Iola Leroy's "Long, Long Ago" Song

Black literature has long been burdened with an evidentiary task: How should Black people and Black life be portrayed? This concern is born of a historical problem. The idea that "the command of written English virtually separated the African from the Afro-American, the slave from the ex-slave, titled property from fledgling human being" influenced the liberatory urgency of nineteenth-century African American writing emerging amidst and in the wake of American chattel slavery (Gates 4).¹

Black writers faced tremendous pressure. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, "If blacks were to signify as full members of the Western human community, they would have to do so in their writings" (6). Literacy was both a technology and a commodity with which Black people's humanity could be negotiated (11). As a result, Gates writes, "Few literary traditions have begun or been sustained by such a complex and ironic relation to their criticism: allegations of an absence led directly to a presence, a literature often inextricably bound in a dialogue with its potentially harshest critics" (26; emphasis added). Within the strategically necessary yet politically overdetermined confines of treating Black art as propaganda, "the critic became social reformer, and literature became an instrument for the social and ethical betterment of the black person" (30).²

As a white scholar and teacher of African American literature, I am invested in questioning this dynamic between the African American literary archive and its critics (including, of course, my own relationship to the work). The inextricable dialogue between Black art and its critics is a collectively uneasy relationship that proliferates. For instance, with notable exceptions, much scholarly attention to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature focuses on anti-racist resistance on the one hand and respectability or assimilation on the other.³ Given how the historical pressures outlined have contoured Black art and its reception, this binary is understandable. However, as a result, little critical attention is given to a complex something else at work in such texts. This something else is a type of narrative excess that can be understood in many ways—as the unspeakable, spoken from the depths, as the text's open secret, as the crack in the edifice of any narrative's project.⁴ In his 1992 essay "On the Unspeakable," Samuel R. Delany explains that the unspeakable can be understood in at least two ways.⁵ First, it can be comprehended as transgressive practices of relation, represented in language affiliated with abjection (66). Second, the unspeakable can be thought of as "a set of positive conventions governing what can be spoken of (or written about) in general . . . it comprises the endlessly specialized tropes . . . required to speak or write about various topics at various anomalous places in our complex social geography" (61–62). In this second definition, the unspeakable illuminates the generic conventions of the articulable, or, for my purposes here, the respectable. It makes the machinations of containment plainly visible.

Within this specific context of African American literature, excess can be thought of as that which eludes an author's or critic's attempts to contain the work as "an instrument for the social and ethical betterment of the black person" (Gates 30). Containment here means a process that simplifies, silences, and/or manipulates representations of race, sex, and gender—a flattening of the range of Black humanity. In Black letters, containment has historically functioned as a type of control that underwrites the project of literary propaganda.⁶ However, when Black literature is contained, a barrier to explorations of non-normative representations of race, sex, and gender that are not recuperable by conventional modes of racial or sexual knowing, such as respectability and/or resistance, emerges. I therefore wonder what is lost, elided, and/or misrecognized within Black literature produced and read in such politically overdeter-mined contexts.

This essay looks at one such moment of narrative excess in one of the first novels by an African American woman—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, published in 1892. This excessive moment concerns a plantation song from "Long, long ago...