My Generation (14 page)

I
magineering, an adroit neologism, is the Walt Disney Company's name for the corporate unit involved in developing Disney's America, the projected mammoth theme park in northern Virginia. Not long ago, the chief imagineer, Robert Weis, described what would be in store, among other historical attractions for hordes of tourists. “We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave, and what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad.” He added that the exhibits would “not take a Pollyanna view” but would be “painful, disturbing, and agonizing.”

I was fascinated by Mr. Weis's statement because twenty-seven years ago I published a novel called
The Confessions of Nat Turner
, which was partly intended to make the reader feel what it was like to be a slave. Whether I succeeded or not was a matter of hot debate, and the book still provokes controversy. But as one who has plunged into the murky waters where the imagineers wish to venture, I have doubts whether the technical wizardry that so entrances children and grown-ups at other Disney parks can do anything but mock a theme as momentous as slavery, the great transforming circumstance of American history. If it is so difficult to render the tragic complexity of slavery in words, as I once found out, will visual effects or virtual reality make it easier to comprehend the agony?

No one knows what Disney's Department of Imagineering has up its sleeve, but whatever exhibits or displays it comes up with would have to be
fraudulent, since no combination of branding irons, slave ships or slave cabins, shackles, chained black people in their wretched coffles, or treks through the Underground Railroad could begin to define such a stupendous experience. To present even the most squalid sights would be to cheaply romanticize suffering. For slavery's abyssal pain arose far less from its physical cruelty—although slave ships and the auction block were atrocities—than from the moral and legal savagery that deprived an entire people of their freedom, along with their rights to education, ownership of property, matrimony, and protection under the law.

Slavery cannot be represented by exhibits. It was not remotely like the Jewish Holocaust—of brief duration and intensely focused destruction—which has permitted an illuminating museum. In its 250-year history in America, the institution, which so intimately bound slave and master together, could not fail to produce almost unlimited permutations of human emotions and relationships. How would the Disney technicians make millions of their pilgrims feel all these things? How would they show that there were white people who suffered torment over the catastrophe? And how can they possibly render, beyond the deafening noise and the nasty gore, the infinitely subtle moral entanglements of the terrible war that brought slavery to an end?

I was born and reared in Virginia, and I am the grandson of a slave owner. I continue to be astonished that in the waning years of the twentieth century, I should possess a flesh-and-blood link with the remote past—that from boyhood I have a luminous memory of an old lady, my grandmother, who actually owned black slaves. For this very reason, she has haunted my life, become embedded in the fabric of my work as a writer, and helped make slavery an undiminishing part of my consciousness. Her story, some of which I recall being told in her own quavering and stubborn voice, would possess no appeal for those planning the wicked frisson of a Simon Legree tableau, but it has its own harrowing truth.

The drama began in 1863, the year the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, when Union troops occupied much of eastern Virginia and part of northeastern North Carolina. That spring, my grandmother, Marianna Clark, was a twelve-year-old living on a remote plantation where her father owned thirty-five slaves. Two of the slaves were girls, roughly her age, who had been given to her by deed. She had grown up with them and played with them; they had become so lovingly close that, not surprisingly, the children
regarded one another as sisters. Her clearest memory was of having knitted woolen stockings for the girls during that bitter winter.

One morning, a large body of Union cavalrymen, detached from General Ambrose Burnside's forces, swept down on the plantation, stripped it bare of everything valuable and worthless, edible and movable, burned down the outbuildings, and, after a day's long plunder, disappeared. Most of the slaves departed with the troops, and the little girls also vanished. My grandmother never saw them again. She and the family verged close to starvation for several months, forced “to chew roots and eat rats.” She grieved for the girls but her grief may have been absorbed into her own suffering, for she became a near skeleton, and the deprivation, I suspect, arrested her growth, making her diminutive and weak-boned (though she was amazingly resilient) to the end of her long life.

My grandmother's terror and trauma were genuine, but they have to be reckoned as no great matter in the end, for she survived the privation of Reconstruction, reared six children in reasonable comfort, and died at eighty-seven, at peace except for her feeling about Yankees, for whom she had a fund of inexhaustible rage and contempt. What has haunted me is those slave girls, her “little sisters” who vanished on that spring day and caused her to mourn whenever she spoke of them. One can be certain that they had no easy time of it. Swallowed up into the legion of disfranchised ex-slaves, they had little to look forward to in the oncoming years of poverty, the Ku Klux Klan, a storm of hatred, joblessness, illiteracy, lynchings, and the suffocating night of Jim Crow. They were truly, in the lament of the spiritual, among the “many thousand gone.”

This renewed bondage is the collective anguish from which white Americans have always averted their eyes. And it underlines the falseness of any Disneyesque rendition of slavery. The falseness is in the assumption that by viewing the artifacts of cruelty and oppression, or whatever the imagineers cook up—the cabins, the chains, the auction block—one will have succumbed in a “disturbing and agonizing” manner to the catharsis of a completed tragedy. But the drama has never ended. At Disney's Virginia park, the slave experience would permit visitors a shudder of horror before they turned away, smug and self-exculpatory, from a world that may be dead but has not really been laid to rest.

[
New York Times
, op-ed, August 4, 1994.]

O
f the many comments that
The Confessions of Nat Turner
has evoked, two have touched me with especial poignancy. One is that of James Baldwin, who is recorded as having said: “He has begun the common history—ours.”
¹
The other is from President Stokes, who wrote in a letter to me: “
The Confessions of Nat Turner
initiates all Negroes into our fearsome and wonderful heritage.”
*
¹
I would like to consider the meaning of these two statements as they merge together in my mind—the Negro's fearsome and wonderful heritage and the relevance of that heritage to the common history,
ours
—and to reflect briefly on the past that binds together all of us.

First, however, let me say that my coming to Wilberforce University represents in a curious way the fulfillment of a journey which I began years ago as a boy in Tidewater Virginia. I was born in a middle-class Southern home, of educated Southern parents who desired what are commonly known as the “best things” in learning and culture. Yet my first memories of cultural advantages are not those arising out of some white background but from the
famous Negro college nearby, Hampton Institute, a campus whose trees and lovely seaside setting are more vivid in my memory than those of the segregated white Southern schools I later attended. It was there at Hampton as a boy and—surprisingly enough for the South at that time—in integrated audiences, that I first heard the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Vienna Choir Boys, the Budapest String Quartet, there that I first saw educational films which the surrounding white community had little interest in seeing. I was very young during those years and I recollect with perfect clarity how, leaving Ogden Hall after an evening concert, some concert of Mozart or Beethoven which first stirred me with a passion for music which has never left me, I would be conscious in a vague, inchoate, yet nagging way that a barrier was gradually being breached in me, that the prejudices which were a normal part of the daily life of a Southern boy were being even then eroded away. For this was a Negro college—it was under the auspices of no white school that I was being proffered such beauty—and I could not escape the dim feeling that my life would someday be bound up together with the lives of those black people who had made me this splendid gift of music and had shared it with me. And although it was a number of years before I was able completely to shake free from that racial bias which wounds nearly every person born and bred in the South, it was surely these memorable evenings at Hampton that caused me far back in childhood to begin a long process of identification with the Negro people and the Negro spirit. And, as I say, the privilege I have of speaking here at Wilberforce seems only a continuation of that privilege which was first tendered me years ago, and as a gift, at Hampton.

I no longer know when or where it was that Nat Turner entered into my consciousness. It may have been around the time when my grandmother—then an old lady almost ninety years old—first told me about the two slave girls she owned when she herself was a little girl, just before the Civil War. In any case, I do know that I was still quite young, still in high school, when something strangely brooding and troublesome stung my curiosity, when I first heard of that slave in a nearby county, Southampton, who a hundred years before had risen up and struck down his oppressors, and had been hanged and had sunk back not into history but into oblivion. I remember going to Southampton in those days; there was no trace of Nat Turner then—only a solitary highway marker—just as there is no trace today of
that dim and prodigious black man, nothing, no monument, no ruin, no relic of that revolt unique in American history. Even at that time I must somehow have been aware of the startling and devastating fact: that here in a state supreme among all the American states in the obeisance it paid to history—here in the Virginia of Jamestown and Yorktown and Williamsburg, of George Washington and Patrick Henry and John Marshall, the bloody land of Chancellorsville and the Wilderness—here in this same commonwealth another man had been born and had risen up, and wreaked a cataclysm, yet unlike those illustrious others he had not been memorialized and enshrined but had had his very memory spirited away, and was now obliterated, entombed, all traces of him vanished as if he had never dwelt on earth. I could not, of course, have expressed at that early age the underlying truth of this matter; my apprehension of the tragic reality came at a later date.

What simply had happened was this: Two races of people had existed side by side on this continent, in intimacy, in the closest propinquity, for three centuries and more. One race had possessed a history, an intricate and meaningful past made up of a web of antecedents and relatives and often remembered forebears whose works and deeds were chronicled or celebrated, indexed, annotated, or otherwise imperishably recorded for a more or less grateful posterity; their names were Stuart and Calhoun and Peyton, Wyatt and Upchurch, Longstreet and Davidson and Taliaferro and Lee. Their fortunes and their failures were a matter of enduring knowledge, their romances the subject of poems and novels, the edifices they built monuments to dynasty and power. Not all were rich by any means, but even those less favored had a past and an ancestry and could claim a continuity in time which might explain and even give some meaning to their present estate.

The other race had no past at all. Generation succeeded generation without mark or record, like dead leaves, the only memorial of their existence a scrawled first name in a property ledger or a carved monosyllable on the cedar headboard in a tumbledown graveyard choked with weeds and dandelions. No tie, no link bound son to father, father to grandfather; of their earthly coming there was small celebration, of their passing scant mourning, and of the chronicling of either few words. Their names were Tom and Jim and Ella Mae, Phoebe and Lucinda, Easter and Uncle Henry
and Jericho and Dred. These people were chattel, property—a terrible though inescapable truth—and even had they been able to create a meaningful history it would have been denied them, obliterated by those who held them in bondage, the worst the world has ever seen. Such common history as the two races shared—shared in passion and heartbreak and hilarity and rage and hatred and love—this common history would not be allowed even after the chains of slavery were broken and black people, at least by law, became free men. If allowed at all, this history would become partisan, factional, biased—the black slave less a subject for the intense exploration of an institution than a pawn in the battle between white men passionate to display either their past benevolence or their present self-righteousness. And no one single figure in Negro history demonstrated how effectively the white man has eradicated that very history than that messianic preacher, Nat Turner. In Southampton County, now as in my boyhood, nothing remains; all is crumbled into dust; dwellings, barns, sheds, anyplace Nat must have visited along his cataclysmic journey has vanished as if into air. Yet perhaps it was just this willful destruction of history, this very absence of anything to see or smell or touch, that for so long challenged me to discover the truth about Nat Turner, to resurrect him from a nearly nonexistent past and in that act of resurrection to try to create a paradigm not only of man in revolt but of the beautiful and tragic reality of the history that all of us, black and white, have shared for so long in common.

It is perhaps a terrible paradox that Nat Turner—certainly one of the first American Negroes to become aware of the nature of our shared history—found the very fact of his inseparable bond with white people so intolerable that he was led to the most hideous sort of slaughter and destruction. I have often been asked if there was not some moral or lesson to be drawn from the story of Nat Turner, whether out of the mythic quality of his career there was not some parallel to be drawn about the revolutionary events of our own era. I have always hesitated to answer such questions, since like most honest writers my true intent was to produce not a tract for the times but a literary work which somehow might transcend matters even of racial conflict. What a slave in his anguish produced in destruction and bloodshed a century and more ago does not necessarily find its echo in the clamor and strife of present-day events. Yet certain connections are unavoidable,
and it may be well to essay one or two final reflections. Was Nat Turner mad? No, I do not think so. Obsessed, yes, fixed with a murderous, obdurate purpose but one who was not so much mad as one who, like Martin Luther, could do no other. Nat Turner was oppressed, yet like some few who are oppressed he had tasted the sweet breath of freedom. It requires only a modicum of psychological insight to reason that continued oppression in the face of the promise of freedom may result in a bloody rage on the part of the oppressed and disaster for the oppressor; that whenever oppression persists—especially when liberty and abundance in all their glory lie roundabout for others—the oppressor may expect, as surely as the dawning of the sun, the visitation upon his head of unholy wrath.

Yet still it cannot be escaped that if oppression is bound to breed hatred, rampant hatred in return can only bring on catastrophe. During Nat Turner's insurrection fifty-five white people went to their deaths, and of the slaves involved most were either transported or hanged. The scores of innocent black people slaughtered or tortured in reprisal appall the imagination. That Nat Turner's revolt prevented the state of Virginia, which had been edging toward emancipation, from freeing its slaves now seems plain, just as that same futile insurrection brought down upon the black people of the entire South cruel new repressions and burdens which lasted until the Civil War. One cannot regard the story of Nat Turner with equanimity and blandly counsel revenge. Then what is the answer? For Frantz Fanon, the distinguished Negro psychiatrist, hatred itself is a cathartic for the disinherited, the oppressed, an emotion outside of morality which, however destructive, allows men the ecstasy of a sense of worth and self-regard.
*
²
The cost in human anguish is consequently of no matter. I myself am in no position to argue against this point of view, since I cannot lay claim to a condition in life which might impel such violence. Nor can I suggest that love is the answer, for love is perhaps now both too difficult and too easy, and in any event doubtless too late. Yet it was the only answer that Margaret Whitehead had—she whom Nat Turner dearly loved and whom in despair he murdered with his sword. “Beloved, let us love one another,” she said to Nat, quoting
John, “for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God” (I John 4:7).

Perhaps there
is
no answer. Love was too late for Margaret Whitehead, as it was for Nat Turner, and indeed as it may be for us; but maybe when all is done it is love that remains still our last, our only hope.

[Speech at Wilberforce University, November 21, 1967. Previously unpublished.]