Abstract
From the first arrival of Europeans in North America, before any notion of nationhood, there was the question of how to get the work done. The acquisition and transformation of land and natural resources for the glory and wealth of European heads of state, and for personal profit, proved too great a challenge for a handful of ambitious explorers, adventurers and settlers. Columbus observed straightaway that the friendly and welcoming Arawaks should be conscripted for this purpose. He wrote in his log: “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them […]. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”2 But the Indians, clearly assumed to be there, like the land, for the taking, proved an unusable source of free labor in that, as a response to disease and mistreatment by the newcomers, they insisted on perishing in great numbers.
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. […] The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. […] He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or spectator of the action he describes.
—Francis Parkman
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
—Charlie Chaplin1
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Notes
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History (1832), qtd. in George Bernard Shaw, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Man and Superman (1903). Francis Parkman, introd., Pioneers of France in the New World, 11th ed. (1865; Boston: Little, Brown, 1874).
Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964; New York: Harmondsworth, 1966).
Rpt. in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, 20th Anniversary ed. (1980; New York: HarperCollins, 1999) 1.
See Bartolomé de las Casas, History of the Indies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) 41. Some sources cite 1501, or other dates, for the introduction of the idea of importing Africans as slaves.
Bernard Grun, ed., The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1991) 227.
Cotton Mather, “On the Conversion of the Negroes,” The Negro Christianized, rpt. in The Minority Presence in American Literature: 1600–1900, ed. Philip Butcher, vol. 1 (1706; Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1977) 71.
Harriet Martineau, Society in America (1837; New Brunswick: Transaction, 1981) 220.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; New York: Signet, 1968) Appendix 121.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1784–85, rpt. in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin, 1975) 454–455.
Thomas L. Connelly, “Robert Penn Warren as Historian,” A Southern Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren, ed. Walter B. Edgar (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984) 1.
Robert Penn Warren, “The Uses of History in Fiction,” Southern Literature Journal 1.2 (1969): 70. Transcription of panel discussion with Ralph Ellison, William Styron and Robert Penn Warren, moderator C. Vann Woodward, thirty-fourth annual meeting, Southern Historical Association, Jung Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana, Nov. 6, 1968.
Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War & the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville, 1995) 120.
E. L. Doctorow, “‘Fiction is a System of Knowledge’: An Interview with E. L. Doctorow,” with Christopher D. Morris, Michigan Quarterly Review 30.3 (Summer 1991): 446.
E. L. Doctorow, “A Spirit of Transgression,” interview with Larry McCaffery, E. L. Doctorow: Essays & Conversations, ed. Richard Trenner (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1983) 43.
See Derek Wright “Ragtime Revisited: History and Fiction in Doctorow’s Novel,” International Fiction Review 20.1 (1993): 14. Wright states in support of Doctorow’s claim that historians do imagine and fabricate a specific view of the past, and that “history, insofar as it is always narrowly partial and selective, is one of the least trustworthy and potentially one of the most fictional of narrative forms. As the opening pages of Ragtime demonstrate, whole racial groups have been written out of American history simply by not being mentioned, and the task of the novelist, as conceived by Doctorow, is to write them back in.”
Barbara Foley, “From U.S.A. to Ragtime: Notes on the Forms of Historical Consciousness in Modern Fiction,” American Literature: A Journal of Literature, History, Criticism and Bibliography 50 (1978): 96.
E. L. Doctorow, “An Interview with E. L. Doctorow,” with Michael Wutz, Weber Studies: An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 11.1 (Winter 1994): 15.
Charles Johnson, “An Interview with Charles Johnson,” with Jonathan Little, Contemporary Literature 34.2 (Summer 1993): 166.
Molly Abel Travis, “Beloved and Middle Passage: Race, Narrative, and the Critic’s Essentialism,” Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998) 80.
Wolfgang Binder, “Uses of Memory: the Middle Passage in African American Literature,” Slavery in the Americas, ed. Wolfgang Binder (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1993) 555, 556.
Susan Willis, Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987)3.
Toni Morrison, “‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” 1981, interview with Thomas LeClair, Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. and introd. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994) 122, rpt. from New Republic 18 (March 21, 1981): 25–30.
Marilyn Sanders Mobley, “Call and Response: Voice, Community, and Dialogic Structures in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” New Essays on Song of Solomon, The American Novel Series, ed. and introd. Valerie Smith (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995) 42–43.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1993) 17.
Mark C. Carnes, Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other) (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001) 21.
C. Vann Woodward, panel moderator, “The Uses of History in Fiction,” Southern Literature Journal 1.2 (1969): 58. See Woodward’s explanation for the historical antecedents shared by the two disciplines, 58–60.
Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 288, 21. See Susman’s discussion on the historical novel in his chapter “History as Myth and Ideology” for the uses of history in the works of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, 21–23.
James R. Thompson, “‘Categories of Human Form’: Some Notes on E. L. Doctorow and Historical Consciousness,” Caliban 28 (1991): 18.
Peter Freese, “Doctorow’s ‘Criminals of Perception’, or, What Has Happened to the Historical Novel,” ed. Gunter H. Lenz, Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies (Frankfurt: Campus, 1990): 346–347.
Joseph W. Turner, “The Kinds of Historical Fiction: An Essay in Definition and Methodology,” Genre 12 (1979): 333. See Turner also for a discussion on problems of definition of the historical novel, voice and uses of the past, authenticity, reliable narrator and authority, and his critique of Avrom Fleisher’s theoretical discussion of the historical novel in The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).
Turner 339. James qtd. from “Anthony Trollope,” Partial Portraits (New York: Macmillan, 1888), rpt. in The Art of Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Morris Roberts (New York: Oxford UP, 1948) 59–60. See also Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1937; London: Merlin Press, 1962) 241–242.
Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Touchstone, 1992) 17.
President George H. W. Bush qtd. in Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990) 10, from an article by George Will in The Washington Post Nov. 3, 1988: A27. DeMott writes that “Will called it ‘a national travesty that a presidential candidate denies class realities.’”
William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (New York: Doubleday, 1994) 31.
Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 54.
C. W. Harper, “Black Aristocrats: Domestic Servants on the Antebellum Plantation,” Phyton 46 (June 1985): 126.
Barbara Christian, “Black Women in Afro-American Literature,” Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985) 3, 2.
S. F. Bennett and J. P. Webster, “Sweet By and By,” Progressive Baptist Hymnal, Bicentennial Edition, ed. D. E. King (1940; Washington, D.C.: Broadman Press, 1976) #344.
The practice of feigned deference did not end with slavery. See Annie S. Barnes, “White Mistresses and African-American Domestic Workers: Ideals for Change,” Anthropological Quarterly 66 (Jan. 1993): 24–25, for a discussion of how a female servant today “stays in her place” in order to get along with her employer and to protect her employment.
Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) 13.
David J. Cherrington, The Work Ethic: Working Values and Values that Work (New York: Amacom, 1980) 39.
Donald L. Kanter and Philip H. Mirvis, The Cynical Americans: hiving and Working in an Age of Discontent and Disillusion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989) 1.
Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 63.
Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 21, 15.
George Watson, “The Silence of the Servants,” The Sewanee Review 103 (Summer 1995): 480. Watson uses as an example the representation of servants in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, both novel and film adaptation, which he says are misguided and outrageous; perhaps the result of inexperience and ignorance.
Bonnie Thornton Dill, “‘Making Your Job Good Yourself’: Domestic Service and the Construction of Personal Dignity,” Women and the Politics of Empowerment, eds. Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988) 36–37. In her study Dill describes the defensive disclaimers used by domestics to hide their shame about their occupations.
Late-nineteenth-century observer Lucy Maynard Salmon reported the same difficulties in acquiring a servant. Even after securing help “it was difficult to keep white servants for any length of time in a country where land was cheap and the servant soon in turn became a master. It was undoubtedly this difficulty that led to the substitution for white servants of Indians and negro [sic] slaves.” Lucy Maynard Salmon, Domestic Service (1897; New York: Arno, 1972) 49. See Salmon’s note on the writing of Elkanah Watson, who discusses the notion of upward mobility, which apparently impairs the usefulness of American servants, but also “adds to his self-respect as a man.” Men and Times of the Revolution 169–170. Of course, such a notion was not pertinent to black and Indian slaves, who had no hope of becoming master.
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1996) 47, 49. See especially Roediger’s chapter 3, “‘Neither a Servant Nor a Master Am I’: Keywords in the Languages of White Labor Republicanism,” for a discussion on the development of working-class terms that distinguished the free from the unfree, and subsequently white from black, and that provided dignity and a sense of upward mobility for white workers.
Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1985) 58–59.
Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992) 7, 12.
Frazer Ward, “Foreign and Familiar Bodies,” from Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine, exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center, June 12–August 14, 1992, ed. Jesús Fuenmayor, Kate Haug, Frazer Ward (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992) 8. Ward discusses anthropologist Mary Douglas’s idea that concepts of dirt and dirtiness are subjective social constructs and not absolute, and “that these ideas symbolize social relations.” Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984) 35.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 4.
For opposing positions on affirmative action and reparations see Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2001),
and Stephen L. Carter, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (New York: Basic-Harper Collins, 1991).
For recent scholarship on race culture, race hierarchy and biological determinism see: Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995);
Philippe J. Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 1994);
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994);
Seymour W. Itzkoff, The Decline of Intelligence in America: A Strategy for National Renewal (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).
Roger Sanjek, “The Enduring Inequalities of Race,” Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, UP, 1996) 8–9, 1.
Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993) 9.
Bruce Robbins, “The Butler Did It: On Agency and the Novel,” Representations 6 (Spring 1994): 90.
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© 2004 Margaret I. Jordan
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Jordan, M.I. (2004). Introduction. In: African American Servitude and Historical Imaginings. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978325_1
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