SOME NOTES ON THE COURSE:
In part, this course grew out of an earlier course, in composition,
that dealt with Sherley Ann Williams' Dessa Rose and Charles
Johnson's Middle Passage as well as the Bell and Patricia Williams'
books listed for this course. One could easily include those texts
for this course.
I supplemented the assigned texts and the reserve list with
photocopies of documents from the 18th and 19th centuries: a
manumission certificate, a certificate of ownership of an infant
born to a slave in New York, a bill of sale for a slave, a "pass"
for a slave to travel away from home, a claim for fees for having
cuaght a runaway slave, and a notice of bond against a free woman
of color who had been arrested for "insulting a white man." We
discussed, among other matters, the implications of the fact that
each of these documents was a printed, i.e., mass-produced form
with blanks to fill out. The quotidian nature of these pre-printed
forms gave us a real sense of the institutionalization of slavery
as a system of control.
We spent some time with the implicit narratives in each of the
documents. That is, the forms themselves were not narratival but
once names, ages, dates, locations, and imputed actions were filled
in, then stories took shape. We talked about how memory, history,
law, and fiction were all narrative systems, all text-producing
enterprises. We noted how these documents contibuted to each of
those genres.
Beyond the notion of intertextuality discussed in the notes to the syllabus, we also worked on understanding such matters as the social construction of reality, privieged narration, subject position in the text, and the ground of definition as they might apply to texts of law and African-American experience. These were ongoing discussions and re-emerged with each new text.
I also distributed to each member of the class a copy of the Constitution, of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its 1793 precursor, and of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Missouri Compromise. These were referred to in our discussions of Beloved, Blake, Bell, and Williams.
In practice, the course worked as a "discussion" by/with/of Delany contra Morrison, then Delany contra Griggs, with both of these informing and being informed by the documents and all eventually passed through Bell and Williams.
ASSIGNMENTS:
1. After identifying relevant chapters in Williams and having read
both Delany and Morrison, the class was asked to consider the
fiction through the lens of one or more of the issues raised by
Williams about African Americans under the law. I expected that the
discussions would reflect the influence of our class discussions
and exerience with reserve readings and documents. I also asked
that the respondent also consider that which she felt remained
untouched in the books by her discussion that was necessary to
account for the book's impact on her.
As an option, a student could address the question of how
writers take similar historical moments and conditions and create
different texts. Delany and Morrison are wonderful examples of
this. Students were to take into account as many variables as they
could identify and then consider what, after all, the texts had in
common other than their historical roots. To end, the student
choosing this option was asked to consider how the texts by Delany
and Morrison changed when read through Williams.
2. At mid-semester, students were asked to choose one or more of
the documents we had seen and develop a fiction that engaged some
of the issues we had been discussing: subject position,
objectification, the function of memory, inhumanity of slavery as
a system rather than as an collection of acts, law as a story,
literacy and the importance of story-telling, the inhumanity of
whites, color discrimination within the race, revolution and
resistance, escape, violence as a response to slavery, violence as
a part of slavery.
3. At semester's end, students responded by writing for two hours
in the seminar room. For the first hour they were to respond to
passages from Houston Baker (Singers of Daybreak 1974) and Toni
Morrison (Playing in the Dark 1992):
Baker: "In the black narrative, the judgement rendered by the
white world manifests itself in a pattern of extralegality. Moving
from an initially limitedposition, the black protagonist often
finds himself outside the dictates of a society that attempts to
confine him, and his expanding consciousness leads to the
realization that it is not humanism or moral righteousness that
brings about the adverse rulings of the white world, but a quest
for personal power and a desire for psychological stability
purchased at the price of a distorted image of the black American."
(16)
Morrison: "Black slavery enriched the country's creative
possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and
enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the
dramatic polarity created by skin color, the not-me. The result was
a playground of the imagination. What rose up out of collective
needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external
exploitation was an American Africanism--a fabricated brew of
darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."
(38)
These passages reflected on the course generally, but specifically
raised issues conmnected to the Griggs novel.
For the second hour the students read a document new to them, an
1837 letter from a Mr. George Farnham complaining to his local
magistrate that a band of slave patrollers had beaten one of his
slaves. In the 3 1/2 page letter, Parnham describes the beating and
reveals much about the relationships between his family and their
slaves. But finally he comes to his point: "So, please to issue a
writ against [the patrol] [sic] I suppose that it would be proper
to say that these men came forcibly upon my preme[]ses and injured
my negro, by means of which I lost his services for a period of
time. The facts of the case are that I am not only losing his
services at this time, but am employing a physician for him."
[Schomburg Slavery Collection MS Slavery P7 Sc Micro R 1520 #77
1837 July 25]
The instructions to the students were: "Read the accompanying
document and write about this course for one hour."
This passage, rich in voice, focused attention on the question
ofsubject position in law and narrative. Slaves could not bring
suit or charges in any court; most were illiterate by law. Then
whose story is this? Can property, which by law could own nothing,
own its own story? Can that which was contracted for, that which
was defined, ever give up the right to contract, the right to
define, once it is seized?
This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.