Jean Cahn

Web Reviews

Web Review 1:  Cindy Goodson’s 2007 Midterm

“Chains, Songs and Bible Motifs:  A dialogue on the American Dream Deferred,” the title of Cindy Goodson’s 2007 Midterm Exam, appealed to me because of my interest in folk songs and biblical motifs.  My expectations were immediately re-routed with the introductory sentence of the first paragraph:  “I attempt to communicate through this essay a brief interpretation of the experiences of African Americans during the nineteenth century.”  (Having come through a literary theory class, I’m used to being confused, so it took me a while to decide the problems were in the paper.)  The organization was difficult to follow and so was the content.  In her attempt to get started, Goodson eventually shared three questions she planned to answer:  “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 [express] their experiences while in bondage?”  With the first question I see that the word “chains” will be used as a means to connect slavery to literacy.  With the second, I assume I will read about the story of Ham as it was used to rationalize the rightness of slavery.  With the third, I am able to guess (although the verb is missing) that Goodson will discuss the woefulness expressed in slave songs.  In a very general way, she accomplished her task, but the path was rocky.  Many sentences in the content misstate her intent.  Surely, this is one:  “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.”  In the first part of the sentence, Goodson tells us that “Harriet Jacobs concurs with Mr. Auld…”  This means that Harriet Jacobs agrees with Mr. Auld!  This is the slave-owner who told his kind wife to quit teaching Douglas to read and write and “If you give a nigger an inch…”  Furthermore, when Goodson continues with “concurs with Mr. Auld on behalf of her master[,] Dr. Flint…,” it means that Jacobs is not only in support of Flint, but, quite possibly, that she is his representative!  Dr. Flint was the slave-master who wickedly pursued Harriet Jacobs.)  One sentence in Goodson’s inserted quote makes clear Jacobs’ feelings:  “O, how I despised him!”  This shows that Jacobs was certainly not in support of Dr. Flint.  The best Goodson’s essay offered was her selection of quotes.  They were choice.  One thing I learned from one of the quotes was that “There were times in post civil war history when black households headed by a single parent were as low as 4 percent.”  Another thing I learned is how hard it is to write about an essay that is so spirited, yet confusing, and misses so many of the marks of good writing.

Web Review 2:  Pat Dixon’s 2007 Midterm

            My interest in Pat Dixon’s essay, “The Defining Moment: From Slavery to Selfhood: An Active Choice,” is the question she uses to organize it:  “What takes a slave from slavery to selfhood?” Her basic answer took her right down to a primal instinct—that of self-preservation.  Self-preservation initiates the choice and causes a person to take action:  “It is my contention that it is the primal force of self-preservation that pushes us into choice.”  She aptly quotes Frederick Douglass’ defining moment:  “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood” (Douglass, 394).  I learned that Douglass did not know he was a slave until he witnessed his aunt being beaten.  This is similar to the story of Harriet Jacobs who also did not know she was a slave until she was six years old.  That makes me think that it is this early sense of a free and valuable self that enables Douglas and Jacobs to take a stand for their freedom.

Web Review 3:  Christine Ford’s 2010 Midterm

The Complexities of Assimilation for African Americans

My interest in Christine Ford’s essay was the word “complexities” included in the title.  I assumed she would deliver details rather than address the simpler question of whether a freed man should assimilate or not.  I appreciate that she chose three characters in order to explore different situations and complexities.  Choosing Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Guitar Baines, she calls attention to the fact that “Joining the majority culture, as well as the consequences of this action, means something very different for each of them…”.  With Douglass, not only becoming literate, but becoming an accomplished writer and speaker, means he is able to “command the respect of white people and dismiss common assumptions that black people [are] incapable of intellectual achievements.”  Working as a carpenter and a caulker, Douglass gains a sense of the satisfaction of assimilation. Even so, he suffers non-acceptance in the “blocking” the white workers perpetuate against him.  One thing I learned is that Douglass’ light skin caused more problems than a darker skin would have caused him. Light skin reminds whites of racial mixing, and they do not like it.  What I learned about Harriet Jacobs is that her story follows Douglass by 15 years, and I had not thought about that.  More than her own initiative, her freedom came through the help of friends.  Her dearest desire was to have “a hearthstone of my own, however humble.”  More than for acceptance, Jacobs’ struggle was against the advances of men who wanted to possess her.  Guitar’s struggle is 100 years later and different still.  Segregation is standard in his time.  Even so, I see that he is similar to Jacobs because he, too, has decided that “sometimes people have to go against their morals just to stay alive.” (Ford)

This exercise makes me realize how difficult it would be to check a whole stack of papers.  I was amazed at the range of abilities of the students.  I really liked being able to see examples of essays by other students.

Essay

The Subject-Object Situation in the lives of Douglass, Equiano, and Milkman

            In the Subject-Object theory, the subject is the person who is self-determining.  The subject is thought of as having a voice and a choice and as being the one who is active in making decisions.  The object is the person who is acted upon.  This person is passive.  As objects of their masters, slaves were not allowed to go where they wished, or do what they wanted.  They had to go where they were told, do what they were told to do and take what they got for sustenance and comfort.  Their beds were usually no more than bare floors and a blanket.  They were not allowed to express opinions, especially negative opinions concerning their masters.  Slaves could be bought and sold like any commodity.  For punishment they were often sold, which meant being uprooted from friends and possibly family.  A master could whip or even kill a slave with impunity.  A slave had no legal rights and could not file suit or own anything.  Slaves had no voice, and they had no choice.  Clearly, the slave-masters were the subjects and the slaves were the objects.  This essay will consider the subject-object experiences of Frederick Douglass (1818 to 1895), and Anaya Equiano (1745 to 1797), two Negroes of an African heritage, and Milkman who was not a slave, but was the object of a controlling father.

Frederick Douglass began his life as an object for his master.  Born of a mother/slave in Maryland, he was the target of his master’s intentions.  Douglass may not have had the power to make decisions, but he had the power of observation.  As a child, he painfully likened himself to a horse because, like them, he did not know his birthday, but he noticed that the little white children knew theirs.  That was his master’s plan–that he should feel as the object he intended him to be.  Douglass witnessed the helplessness of his favorite aunt as she was whipped by a vicious boss.  Slave songs contributed to his awakening to the terrible, powerless state he was in.  As an adult he wrote, “To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.” “[T]hey were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.”

Overseers, seen as the ones with voice and choice, could often be seen as less human than the so-called subhuman slave.  In Frederick Douglass’ story of Colonel Lloyd’s overseer, Austin Gore, Gore is exposed as the cruel, harsh person he is.  Gore punished slaves at the slightest aggravation, and he “demanded the most debasing homage of the slave.”  Douglass describes him as “a man of the most inflexible firmness and stone-like coolness.”  From this, it can be seen that dehumanization can take place whether one is the subject or the object.  Even Sophia Auld, the kind wife of Mr. Hugh Auld in Baltimore, was vulnerable to that dehumanization.  When Douglass first arrived, she was all smiles, a white woman like he had never met before.  He could look her in the eye, and she did not care for a subservient attitude; but, Mrs. Auld had never had a slave before.  Then, after instruction from her husband, Douglass relates that “the fatal poison of irresponsible power… soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.”  It was during that instruction from her husband that Douglass heard the words that set him on the path to freedom.  Mr. Auld told his wife that teaching a slave to read would “forever unfit him to be a slave.”  At the moment Douglass made the choice to learn to read—the shift from object to subject began.

As a result of being an object to his master, and having been taken away from his mother at an early age, Douglass failed to develop healthy, natural relationships to his mother and sisters.  His mother was sent away before he was one year old, and although she came to visit in the night, when the work was over and slaves were allowed their own time, he never saw her more than four or five times because she had a long way to walk to see him.  He was seven when she died, and the event was no more important to him than if a stranger had died.  That is what the master intended and created.  Douglass had “not [been] allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial.”  His sisters lived in the same house that he did, but they had no special relationship either.  That seemed to get lost along with his mother.  When he was told he was chosen to go to Baltimore, he was happy—a happy object.  He had nothing to lose in the move.  Even his grandmother had long been moved away from him.  In Douglass’ own words, written in 1845, “The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were all suspended in my case.”  He did not develop the relationships that would have come with loving family connections.  They were denied him by the master who had subject powers over him.

Writing in 1789, in his essay, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano…the African,” Equiano tells a different story of the subject-object experience. Equiano grew up on a “rich” estate in Benin, Africa, where his own father had slaves, but writes that their treatment was much kinder than that of the American slaves.  Equiano was born on the subject side of the fence, but, as a child he probably would have had to follow instructions from his parents even though he was able to make choices, too.  In Object Relations Theory, Equiano would be both subject and object.  Equiano was the object of his mother’s devotion, but not the powerless object that a slave would be; likewise, his parents were the objects of his devotion.  He writes, “I was very fond of my mother, and almost constantly with her.”  His mother took care to train him to become a warrior.  When he and his sister were kidnapped and his sister was soon taken away from him, the day “proved a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experienced.”  “I cried and grieved continually; and for several days I did not eat anything but what they forced into my mouth.”  (Compare that to Douglass’ lack of attachment to his “home” and his sisters when he learned he would be moving away.)  In the possession of various masters, Equiano began to learn what it meant to be helpless and the object of other people’s power.  He experienced being a commodity when he was sold for “one hundred and seventy-two” little white shells.  In his new situation he “suffered hardship and cruelty” as he had never imagined; but, oddly, in that same situation, he was allowed to refuse when the people wanted to sharpen his teeth and make him look like them.

Tony Morrison’s Milkman, in Song of Solomon, has yet a different kind of the subject-object experience.  As the object of his father’s power, Milkman found his life “pointless, aimless” (107).  Almost like Douglass’ overseer, Austin Gore, Milkman’s father, Macon Dead, Jr., too, was possessed of “inflexible firmness.”  His house in Michigan felt more like a prison than a home.  It can be assumed from this that Milkman experienced being an object in a manner similar to that of the slave.  Eventually, Milkman decides he wants his own life, saying to his friend Guitar, “I don’t want to be my old man’s office boy no more.”  At that, he heads out to discover his family history and succeeds in shifting from that of object to his father to subject in his own right.  The slave, as object, could not do that, but all Milkman had to do was find the will, and he could decide his own life.

Milkman’s life covers approximately the time from 1931 to 1963.  He grew up in a time when Negroes were segregated from whites.  Although in 1776, the Declaration of Independence declared “all men are created equal,” the reality was that blacks and women were not “equal.”  The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 may have made Negroes legally free, but it did not have the power to eliminate prejudice.  As Dr. Martin Luther King said in his “I Have a Dream Speech,” 1963, “the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. 

These three men had very different experiences of being “subject,” the one with the power, and “object,” the powerless, the one who is acted on.  Frederick Douglass knew nothing but the life of a slave, even though he did not realize it in the early years of his childhood.  His close relationships to others were taken away from him.  He felt the extreme ‘object-hood’ of slavery--of being used, abused and moved around like a pawn.  Since he lived to 1895, he lived to witness the Emancipation Proclamation take effect in 1863.  Anaya Equiano started his life in freedom.  He had no idea of being a slave until, as a child, he was stolen away to be sold as one.  He knew his father had slaves and that he was not one; and, he thought slaves were to be treated well because that is how his father’s slaves were treated.  Later, Equiano got the full experience of being “object” as a slave in America.  Milkman, the protagonist in Morrison’s story, experienced ‘object-hood’ while he lived under his father’s roof, but he was free to walk away and be the subject, but first it took awareness.  Most people can be the subjects, or masters, of their own lives today if the mind is so inclined.  Being an object is also part of life today.  Consider all of the governing laws and various institutions that have control over our lives and to whom we may be objects! 

Research Plan

Milkman and Antonio:  Growing Up                                                           

For my research project, I would like to compare and contrast the coming-of-age stories of Milkman in Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Antonio in Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.  I will include things such as the backgrounds from which they come, the settings and years in which their stories take place, as well as the people who give them support and guidance.  I will look at their personal desires for their lives and what their families want them to pursue.  Feeling responses identify moments of awareness and satisfaction in Milkman, and I will look for similar experiences in Antonio.  Also included will be the role of nature in their development and how knowing family history makes a difference for each of them.

One course objective that will be considered is Objective 3 as Milkman’s heritage is that of involuntary immigrants and Antonio’s heritage is that of people who voluntarily chose to come to this country.

In addition to the books, I will use Jennifer Terry’s paper, “Buried Perspectives:  Narratives of landscape in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” and other research papers.