My Generation (13 page)

I
can recall with clarity from childhood my North Carolina grandmother's reminiscences of her slaves. To be sure, she was an old lady well into her eighties at the time, and had been a young girl growing up during the Civil War when she owned human property. Nonetheless, that past is linked to our present by a space of time which is startlingly brief. The violent happenings that occur in Oxford, Mississippi, do not take place in a vacuum of the moment but are attached historically to slavery itself. That in the Commonwealth of Virginia there is a county today in which no Negro child has been allowed to attend school for over four years has far less relevance to Senator Byrd than to the antebellum Black Laws of Virginia, which even now read like the code of regulations from an inconceivably vast and much longer enduring Nazi concentration camp.

As Professor Stanley Elkins has pointed out, the scholarly debate over slavery has for nearly a century seesawed with a kind of top-heavy, contentious, persistent rhythm, the rhythm of “right” and “wrong.” These points of view, shifting between the Georgia-born historian Ulrich Phillips's vision of the plantation slave as an essentially cheerful, childlike, submissive creature who was also in general well treated (a viewpoint which, incidentally, dominated historical scholarship for the decades between the two world wars), and Kenneth Stampp's more recent interpretation of American slavery (
The Peculiar Institution
) as a harsh and brutal system, practically devoid of any
charity at all, have each been so marred by a kind of moral aggression and self-righteousness as to resemble, in the end, a debate between William Lloyd Garrison and John C. Calhoun—and we have had enough of such debates. Granted that it seems inescapable that the plantation slave, at least, often displayed a cheerful, childlike and submissive countenance, and that plantation life had its sunny aspects; granted, too, that the system was at heart incredibly brutal and inhumane, the question remains: Why? Why was American slavery the unique institution that it was? What was the tragic essence of this system which still casts its shadow not only over our daily life but over our national destiny as well? Professor Frank Tannenbaum's brief work,
Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas
(first published by Knopf in 1947 and now reprinted by Vintage), is a modest but important attempt to answer these questions.

Tannenbaum's technique is that of comparison—the comparison of slavery in the United States with that of coexisting slave systems in Latin America. Slavery was introduced by the Spanish and Portuguese into South America at the identical moment that it was brought to North America and the West Indies by the British, and its duration in time as an institution on both continents was roughly the same. But it is a striking fact that today there is no real racial “problem” in Brazil; a long history of miscegenation has blurred the color line, legal sanctions because of race do not exist, and any impediments toward social advancement for the Negro are insignificant. That this is true is due to an attitude toward slavery which had become crystallized in the Portuguese and Spanish ethic even before slaves were brought to the shores of the New World. For slavery (including the slavery of white people), as Tannenbaum points out, had existed on the Iberian peninsula throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Oppressive an institution as it may have been, it contained large elements of humanity, even of equality, which had been the legacy of the Justinian Code. Thus Seneca: “A slave can be just, brave, magnanimous.” Las Sieste Partidas, the body of law which evolved to govern all aspects of slavery, not only partook of the humanitarian traditions of the Justinian Code but was framed within that aspect of Christian doctrine which regarded the slave as the spiritual equal of his master, and perhaps his better. The law was protective of the slaves, and in conjunction with the church provided many incentives for freedom; and this attitude persisted when Negro slavery was established in South America. Despite its frequent brutality, the institution of slavery in
Brazil, with its recognition of the slave as a moral human being and its bias in favor of manumission, had become in effect, as Tannenbaum says, “a contractual arrangement between the master and his bondsman”; and in such a relatively agreeable atmosphere it is not unnatural that full liberty was attained through a slow and genial mingling of the races, and by gradual change rather than through such a cataclysm as Civil War.

We are only beginning to realize the extent to which American slavery worked its psychic and moral devastation upon an entire race. Unlike the Spanish and the Portuguese, the British and their descendants who became American slave owners had no historical experience of slavery; and neither the Protestant church nor Anglo-American law was equipped to cope with the staggering problem of the status of the Negro: forced to choose between regarding him as a moral human being and as property, they chose the definition of property. The result was the utter degradation of a people. Manumission was totally discouraged. A slave became only a negotiable article of goods, without rights to property, to the products of his own work, to marriage, without rights even to the offspring of his own despairing, unsanctioned unions—all of these were violations of the spirit so shattering as to beg the question whether the white South was populated either by tolerant, amiable Marse Bobs or by sadistic Simon Legrees. Even the accounts of brutality (and it is difficult even now, when witnessing the moral squabble between those historians who are apologists and those who are neoabolitionists, to tell whether brutality was insignificant or rampant) fade into inconsequence against a backdrop in which the total dehumanization of a race took place, and a systematic attempt, largely successful, was made to reduce an entire people to the status of children. It was an oppression unparalleled in human history. In the end only a Civil War could try to rectify this outrage, and the war came too late.

In Latin America the Negro achieved complete legal equality slowly through manumission, over centuries, and after he had acquired a moral personality. In the United States he was given his freedom suddenly, and before the white community credited him with moral status.

That is the problem we are faced with today: too many white Americans still deny the Negro his position as a moral human being.

Unfortunately, history does not give answers to the problems it leaves us.
Professor Tannenbaum concludes his excellent study with the reasonable implication that the attainment by the Negro of a moral status may still take a very long time. It seems apparent that a very long time might be too long for our salvation.

[
New York Review of Books
, Inaugural Issue, February 1963.]

A
mong the many humiliations of the American Negro, not the least burdensome has been the various characterizations he has had to undergo in the eyes of the white man. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that before World War II the predominant image of the Negro was that of the
New Yorker
cover of around 1935, which in a cartoon by Rea Irvin depicted a rotund and very black man in the act of chicken thievery: against a background of midnight blue the chickens are squawking their panic while the Negro, pop-eyed and comically aghast, tries vainly to shush them with a finger held against his blubbery lips.
*
¹
This caricature of the Negro as a pilfering but likeable scalawag was dominant from slave days until the early 1940s, and one is bemused by the fact that it appeared on the cover of the same magazine which this year published James Baldwin's now celebrated essay.
¹
Since that
New Yorker
cover, of course, reaction has set in with a vengeance. Yet though the situation has virtually reversed itself, the characterizations—the caricatures—persist. With the help of sociology and anthropology and hipster romanticism, Stepin Fetchit has been transformed into a sexual carnivore of superhuman capacities. The
New Yorker
cover was thoughtless and vapid enough—even though a fair reflection of the times—but
the concept of “the white Negro” is equally preposterous; both arise from an imaginary notion of Negro life, both are lampoons and vulgarizations, and both are products of wish fulfillment.
*
²

The historiography of the American Negro, especially that of Negro slavery, has likewise suffered from a career in which genteel apology has been supplanted less by perceptions than by extremist revisionism. First published in 1943 and reissued now, Herbert Aptheker's
American Negro Slave Revolts
is an attempt to repudiate such old-school apologists for the antebellum Southern plantation system as Ulrich B. Phillips, who saw in slavery a generally genial institution, the victims of which were more or less content with their lot and in any case so docile by nature as to be incapable of rebellion. Certainly it seems clear now that the Phillips viewpoint, shared by many other historians, was befogged by Southern pride and often by frank racism: and when Aptheker's book first appeared (during the same general period as Myrdal's
An American Dilemma
, a period of leftist-oriented anthropology and sociology), the reaction had begun to move into full tide. Negro slaves, according to the new canon, were not happy, servile, childlike; they were instead intractable, seething with unrest, forever chafing in the bonds of slavery. As Aptheker stated this position: “The evidence…points to the conclusion that discontent and rebelliousness were not only exceedingly common, but, indeed, characteristic of American Negro slaves” (p. 374).
²

As a matter of fact, if we can accept Aptheker's evidence—and on the whole his book seems well documented—it would appear that unrest and discontent
were
considerably more widespread than earlier historians would grant, with sporadic outbreaks of violence occurring throughout the South for many years. Relying heavily on contemporary newspaper accounts and documents overlooked or ignored by other authorities, Aptheker traces the course of slave unrest from early colonial times until the Civil War, and makes a good case against the theory of universal content and docility among the slaves. A considerable number of plots and conspiracies arose among the Negroes—most of them aborted or otherwise unsuccessful—and the incidents of murderous violence which abounded from Delaware to Texas are both too numerous and too striking to be shrugged off; thus, Aptheker
offers convincing proof that some slaves, at least, were not only discontented, but through courage and out of desperation found opportunity to make their forsaken bids for freedom.

Yet the title
American Negro Slave Revolts
is badly misleading (
Signs of Slave Unrest
might have been more exact), and it is a measure of Aptheker's extremist “either-or” position that, in the preface to this new edition, he is forced to protest: “Generally speaking, this book has weathered some heavy attacks launched by individuals to whom white supremacy and the magnolia-moonlight-molasses mythology that adorns it were sacred.” But one does not have to be a white supremacist to note that Aptheker fails almost completely in his attempt to prove the universality of slave rebelliousness. Save for two enthusiastic but localized conspiracies—that of Gabriel in Richmond in 1800, and that of Vesey in Charleston in 1822, both of which were nipped in the bud—there was only one sustained, effective revolt in the entire annals of slavery: the cataclysmic uprising of Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. To say, therefore, as Aptheker does, that “discontent and rebelliousness were not only exceedingly common, but, indeed, characteristic of American Negro slaves,” is not just to indulge in distortion, it is once again truly to fall into the trap of “characterization.” Of unrest and disaffection there seems to have been a natural plenty; of true rebelliousness on any organized scale there was amazingly little, and in his eagerness to prove the actuality of what was practically nonexistent, Aptheker, like those latter-day zealots who demean the Negro's humanity by saddling him with mythical powers of eroticism or other attributes he neither wants nor needs, performs only a disservice to those who would understand American Negro slavery and the meaning it has for us.

It may be impossible ever to tell for certain, but it would now seem apparent that it was the monolithic structure of the institution of chattel slavery itself which generally precluded organized revolt. In his brilliant analysis
Slavery
, Stanley Elkins has demonstrated what must have been the completely traumatizing effect upon the psyche of this uniquely brutal system, which so dehumanized the slave and divested him of honor, moral responsibility, and manhood. The character (not characterization) of “Sambo,” shiftless, wallowing happily in the dust, was no cruel figment of the imagination, Southern or Northern, but did in truth exist. But that the plantation slaves
were
often observably docile,
were
childish,
were
irresponsible and incapable of real resistance would seem to be no significant commentary upon the
character of the Negro but tribute rather to a capitalist super-machine which swiftly managed to cow and humble an entire people with a ruthless efficiency unparalleled in history. Nat Turner, a literate preacher and a slave of the Upper South, lived outside the thralldom of organized plantation slavery; the success of his revolt was due to a combination of native genius, luck, and the relative latitude of freedom he had been granted. The many millions of other slaves, reduced to the status of children, illiterate, tranquillized, totally defenseless, ciphers and ants, could only accept their existence or be damned, and be damned anyway, like the victims of a concentration camp. Rebellion was not only not characteristic: to assign a spirit of rebelliousness to human beings under such conditions is to attribute to the Negro superhuman qualities which no human being possesses. Like the comic chicken thief, like the raging hipster, the slave in revolt is a product of the white man's ever-accommodating fantasy, and only the dim suggestion of the truth. The real revolt, of course, is now, beyond the dark wood of slavery, by people reclaiming their birthright and their direct, unassailable humanity.

[
New York Review of Books
, September 26, 1963.]