exist on the precise meaning of neo-slave narrative. On the one hand, the term is applied—often mockingly so—to an African American writer’s description of his or her successful fight against discrimination, ghettoization, and poverty en route to becoming a full member of the respectable middle class. It is in this sense that John Edgar Wideman used the term when characterizing the autobiographies of Oprah Winfrey and O. J. Simpson. These seemed to Wideman cliché-ridden up-from-the-depths biographies, “merely repeating one of the master plots Americans have found acceptable for black lives” (xxix). On the other hand, the term is also frequently invoked when characterizing literary works of fiction dealing thematically with the historical institution of slavery in America, or comparing in one way or another contemporary African American lives to life in slavery. It is in this more inclusive and subtle sense that a novel such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved is often described as a neo-slave narrative.¹ However, Brian Jarvis uses the term altogether differently in his book Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and US Culture, when describing narratives written by African American inmates as a neo-slave literature of sorts. Here Jarvis points to prison narratives written by authors and activists such as Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson, in which the prison itself figures as a kind of slavery. For instance Cleaver, in his 1968 classic Soul on Ice, described prison as “a continuation of slavery on a higher plane” (qtd. in Jarvis 107).

From these various suggestions, however different they are, we may conclude that the term neo-slave narrative designates a literature concerned with isolation and confinement as racialized experiences in contemporary American society. More precisely, neo-slave literature seems to be a literature exploring at least one of two cultural templates for imagining and understanding imprisonment central also to the historical slave narratives. According to the first of these templates, racial markers such as skin color themselves amount to a form of prison. Thus, racial “passing” may figure as a strategy to escape the prison of color so pointedly described by James Weldon Johnson when relating a black man’s experience of being let down by the white woman he loves after confiding his passing: “My situation made me feel weak and powerless, like a man trying with his bare hands to break the iron bars of his prison cell” (140). According to the second of these two cultural templates, incarceration correlates, at least to some extent, with skin color. While this aspect of incarceration is of course central to the historical institution of slavery and its narratives, it is also central to today’s criminal justice system. As a recent report found, thirty-eight percent of prison and jail inmates are African American, compared to their thirteen percent share of the overall population (“Reducing Racial Disparity” 2). These rates imply that a black male born in 2001 has a thirty-two percent chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life, a Hispanic male has a seventeen percent chance, and a white male has a six percent chance.

One pertinent way of understanding this racial disparity within the criminal justice system is to look at it as an example of structural racism—that is, the longstanding differential treatment of people of color. In this vein, sociologist Loïc Wacquant suggests we understand the contemporary American prison system to be the latest in a sequence of institutions whose purpose it has been to define, confine, and control black Americans. Wacquant lists four such institutions, namely slavery, Jim Crow, the urban ghetto, and finally the contemporary United States prison system. The institutional nexus in this fourth arrangement of racial dominance is a combination of material and symbolic containment of people of color, Wacquant notes. Materially, black offenders are contained by draconian penalty laws.² Symbolically, Wacquant argues, the current paradigm of law and order has succeeded in strengthening the old American...