The Restored Literary Behaviors of Neo-Slave Narratives: Troubling the Ethics of Witnessing in the Excessive Present

Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.

—Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

When I'm telling you something don't you ever ask if I'm lying. Because they didn't want to leave no evidence of what they done—so it couldn't be used against them. And I'm leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And you children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up.

—Gayl Jones, Corregidora

Early in Gayl Jones's 1975 novel Corregidora, the protagonist Ursa remembers her Great Gram's charge to her descendants, a charge which is instructional for reading the neo-slave narrative genre. Great Gram signifies on the convention by which antebellum slave narratives' authors (and those who wrote their paratextual authenticating documents) had to (re)assert throughout their writing that they were not lying. Such (re)assertions both reinscribed and sought to defy the charge that the enslaved subject could not be trusted to bear witness to truth, whether in a court of law or otherwise.¹ Great Gram's slap and assertion trans/re-figures Harriet Jacobs's (et al.) insistence on veracity from a plea for readers' sympathy and trust to an attempt to, as Christina Sharpe emphasizes, "make redress to the law itself" (Monstrous Intimacies 40).

Insofar as Great Gram's slap and assertion both repeat and revise the antebellum slave narrative's insistence on truth and call forward in time to a deferred moment of future justice, they illustrate a model for what I call restored literary behaviors. Restored literary behaviors trouble the linear temporality and "social logic" of rupture which are implicitly present in the neo in the phrase neo-slave narrative and explicitly appealed to in Ashraf Rushdy's insistence on figuring the Black Power movement not only as a moment of inspiration, but as a moment of "origin" for the form itself in his seminal 1999 book, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Rather than reading neo-slave narratives as encompassing a genre with a defined moment of origin, as Rushdy does, I argue through a close reading of Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel Dessa Rose and Toni Morrison's 2008 novel A Mercy that neo-slave narratives embed the past, present, and future together in an "excessive present" within their texts and thus enact both continuity and rupture through literary acts which reach back in time in order to call into the future through engaging with and making demands on the immediately present readers to bear the burden of witnessing. And then, given the familiarity of the invocation of "witnessing" as an ethical demand in African Americanist literary studies, I also, through Fred D'Aguiar's 1997 novel Feeding the Ghosts, gesture towards the limits of witnessing as an end in itself, such that "making demands" in this sense denotes witnessing as a means, not an end, of ethics. In other words, witnessing is not the point, but rather the actions that follow from witnessing are.

Of course, the notion of texts making demands on their own readers is a signal attribute of the nineteenth-century slave narrative. While the specific techniques used by authors of slave narratives vary too much to suggest uniformity in mode of appeal, it is clear that slave narratives were aimed towards abolition and therefore explicitly addressed readers through the use of second-person interpellation, thus creating a dialogue between narrator and reader. To use Toni Morrison's words: "Whatever the style and circumstances of the narratives, they were written to say principally two things. One: 'This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but that also represents the race.' Two: 'I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human beings worthy of God's grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery'" ("The Site of Memory" 66...