LITR 5731: Seminar in American Minority Literature
University of Houston-Clear Lake, Fall 2001
Sample Student Midterm

Ashley Salter
LITR 5731
Spring 2003

Collective Tale vs. Personal Story in

The Slave Narratives, Song of Solomon and Push

             In his introduction to The Classic Slave Narratives, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses how the texts in the volume functioned as narratives of the entire African American experience with the goal of promoting the abolition of slavery.  “The black slave’s narrative,” he writes, “came to be a communal utterance, a collective tale, rather than merely an individual’s autobiography.  Each slave author, in writing about his or her personal life’s experiences, simultaneously wrote on behalf of the millions of silent slaves still held captive throughout the South.  Each author, then, knew that all black slaves would be judged – on their character, integrity, intelligence, manners and morals, and their claims to warrant emancipation – on this published evidence provided by one of their number (x).”  The impetus to aid their brothers and sisters in securing freedom led these former slaves to write in a similar manner, about similar topics, and to present the best case for abolishing slavery.  Gates’ summary led me to wonder about the influence of the slave narratives on later African American literature and especially to what extent later literature can be read as “collective tales” as well as individual stories.  I will first explore the balance between group and individual in the narratives of Equiano, Douglass, and Jacobs.  Then I will compare these texts with the stories of Milkman from Song of Solomon and Precious from Push. 

            Authors of slave narratives dealt with many of the themes in their respective texts.  Among these were the importance of literacy in gaining freedom, disruption of the family unit, the difference between life in the city versus plantation life, variations in shades of skin color, and African American perspectives on the American Dream.  I propose to look at the authors’ writing on these topics, investigating the instances where a very personal, unique story exists within a document written to be very much a collective tale, a narrative of the experiences of the entire culture.

            Literacy is a prominent topic in the narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs (under the name Linda Brent).  Equiano describes his “curiosity to talk to the books” and how he would talk to the books and listen in hopes of an answer (Gates 43-4).  Douglass, like Equiano, also saw the whites around him reading and wished to understand it for himself.  He comes to identify literacy as “the pathway from slavery to freedom” after Mr. Auld forbids his wife to teach Douglass to the alphabet and spelling.  Auld’s words articulate the slaveholder’s perspective without apology:  “A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master – to do as he is told to do.  Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world . . . if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him (274-5).  Brent (Jacobs) relates that her first mistress taught her to read when she was a child (344).  

The dates of publication for these three narratives were 1814, 1845, and 1861 respectively.  More than 100 years later, Song of Solomon and Push, a story with literacy issues at its very heart, were published.  In Song of Solomon, Macon related how the illiteracy of his father contributed to the situation that gave three generations of Dead men their names (Morrison 53).  The novel follows Precious as she learns to read and write.  As in the slave narratives, literacy is essential to freeing Precious from her oppressive situation.  She meets the challenges of her teacher Ms. Rain and succeeds in reading and writing, but the results are bittersweet.  The counselor’s notes in her file reveal that Ms. Weiss doesn’t consider Precious capable of attaining a GED and going to college.  “Despite her obvious intellectual limitations, she is quite capable of working as a home attendant.  This leads Precious to declare in her journal, “I don’t need her if all she see for me is wiping ol white people’s ass.  I ain been going threw all this learning to read and write so I be no mutherfucking home attendint (Sapphire 121).” 

This introduces another theme that runs through the slave narratives and also figures in the novels.  That theme is The Dream and the catch that makes the African American version distinct from the American Dream.  For Precious, this catch is the “However” in her file, signaling introduction of the counselor’s low expectations (Sapphire 118).  For Douglass, the catch comes when he seeks employment in New Bedford and is unable to work in the field he is trained for because “such was the strength of prejudice against color, among the white calkers, that they refused to work with me, and of course I could get no employment (Gates 325).”  Milkman’s grandfather also pursued the American Dream, starting with nothing and building a farm much envied by others in the county (Morrison 235).  The catch in his Dream was the loss of his life.

Musings about family ties are another common thread running through these texts.  Equiano details the heart break of being separated from his sister, and later from being amongst people who no longer spoke his language.  He was disconnected from family and larger community.  Later, he seems practically to have his shipmates as a make-shift family.  Referring to their engagements with French ships, he frequently comments, “We did this” or “We did that,” clearly identifying himself as one of the group.  He also calls himself “almost an Englishman (50-1).”  I don’t mean to suggest that these people treated him as warmly as family, merely that, like writers to follow him, Equiano dealt with the topics of family and belonging. 

Douglass introduces his mother in the second paragraph of his narrative but only requires a brief passage to relate everything he knows of her.   “I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four of five times in my life; and each of these time was very short in duration,” he writes (Gates 256).  Later Douglass becomes part of a close group who meet to celebrate the Sabbath and learn to read.  He describes his bond with and love for these friends and his concern for their souls still tangled in slavery (304).  When he escapes to the North, Douglass actually forms a new family group by marrying.  The prominence of family relationships is most striking in Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Her story both begins and ends with discussion of her family.  Having escaped to the North, she is able to see both of her children.  She holds especially fond memories of her grandmother, about whom she writes in the narrative’s final sentences: “I would gladly forget [my years in slavery] if I could.  Yet the retrospection is not entirely without solace; for with those gloomy recollections came tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubles sea (513).  Her family’s ability to stay somewhat together distinguishes them from the other narratives’ families.  But they were not without a share of incidents where family members were sold out to pay the slaveholder’s debts or at the death of a slaveholder. 

In Song of Solomon and Push, families no longer separated by slavery, but they are separated nonetheless. Milkman’s parents are alienated from and hostile toward each other.  He seems to barely know his sisters.  Macon harbors dislike for Pilate.  Milkman also undertakes a journey to rediscover ties to his extended family in the South.  Precious lives with only her mother, and both parents abuse and molest her.  She finds a family group in her teacher and fellow students at Each One Teach One. She also becomes a devoted mother to Abdul and wises she knew what to do about Little Mongo.

With this discussion of familial relationships, the variety of experience in these five narratives becomes apparent.  Certainly, they have many common themes, and others could be added to the ones mentioned above.  I am concerned, however, with the ways in which specifically individual stories are evident in these five texts and whether or not the narratives become increasingly individual rather than collective after the slave narratives.  Below, I’ll turn my attentions to such differences in the texts.

First, any one of the slave narratives cannot purport to tell of every African American ever enslaved.  Equiano is distinctive for offering the tale of the salve born free then enslaved and brought from Africa.  Thus he cannot speak of the experience of being born into slavery as can Douglass and Jacobs.  Similarly, Jacobs offers a perspective different from both Douglass and Equiano.  Her experiences could never have been written by a former male slave. 

Milkman’s story is contrasted with Guitar’s and Macon’s.  Macon pursues a version of the American Dream, focusing on wealth, business success, and prestige.  He assimilates and lives peacefully in the dominant culture.  Guitar becomes one of the Seven Days, and brutally retaliates against whites for murders of his own people.  Milkman seems caught between the worlds of his father and his friend, satisfied by neither option.   The novel also gives us several and varying women’s perspectives in Ruth, Lena, First Corinthians, Pilate, and Hagar.  The nature of the novel narrated in third person makes possible much of this variety.

Push, more easily compared with the salve narratives due to its first person point of view, etches the strongest distinctions between personal and collective narrative.  Precious is a highly developed character, and Sapphire gives details such as her tendency to pretend she’s in music videos when she would rather not be in a situation she is in.  Her writing and her voice as narrator evolve throughout the novel.  Individual characteristics aside, Precious could be read as representing the African American experience circa 1988.  She lives in a part of the city that is dominantly African American, and goes to an inner-city, predominantly minority school.  But many of the things we know about Precious are not race-specific.  She has slipped through the school system unable to read, something which happens to children of all ethnicities.  She suffers abuse at the hands of parents, which is certainly not limited to African Americans.  She contracts the AIDS virus, a disease which affects all sorts of people.

Does this mean that there is no value in attempting to read modern works as collective tales of the African American experience?  I think not.  Rather, modern works such as Song of Solomon and Push require a critical examination that balances collective against individual stories.  Characters such as Milkman and Precious do not have a single common experience, such as slavery, that unifies their stories.  But modern African American literature continues to reflect themes such as family, literacy, and the Dream that developed with the tradition of the slave narrative.  African American literature requires a unique approach, because it was the first minority literature to develop in the United States.  It has been evolving long enough to begin to challenge its own traditions.

Works Cited

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., Editor.  The Classic Slave Narratives.  New York: Mentor, 1987.

Morrison, Toni.  Song of Solomon.  New York: Plume, 1977.

Sapphire.  Push.  New York: Vintage, 1996.