Making the Invisible, Visible

The discourse around the revision of African American identity was at its loudest in the mid to late twentieth-century. Against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance which began around 1920, the culmination of black political, social, economic, and artistic agency of that era gave way to a reconstruction of African American identities by African Americans. However, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was a clear testament of the work that still needed to be done by both ‘White’ and ‘Black’ America. With, particular focus on James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992), I will explore the way African American identities are reconstructed and revised as a means of making visible this marginalised community in twentieth-century America.

It is plausible to suggest that the African American experience find its origins in the institution of slavery, therefore, the construction and perpetuation of African American ‘otherness’ is rooted in its legacies. As such, in the context of the construction of identity, slavery is no longer just an institution or experience, it becomes a “collective memory… a form of remembrance that founded the identity-formation of a people” (Alexander, 2004).

The complex issue of representation has been of central concern for black Americans since the earliest period of the slave trade. The reconstruction of the historical narrative of the decades that followed the Civil War reduced African Americans to slavery and subordination which established and inscribed a false memory that would later be ‘indigenously passed on’ (Alexander, 2004).

For example, the nineteenth century saw an influx of paintings produced by white artists that reinforced the belief that slavery was indeed a ‘benevolent good’ that ‘civilised’ African Americans. This image and narrative of the ‘happy slave’ permeated popular culture in the form of minstrelsy wherein black-faced white actors parodied black dialect and behaviour in staged performances. This misrepresentation and disregard for African American complexity is what James Baldwin speaks violently against in his essay Everybody’s Protest Novel.

Known as one of the greatest essayists in American history, James Baldwin provides an examination of the way ‘blackness’ is constructed either in opposition to ‘whiteness’ or in its likeness by critiquing one of the most celebrated anti-slavery protest novels in American history, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Baldwin deconstructs this widely accepted narrative of the ‘good slave’ and ‘benevolent, sentimental master’ to highlight its falsity whilst propelling the need for African Americans to detach themselves from these legacies of slavery. He critiques the way “White America” continues to “purify” African Americans of their “intimidating nakedness” as “black equates with evil” but “white with grace” (Baldwin, 1955). This critique becomes significant when we consider the purpose of protest novels and slave autobiographies. Stowe’s critically acclaimed novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, perpetuates the ideology of sentimentality to appease white Northerners during the fight for abolition and women’s rights. With this, Baldwin’s critique of Stowe’s narrative is one that reveals the inability for white America to fully acknowledge the complexity and humanity of black Americans. In constructing the character of Uncle Tom – “her only black man” – she, according to Baldwin, “robbed [him] of his humanity and divested [him] of his sex. It is the price for that darkness with which he has been branded” (Baldwin, 1955, p. 14). With Baldwin’s critique, the intention of protest novels like Stowe’s then is to adopt the notion of sentimentality, this ostentatious display of unearned emotions, in order to prove to white Americans that one, slavery is indeed an abhorrent institution and two, African Americans are capable and should be saved from it (as long as they are created in the image that is familiar and accepted).

This reading is further emphasized by Baldwin’s analysis of the other characters in the novel. Baldwin examines the characters of Eliza and George claiming that we are not entirely sure if they are African American as we “have only the author’s word that they are Negro [because], in all other respects, [they are] as white as she can make them” (Baldwin, 1955, p. 13).While Eliza “is a beautiful, pious hybrid, light enough to pass,” George is “darker but makes up for it by being a mechanical genius, and is, sufficiently un-Negroid to pass” (Baldwin, 1955, pp. 13-14).

Baldwin begins to piece together the picture that these characters have been “purified of their sins” and therefore in creating their identities in the image of white piety, womanhood and ‘civilization’, Stowe makes these Negroes acceptable and therefore relatable in the image of white America and sentimental abolitionists. By refusing to see these African Americans as ‘other’, Baldwin concludes that “this panic of the dark makes it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial” which is what he suggests “has put death to our freedom” (Baldwin, 1955, p. 15). He highlights that the dependence on the “description of brutality” in slave narratives makes it easy to bypass the existential dilemma that the institution of slavery presents. The problem is not the overt description of the violence and the need to purify these characters of their blackness, but a catalyst in which the question of “what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds” is bypassed (Baldwin, 1955, p. 12).

Baldwin’s blatant critique of this narrative not only calls for a re-evaluation of the intention of protest novels but also calls for a revision of this widely accepted narrative of African American subordination and inferiority. Baldwin calls for a psychoanalysis of both ‘White’ and ‘Black’ America to revise the accepted “categories… meant to define and control the world for us,” that have instead “boomeranged us into chaos” (Baldwin, 1955, p. 15). This critique and rejection of “the straws of definition” (Baldwin, 1955, p. 15) is what Bill Lyne considers “the white liberal feeling of betrayal” (Lyne, 2010) that lead to the commercial decline of Baldwin’s work in his later, more radical years.

This literary critique of the construction of African American identities is further explored by Toni Morrison in her 1992 essay, Playing in the Dark. Morrison illustrates her notion of “American Africanism” in which the “white writer’s self-conscious and unconscious use of blackness results from life in a society where racial identity dominates thinking and pervades the literary imagination as well” (Furman, 1996). Immediately echoing Baldwin, Morrison critiques how “the major and championed characteristics of national literature – individualism, masculinity, social engagement – coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell” (Furman, 1996, p. 158) are responses to the black presence. In the preface of Playing in the Dark, Morrison provides an analysis of Marie Cardinal’s The Words to Say It, particularly the section in which Cardinal speaks of her “anxiety attack” at a Louis Armstrong concert. Cardinal’s account allows Morrison to begin to analyse the way “black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them” (Morrison, 1992). Again, one may draw the parallel between Morrison and Baldwin in the context of the construction of identity as she highlights how Cardinal’s reaction was not necessarily a “physical reaction to the art of a black musician, but instead a conceptual response to a black, that is, non-white, figuration” (Morrison, 1992). Jan Furman examines this idea in his work Toni Morrison’s Fiction as he highlights Morrison’s belief that a writer’s cultural and personal history undoubtedly shapes her work. With this narrative then, Furman concludes that “for a Frenchwoman born in Algeria, not surprisingly simultaneously repulsed and attracted by Arab (non-white) images, the exotic figurations of jazz perhaps possessed the power to unlock her subconscious and unleash its force” (Furman, 1996, p. 158). Evidently, Morrison draws the parallel between this encounter and Cardinal’s creation of ‘the Thing’ as a means of illustrating the “internal devastation” that “is aligned with a socially governed relationship with race.” Thus, the literary manifestation of Cardinal’s illness emerges in the “symbolic figurations of blackness” that perpetuate the ideologies of “the benevolent and the wicked,” i.e. black and white.

As aforementioned, slavery provides the focal point for the construction of African-American identities thus, as the Civil War became the ‘civilised war’ and a “space both for sectional reconciliation and for the creation of modern southern whiteness” (Alexander, 2004, p. 60), the narrative of the war remembered and inscribed into the memory of nationalists is one that continues to render African Americans invisible. With this new narrative of the war, Reconstruction and African Americans become objects of hate; “an ‘Other’ against which the institution of slavery continues to be portrayed as ‘benign’ and civilising. In a theoretical framework, “slavery formed the root of an emergent collective identity through an equally emergent collective memory, but one that signified and distinguished a ‘race’, a people, or a community” (Alexander, 2004, p. 60). Morrison reiterates this as she analyses the “validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and calculated as knowledge” (Morrison, 1992, p. 4). According to Morrison, the construction of ‘whiteness’ is only made possible through “the slave population” that “offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of freedom, failure, aggression, evil, sin, and greed” (Morrison, 1992, p. 5). Therefore, by choosing to ignore this “four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans” (Morrison, 1992, p. 5) or suggesting that the ‘national literature’ is ‘unshaped’ and ‘uninformed’ by it is what inhibits African Americans from developing their identities.

This is the problem with Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe attempts to depict the complex nature of the African American experience in such a simplistic way that she dissolves the ‘blackness’ and assumes that this is how African Americans would like to be represented. In consequence, Morrison sees the black presence ‘inextricably and uncomfortably bound to the American character” but as “in society historically, black in literature are not accorded full stature as agents of their own fictional destinies” (Furman, 1996, p. 159). Both Morrison and Baldwin here explicitly reject the one-dimensional nature of these African Americans characters and the black experience created by the white imagination [which] is reduced to Africanism: stereotypical personae and symbols of otherness (immorality, ignorance, cowardice, enslavement, servility, savagery).

The legacies of slavery become “a kind of blind fever” then to the identities of African Americans, which forms the basis of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. At the beginning of his narrative, Baldwin paints a disconnected picture of his relationship with his father, however, Baldwin soon learns that his father’s bitterness was imminent for him. Following Ron Eyerman’s idea of a ‘collective memory’, Baldwin realises his individual identity is created through the “shared past” he has with his father, that “to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people” (Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955). His encounter with the waitress at the restaurant acts almost like Baldwin’s epiphany in this matter. The waitress’ fear seeing Baldwin, despite the events occurring outside of the restaurant, and her ‘repeated’ utterance of “we don’t serve Negroes here,” as though she had learned it somewhere (Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955, p. 71), insinuates that, not only did she not understand the plight of African Americans, but she had blindly accepted an oppressive system. This is what infuriates Baldwin and many other African Americans. Here, just like Cardinal’s narrative, the waitress’ fear arises as a construction of African American ‘otherness’ in that Baldwin’s black skin, just like Louis Armstrong’s Jazz, reiterates the legacies of slavery that continue to make African Americans and “otherness” synonymous. Notes of a Native Son seems to perpetuate that only in death can these prescribed modes of identification be removed from African Americans. At his father’s funeral, Baldwin comes to witness a man he “had not known” but more importantly, “the man [he] had not known may have been the real one” (Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955, p. 78). At the beginning of the narrative, Baldwin characterises his father mainly through his illness (physical & psychological), however, in death these definitions dissolve, to reveal an “old man” whose life “filled that room.”

Only in death then do we begin to recognise that these African American families existed just like their white counterparts but died of the incurable rage and bitterness that comes with racism and oppression. In painting this image of an ‘old man’ whose “blackness had been equivocated by powder,” Baldwin solidifies the notion that the “dehumanization of the Negro is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves. The loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his” (Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955, p. 81) The story of Negro then is indeed the story of America: a place in which one goes to purify oneself of any personal past and identity.

While many have considered Notes of a Native Son as an explicit rejection of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Baldwin’s critique of Wright is one that stipulates that “escaping U. S. racism through the fragile privilege of being perceived by Paris elites as an exotic and talented American Negro should not blind Wright” (Lyne, 2010, p. 22). Although Baldwin and Wright found refuge in Paris, not having a refuge in the United States “should provide Wright with such knowledge that his being embraced by Satre, Camus, and du Beauvoir did not change the fundamental status of blackness in Western modernity” (Lyne, 2010, p. 22).

It must be understood that the creation of this hyphenated identity (African American), is one that is a result of this identity struggle. As it is not necessarily a ‘natural category’, it finds itself rooted in a “historically formed collective identity that first of all required articulation and acceptance of those it was meant to incorporate” (Alexander, 2004, pp. 74-75). Baldwin and Morrison provide an examination and critique of the nationalist ideologies of ‘Americanness’ however, both identify that the inability to imagine the American society without the African American presence is a testament to the integral nature of the black presence. The image of the Negro is indeed a social construct not a personal one, thus he is a social and not a personal or a human problem. Therefore, “what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him” (Baldwin, Many Thousands Gone, 1955, p. 21).

Works Cited.

Alexander, J. C. (2004). Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. In a. o. Jeffery C. Alexander., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 60-111). University of California Press.

Baldwin, J. (1955). Everybody's Protest Novel. In J. Baldwin, & T. Morrison (Ed.), James Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Library Classics of the United States.

Baldwin, J. (1955). Many Thousands Gone. In T. Morrison (Ed.), James Baldwin: Collected Essays (pp. 19-35). Penguine Random House inc.

Baldwin, J. (1955). Notes of a Native Son. In J. Baldwin, & T. Morrison (Ed.), James Baldwin: Collected Essays (pp. 63-85). New York: Library Classics of the United States, Inc.

Furman, J. (1996). Literary and Social Criticism. In J. Furman, Toni Morrison's Fiction: Revised and Expanded Edition (pp. 157-164). University of South Carolina Press.

Lyne, B. (2010, Jan). God's Black Revolutionary Mouth: James Baldwin's Black Radicalism. Science and Society, 74(1), 12-36.

Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. First Vintage Books.