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  • Exceptional Minds, Unstated Exceptions: Intellectual Disability and Post-War Racial Liberalism in African American “White Life” Novels
  • Stephen Knadler (bio)

At the end of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1948 white life novel Seraph on the Suwanee, Arvay Henson proves her love to her husband Jim Meserve, Hurston’s aptly named figure of an individualistic New South, when she becomes the post-war domestic “seraph” in the suburban house. As Arvay discovers, in what she calls her “resurrection,” “Her job was mothering.”1 Critics of Hurston’s novel have often parsed out Hurston’s complex gender politics in the novel’s compromised denouement,2 but Arvay’s makeover to a life of “serv[ing] Jim,” it is rarely noted, is accompanied by her denial of her first born son Earl, the intellectually disabled child whom Jim had wanted institutionalized and who was later hunted down and killed like a fugitive slave in the Big Swamp after allegedly attacking a neighbor’s daughter. “Earl was in her and had to come out some way or another. . . . Earl had served his purpose and was happily removed from his suffering.”3 To integrate into a New South of interstate highways, suburbs, and agribusinesses (all of which Jim promotes), Hurston implies, Arvay must concede that her intellectually disabled child no longer has a “purpose.”4 By triangulating intellectual disability, the normalization of the bourgeois nuclear family, and U.S. myths of a color-blind democratic individualism in her representation of white Southern life, Hurston indicates, by contrast, that the sudden post-war integrationist visibility of the mentally retarded child did indeed have a constitutive purpose. The exceptional mind, Hurston’s novel indicates, functioned as a key liminal figure within the Cold War re-imagining of U.S. exceptionalism around racial liberalism and its colorblind meritocracy. [End Page 231]

African American disability scholars have often noted the comparative absence of representations of disability within twentieth-century racial uplift literature. As Jennifer James notes in her study of Gwendolyn Brooks, the need to rehabilitate the pathologized image of African Americans in the white mind prompted writers to overstress respectability in order to fracture any link between race and disability.5 But such a dearth of disability representations does not recur within post-war integration-era “white life novels,” or those pre-Civil Rights era African American novels that like Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee focused on largely all-white casts. While as Gene Andrew Jarrett notes, these integration-era white life novels have historically been marginalized within a nationalist-based African American canon because of their deficient race consciousness,6 many of them, I will argue in what follows, turn the gaze back on whiteness to challenge a Cold War discourse of liberal pluralism—an official anti-race discourse, which, as Jodi Melamed, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Joseph Keith have shown, emerged in the decade after WWII to emphasize colorblind self-determination, mobility, and consumer progress at a time when Cold War geopolitics made white supremacy and African American inequality a political liability.7 At the same time, however, that racial liberalism was insisting that African American discrimination could be solved by a change in white attitudes rather than through transforming structural injustices, the figure of the intellectually disabled differentiated citizen gained national prominence to redefine, to reshape and to mark the limits of this national story of inclusion, individualism and colorblind meritocracy.

Indeed, the post-WWII era witnessed a boom in the media visibility of intellectual disability. In 1948 the National Mental Health Foundation, which had been started just two years before, released a widely circulated pamphlet, Forgotten Children: Story of the Mental Deficiency. Two years later, Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck further catapulted intellectual disability onto the national agenda with a lengthy essay in The Ladies Home Journal that later was republished as the best-selling book The Child That Never Grew (1950), which recounted her decision to institutionalize her daughter Carol. In turn, Buck’s confessional spurred the release of several other debate-stirring memoirs, including lawyer John P. Frank’s 1952 My Son’s Story and, most notably, country performer Dale Rogers Evans’s highly successful 1953 Angel Unaware, in which...

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