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

Sergio Santos                                                            February 19, 2003

Dr. White                                                        Seminar in American Minority Literature

Desire in Douglass, Morrison and Sapphire

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Song of Solomon, and Push partake in the narrative of desire.   Each text possesses a character (or in Douglass’s case, the author) that yearns for something in hopes that it will improve their lives.  As each narrative moves towards the fulfillment of their respective desires, the protagonist in each work is ultimately confronted with obstacles and limitations that obstruct the expected flow of what would be expected to be the natural progression in fulfilling their desires, and it is then that a revelation is made.

            In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the author’s desire is brought forth by, as Douglass describes, “a kind and tender-hearted woman” that when he first went to live with her treated him “as she supposed one human being ought to treat another” (277).  Douglass describes how, “Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities” (277).  He describes how slavery causes her to stop her from teaching him how to read becoming more violent in her opposition than her husband.  “Nothing seemed to maker her more angry than to see me with a newspaper” (277).  Douglass further describes being “most narrowly watched” from then on, but concludes that:

                        All this, however, was too late.  The first step had been taken.  Mistress, in

Teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell. (277)

It is at this point in his narrative that a desire is formed. 

Douglass’s desire is one for literacy that the he actively seeks to attain and attains successfully.  It is only when Douglass becomes literate that he begins to see problems with the forbidden fruit that his masters firmly deny him: “As I read and contemplated the subject, behold!  that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish” (279).  A few lines later Douglass expounds on what he means by his latter statement:

As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.  It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.  It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.  In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity.  I have often wished myself a beast.  I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own.  Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!  It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. (279)

While Douglass uncovers the clichéd axiom that, “ignorance is bliss”, he still is able to acknowledge the power of his literacy as it opens doors for him that are not previously available to him like the meaning of the word, “abolition”. 

If a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of as the fruit of abolition.  Hearing the word in this connection very often, I set about learning what it meant.  The dictionary afforded me little or no help. I found it was ‘the act of abolishing;’ but then I did not know what it was to be abolished. Here I was perplexed. (279-280)

The meaning of the word “abolition” is vital as its meaning holds the key to Douglass’s future. The more literate that Douglass becomes, the closer he arrives to attaining his freedom.  He eventually makes his way north and makes his yearning a reality.  It is when he finally is a free man, however, that he realizes the ultimate obstruction to the fulfillment of freedom:

I worked that day with pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and my newly-married wife.  It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.  When I got through with that job, I went in pursuit of a job of calking; but 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. (325)

It is in this instance that Douglass realizes that although he is free, he is not equal, but nevertheless he is still quite happy as he explains that:  “I was my own master.  It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves” (325).

            In Song of Solomon, a different kind of desire is present as it is a desire for material things.  Gary Storhoff posits that Macon Dead (Milkman’s father) is the source of this desire in Morrison’s text as: “He consumes himself with the outward symbols of wealth and elegance, buying the finest cars while the rest of the African-American community in his city suffers dire poverty.”  Storhoff furthermore states, “Macon reinscribes within his family the discourse of slavery” (1).  The particular passage that Storhoff cites to illustrate this reinscribing is one in which Macon tells Milkman:

Let me tell you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things.  And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too. (55)

Macon’s advice indeed reinscribes his family within the discourse of slavery in that his desire to own things are akin to the mentality of slave owners.  This white, southern mentality is one that Milkman encounters in the latter part of the novel.

            Macon’s advice to Milkman does not fall on deaf ears as Milkman is ultimately in search of the gold his father tells him of.  The desire for the material is then passed onto the son.  It is this inherited desire that leads Milkman to steal the bones from Pilate and upon learning that the gold is probably still in the cave (and not in Pilate’s home) it (the desire) becomes the impetus for Milkman to journey to his father’s hometown.

            In his journey, Milkman encounters men who remember his grandfather, Macon I.  A fire is rekindled as the narrator states: “They talked on and on, using Milkman as the ignition that gunned their memories” (235).  The narrator states that the death of the “magnificent Macon Dead” it seems to Milkman is “the beginning of their own dying even though they were young boys at the time.”  Macon Dead is the farmer “they wanted to be” (235).

He had come out of nowhere, as ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict, with nothing but free papers, a Bible, and a pretty black-haired wife, and in one year he’d leased ten acres, the next then more.  Sixteen years later he had one of the best farms in Montour County.  A farm that colored their lives like a paintbrush and spoke to them like a sermon. ‘You see?’  The farm said to them.  ‘See?  See what you can do?  Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind you daddy dead, never mind nothing.  Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it.  Stop snivelin,” it said. (235)

Material gain to these men does not mean partaking in the discourse of the slave owner; rather it provides them with a sense of hope.  They yearn to resurrect this hope as they press Milkman for, “Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying.”  It is their yearning that triggers Milkman to tell them about his father, “the son of the fabulous Macon Dead” (236).

He bragged a little and they came alive.  How many houses his father owned (they grinned); the new care every two years (they laughed); and when he told them how his father tried to by the Erie Lackawanna (it sounded better that way), they hooted with joy.  That’s him!  That’s Old Macon Dead’s boy, all right! (236)

Milkman’s bragging indeed revives a fire in the old men, but it is only the temporary fire that can come from the acquisition of material things that his father partakes in acquiring.  Morrison’s character Circe’s role in Milkman’s quest for gold, abruptly illustrates just how empty Macon II’s philosophy is.

            Upon reaching his father’s old house, Milkman is surprised to find that Circe is still alive and it is her tale that provides an interesting contrast to the bragging that has taken place in the latter passages.  The ancient Circe lives in the house filled with dogs.  Milkman assumes that she does it out of loyalty, but Circe angrily retorts: “You don’t listen to people.  Your ear is on your head, but it’s not connected to you brain.”  Circe’s rant continues as she exclaims that the house’s Mistress killed herself rather than do the work Circe does all of her life. 

‘Do you hear me?  She saw the work I did all her days and died, you hear me, died rather than live like me.  Now, what do you suppose she thought that I was!  If the way that I lived and the work I did was so hateful to her she killed herself to keep from having to do it, and you think I stay on here because I loved her, then you have about as much senses as a fart! (247)

“They loved this place,” Circe explains.  “Stole for it, lied for it, killed for it,” and now Circe is the only survivor determined to stay and never clean it again as she waits for the house fall to pieces.  “The chandelier already fell down and smashed itself to pieces.  It’s down their in the ballroom now,” (247) she states.

            This haunting scene in the house displays the superficiality of possessions and the flaw of Macon’s beliefs.  It illustrates that if people allow themselves to let their possessions define who they are, they become nothing without those very possessions.  They do not, as Macon posits, come to own themselves because of what they own, but rather become owned by their own materialism.  In effect, Macon’s belief of owning becomes a type of slavery.  This point is fortified as Milkman prepares to depart from the house and once again asks her if he can help her with money.  “Are you sure?” he asks.  “Never surer,” (248) Circe responds, forcefully affirming that material things have nothing to offer her.        

            Catherine Carr Lee asserts that Milkman’s journey leads him “from a selfish and juvenile immaturity to a complex knowledge of adulthood” (1).  Carr cites stories such as Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineaux’ and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as texts in which “the American protagonist usually moves from a rural to an urban area, from the protection and identity of the nurturing family and friends to the isolation and alienation of western individualism.”  She maintains that, “Such a movement allows the youth to escape the confines of the past in order to create himself as an individual acting outside of time and convention” (1).

            Lee also makes note that this “[f]reedom comes with a price . . . such an initiation typically brings separation, restriction, and a knowledge of evil.”  This “trope,” Lee states, is “problematized in many African American works, such as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which the protagonist moves from an oppressive, enslaving, agrarian South to an enabling, industrial North” (1).  There is a distinction between the authors of these slave narratives (that leave behind family, friends and even names—all of which are essential to their escape), and the African American Community in the twentieth century.  Catherine Carr Lee states that Morrison suggest that it is this “isolating individualism that erases the memory of the South destroys spiritual and moral identity” (1).  The isolating individualism that is Lee mentions is instilled in Milkman (as previously stated) by his father and it is ironic that it is Milkman’s participation in Macon’s philosophy that leads delivers him from such materialistic individualism. 

            Milkman’s “journey into an African American South strips him of superficial external moorings and submerges him in the communal and spiritual culture of his larger family” (Carr 2).  Once free of such “superficial external moorings,” Milkman’s quest becomes one no longer for gold but for the meaning of the “Song of Solomon”; a song that plays upon the myth of the flying African that escapes slavery by flying away.  Milkman’s desire changes, as it now becomes a desire to uncover his past.  The obstruction in his quest is not like Douglass’s in that his desire is redirected the more he learns about his past and his revelation becomes something positive.  Once the material thinking of his father no longer binds Milkman, he is able to be more like Solomon, who he discovers, is his ancestor. 

The novel ends with an allusion to this type of flight as there is a verbal affirmation that Milkman sheds the ideology of his father by the novels end and transcends to something greater as he has a revelation at Pilate’s death: “Now he knew why he loved her so.  Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly” (337).  It is not coincidentally that after he has this revelation, Milkman makes a physical leap towards Guitar in the final lines of the novel.

“You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now.  “You need it?  Here.”  Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped.” (337)

            In Sapphire’s¸ Push, the narrative of desire is less like Morrison’s and more like Douglass’s.  The desire of Sapphire’s main character, Precious, is one that yearns for literacy.  After years of being bumped through grade levels in her school system, Precious is sent to an alternative school, due to her incestuous pregnancy.  It is under the guidance of Ms. Rain that Precious embarks on the journey towards literacy.  Her acquisition of knowledge instills happiness in her as it represents hope the way it does in Douglass.  For Precious literacy is also a validation of self as it builds a self-esteem in her that is previously non-existent in her character:  “On the wall under picture of Harriet, Alice Walker, and Farrakhan is my Literacy Award.  That is good proof to me I can do anything” (88).   Precious also views literacy as a type of salvation:

Listen baby, Muver love you.  Muver not dumb.  Listen baby: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

Thas the alphabet.  Twenty-six letters in all.  Them letters make up words.  Them words everything (66).

Her journey upwards seems a relatively smooth one until a social worker obstructs the narrative by presenting a conflict in goals between the girls in the alternative school and what social workers such as Ms. Weiss expect their goals to be.

It’s not like I in no big state of shock.  I knew white bitch had something up her sleeve.  Ms. Weiss.  Fuck her: I don’t need her if all she see for me is wiping ol white people’s ass.  I ain been going trew all this learning to read and write so I be no motherfucking home attendint. (121)

The issue is further explored within the classroom as Jermaine has her say about the conflict. “‘If all they wanna do is place us in slave labor shits and we want to keep going to school, then that means they have a different agenda from us’” (122).  This differing of agendas is not an issue that is resolved by the end of the novel making it similar to the way Douglass’s narrative ends.  Although Douglass attains freedom, he still lacks equality, whereas here, Precious attains literacy, but her ability to do something with that literacy is threatened by the very system that provides her a chance to be literate.

            What all three of these texts have in common is that the desires are not ultimately material desires.  The desires in these stories entail a desire for personal growth.  The only text that satiates this desire, however, is Song of Solomon.  This discrepancy between Morrison and the other two texts creates an interesting rift, chronologically speaking, as Douglass and Sapphire’s text mirror one another significantly.  Whereas the expectation is for the condition of African Americans to improve between the latter parts of the 1800’s of Douglass’s text to the 1996 writing of Push, this is not the case.  When examining the three texts together, there is a push forward towards spiritual growth in Morrison and then a return to the way things are in Douglass’s narrative. There is still prejudice in 1996 and there is still the threat of slavery, only it is a different kind, it is slavery to a system that seeks to dictate the lower class’s role in society in a world where slavery is allegedly abolished.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York, 1987. 245-331.

Lee, Catherine Carr. “The South in Toni Morrison’s Song Of Solomon: Initiation, Healing, and Home.”  Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2 (1998): 1-11.

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

Sapphire. Push. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1996.

Storhoff, Gary. “‘Anaconda Love’: Parental Enmeshment in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Style 31.2 (1997): 1-14.