The
systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of
its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for
menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent
violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of
knowledge; it limits knowledge.
—
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1993
David Ryan in a recent essay on rhetorical devices and photographic
manipulation of public opinion by US foreign policymakers in the
wake of 9/11 quotes Archbishop Rowan Williams’s article, “End of
War.” Archbishop Williams recalls the moment when the significance
of the right choice of language occurred to him while answering the
phone soon after the suicidal terrorist attacks had destroyed the
Twin Towers in New York City and damaged the Pentagon in Washington
D.C., killing thousands of civilians and service personnel. The
voice called the Archbishop in Welsh, which he could speak well.
Under the weight of the recent calamities in the US and the official
rhetoric of bullying revenge following them, he, however, hesitated
to respond in Welsh because “he knew if he responded in Welsh, the
conversation would continue in that language” (Ryan 6).
It seemed
a telling metaphor at that particular moment. Violence is a
communication, after all, of hatred, fear, or contempt, and I have a
choice about the language I am going to use to respond. If I decide
to answer in the same terms, that is how the conversation will
continue. (Williams 267)
US
Administration chose to respond in the violent language of military
retaliation to the violent call of terrorism. After years of
bleeding, code-switching appears ever more impossible, and the
ideals of American exceptionalism seem to be running amok globally.
In its desire for code-switching from violent to non-violent
communication in US foreign policy making, Ryan and Archbishop
Williams’s “telling metaphor” of call and response echoes Toni
Morrison’s earlier urge for scholars and artists to embrace language
that is aware of its subtle oppressive qualities (“Nobel” 269) and
to “develop nonmessianic language to refigure the raced community,
to decipher the deracing of the world (“Home” 792).
In
this essay, I will argue that in Jazz Morrison develops her
non-messianic, nonviolent language most daringly by the remaking of
the violent, racist, hand-me-down lynching lexis into the
nonviolent, non-racist language of everyday use for private and
public matters, while still retaining its race-specific drawl.
Jazz achieves to mobilize the vocabulary and spectacles of
institutionalized lynching of black people without ever presenting
an actual lynching scene. Instead, the themes of lynching, jazz, and
love are intertwined in it through the repetitive recombination of
the textual elements of lynching imagery and through the
reconfiguration of lynch trees as trees of life in order to remake a
potential narrative hope for union, peace, and love for Joe and
Violet Trace. With the insights offered in Jazz’s
historiographic fiction,[i]
I will suggest a rethinking of US exceptionalism – the messianic
narratives of which seem to have been begging the same hope for
union, peace, and love for all of us on this planet under
American/US moral, political, and economic leadership.
As
both historical documents and literary texts demonstrate,
code-switching – whether between violent and nonviolent, racist and
non-racist, or messianic and non-messianic language and performance
– has been an existential survival demand (call) as well as a
creative practice (response) in African American cultural
experience.[ii]
Olaudah Equiano’s legendary account of his experience of “the
violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea
ship, the seasoning in European colonies, or the lash and lust of a
brutal and unrelenting overseer” (Equiano 14) is among the first
texts that describe the enslaved Africans’ sense of linguistic,
geographical, and cultural loss and “astonishment” at the “magical”
ways of European slave traders, whom he first expected to eat or
sacrifice him (Equiano 18). The institution of seasoning of would-be
American slaves fresh from Africa shows that European traders and
their American customers also perceived of these allegedly dangerous
cultural differences based on ignorance Equiano describes in his
Interesting Narrative. Most enslaved Africans brought to the New
World, came to the American Colonies after a period of seasoning in
the Caribbean islands because the Europeans who had settled in there
were reluctant to import their slaves directly from Africa as they
believed that Africans were brutal, cannibalistic savages, whose
presence would jeopardize the safety and security of their new
homes. Instead, they tended to buy slaves who had already been
trained and broken; that is, seasoned.[iii]
Ironically, the practice of seasoning both forced and taught
Africans to keep switching codes relentlessly between their African
and American consciousnesses in order to survive. The recognition of
and theorizing about this initial demand and need for enslaved
Africans to switch between traditions (African tribal and American
plantation), selves (free and enslaved), and languages (tribal and
English) is another dynamic view of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of
“double-consciousness” (Du Bois 615). When at a conference
celebrating the publication of Cornell West’s Race Matters,
Morrison reads Du Bois’s observation about double-consciousness as
“a strategy, not a prophecy or a cure” (Morrison, “Home” 792), she
appears to embrace a similarly dynamic vision of African American
racial experience.
W.E.B. Du
Bois’s observation about double consciousness is a strategy, not a
prophecy or a cure. Beyond the dichotomous double consciousness, the
new space this conference explores is formed by the inwardness of
the outside, the interiority of the “othered,” the personal that is
always embedded in the public. In this new space one can imagine
safety without walls, can iterate difference that is prized but
unprivileged, and can conceive of a third, if you will pardon the
expression, world “already made for me, both snug and wide open,
with a doorway never needing to be closed.” (Morrison, “Home” 792)
Morrison’s explicit words here repeat what Jazz enacts: the
need for scholars, students, writers, and readers to stop
envisioning literature and “academic life as straddling opposing
worlds or as escapist flight” by carving away the “sheer malevolence
embedded in raced language so that other kinds of perceptions were
not only available but were inevitable (Morrison, “Home” 789). What
can or should a scholar of American Studies then do to remain both
free and situated?
The Ethics of Looking and Telling
To
demonstrate some ways Morrison’s fiction may empower her colleagues
and readers “how to resist acts of racial persecution today without
sowing illusions or being drawn into the rhetoric of a racist and
undemocratic system” of US exceptionalism (Apel 475), Dora Apel’s
eye-opening review of the Witness: Photographs of Lynching from
the Collection of James Allen and John Littlefield exhibition
series[iv]
will serve as an initial critical, creative, and conceptual
framework to think about our scholarly positions as students of
American Studies. Besides Apel’s visual–cultural insights on racial
power relations manifested in the dialectic of looking and
various denials of looking at lynching spectacles and in
exhibition halls (457–469) and as revealed in the uses and
abuses of lynching memory in contemporary US (469– 475), I will
also follow the literary scholar Philip Page’s and the historians
Carl Pederson’s and Philip Fisher’s arguments proposing that
involuntary passages have determined the course of the formation of
African American cultural consciousness to reinvent a past and a
future and to forge a cultural identity.
Page’s, Pederson’s, and Fisher’s cultural–historical hypotheses
mutually reinforce one another and fly straight into the face of [1]
the frontier myth energizing the grand narrative of US
exceptionalism, held mainly responsible for [2] a missionary sense
and puritan rhetoric of American moral superiority among nations. By
recalling the language and imagery of lynching and slavery,
Morrison’s novels (mainly Beloved and Jazz), along
with the Witness exhibitions, appear to shake the third
formative narrative of US exceptionalism: [3] the ethos of
republican hope. This particular exceptionalist scheme claims that
the US Republic will last for ever unlike any other republics in
history, because Americans are democratically inclined in their
minds and hearts, and also because it was American intellectuals and
statesmen of the American Revolution (War of Independence) who put
the egalitarian philosophies of the European Age of Reason into
social practice.[v]
In
“On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after
9/11,” Apel makes clear that anybody (Morrison and I, too) using
lynching narratives and/or lynching imagery for intellectual,
political, or aesthetic purposes gambles with history and with the
dignity of millions of (black and white) people at very high stakes.
First, I can risk assuming either the positions of the white
executioners and onlookers in the postcards or of the photographer’s
viewing position, seemingly neutral but as immoral as that of the
“white killers or voyeuristic spectators who turn to face the camera
and the hanging, burned, and/or bullet-riddled black bodies” (458).
Despite the recognition of my manipulative and potentially
belittling power as a later-days commentator, in agreement with Apel,
I must deter myself of not looking, which was my very first reaction
to what I could see in these picture postcards of spectacle lynching
and read in Beloved and Jazz. Apel credibly elaborates
on the impasse in evaluating the photographer–commentator’s role:
The
photographer who records the gruesome spectacle is implicated as
rendering a service to the lynching community through the taking,
reproduction, and sale of lynching postcards as commemorative
souvenirs that record the race-color-caste solidarity and lethal
“superiority” of the white community. But the passing of time, the
changing contexts for the presentations of the photographs, and our
own subject positions change how we perceive the photographs. Most
of us reject the complicity implied in assuming the position of the
photographer and recognize a much different issue at stake today in
this legacy of representation, namely, the responsibility of
historical witnessing. The photographer renders a service to
history. (459)
The
author’s urge for “responsibility of historical witnessing” (ethics
of looking) – the will to “rememory” the past – is very much in tune
with what Morrison is trying to accomplish in and by her creative as
well as theoretical work; most notably in The Bluest Eye,
Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise,
Playing in the Dark, “Nobel Lecture, and “Home:” the ethics
of telling.
The Flight from the Lynchtree: Birds of Migration
In
Jazz, the background historical facts[vi]
and the fictional characters interact, and together relate to the
narratives of US exceptionalism. The novel is set in the time of the
so-called Great Migration, when the sight, sound, touch, and smell
of slavery and lynching were still deeply ingrained in – and had
effectively formed – both Black and White cultural consciousness of
racial power relations in America. Joe and Violet Trace board the
Southern Sky to get to the City (New York) in 1906. The story is
related in the winter and spring of 1926 in Harlem with vivid
memories going back to and coming up from the Post-Reconstruction
South. (Though the novel covers the larger period between 1855 and
1926.)[vii]
For Joe and Violet, parallel to the urge to search for a place of
their own is the urge to search for an acceptable past of their own.
This need of temporal and spatial mobility creates the novel’s
narrative structure, while re-enacting the melodic structure of
jazz. The one extra-literary point the novel thus brings to mind
instantly is the possibility that migration and jazz have a lot in
common and can say more about African American cultural–historical
experience than the myth of the frontier at the heart of American
exceptionalist narratives can. By this key notion of the frontier,
here I will primarily mean the freedom to leave behind any miserable
place in an anticipation of a better future.[viii]
As
Philip Page in the preface to his Reclaiming Community in
Contemporary African American Fiction reminds us of Margaret
Atwood’s proposition, every country and civilization may have a
“unifying and informing symbol: “for Canada, it is survival; for the
U.S. the frontier (Page 1). The frontier was the creative edge of
the ideal “democratic space” by which, according to the historian
Philip Fisher, the U.S. invented its national identity (72). Fisher
goes on to say that for the narrative of the frontier to work,
movement should be free, voluntary, and apparently beneficial to the
individual in motion. Arguably, spatial, horizontal, and, in
general, physical, mobility in American civilization has been the
key to vertical, upward socioeconomic mobility (Schlesinger 1942) or
success, and to freer political as well as artistic self-expression.
Fisher convincingly argues that the U.S. was founded on the
principles of an open, transparent grid on which each individual was
assumed to be free to move to any node: in addition to
“representation, the essential features of a continuous and
democratic social space were the absence of limits, openness to
immigration and expatriation, [and] internal mobility” (Fisher 74).
Among the many realities that have caused this model to be an
unrealized American dream, or a haunting nightmare to many, black
slavery is “clearly the most radical contradiction possible” –
concludes Fisher (87).[ix]
In
Page’s prompt explication, the frontier then had two incompatible
meanings: one for European Americans and another one for African
Americans. Beginning with the Middle Passage, movement for Africans
(and African Americans) was not free but forced: neither was it a
pursuit of a dream nor did it bring about a rebirth in a new time.
Instead, it meant expulsion from African time – circular and
inclusive – to European time – linear and alienating (Page 1–3). In
other words, emigration was not an optimistic pursuit for a new home
but the almost unbearable loss of home, community, family, and
identity (Du Bois 613–619). By quoting Equiano’s Interesting
Narrative (“We were landed up a river …”), Houston A. Baker Jr.
asserts:
Moved to
introspection by apparent “blankness” that surrounded him, the
black, southern field slave had scarcely any a priori assumptions to
act as stays in his quest for self-definition. He was a man of the
diaspora, a displaced person imprisoned by an inhumane system. He
was among alien gods in a strange land. … For the black slave, the
white externality provided no ontological or ideological
certainties; in fact, it explicitly denied slaves the grounds of
being. (Baker 244)
For
young Olaudah, and for millions of others sharing his fate, the
American African Diaspora thus stands for the end of freedom, for
the loss of perspective. Chattel slavery meant the slaves’ exclusion
from history, and it threatened them with social and physical
annihilation. For slaves, America did not mean the chosen rejection
of an undesired space but the forced eradication of a desired one.
For them, in America, there was no desired place either where they
were or anywhere else; that is, there was no desired frontier. As
reversal of the American myth of the frontier, movement for most
slaves was not a chosen quest but a forced passage. Page boldly
proposes: “the unifying symbol for African American culture is not
the frontier but their passage itself” (2). In this sense, Violet
and Joe are two vulnerable migrating birds; birds of passage with a
confused sense of bearing who keep fleeing from one troublesome
perch to another, switching codes all the time. Jazz starts
and ends with strong bird imagery and action. At the beginning,
Violet sets her tropical caged birds free out of window in the cold
January weather in New York whereas at the end, a new bird
pleasurably makes itself at home with them. Among other things,
these birds in Jazz, may stand for Violet and Joe’s migrant
life of coerced flights (moves, changes) and irrepressible desire
for nesting (home), and also symbolize southern rural African
Americans’ disoriented search (via attempts of ‘self-seasoning’) for
a bearable living place in northern urban housing.
The
idea that passage is the informing symbol of African American
experience has many implications. For one thing, both the Middle
Passage and the Great Migration had double consequences: first,
slaves were denied their African past; and then, ex-slaves had to
repress (forget and “disremember”) their slave pasts simply to get
on with living. Because of these passive or active denials of
looking back into old space and time – in agreement with Page’s
thesis – African American identities have historically been
unsettled and kept in their transitory condition: constantly
replaced, misplaced, and displaced in literal as well as figurative
passages from one attempted identity to another (Page 3). Violet and
Joe also leave the segregated South with its unbearable
sharecropping country, Jim Crow legislation, and Ku Klux Klan
atrocities in a hope to find a “democratic social space” in the
City: an integrated space where people could act “on a first-come
first-serve basis” (31). Both Joe’s and Violet’s migrant lives of
many places and changes (Joe changes eight times, once too many)
appear to uphold the premise that involuntary passages have
determined the course of African American cultural becoming. Here is
what Joe says about the circumstances of their farewell to Dixie:
“Then I
got a job laying rail for the Southern Sky. I was twenty-eight years
old and used to changing now, so in 1901, when Booker T. had a
sandwich in the President’s house, I was bold enough to do it again:
decided to buy me a piece of land. Like a fool I thought they’d let
me keep it. They ran us off with two slips of paper I never saw nor
signed.”
“I
changed up again the fourth time in 1906 when I took my wife to
Rome, a depot near where she was born, and boarded the Southern Sky
for a northern one. They moved us five times in four different cars
to abide by the Jim Crow law.” (126–127)
Joe
and Violet seem to have hoped for a better future up in the North
(in the City). Morrison does not explicitly say whether the push or
the pull factors triggered the Great Migration, though. Despite the
narrator’s brief musing over the historical causes of successive
waves of northern migration in the 1880s–1890s and well into the
first decades of the 1900s’ (30–36), the detailed life-shots are
what eventually convince the reader that migrating black people were
rather “running from want and violence” (33) in the South than
merely hoping for greater economic prosperity and more comfortable
living in the North.
In
Violet’s life story section (89–114), just as throughout the whole
novel, Morrison masterly mixes tiny personal things, local
anecdotes, and historical events to consider what were the things
they “had not been able to endure or repeat” before leaving their
homes en masse.
What was
the thing, I wonder, the one and final thing she had not been able
to endure or repeat? Had the last washing split the shirtwaist so
bad it could not take another mend and changed its name to rag?
Perhaps word had reached her about the four-day hangings in Rocky
Mount: the men on Tuesday, the women two days later. Or had it been
the news of the young tenor in the choir mutilated and tied to a
log, his grandmother refusing to give up his waste-filled trousers,
washing them over and over although the stain had disappeared at the
third rinse. They buried him in his brother’s pants and the old
woman pumped another bucket of clear water. Might it have been the
morning after the night when craving (which used to be hope) got out
of hand? When longing squeezed, then tossed her before running off
promising to return and bounce her again like an Indian-rubber ball?
Or was it that chair they tipped her out of? Did she fall on the
floor and lie there deciding right then that she would do it.
Someday. … What could it have been, I wonder? (101)
The
national historical fact of the Rocky Mount hangings in 1888 stands
side by side some local ballad-like stories of atrocities Rose Dear
heard of and together with the account of her private humiliation in
her own house. Not only does the narrator (within Violet’s mind)
wonder about what might have made Rose Dear commit suicide, but this
short passage also implies that it was rather “craving [gotten] out
of hand” than “hope” that had black people make a final decisive
move to pass away: depart or die.
Reinforcing Page’s hypothesis of passage being the most informative
unifying symbol for African American experience, Carl Pederson
similarly claims: “the Middle Passage is arguably the defining
moment of the African-American experience” (225). Pederson reasons
that from the Diaspora and the Middle Passage, to being sold down
the river, to northward journeys to freedom, to westward and urban
migrations, African Americans have been forever on the move: forced
or pressured into one passage after another in an attempt to find a
bearable place in the land. Harlem (and Lenox Avenue in it) of the
1910s and 1920s was one of those bearable physical places compared
to the ones they left behind. Here, there seemed to be both room and
place for black folks:
Breathing
hurts in weather that cold, but whatever the problems of being
winterbound in the City they put up with them because it is worth
anything to be on Lenox Avenue safe from fays and the things they
think up; where the sidewalks, snow-covered or not, are wider than
the main roads of the towns where they were born and perfectly
ordinary people can stand at the stop, get on the streetcar, give
the man the nickel, and ride anywhere you please, although you don’t
please to go many places because everything you want is right where
you are: the church, the store, the party, the women, the men, the
postbox (but no high schools), the furniture store, street newspaper
vendors, the bootleg houses (but no banks), the beauty parlors, the
barbershops, the juke joints … (10)
The
remarks in parentheses on the lack of high schools and banks in the
black neighborhood imply that although Harlem, and the North in
general, meant relieved life to many migrants, still some key public
institutions were strikingly unavailable to African Americans. In
addition to financial and educational disadvantages, as Dorcas’s
life shows, institutions of both public emergency care and of legal
protection were reluctant to relieve African American needs.
When
Dorcas’s mother burns to death in their house during the East St.
Louis race riot in 1917, the fire brigade refuses to come (38–39).
When Dorcas is lying shot and dying, although Felice calls the
ambulance, they cannot get there on time allegedly because of the
heavy snowfall (209–210). Though Dorcas is murdered with
eyewitnesses around, her aunt Alice “didn’t want to throw money to
helpless lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn’t
improve anything” (4). Her case is not tried before court. Not only
is she orphaned biologically – both her parents were murdered in the
East St. Louis Riot – but also socially, which really signifies the
ways some public spaces remained impenetrable for African Americans
in the urban North. The unavailability of these public interiors
limits Dorcas’s movements in life as well as makes her final passage
from life to death somewhat grotesque and awkwardly involuntary.
African American migrants’ access to the North, then, also meant
struggle over public spaces: physical (hospital, bank, school) and
virtual (health, savings, learning). Jazz shows and makes
inseparable three characteristic forces of this hazy though
subversive penetration process in the 1910s and 1920s: [1] memories
and fresh news of southern lynching, [2] proliferation of race riots
in northern cities, and [3] spread of jazz.
Jazz: Sounds and Smells of Order and Disorder
Jazz
opens space for African American urban presence: it signifies
change, danger, desire, love, and hope in the novel. It connects
past and present; relates the rural to the urban; kneads a country
sharecropper and an urban employee into a Harlemite; and blends the
rustic and the mechanical: channels the back-woodsy African American
into New York Modern. It is like weather, elemental and changeable:
“[Up] there, in that part of the City – which is the part they came
for – the right tune whistled in a doorway or lifting up from the
circles and grooves of a record can change the weather. From
freezing to hot to cool (51).
Jazz
is the music of passage from one state of being to another. On the
one hand, to Alice and the Miller sisters, it is dangerous,
disruptive, and aggressive: full of “complicated anger [and] a kind
of careless hunger for fight” (59) and sex. While watching the 1917
anti-lynching march in Fifth Avenue and holding the hands of her
niece whose parents were victims of the East St. Louis race riot a
couple of days earlier, Alice thinks jazz has caused all that
violence: it just makes you want to break the law.
No. It
wasn’t the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn’t the droves
and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full
of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the
women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and
shameless or apart and wild. … It made you do unwise disorderly
things. Just hearing it was like violating the law. (58)
At
the Fifth Avenue march, however, there is no sound other than the
drums. To Alice, drums grow to signify order and hope: “fellowship,
discipline, and transcendence” (60). She nevertheless feels that it
is also “impossible to keep the Fifth Avenue drums separate from
“the belt-buckle tunes vibrating from pianos and spinning on every
Victrola” (59) in the vice districts as well as every street in
Harlem. These two sounds – orderly and disorderly – keep resonating
in her mind while she tries to “balance” her living. She is trying
to hold on to the drums “like a rope cast for rescue” (58) but she
also hears the songs whose lyrics are as “greedy, reckless, … loose
and infuriating” as their tunes. Yet, they are “hard to dismiss
because underneath, holding up the looseness like a palm, are the
drums that put Fifth Avenue into focus” (58).
For
Joe and Violet, on the other hand, jazz acts as a focalizer of love
and hope for reunion in the City. At the end of their story, they
clumsily yet eagerly begin dancing together to it, just as they did
when they “danced up” to the City on board of Southern Sky twenty
years ago (31), “running from want and violence” (33) but also in an
anticipation of a better future. After that, they dance separately.
Joe dances in the street when the 369 Regiment marches along Fifth
Avenue on Armistice Day in 1919 (129) and later watches Dorcas dance
before he shoots her at a Harlem party. Violet decides to learn the
dance Dorcas was so good at after she violates her corpse at the
funeral (5). Readers learn from Felice how the elderly couple
gradually revive their caring relationship to the rhythm of jazz
floating into their living room through the open window (214–215) –
the window that Alice cautiously keeps shut (59). Even their new
bird – a nature symbol of their rural past as well as of their
flight from there – eventually makes itself at home in their Lenox
Avenue apartment house thanks to that music. So do Joe and Violet.
… So if
neither food nor company nor its own shelter was important to it,
Violet decided and Joe agreed, nothing was left but music. They took
the cage to the roof one Sunday, where the wind blew and so did the
musicians in shirts billowing out behind them. From then on the bird
was a pleasure to itself and to them. (224)
Listening to the healing tunes the street musicians play recovers
the bird’s appetite, its desire for food. Likewise, Violet and Joe
recover their desire for talking and listening to each other. While
for Alice and the Miller sisters, who may represent African American
urban middle class, jazz and dancing to it also show and promote
promiscuity (monstrous sexual appetite), because it brings black
flesh, perspiration, smell, and touch to the fore, into motion, to
Violet and Joe, this music helps “figuring things out, telling each
other those little personal stories they like to hear again and
again” (223). Jazz is instrumental in the satisfaction of their
desire for self-expression rather than in their sexual
gratification. Because of this new order in their home, their past
traumas also seem to resolve. Joe lets his elusive hunt-obsession
for Wild-Dorcas take the solid shape of a bird outside the window in
the darkness while “Violet rests her head on his chest as though it
were the sunlit rim of a well” (225). The recollection of the well
here is no longer a gruesome reminiscence of “Rose Dear or the place
she had thrown herself into – a place so narrow, so dark” (100–101).
The image of the well Rose Dear jumps into to kill herself in 1892
(99–101) refigures in Violet’s fearful “private cracks” (22–23) in
the narrative present; but now, Joe is her anchorage against the
“pull of a narrow well:” exactly the way he was when they first met
under “their” tree in 1893 (104).
The Perch: Trees of Life
When
Violet meets Joe, they have a fresh row about who owns the tree they
happen to be in and under at the edge of a cotton field. Here is an
excerpt from their sassy dialogue.
“You
sleep in trees?”
“If I find me a good one.”
“Nobody sleeps in trees.”
“I sleep in them.”
“Sounds softheaded to me. Could be snakes up there.”
“Snakes around here crawl the ground at night. Now who’s
softheaded?”
“Could’ve killed me.”
“Might still, if my arm ain’t broke.”
“I hope it is. You won’t be picking nothing in the morning and
climbing people’s trees either.”
“I don’t pick cotton. I work the gin house.”
“What you doing out here, then, Mr. High and Mighty, sleeping in
trees like a bat?”
“You don’t have one nice word for a hurt man?”
”Yeah: find somebody else’s tree.”
“You act like you owned it.”
“You act like you do.”
“Say we share it.”
“Not me.” (103–104)
When
morning comes, however, the tree is already theirs rather than his
or hers.
She grew
anxious when she heard workers begin to stir, anticipating the
breakfast call, going off in the trees to relieve themselves,
muttering morning sounds – but then he said, “I’ll be back in our
tree tonight. Where you be?” [emphasis added.]
“Under it,” she said and rose from the clover like a woman with
important things to do. (105)
The
tree belongs to both of them, just as they belong to the same tree
of life. In the course of the narrative, told from different
perspectives, readers gradually learn that actually Joe’s and
Violet’s two separate trees of life are one. Joe’s and Violet’s life
stories were mythically connected in the past through the legendary
“golden boy” (Golden Gray) story, and may be connected through
Felice and jazz in the future. The narrative structure of the novel
thus generates a hope for reunion of Joe and Violet, because their
lives were started and can be told in one story.
Joe’s and Violet’s trees of life and the character map of the novel
show that Golden Gray and Felice are the two characters to whom all
other characters are somehow related in both trees. With regard to
the past, Violet’s story and Joe’s story merge in Golden Gray’s
almost mythic figure. Violet grows up listening to True Belle’s tall
tales about Golden Gray’s legendary beauty, whereas Joe is born in
the Vienna hut of Henry Lestory, Golden Gray’s ex-slave father. True
Belle, Violet’s grandmother and Golden Gray’s freed slave mammy,
sends Golden Gray to Lestory. What is more, Golden Gray takes Wild
to Lestory’s farm. On his way there, he comes across a wild-acting
woman in labor. He picks her up, takes her to Lestory’s, names her
“Wild,” covers her bleeding body with a green dress, and is present
at Joe’s birth (if the child is Joe at all). Later, Henry Lestory
teaches Joe how to hunt, and Joe repeatedly tries to hunt down Wild
to ask her whether she is his mother or not (36, 175–178).
As a
direct sequence to his last hunt in 1893, just before he meets
Violet at their tree, the story of how he hunts down Dorcas in 1926
is focalized from Joe’s point of view. The two themes suddenly join
and flow on together: for a while, neither the reader nor Joe really
knows who Joe is after. The most striking image that connects the
two hunts (for Wild and for Dorcas) is a green dress Dorcas is
wearing at the party and the green dress Golden Gray covers Wild
with (161, 169) some fifty years ago in the Lestory hut in Vienna.
… A green
dress. … Also, a pair of man’s trousers with buttons of bone.
Carefully folded, a silk shirt, faded pale and creamy – except at
the seams. There, both thread and fabric were a fresh and sunny
yellow.
But where
is she? (184)
Who?
Wild or Dorcas? Or both? Joe could have only seen for sure that
green dress on Wild at the moment of his own birth: Wild in labor
and Golden Gray looking and helping. The two women melt into one in
Joe’s imagination and/or memory (166–184). The mythic union between
Violet and Joe through Golden Gray’s figure is then performed in a
perfect narrative synthesis by relating Joe’s thinking just before
shooting Dorcas-Wild. He spots Dorcas in the green dress dancing
with Acton wearing clothes like Golden Gray does at Joe’s birth.
Violet’s tree of life and Joe’s tree of life may become one at their
mythic roots. The presence of Golden Gray in their stories and the
actual words that describe his appearance and deeds are as
instrumental in Joe’s imagination as they are in Violet’s. This
textual recombination presents a narrative hope for a thematic one
in the novel for Violet and Joe: shared tree – shared story – shared
life.
After exploring the narrative significance of Joe and Violet’s
shared tree of life bears, I will focus on my other argument
claiming that the language describing lynching spectacles and race
riots black people have suffered and the language describing a hope
for improved living conditions, social security, and personal
happiness are used interchangeably in Jazz, where lynching
lexis being the hand-me-down linguistic legacy of the South.
Liberation and Love: Sights and Smells of Lynching Spectacles
Reconfigured
Historical precedents of spectacle lynching further unsettle the
belief in an inherently republican American nation that is
democratically inclined by nature largely due to the (supposedly)
shared frontier experience of its people. In addition to and in
congruence with the Page-Fisher-Pederson theses of the
frontier/liberty/westward expansion vs. passage/slavery/migration
paragon, the institutionalized practice of ritualistic lynching
spectacles during the Reconstruction Era, Gilded Age, and Jazz Age
is another challenge to the narratives of American exceptionalism.
For
a credible textual proof in the novel, I have to recall where I
started out and what has been said so far: viewing lynching picture
postcards and our anxiety of looking or not looking, the push and
pull factors of the Great Migration, post-bellum racial violence
both in the South and in the North up until the 1960s, the
circumstances of Rose Dear’s suicide, and Alice Manfred’ watching
the Fifth Avenue march in 1917 while holding Dorcas’s hand and then
hearing the inseparable sounds of the orderly drums and disorderly
jazz ever after.
There had
been none of that [jazz] at the Fifth Avenue march. Just the drums
and the Colored Boy Scouts passing out explanatory leaflets to
whitemen in straw hats who needed to know what the freezing faces
already knew. Alice had picked up a leaflet that had floated to the
pavement, read the words, and shifted her weight at the curb. She
read the words and looked at Dorcas. Looked at Dorcas and read the
words again. What she read seemed crazy, out of focus. Some great
gap lunged between the print and the child. She glanced between them
struggling for the connection, something to close the distance
between the silent staring child and the slippery crazy words. Then
suddenly, like a rope cast for rescue, the drums spanned the
distance, gathering them all up and connected them: Alice, Dorcas,
her sister and her brother-in-law, the Boy Scouts and the frozen
black faces, the watchers on the pavement and those in the windows
above.
Alice
carried that gathering rope with her always after that day on Fifth
Avenue, and found it reliably secure and tight – most of the time.
Except when the men sat on windowsills, fingering horns, and the
women wondered “how long.” The rope broke then, disturbing her
peace, making her aware of flesh and something so free she could
smell its bloodsmell; made her aware of its life below the sash and
its red lip rouge. (58)
Alice’s reflection on how current race riots and jazz are correlated
recycles some of the vocabulary describing the elements of lynching
spectacles: white men in straw hats looking ignorantly yet
interested, rope cast in, frozen black faces watching from a
distance, sudden sight and smell of flesh, blood smell, life below
the sash, red lip. Out of these verbal elements of an ordinary
lynching event, Morrison creates a description of a well-organized
event of African American protest against lynching, as well as
alludes to a language of frenzied freedom articulated in and
perpetuated by jazz. These expressions also convey Alice’s hope for
personal balance, which is expressed in her understanding of “rope”
as a means of gathering, rescue, and security rather than a means of
mooring down, capturing, and hanging agonizing bodies on tree
branches. Morrison describes a protest against lynching without
representing any concrete lynching image in the passage. Readers do
not get to read what is in the leaflet after all, but they still
know. The words, expressions, and syntax the narrator conjures out
of Alice’s thoughts, however, yield a lynching scene right there, on
the very same page. Alice observes the present march but perceives
of the past riot. Words of lynching thus mobilized in her
consciousness come easy to her but startle the reader, because
Alice’s mind converts that vocabulary to enunciate something good,
something hopeful and necessary for life to go on then and there.
Alice, although she cannot help thinking in the language of racial
violence and suffering, reshuffles and remakes it to recreate a
language of hope and black liberation struggle.
Next
time, the language of lynching figures notably in the charming
account of how Violet and Joe fall in love. They meet while picking
cotton in Palestine. Joe, like a strange fruit, drops beside Violet
from the walnut tree she prepares to sleep under. Now, we need to
read a longer passage of Morrison’s masterly weave of narrative,
which will enable us to see the ways Violet’s story distills and
reshapes the elemental vocabulary of lynching into the teasing
language of love and belonging, still preserving its recognizable
ingredients, though.
… when a
man fell out of the tree above her head and landed at her side. She
had lain down one night, sulking and abashed, a little way from her
sisters, but not too far. Not too far to crawl back to them swiftly
if the trees turned out to be full of spirits idling the night away.
The spot she had chosen to spread her blanket was under a handsome
black walnut that grew at the edge of woods bordering the acres of
cotton … (103)
…
His name
was Joseph, and even before the sun rose, when it was still hidden
in the woods, but freshening the world’s green and dazzling acres of
white cotton against the gash of a ruby horizon, Violet claimed him.
Hadn’t he fallen practically in her lap? Hadn’t he stayed? All
through the night, taking her sass, complaining, teasing,
explaining, but talking, talking her through the dark. And with
daylight came the bits of him: his smile and his wide watching eyes.
His buttonless shirt open to a knot at the waist exposed a chest she
claimed as her own smooth pillow. The shaft of his legs, the plane
of his shoulders, jawline and long fingers – she claimed it all. She
knew she must be staring, and tried to look away, but the
contrasting color of his two eyes brought her glance back each and
every time. She grew anxious when she heard workers begin to stir,
anticipating the breakfast call, going off in the trees to relieve
themselves, muttering morning sounds – but then he said, “I’ll be
back in our tree tonight. Where you be?”
“Under it,” she said and rose from the clover like a woman with
important things to do. (104–105)
Here
we find the lynching elements that were missing in the previous
scene: the nigger in the Southern tree – a strange fruit hanging
like a bat, hurt with a broken bone, dropping because the rope that
secures him to the branch broke, and burning in the rising morning
sun’s ruby.
This
passage (with Rose Dear’s and Alice’s as textual backdrops to it)
evokes the lyrics of Billie Holiday’s blues, “Strange Fruit,” and
the sceneries in the picture postcards displayed at the Witness
exhibitions. The associations do not come as easy now as they do
while reading Alice’s stream of thoughts at the Fifth Avenue march,
because there the connections between suffering lynching and the
hopeful struggle against it are more direct (expressed in the image
of “rope cast for rescue”) than here, where the verbal
reminiscences of lynching imagery are more hidden and abstract.
Nonetheless, the ingredients are the same: young black man, strong
tree, rope, fire, “pastoral scene,” refreshing Southern breeze;
black, red and white; buttonless open shirt, exposed chest, shaft of
legs, plane of shoulders; bits of him; staring and trying to look
away, mesmerizing eyes; stirring, muttering sounds around; the
memory of Rose Dear’s twisted dead body; fear of killing and death.
Yet,
“our tree” now is a shelter to sleep in and under, a likely place of
perch and nesting; the rope is to secure the sleeper so that he
would not fall and to tie the couple together; the red (color of
blood and fire) is the ruby of the morning sun in the horizon
shedding light on the attractive details of Joe’s handsome body; the
“bits of him” are desirable body parts full of life rather than
splintered dead flesh lying around to be picked up for souvenir; and
the burning is in the fire of awakening love. Joe’s eyes are wide
open rather than “bulging” and his mouth is smiling rather than
“twisted” while the fear is the fear of breaking up a fresh sense
of belonging. The buttonless open shirt exposes Joe’s chest, which
Violet claims “as her own smooth pillow” (105). Violet’s fear of
death disappears when she claims him, all of him, in the morning
after a long night’s journey of talking and teasing into day. This
tree is a lifetree not a lynchtree. The black male, who used to be
the most likely target of white lynching mobs once upon a time in
America, is presented as beautiful and charming now.
Free and Situated
If
Morrison fills the empty sign of ‘slave’ in Beloved with
meanings, she fills the empty sign of ‘lynched black male’ with
meanings in Jazz for sure. On national scale, from a more
political perspective, what Morrison achieves in Jazz is to
show and demolish the racist construct of American society and
nation embedded in language. As she asserts in the conference speech
delivered after she had just written Jazz and while she was
working on Paradise, in Jazz, she
… tried
to locate American modernity as a response to the race house. It was
an attempt to blow up its all-encompassing shelter, its
all-knowingness, and its assumptions of control. In the novel I am
now writing, I am trying first to enunciate and then eclipse the
racial gaze altogether. (Morrison, “Home” 790)
Jazz
is then part of her larger vocation evolving around questions of the
hazards of making a living in a racist house while trying to convert
it into a nonracist home; that is, writing in racist language to
produce a race-specific yet non-racist text.
How to be
both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a
race-specific yet nonracist home. How to enunciate race while
depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of
language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although
my engagement with them has been fierce, fitful, and constantly (I
think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and
politically unresolved. (Morrison, “Home” 790)
Her
political and aesthetic efforts of rewriting that house into home,
she believes, has global significance in our day, when racist
narratives seem to bless wars waged on every continent. Although
Morrison does not explicitly calls attention to US involvement in
these wars, but in the mid-1990s, it was obvious and it is even more
obvious in 2003, when Dora Apel publishes her Witness
exhibition review or in 2004, when David Ryan recollects Archbishop
Williams’s dilemma of the right language of political and personal
response after 9/11. What can or should a scholar of American
Studies do to remain both free and situated?
Apel
warns that to use slavery and lynching narratives negligently may
also lead to “the flattening out” of their meanings (Apel 474) by an
immature acceptance of the current US rhetoric of “the war on
terrorism” and by a shortcut conceptualization of other forms of
“extralegal execution, [like] gay bashing, police brutality, and
anti-Arab persecution” (Apel 473). What scholars can/should do,
then, is rather try to represent and scrutinize ways of lynching
representations in their own “past and present histories” (Apel
474). If we fail to do that, we may end up giving a hand in forming
post-9/11 narratives of US exceptionalism using lynching narratives
to support the government’s violent racist antiterrorist rhetoric.
While the
lynching photographs today constitute a form of protest and
resistance against the history of lynching and its contemporary
effects, Bush and Aschcroft’s rhetoric of terrorism only reinforces
the ideology of white supremacism and further, American nationalism,
which is still inherently defined as white, male, Christian, and
heterosexual. (475)
“On
Looking” hence opens our eyes to the problematic situation the
popularity of lynching images and narratives may cause today. Apel
is also quick to point out that instead of deflating the supremacist
narratives of American exceptionalism by showing how the spectacular
performances of “lynching carnivals” (Apel 469) obliterate the
morally superior condition the protagonists of the American Dream
have enjoyed, we may end up reinforcing that very same narrative.
However, she hastens to quote Mark Bauerlein, warning that the
reasons one might be disinclined enough to show such photographs
“are outweighed by the importance of showing how people who
otherwise believed in basic democratic principles turned into
self-exonerating murderers” (Apel 466).
Jazz
was published in 1992 among such theoretical works as Playing in
the Dark, “Nobel Lecture,” and “Home;” all of which call
attention to the unifying roles of a denied “Africanist presence” in
both US society – thriving on the ideals of US exceptionalism – and
literature. In a 1989 interview with Time, Morrison voices
her life-long experience according to which the key to become an
American and to keep the country whole has always been the unanimous
rejection of black people by immigrants.
If there
were no black people here in this country, it would have been
Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each other’s throats out,
as they have done everywhere else. But in becoming an American, from
Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt
for me – it’s nothing else but color. Wherever they were from, they
would stand together. They could all say, “I’m not that.” So in that
sense, becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of
me. (Morrison, Conversations 255)
This
author of Jazz sounds rather antithetical to the unifying
narratives of the frontier and the premises of republican hope. Even
so, instead of brooding over racial discrimination and belonging to
“the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has
given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt
about it” (Hurston 1009), Morrison explores ways and portrays
possibilities of the creative remaking of US racial and literary
history of expulsion through “[converting] a racist house into a
race-specific yet nonracist home” (Morrison, “Home” 787) in her
fiction.
I
believe, students of American Studies may learn from Toni Morrison
about how to be both free and situated without embracing racist,
violent, or propagandistic rhetoric. Jazz enables a sort of
creative ‘counter-seasoning’ of the narratives of US exceptionalism,
while “counterracism [is] never an option” (Morrison, “Home” 787) in
Morrison’s texts, because she knows if she responded in racist
language, the conversation would continue in that language. The
trees of life in Jazz are rooted into the shattered flesh and
the splintered bones of real black people, though. Jazz, like
Beloved, openly brings them back; it commemorates them. Alas,
no wonder Morrison’s trees are yielding bittersweet crop, bearing
(in our minds) the juicy fruit of lynching and love at once.
N
otes
[i]
Jazz could be read as a neo-slave narrative, a migration narrative, or even
as a modernist novel, too, but this reading now is not
focusing on genre classification issues. Postmodern
historiographic fiction and neo-slave narratives do have a
lot in common, though, I think. I mean, for example, Charles
Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) is both a neo-slave
narrative and a postmodern historiographic novel. It is
possibly the case with Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography
of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to
Canada (1976), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), and Morrison’s Beloved (1987) as well. These
novels use fragments of history as their organizing force
and blend other facts with fiction just as fugitive- and
ex-slave narratives do. Just think of William Wells Brown’s
Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1851). In many
ways, Clotel is both a historiographic novel and a
fugitive slave narrative. In “Who Set You Flowin’?” The
African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), Farah Jesmine Griffin argues that
Jazz is a migration narrative. Four migratory moments
describe best the narrative tradition Griffin explores: “the
migrant’s connection and/or lack thereof with the
“ancestor;” the migrants experience with and as “the
stranger;” the migrants negotiation of “the urban
landscape;” and the fourth, the moment always already in
progress, the migrants “consideration of the sophistication
of modern urban power [,] … evaluation of the consequences
of migration and urbanization, and … vision of future
possibilities” (4).
[ii]
In The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk
Roots and Modern Literary Branches, (Amherst and Boston:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), Bernard W. Bell
develops an African Americentric vernacular theory of
culture and identity that is rooted in African Americans’
socio-historical, socio-cultural, and socio-psychological
double-consciousness and “the code-switching or blending of
Standard American English (SAE) and African American
Vernacular English (AAVE) vocabulary, pronunciation,
grammar, and tropes” (xv). He further asserts that “[the]
manner and degree of code-switching of novelists between the
pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar of AAVE, especially
its distinctive idioms, sayings, and cultural commonplaces,
and SAE in the imaginative construction of identities of
African Americans is therefore one important area of
analysis for assessing the agency, as well as the
authenticity and authority, of black American novelists,
their characters, and their texts” (43–44). In Bell’s
terminology of code-switching, I argue that through complex
maneuvers of code-switching from violent to nonviolent
diction and imagery, Jazz performs a remaking of
images and language of spectacle lynching (historically
ingrained into many American minds) into the language of
social liberation, romantic love, and belonging.
[iii]
Any Internet search engine will show hundreds of reliable
sources on “seasoning slaves.”
[iv]
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
(Ed. Hilton Als et al., Santa Fe, New Mexico:
Twin Palms Publishers, 2000)
explores the exhibition at the Roth Horowitz Gallery
and the collected photo postcards of Mr. James Allen of
Atlanta, Georgia. Spectacles of actual real life lynchings
are captured with photos and full historical documentation
of the events. There are 98 plates of lynching pictures
viewing the victims and the people surrounding them. The
last document is from 1960.
[v]
According to Dorothy Ross in her entry “American
exceptionalism” in A Companion to American Thought
(Ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg,
Cambridge, USA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1995), the notion
of “American exceptionalism” – the idea that the United
States of America occupies a place in history significantly
different from that of any other country in the world – may
have three enduring characteristic narratives about the
American experience: [1] puritan faith in America’s holy
mission in the New World and in the whole world; [2]
republican hope, which expresses the belief in the US
Republic to live for ever unlike other republics in history
because Americans are democratically inclined in their minds
and hearts, and also because it was American intellectuals
of the Enlightenment era who put the philosophies of the
European Age of Reason into social practice; and [3] liberal
expectations of economic expansion enabled by as well as
further enabling the triumph of the common man, the
democratic legacy of the frontier experience, and a sense of
a homeland of limitless opportunities (22–23).
[vi]
1870 – 1890s: the Great Migration culminates; 1888: Rocky
Mount hangings; 1901: Booker T. Washington has breakfast at
the White House; 1917: race riots in East St. Louis; July
1917: anti-lynching march on Fifth Avenue in New York City;
February 1919: Armistice Day Parade in New York City.
[vii]
In 1855, Vera Louise Gray, pregnant with a mulatto child
(Golden Gray) of Henry Lestory (Hunters Hunter) moves to
Baltimore and takes along True Belle, mother of Rose Dear,
who is Violet’s mother. At that time, Rose Dear is eight
years old. On 1 January 1926, Joe Trace shoots Dorcas
Manfred; Dorcas’s funeral is on January 3, when Violet stabs
her face; and Violet visits Alice Manfred in March. The
story ends sometime in May 1926.
[viii]
Henry Nash Smith in The Virgin Land: The American West as
Myth and Symbol (1950) claims, “one of the predominant
theorizations of American identity – grasped in part by
people like Hector St. John de
Crèvecœur,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman – is
explicitly expressed in Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893
“frontier” hypothesis; namely, that American society has
been shaped by the westward pull of a vacant continent.” I
am aware of the complexity of the notion of the frontier and
of the risk I am taking by reducing its significance to this
single assertion. I am also aware of the many critiques and
mutations this concept has enjoyed or suffered. Patricia
Nelson Limerick in her entry in the Fox-Kloppenberg
Companion to American Thought gives a very instructive
summary of how the concept of the frontier has changed its
meanings for scholars since Turner, but, at the same time,
its popular understanding somewhat has remained the same,
evoking its primary meaning as a border and its secondary
one as a place of clash (255–259). Ray Allen Billington
emphasizes the standardized zonal character of the frontier.
He proposes that the frontier consisted of “a series of
contiguous westward-migrating zones, each representing a
different stage in the development of society from elemental
to complex forms:” namely the zones of the fur traders,
cattlemen, miners, pioneer farmers, equipped farmers, and
the urban pioneers (256). Jack D. Forbes hopes to
conceptualize the frontier as a zone of cultural encounter
as opposed to Turner and Billington’s concept of the edge of
the westward movement. At this zone of cultural interaction,
different processes of intercultural contacts happened, such
as acculturation, assimilation, miscegenation, conquest,
imperialism, and colonialism. He believed that in seeing the
frontier as a place for cultural encounter, the faith in US
exceptionalism would fade a little and US history could be
read and written just as another chapter in world history,
nothing exceptional (257). Twenty years later, in the early
1980s, Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson came up with a new
definition of the frontier. They would have loved to see the
frontier “not as a boundary or line, but as a territory or
zone of interpretation between two previously distinct
societies” which struggle over hegemony there (257–258).
This definition, I think, is the closest to our everyday
understanding of the term. On the one hand, we may
historical-mindedly say that the frontier was a place where
European Americans and Indians met and fought for
domination. On the other hand, we can be more metaphorical,
and say that the frontier is a border between peoples and
between two people, or a place of political, economic,
social, scientific, or racial, or even gender contest (259).
None of these deliberations seem to undermine the thesis
that the notion of the frontier primarily has meant to many
Americans and foreigners alike the freedom to leave behind
any miserable place in a hope for a brighter future.
[ix]
Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X
neatly point out this contradiction in “What to the Slave Is
the Fourth of July?” (1852), “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
(1963), and “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), respectively.
By showing the inconsistencies between the governing
principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution and the actual political
practices in the U.S.A. of their own times, they all
emphasize the inertial immobility or the involuntary
journeys black people are forced into. African Americans
neither enjoy some desired places of their own (a potential
springboard) nor have the income that could enable them to
move (on) freely. While Douglass’s antislavery speech
culminates in expressing his hope that the liberal
principles of the Declaration of Independence eventually
will prevail, and King believes in the power of love that
could enable all Americans to join the national dream of
freedom in their own ways, Malcolm X rather calls for a
violent and immediate awakening from the nightmare African
Americans are obliged to dream in segregated America.
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