Christine Ford

Web Review
 

1.     Leah Guillory

Leah’s midterm got my attention not so much because of her topic but because of the way she incorporated quotes from multiple texts, especially poetry, into her main reading of Song of Solomon. Her main discussion is on Milkman’s journey towards becoming his own man, and she often compares his struggles to those of Frederick Douglass and Equiano. Yet in the midst of all of these prose quotations, she brings in lines from Maya Angelou’s “I Will Rise” and later Langston Hughes’ “Harlem”: “My assertion is this: Milkman’s flight to freedom—his “up from a past that's rooted in pain / leaving behind nights of terror and fear” is dialectically developed” and “Blindly imitative of his father—Milkman’s dreams are thus “deferred.” At first this move surprised me, since Leah did not introduce the quote or mention in her introduction that she would be using poems from the class reading, but I found her choice to be effective in that it helped to bring the poems into a dialogue with the prose pieces. Because we spend the majority of our class time on prose pieces, I often forget about the poetry we do read and neglect to relate it to the larger texts we’re focusing. While I did appreciate the time and skill Leah put into working in so many quotes, I would have liked more warning when she was switching between pieces; sometimes I had difficult telling what quotation came from where, since she was drawing from at least five different texts through the course of her essay.

2.     Gary Pegoda

I read each of these model assignments before I began my own midterm, and I found this one to be most helpful in developing my topic. He discusses how assimilating into mainstream culture helped Douglass and Equiano ultimately become advocates for their own people, since “by accepting assimilation, Equiano’s request to be free is granted and he is able to write The Life of Olaudah Equiano, with a strong abolitionist voice against slavery.” Literacy is a key point for each of these former slaves since it not only provides them with the knowledge they need to aid in their escape or write accounts of their trials, but also is a proof to white people that blacks are just as intelligent and capable as any of them. His point that by “refusing assimilation into the voiceless, choiceless slave culture of the South, Douglass earns Douglass the right to escape North, to develop his own voice in assimilating that culture… he gains his voice by assimilating enough to express himself in the northern culture’s language, but he is able to use that voice as he did not allow himself to be assimilated into the culture of brutality” I found particularly thought provoking. I had not considered that by refusing to assimilate into the negativity of slave culture, Douglass was helping himself just as much as he was by learning how to read and adopt other dominant culture traits. My only disappointment in this essay was Gary’s use of five texts, when three could probably have served his purpose better. His sections on Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and on Milkman did not fit in as well with his overall point of minorities assimilating into dominant culture with success and seemed to be stretching his idea a little too far.

3.     Sonya Prince

Sonya provides a close look at how literacy can improve the lives of slaves yet also cannot solve all of their problems. I like that she emphasizes the point “Literacy did not guarantee freedom from oppression” because it is easy to read Douglass’ and Jacob’s glowing accounts of how literacy changes their lives and forget that for their descendants, literacy is no such golden ticket. She points to the case of Corinthians, an educated black woman who finds her literacy more or less useless. Corinthians discovers that she actually might have been better off with less education since “when she arrived back in the U.S., she was seen as another useless Negro. Ordinarily, a lady who was well educated would have a good job and be in apposition of power if she wanted to. White women could choose whether or not they worked or stayed home... Not Corinthians. Corinthians does not have the power to choose.” While I had certainly noticed that literacy didn’t help Corinthians, I had not thought about the irony that her literate forebears considered their ability to read and write such as asset and probably would never have conceived of a time when a black person would actually regret their learning.

Christine Ford

March 2, 2010

The Complexities of Assimilation for African Americans

            The issue of assimilation comes up in almost everything we have read this semester, making it clear that this is an important matter in minority literature. These characters have to walk a narrow line of balance between the “economic benefits [of assimilation] and personal or cultural sacrifices” (Objective 4) and often struggle in this endeavor. I find it especially interesting to observe the way assimilation issues change across time and gender, as in the case of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Guitar Baines. Joining the majority culture, as well as the consequences of this action, means something very different for each of them and highlights the fact that this was and still is a motivating factor for many members of minority culture.

            For Douglass, assimilation into the dominant culture is the best thing he could hope for. Literacy is not only key in his road to freedom but also as a doorway into the culture at large. By becoming not just literate but in fact a very compelling writer and speaker, he is able to command the respect of white people and dismiss common assumptions that black people were incapable of intellectual achievements. Of course, as he was learning to read and write, all he could see was “a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy”; he could now read about the abolition movement but still didn’t have the freedom to join it or help himself. As he begins to work out in the world as a carpenter and later a caulker, he finds more short-term satisfaction in his ability to work alongside white men and black freemen, where “all hands seemed to be very well satisfied.” Unlike literacy, which provided delayed but more lasting long-term assimilation benefits, his work as a skilled laborer immediately puts him on a much higher level of freedom and commonality than he had ever experienced as a slave working in a home or in the field. Also, during his time as a caulker when he is able to hire his time, he gets a taste of what it is like to live as freemen do, choosing the work he wants to take and providing for his own necessities, a task he finds difficult but endures since “it was a step towards freedom to be allowed to bear the responsibilities of a freeman, and I was determined to hold on upon it.” But both as a carpenter and a caulker, Douglass experiences the backlash of white workmen who do not want him to be a part of their world. Even with his talents, he poses as threat to them as an outsider and interloper, and they throw obstacles in the way of his assimilation into the working world.

            Douglass’s “outsider” status is due purely to his skin color, even though he is a light skinned man. He is not light enough to pass as white, and in the slave world, such lighter skinned people “invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others.” Resembling the cultural majority actually makes their lives harder, since it is a clear sign of racial mixing and makes slave-owner’s wives angry to see they are being cheated on, thus causing the masters to be even more harsh towards slaves they have fathered. Even once he is free, his skin color still is a strike against him, keeping him from working as a caulker and forcing him to take very menial, low paying jobs. He does find happiness in the communities of Negro freemen, where he is shocked to see that “many who had not been seven years out of chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.” They may not be able to equally coexist with the dominant culture, but they are able to assimilate to at least some degree, and that is enough for Douglass.

In Harriet Jacobs’ narrative, which takes place about fifteen years later than Douglass’, she describes struggles with assimilation that are rather different than his. Her story is first and foremost that of a slave woman and as such, she is not so easily helped by literacy or work. Being light skinned and pretty, she is the object of many unwanted sexual advances, a problem she continually fights. She wants to fulfill the expectations of a moral woman in that time: “I wanted to keep myself pure; and, under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect.” Indeed she tries to marry a black freeman, but her master will not allow it. With marriage being out of the question, she is forced to resort to other means to protect herself, regardless of whether this means going against the dominant morality; as she so memorably says, “The condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible”. Unlike Douglass, who can at least physically protect himself, Jacobs has to rely on protection from white men in whatever way she can secure it, thwarting her desire to be an upstanding woman.

            Curiously, even after she gains her freedom, Jacobs does not express the same joy that Douglass does. Certainly she is happy when she discovers a friend has bought her freedom, even though she resents the need for it to be bought in the first place, yet she ends her narrative saying “the dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own, I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble.” As a woman, she cannot simply work hard or join the abolition writing/lecture circuit to gain financial security. Assimilation into the free world for her will come via help from others, always filtered through a third party since she prohibited from doing it herself. Perhaps this is why her narrative does not end as happily as Douglass; he is able, by sheer dent of will and force, to carve a place for himself in the majority culture, while she is still at the mercy of others even as a free woman.

            For Jacobs and Douglass, problems with assimilation have less to do with losing cultural identity than with being allowed entry at all into dominant white culture. The last character I want to examine, Guitar from Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, is more focused on the trouble black people face, around a hundred years after these slave narratives, in a world where black people are segregated and subject to great inequality. Guitar is proud of who he is and where he’s from: “Slave names don’t bother me; but slave status does.” He isn’t interested in his friend Milkman’s “high-tone friends and your picnics on Honore Island” but rather in achieving some measure of justice for his people. For Guitar, there is no reason to want to assimilate into white culture. He describes white people as “unnatural,” fundamentally different than and worse than black people, because they kill black people simply because they can. Guitar’s mission, to requite crimes against his people, is one is he describes as full of love: “It’s about loving us. About loving you. My whole life is love.” There is love because he acts without self-interest and without any promise of recompense, merely trying to do what he can do make life a little better for his race.

            Guitar sees how hard life is for black people, how the problems Douglass faced in getting work with white men and the problems Jacobs faced in making a life without help from others are not getting any better in his lifetime. He tells Milkman one day when he is facing trouble at home, “Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things…Things that make us hurt one another.” In the minority culture’s struggle to make its way in a majority-owned world, sometimes things don’t go well. Sometimes humans have to be bought just to gain freedom; sometimes people have to go against their morals just to stay alive. Trying to fit into the mold of what the world at large says a minority should be is hard precisely for the reasons Guitar lists.  The system is not designed for them and offers no sympathy for mitigating circumstances, leaving the minority person with the daunting task of finding a way to assimilate enough to be secure yet still keeping a sense of selfhood apart from the system.