LITR 5731: Seminar in American Multicultural Literature
Sample Student Midterm, Fall 2007

Cindy Goodson

Chains, Songs and Bible Motifs: A Dialogue on the American Dream Deferred

            “Whatever the European man has today he borrowed or stole it from the Africans.”

                                                                                                -- Dr. G.K.Osei

I attempt to communicate through this essay a brief interpretation of the experiences of African Americans during the nineteenth century. In doing so I have provided a discourse in which to gauge the authors’ perspectives on the cultural aspects of the minority experience as it relates to the constructs of slavery.  Maintaining however, that we see and experience life through an array of different lenses, the personal accounts in the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs serve as a wake up call for some of us and as a harsh reminder to others.  The dehumanizing acts of racial injustices and the barbaric institution of the enslavement of blacks tend to appear whenever discussions of black history take place.  The abolishment of slavery is very young - less than two hundred years old and is quite a fresh topic.

Although my primary illustrations will be drawn from the slave narratives, of equal importance is Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In it she has provides us with a fictional hodgepodge of valuable lessons that register within the minority dilemma of assimilation and resistance as seen in our class objective 4.  I will examine these authors’ narratives and add some commentary from Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” A Dream Deferred.  My aim is to create a type of dialogue of the discourses and in doing so answer three questions:  Can literacy dissolve a slave’s chains?  How is the Bible used in the literary scheme of enslavement/bondage?  And how do the songs of affect their experiences while in bondage?

A suitable starting point is on the subject of literacy for African Americans.  My former classmate Anuruddha Ellakkala made a very valid statement in his 2006 midterm when he held that “Literacy is everything for African Americans”.  I think Anuruddha is accurate in his position and I agree that gaining literacy was a very important though life threatening first step for slaves in the U.S.  He seems to suggest however, that all blacks had to do was learn to read and write and in becoming educated their dreams of becoming a liberated people would be a reality.  Unfortunately, this was hardly the case as the dominant culture was relentlessly unwilling to give up their positions as the superior race and had constructed a multitude of schemes in order to keep slaves ignorant.

In reference to Objective 3, we compare and contrast the dominant “American Dream” narrative with alternative narratives of American minorities we find in Douglass’s account that his owners Mr. and Mrs. Auld were succinctly fitted within their American Dream as theirs was held in place by the U.S. Constitution which on the one hand reads “liberty and justice for all” but actually resulted in injustices for blacks.  So the question here would be who is included the “all” as mentioned in the Constitution?  Certainly not the slaves as they were not even considered as humans.  Mr. Auld leads the dialogue as he proposed that as long as the slaves remained uneducated and ignorant the White Dream would continue to prevail.  As a result, he forbade Mrs. Auld from continuing to teach Douglass to spell.  He purported that:

“If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell.  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.  Now…., if you teach that nigger (speaking of Douglass) how to read, there would be no keeping him (Douglass, 364).”

Harriet Jacobs concurs with Mr. Auld on behalf of her master Dr. Flint who aptly symbolizes the defining qualities of slavery: lust for moral power, moral corruption and brutality.  He was monstrously cruel, hypocritical, and conniving, and will accept nothing less than total submission from his slaves.  She implies that he keeps his slaves trapped by ignorance: unable to read, so they cannot question the pro-slavery claims that the Bible dictates is their position.  Biblical motifs come into play as she vividly describes him:

“For my master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour, had just left me, with stinging, scorching words; words that scathed the ear and brain like fire.  O, how I despised him!  I thought how glad I should be, if some day…the earth…would open and swallow him up, and disencumber the world of a plague.  When he told me that I was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing; that I was nothing but a slave, whose will must and should surrender to his, never before had my puny arm felt half so strong (Jacobs, 459).”

            The American Dream reigns supreme and both the Auld’s and the Flint’s actively do their part in keeping it alive and at the highest degree of degradation and despondency thwarted upon their slaves.  It is evident here that the American Dream for the dominant culture equals the American Nightmare for blacks.  Douglass admits to both parties above that at times it may have been better not to have been among the learned.  He replies:

                        “Learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing (Douglass, 370).”

He goes as far as to give Master Hugh Auld credit for having accurately predicted to Mrs. Auld that he would feel horribly if he were to ever come to the realization that human beings were meant to be free.  He reflects upon Mr. Auld’s words:

“As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm.  It would make him discontented and unhappy (Douglass, 370).”

To Douglass’s discontentment, not only had he found out through his readings that there existed such a thing as black people who were free but also that there were white abolitionists who fought for the freedom and liberty of blacks.  He made note of the sinking feeling this revelation brought about and how it began to explain the things he had so struggled with during his youth.  He wrote:

“Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master.

Literacy for Douglass proved to be a way of establishing himself as a major figure in the coming of the anti-slavery act and according to John Marszalek, Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, “Frederick Douglass was called the consciousness of the Nation (A&E Biography, 1994).  In this instance, due credit should be given Douglass for his intellectual achievements.  Contrarily, Toni Morrison would ask Douglass what about those African Americans that didn’t want to learn to read and write?

            She enters the conversation by giving an account of her character Macon Dead, Sr. (Jake) who was a freed slave, lost his property, and was given a wrong name because he couldn’t read nor write.  Morrison writes:

“Papa couldn’t read, couldn’t even sign his name.  Had a mark he used.  They tricked him.  He signed something, I don’t know what, and they told him they owned his property.  He never read nothing (Morrison, 53).”

The paradox Morrison presents here takes place through a conversation between two of her main characters in the novel Macon Dead, Jr. and Milkman.  Dead gives his son an example of an unmotivated freed slave who in his eyes should’ve been running to the opportunity to become literate but in spite of his son’s repeated efforts to teach him he remained uninspired to test whether or not his chains would be dissolved through literacy.   Morrison writes:

“I tried to teach him, but he said he couldn’t remember those little marks from one day to the next. Wrote one word in his life-Pilate’s name; copied it out of the Bible.  That’s what she got folded up in that earring.  He should have let me teach him.  Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read.  Got his name messed up cause he couldn’t read….When freedom came.   All the colored people in the state had to register with the Freedmen’s Bureau (Morrison, 53).”

This was rarely the case with blacks slave or free.  For the most part they were eager to learn.  But here you have an example of contentment but at a great cost.  I think Morrison’s objective was to engage her reader with the other side of illiteracy – the fear of trying.  In addition to the issue of literacy the authors share another strong element used in their narratives the use of Biblical motifs. 

            Both Morrison and Douglass agree that the Bible played a vital role in the scheme of holding slaves to the chains of illiteracy.  At the time Douglass was writing, many people believed that slavery was a natural state of being and slave owners even used the Bible as a means of justifying their actions.  The slave owners’ presupposition claimed that God’s curse on Ham as interpreted in the Bible justified American slavery and if this were true Douglass felt that the great statesman of the south who predicted the downfall of slavery to be inevitable by the laws of population would be quite adequate.  He proposed that:

“Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves...  one great statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the inevitable laws of population.  Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away with the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right.  If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural (Douglass, 342).”

What Douglass is suggesting to the masters here is that if we are a country built upon the words in the Bible then American slavery is unjust based on the fact that masters were impregnating their black slaves therefore producing black and white babies.  Though Douglass may be accurate in his argument the slave owners’ retort at Douglass and other blacks claims that they are inherently incapable of participating in civil society and thus should be kept as workers for whites.

Douglass then shows that Mr. Auld and other slave owners’ Christianity is not evidence of their innate goodness, but merely a hypocritical show that serves to reinforce their self-righteous brutality.  During class discussions I have made mention of my personal feelings toward Christianity as it relates to whites having superimposed a shady form of Christian religion upon blacks that has nothing at all to do with pure religion but has served only as a means of oppression.  Douglass, through this instance supports my position as he enlightens the Southern church of their corruption when he wrote,

“We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members.  The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus.”  He continues further saying, “He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me.  He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution (Douglass, 430).”

As slave owners continued to convince themselves that American slavery was Biblically justified there was yet another strong misconception that had to do the songs they heard their slaves singing while on the plantation.  The old plantation hymns and spirituals proved to be one of the only means of true expressions of the experiences of the slaves.  Many northerners mistakenly believed that the singing of slaves was evidence their happiness.  The songs were rather, evidence on an almost subconscious emotional level, of the slaves’ deep unhappiness.  Douglass replies to the misconception by suggesting:    

“They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long and deep…Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.  The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness.  To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery…if any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation…and there let him in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.” (Douglass, 349).

Douglass admits that during his slavery he was unable to interpret these songs.  Implicitly the idea is that a culture remains invisible to those who are raised within it.  As a professional R&B/Soul Singer I am naturally drawn to the power of the expressions illuminated through song and am interested the adequate interpretation of them within the narratives. 

One of Toni Morrison’s characters Pilate in Song of Solomon illustrates through a song the desire of an insurance agent and member of the Seven Days vigilant group to liberate himself by flying off a hospital roof.   Morrison does a fine job at giving the reader a better interpretation of the slaves’ songs meaning. 

            “O Sugarman done fly away

            Sugarman done gone

            Sugarman cut across the sky

            Sugarman gone home…. (Morrison, 6)

Morrison would add to Douglass’s interpretation that singing is a means of maintaining a link to a forgotten family history.  In a community where most of the past generations were illiterate, songs rather than history books tell the story of the past.  In Song of Solomon songs record details about Milkman’s heritage and cause Milkman to research his family history.  Pilate’s songs about Sugarman, for instance, encourage Milkman’s quest to Virginia.  By singing folk songs about Sugarman’s flight, Pilate recreates a past in which her ancestors shed the yoke of oppression. 

Other members of the Dead family used songs and singing to heal themselves spiritually and emotionally.  When Macon Jr. is depressed, for example, he secretly listens to Pilate’s songs under her windows.  Similarly, after Hagar dies, both Pilate and Reba cope with their grief by singing a mighty rendition of a gospel tune.  The healing power of song is a common theme in African-American culture, where it brings people together and allows people to share experiences.  Langston Hughes adds a flare of poetry to this theme and he is known as a writer who writes in Blues rhythms.  His poem entitled “Harlem” A Dream Deferred played an important role in inspiring my title in this essay.  Hughes suggests that resentment when held too long, depending on the person’s personality and societal conditions, either results in depression or uncontrolled rage that could manifest itself in outrage or violence.  I would like offer that this idea can be directly tied the deep disparity found in the slaves’ songs.  With this in mind I would like to move back the Dream Objective.

In short, I’d like to focus on the dream objective as it relates to the Hughes’ poem and questions in the introduction.  Can literacy dissolve a slave’s chains?  How is the Bible used in the literary scheme of enslavement/bondage?  And how do the songs of affect their experiences while in bondage?  Objective three or the American Dream involves voluntary participation, forgetting the past, and individuals or nuclear families – with alternative narratives of American minorities, which involve involuntary participation, connecting to the past, and traditional, extended, or alternative families. 

Exploring these questions has been an enlightening exercise and though one cannot fully come to any finite conclusion of things, one can gain a better understanding of them through African American literature.  And as Dr. White often reminds us “it helps us lit folks to find a way to talk about things as we search for answers to certain questions.”

Hughes’ poem does not necessarily answer a question either nor does it choose the dream but rather leaves it up to the reader – the speaker does offer a possibility of each negative affect.  The first question is his poem “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun”: a raisin is already dry, and as a raisin, it is useful and nutritious, but if a raisin is left in the sun to dry up, as was the slaves’ pale dreams of being free they too, become hard and impossible to eat; its value sucked out, it no longer serves its useful, nutritional purpose. 

By keeping slaves illiterate, Southern slaveholders maintain control over what the rest of America knows about slavery.  If slaves cannot write, their version of the slavery story cannot be told.  If the dream does not dry up it will probably “fester like a sore and then run.”  We all know that we want sores to dry up that means they are healing but if it festers and runs, that means it is infected and will take longer to heal.  The dream that festers becomes infected with the disease of restlessness and dissatisfaction that may lead to criminal activity, striking back at those who are deferring the dream.  I interviewed a personal mentor who serves as a prominent legal advisor in the community and an African-American historian. On the subject of the dream -vs- chains concept he offered the following:

“Unfortunately, ‘The Dream’ has been reduced to success based on economic and material gain.  Inherent in economic advancement is acceptance from others which, on its face is an empty notion if the group is underdeveloped.  Accepted by whom?  Once accepted, then what? The shortcoming is no accident; it is merely a product of a culture built on imperialism and capitalism.  There was not (and still is not) a plan for the group who entered the great experiment as chattel property.  The only purpose for this group was the furtherance of dominance of the new world market economy (Chiles/Interview, 2007).”

When I asked about aspects implicit in the information he has researched on the civil war he went on to say:

“There were times in post civil war history when black households headed by a single parent were as low as 4 percent.  The destruction of the black family as a unit is central to the disenfranchisement of black in the United States.  As a result, black males are more likely to commit crime and prison system is entrenched in our popular culture, both in entertainment and reality. Not only is it accepted, it is applauded (Chiles/Interview 2007).”

Clearly then it is inevitable for our society to completely do away with the chains of bondage as our economy would fail horribly.  Slavery in its original form was outlawed but within the structure of our society still persists.  From a literary perspective I think African-American Literature is finding its place in the mainstream literary canons and more literary and political figures are rising to the occasion of addressing issues of racism and injustice.  The Bible still ranks as the number book ever read by Americans and continues to serve as a means for the dominant culture to uphold mechanisms in keeping a minority culture in bondage at least for those who won’t “Study to show thyself approved (2 Timothy 2:15).”

Works Cited

DVD- A&E Television Networks. Biography: Frederick Douglass

            A&E Television Networks, 1994

Gates, Louis Jr. The Classic Slave Narratives.

            New York:  Penguin Group (USA), 2002

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon.

            New York:  Penguin Books, 1987. (6, 53)