Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life (review)

Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life . By Jon-Christian Suggs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000; pp. xiii + 401. $67.50.

This book is ambitious, smart, and incredibly well titled. This third characteristic may seem slightly more superficial than the first two, but in this case the title matters a great deal. Jon-Christian Suggs's main question, how nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American writers have responded to American law within their literary works, has obvious interdisciplinary appeal. Thus the title needs to be relatively jargon-free for the book to attract the wide audience it deserves. Perhaps more important, however, is the title's inherent pathos, for this book aims to make readers both marvel and sigh over the things African American writers have done with words in response to an oppressive legal system. At times when Suggs, an English professor at John Jay College, City University of New York, seems to care more about the words than the law—when he seems to want readers to care more about intertextuality than about inequity, for example, more about irony than injustice—it helps to remember the title. While Suggs's main critical question may be what, exactly, was uttered in these "whispered consolations," this work also begs a larger set of social, legal, and political questions: Why, and for how much longer, must African Americans' responses to U.S. law be whispered? And why, and for how much longer, must African Americans be so consoled?

To be sure, the main focus of Suggs's analysis is the past, not the future. Drawing from the work of both well-known and not-so-well known African American writers from 1820 to 1954, he attempts the "preliminary study of signifying on the law and of law as signifying discourse" with the goal of "watching the signifying make the real" (11). "Both law and literature are mutually and inextricably responsible for the writing of larger texts of social reality," he reasons, employing assumptions that will undoubtedly be familiar to readers of this journal (11). In the United States, he argues, the writing of this social reality has largely "excluded African Americans from citizenship in the imagined national community and acted to suppress the expression of African American desire" (12). Thus "all African American fiction carries the question of legal status of blacks as its subtext," Suggs claims (8). "Even when a Walter Mosley or Chester Himes writes a genre novel, say a detective story, the issues are identical to those at the center of the novels of Chestnutt, Delany, Harper, McKay, Hurston, Bambara, and Morrison" (9).

If a few of the names on this list are unfamiliar to some readers, one of the main contributions of this work is the recovery and criticism of work by some lesser-known African American authors of fiction. Reading their work alongside more commonly celebrated authors, Suggs suggests that two main themes can be found in African American authors' literary responses to U.S. law. These themes correspond with historical periods marked by key legislative and social events.

The first theme, romanticism, can be found most obviously throughout the antebellum and postbellum periods up until the opening of the twentieth century. Romantic themes in African American fiction during this period can be read as a "struggle over the right to desire" for claims to identity, property, personhood, and citizenship (17). Suggs's analysis of romanticism in chapters 1 through 4 is both convincing and compelling. In chapter 1, for example, he offers textual explication of Mrs. F.E.W. Harper's 1892 novel Iola Leroy to show Harper's African American characters' desire for a more just nation. "Iola Leroy and her circle seem intent on creating a more American America than whites can envision," Suggs concludes, noting that novels of Harper's contemporaries also suggested that "somehow the great promise of America has been aborted by...