Abstract
Slaves and servants in Robert Penn Warren’s Band of Angels provide a frame of reference that exposes the visceral nature of color prejudice, the causes of white racial anxiety, the presumption of being human and American as “white,” and the compatibility of all these elements with the idea of the inferiority and utilitarian nature of Negroes in antebellum culture—issues that were still rending American society apart in the early years of the civil rights movement, the period in which the book was written. My purpose here, if I may borrow from Dana D. Nelson’s The Word in Black and White, is to uncover the
“violence of representation” that occurs in texts about race, the oppressive reduction of the apparently infinite diversities among humans to an oppositional binary, always hierarchically figured. […] The ideological figuration of “race” is structurally violent in its reductiveness, denying the perceptual evidence of multitudes of colorations […]. At the same time, the notion of “race” is necessary for a certain kind of violence, established and promulgated to justify the domination of one group of human beings over another.2
Many issues about race and race relations in America are organized in Band of Angels around ideas about the Negro as utilitarian and best suited for servitude, both as slaves and servants, because of tradition, particularly in the southern agrarian culture, and presumably because of natural or divine design; a breed to be set apart except when in the performance of labor.
The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
—Jeremiah 31:29
The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yielded all their bitter vintage.
—Samuel Eliot Morison1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The Holy Bible, King James Version. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People: Volume Three, 1869 Through the Death of John F. Kennedy, 1963 (1965; New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1994).
Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford UP, 1993) xii.
Nelson borrows the term “violence of representation” from Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Joseph Blotner, Robert Penn Warren: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997) 300. According to Blotner, critical reception of the novel at its first release was mixed but generally favorable (298). Critics have been eager to agree with this assessment, with notable exceptions such as John R. Strugnell, who writes that the novel “is very like the costume novels which Penn Warren says he hates” (“Robert Penn Warren and the Use of the Past,” Review of English Literature 4.4 [1963]: 100).
—. “Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity in Robert Penn Warren’s Fiction,” Mississippi Quarterly 48 (Winter 1994–95): 147.
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1961; New York: Norton, 1978) 90.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999) 9, 8, 195, 196.
For a discussion about the “two white societies in the South” (78), see James A. Perkins, “Racism and the Personal Past in Robert Penn Warren,” Mississippi Quarterly 48 (Winter 1994–95): 73–82.
Robert Penn Warren, Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, Volume One: The Apprentice Years, 1924–1934, ed. and introd. William Bedford Clark (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000) 179. Blotner calls Warren’s part of the project “the most difficult task: locating the position of the Negro in this [the Agrarian] economic and social order” (106).
Robert Penn Warren, “The Briar Patch” (250), in Rubin, I’ll Take My Stand. See Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” Up From Slavery (1901; New York: Penguin, 1986). A significant part of Washington’s strategy to diffuse white hostility (especially violence and lynching) was to convince white people that blacks were not a threat to them, and that black people were willing to “learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life” (220). Most important, he assuaged their fears of integration and miscegenation with the assurance that “[i]n all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (221–222).
See response and counterargument of W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Signet NAL, 1982), especially “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in which Du Bois discusses the resulting burden and psychological damage black people suffer from being considered a “problem.”
See also, “The Talented Tenth.” See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Macrae-Henry Holt, 1993);
and, Thurgood Marshall’s “The Brown Decision,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, An African American Anthology, eds. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) 357–364.
Robert Perm Warren, “Warren on the Art of Fiction,” interview with Ralph Ellison and Eugene Walter, Talking with Robert Penn Warren, eds. Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers and Mary Louise Weaks (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990) 33; from original uncut manuscript, held in Ellison’s apartment, 1956, American Academy of Rome.
Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (1961; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983).
Robert Penn Warren, Band of Angels (1955; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994) 2. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text. Quote by A. E. Housman. Band of Angels is based on a true incident in antebellum Kentucky. A wealthy white man who was the father of two little black girls died without having told them of their lineage. They were sold on the auction block as part of the estate. See Blotner for particulars of incident, 291.
See Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997) 483n32, who writes: “The white father who dies intestate, bringing his children—most especially daughters—in danger of being sold may be considered a topos of interracial literature, including writers from Ignaz Franz Castelli to Robert Penn Warren. As Brown, The Negro in American Fiction, 46, pointed out: ‘Too often the kindly disposed master dies suddenly, without having chance to fulfill his promises of freedom.” Sollors refers to Sterling Brown’s The Negro in American Fiction (1937; New York: Atheneum, 1969).
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial Self” (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) xviii.
Robert Penn Warren, “Why Do We Read Fiction?,” New and Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1989) 64, 65.
Forrest G. Robinson, “A Combat with the Past: Robert Penn Warren on Race and Slavery,” American Literature 67 (Sept. 1995): 527, 513.
James Justus, “The Slavery of Freedom in Band of Angels,” The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981) 236.
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1968) 18.
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1972) 91.
See Clinton, Tara 109–124. Clinton quotes from Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie After the War (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1903) 263, and from Jane Pickett in a letter to her mother, July 25, 1863, Montevallo, Boddie Family Papers MSA.
See also Clinton, Tara 171–177. For more discussion about slave desertion see Daniel E. Sutherland, “A Special Kind of Problem: The Response of Household Slaves to Their Masters and Freedom,” Southern Studies 20.2 (1981): 151–166.
Also, Annalucia Accardo, “A Spy in the Enemy Country: Domestic Slaves as Internal Foes,” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994) 77–87.
In a letter dated Sept. 20, 1786, Thomas Jefferson cautioned his daughter Maria about keeping herself protected from the sun so that she would not become tanned: “Remember too as a constant charge not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.” The beauty of southern women was based “on a standard of facial pallor.” Family Letters, ed. Betts and Bear (30). Qtd. in Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) 100. Jefferson was subscribing to the common belief, the “self-flattering assumption in Western culture that mankind’s initial color must have been white—and the problem thus became how to explain, not the diversity of human pigmentation as such, but most especially the appearance of blackness” (Sollors, Neither Black 76). If a highly educated intellectual such as Jefferson thinks this way about color, it’s not surprising that an entire society is similarly afflicted, slaveholding or otherwise, as well as an identity-challenged mixed-race teenager during slavery.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 109, 196, 202, 203.
See Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861; New York: Oxford UP, 1988); especially the chapters “The Trials of Girlhood,” “The Jealous Mistress” and “A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life.”
Justus 237. See also Allen Shepherd, “Toward an Analysis of the Prose Style of Robert Penn Warren,” Studies in American Fiction 1 (1973): 196–197.
Alma A. Ilacqua, “Amanda [sic] Starr: Victim of Her Own False Assumptions,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 8 (1976): 179, 181, 182.
Lucy Ferris, “Sleeping” 165. For a discussion on interracial love relationships during slavery see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, rev. Tenth Anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000). Collins argues that “even under slavery, to characterize interracial sex purely in terms of the victimization of Black women would be a distortion, because such depictions strip Black women of agency. […] More difficult to deal with, however, is the fact that even within these power differentials, genuine affection characterized some sexual relationships between Black women and White men” (d’Emilio and Freedman 1988, 100–104) 162–163. Clearly, within the enormous realm and potential for human interaction love was a possibility in some of these circumstances. But Clinton’s assessment reflects the dynamics of power and forced submission that typically dominated these situations; an apt point well taken.
Lucy Ferris, “From Manty to Cassie: The Evolution of Warren’s Female Persona,” in “To Love So Well the World”: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren, ed. Dennis Weeks (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) 269.
Robert Penn Warren, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1980) 112, qtd. in Robinson 528–529.
Robert Penn Warren, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, for. William Bedford Clark (1956; Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994) 63, my emphasis.
Lewis P. Simpson, “Robert Penn Warren and the South,” Southern Review 26 (Winter 1990): 8.
Hugh Ruppersberg, “Robert Perm Warren and the ‘Burden of Our Time’: Segregation and Who Speaks for the Negro?” Mississippi Quarterly 42 (Spring 1989): 117, 116. Blotner writes that the material that made the book was “too inflammatory for Life: the epithets and expletives, and sheer hatred and the vitriolic anti-NAACP and anti-Negro fulminations” (304).
Christopher Metress, “Fighting Battles One by One: Robert Penn Warren’s Segregation,” Southern Review 32 (Winter 1996): 167. Metress goes on to argue that “Briar Patch” actually reflects the beginnings of profound changes in Warren’s ideas about race. He states: “Changed attitudes about race make it difficult for us today to see anything but an unreconstructed Warren in ‘The Briar Patch,’ but bitter though his defense of segregation may seem to modern sensibilities, it contained the seeds of uncertainty and self-criticism, seeds that would yield a more pleasing fruit when Warren returned to the race question in the 1950s” (167).
Copyright information
© 2004 Margaret I. Jordan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jordan, M.I. (2004). What Made Amantha Lean?. In: African American Servitude and Historical Imaginings. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978325_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978325_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52856-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-7832-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)