The interest in Negro folk expression is not a momentary fad; the collection and interpretation are the work of both white and Negro folklorists, united in respect for material which, no longer set in isolation, is becoming recognized as an integral part of the American experience. But with folk culture corresponding less and less to Negro experience in America, it is of course to the conscious literature that we turn for its fullest expression.

—Sterling A. Brown, “The New Negro in Literature”

The writers who, over the decades, have insisted on the centrality of folk culture to the African-American literary tradition have done so in part because they shared Sterling Brown's concern that folk ways were slipping into obscurity. They recognized that Negro folk culture evoked ambivalence among African Americans because of its negative connotations and subsequent employment as a tool of oppression. African Americans feared that their appreciation of all aspects of their lives would mark them as inferior. Consequently, as they moved away from the rural home of the folk, they moved away from folk culture as well. The resulting erosion of folk beliefs and values threatened the loss of black history, strength, and strategies of resistance. Ralph Ellison suggests that it threatens black sanity as well. Although the themes and techniques of the following writers vary, their goals are similar. Each attempts to hold on to Negro orature and to preserve the functions it serves in folk life.

CHARLES W. CHESNUTT'S THE CONJURE WOMAN AND OTHER CONJURE TALES

Charles Chesnutt found literary success writing within the popular genre of the plantation tradition. He employs the Negro folktale, told in impeccable dialect, to authenticate his local-color literature, which paints a picture of life on the southern plantation. Chesnutt focuses on the conjure tale, a form of lore that emphasizes the superstitious nature of slaves as it addresses their belief in ghosts and “conjure doctors,” who have the ability to control nature. While the form generally was cited as evidence of the slave's childlike nature and lack of intelligence, Chesnutt uses it to subvert these stereotypes. He perfects his subversion in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales.

The Conjure Woman was published in 1899 and contained seven of Chesnutt's conjure tales. Solicited by Walter Hines Page (editor of the Atlantic Monthly) for Houghton Mifflin, the collection included only those stories deemed inoffensive to white audiences. Additionally, Chesnutt's race was hidden from white readers of the Atlantic Monthly, which inadvertently supported the subversive quality of the tales. Richard H. Brodhead collected the tales Page chose to omit and offers them in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, published in 1993. An examination of representative tales from the original collection, as well as from the excluded tales, reveals the range of Chesnutt's subversive strategies and the role of folklore in that subversion. “The Goophered Grapevine” and “Mars Jeem's Nightmare” from the original collection, and “A Victim of Heredity; or Why the Darkey Loves Chicken” from the restored collection, serve as effective examples of Chesnutt's oeuvre.

Chesnutt organized the collection to support his goal of morally elevating the white reader. He judged that the task demanded a subtle approach rather than the emotional and polemical strategy of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Accordingly, he drew his reader into the stories by playing on the reader's stereotypical expectations before easing into the moral lesson. The stories placed early and late in the collection are the least disturbing, with the most challenging tales inserted in the middle. Matthew R. Martin notes that “the arrangement of the stories in The Conjure Woman repeats the pattern of advance and retreat often contained within the individual tales themselves: a gentle opening, a more openly challenging central section, and finally a conclusion which largely smooths over the story's more subversive implications.”¹

The fact that Chesnutt's race was unknown to readers supported his strategy. All of the stories collected in The Conjure Woman are structured similarly as a story within a story. John, a white northern capitalist, is the narrator of the framing tale, and he listens to stories told by an ex-slave, Uncle Julius McAdoo. Believing that the author of the conjure tales was white, the Atlantic Monthly's audience likely identified with the narrator and assumed his point of view. As such, they shared his values and prejudices, never expecting they could be taught anything or be fooled by a Negro. Chesnutt trades upon this perception and has the ex-slave do the same. Consequently, McAdoo's inner stories tend to be used to manipulate the circumstances recounted by John.

Chesnutt seems to draw stock characters of the plantation and local-color traditions in his conjure tales. Employing the cultural tourism theme, he depicts the collision of different worlds as the typical educated, northern capitalist encounters the backward, uneducated local. In this instance, the northern businessman is a white gentleman, John, who moves his delicate wife, Annie, south for an extended rest cure. They encounter McAdoo, an ex-slave who appears to fit the stereotypes of the Negro that whites received from plantation literature. McAdoo speaks in quaint dialect, is polite and congenial, appears to be lazy, and reflects the cunning or shrewdness of his kind who attempts to get more than he actually has earned.

While the encounter typically serves to introduce the reader to the intricacies of a different locale or culture, Chesnutt raises the stakes in his conjure tales. The collision of two worlds becomes a conflict between powers, and the conflicted territory is not only physical but psychic space. John's quest for economic advantage, reflected in his purchase of the plantation and the exploitation of the materials associated with it, conflicts with McAdoo's pursuit of self-definition and self-determination. Their battle for the contested territory is one of wits as McAdoo uses the stereotypes from which whites operate to instruct John and Annie about the moral and social implications of slavery and also to serve his economic self-interest.

The “Goophered Grapevine” opens the collection and introduces John, Annie, and McAdoo. John is considering the purchase of the old McAdoo plantation and comes to inspect its vineyard. He and his wife encounter McAdoo, who attempts to dissuade John, explaining that the vineyard is “conjured” or hexed. John and Annie sit down to hear the tale, and McAdoo expounds upon his assertion. McAdoo explains that the original plantation owner, in an attempt to protect the proceeds of his vineyard from his thieving slaves, hired a free conjure woman named Aun' Peggy to cast a spell on the grapevine. In the process, an unwitting slave is conjured as well. The counter-conjure bestows a special ability on the slave: his youth and strength increases and declines with the grapes' growing season. Recognizing the potential for profit, Mars Dugal' McAdoo exploits the situation but in his greed destroys the vineyard and his slave. John is not convinced by the tale and purchases the plantation anyway. He learns that McAdoo had hoped to prevent the purchase in order to continue profiting from the vineyard.

The moral of the story that Chesnutt tells through McAdoo is clear. He indicts those who perpetuated the institution of slavery for their greed and inhumane exploitation of slaves. However, he also censures northern capitalists for their encroachment on and exploitation of the South following the Civil War.

In this story, Chesnutt establishes the subversive strategies he employs throughout the collection. By beginning the story with John's articulate and logical exposition, Chesnutt invites the reader to see McAdoo through John's eyes. The reader sees the ex-slave as a trickster figure who uses guile to pad his pocket or fill his stomach. Consequently McAdoo is viewed as socially and morally inferior to John. However, Chesnutt does not allow this perspective to persist. He uses subtle tactics to equalize John and McAdoo, and allows the latter to win the battle of wits.

Chesnutt equalizes the characters socially by giving John and Annie first names only. In true life, the white characters of plantation fiction would have been addressed by their last names. Chesnutt gives McAdoo a last name, however. In so doing, Chesnutt subverts the social order and calls attention to the institution of slavery by connecting the ex-slave to the plantation owner through a shared surname.

The author also breaks social codes by creating a sympathetic relationship between the black, male ex-slave and the white property owner. Such relationships would have been forbidden during slavery for fear of miscegenation. However, it is through Annie that Chesnutt manipulates John and offers a lesson in the possibility of moral development in the white reader.

“Mars Jeem's Nightmare” is a similar tale of exploitation and a moral lesson in appropriate race relations. John hires McAdoo's grandson as a courtesy, but fires him when the youth proves to be lazy. McAdoo then tells John and Annie about Mars Jeem McLean, who drove his slaves unmercifully. McLean hired Mistah Johnson as overseer, and he turned out to be more ruthless than the master. One of the slaves, Solomon, acquired the services of Aun' Peggy, who turned McLean into a slave. After suffering under Johnson's abuse, McLean returned to normal but treated his slaves more humanely. McAdoo explains the moral to John and Annie:

“Dis yer tale goes ter show … dat w'ite folks w'at is so ha'd en stric', en doan make no 'lowance for po' ign'ant niggers w'at ain' had no chanst ter l'arn, is li'ble ter hab bad dreams, ter say de leas', en dat dem w'at is kin' en good ter po' people is sho' ter prosper en git 'long in de worl'.”

(68)

Of course, Annie is persuaded by McAdoo's tale and rehires his grandson. Again, McAdoo plays upon the stereotypes held by whites in order to explain his grandson's behavior and to chastise whites for their attitudes and actions.

Finally, Chesnutt employs the same theme in “A Victim of Heredity; or Why the Darkey Loves Chicken,” a story excluded from the original collection. In this tale, John catches one of his employees stealing chickens and determines he will have him jailed for five years for the offense. He thinks the sentence might be too harsh, apparently having learned from McAdoo's earlier lesson, and reconsiders the penalty. John reduces the sentence to two years then to one year and finally to six months when he learns that the thief has a sick wife and large family he will have to support during the employee's incarceration. When John asks McAdoo why Negroes like chicken so much, the ex-slave agrees that it is in their blood. When Annie objects to the observation, McAdoo tells her that it is not the Negroes' fault for the hereditary problem but that the white man is responsible. He shares a tale about a poor white man, Mars McDonal', who worked his way up the social and economic ladder from overseer and sharecropper to plantation owner. Not satisfied with his success, he determined to abuse his slaves in order to exploit them to the fullest. He hired Aun' Peggy to conjure the slaves' food rations so that he might hold back half of their allowance without any suspicion. Aun' Peggy helped McDonald but manipulated him into running himself nearly into bankruptcy by purchasing chickens to feed to his slaves. He must then give his slaves chicken on a weekly basis in order to recover from the starvation he sets in motion by his greedy actions. When Annie hears McAdoo's story, she feels partly responsible for the chicken thief's actions and decides to free him.

In all three stories, Chesnutt does more than pit John and McAdoo against one another in economically motivated battles. He uses McAdoo's stories to expose the dehumanizing effects of slavery on both the slave and the slave master, and to demonstrate to John how he employs similar supremacist and proprietary notions about the free Negroes who work for him. While most critics view McAdoo's manipulation as motivated strictly by economic self-interest, Chesnutt's purpose for the deception is greater. McAdoo's sense of entitlement with regard to the old McAdoo plantation is based upon the African-derived belief in usufructuary rights. In his comments that frame McAdoo's story in “Mars Jeem's Nightmare,” John notes McAdoo's “peculiar attitude” toward the plantation, which he describes as “predial rather than proprietary” (55). The term “predial” is a variant of “praedial,” meaning attached to an estate or to land. While John likely views McAdoo's attitude as related to the attachments of serfdom, Chesnutt employs it in a manner more directly related to the African value.

In believing that slaves and ex-slaves are entitled to profit from the lands on which they toil, McAdoo does not find it problematic that they must resort to taking that which is not freely given. Chesnutt empowers the slaves with conjure, thus privileging a discredited form of knowledge as a tool of control and resistance. The use of conjure also is African-derived both in form and function. Its use reflects the African belief in a just universe and the expectation that those who violate the moral order of the universe should be punished. Aun' Peggy represents a spiritual being who has the power to manipulate nature in the service of the gods to exact revenge on those deserving punishment.

Chesnutt's choice of local color fiction in the plantation tradition has proven controversial among critics. As with Dunbar's and Harris's work, debate continues with regard to the social and political effect of Chesnutt's characterization of the Negro. While some critics recognize Chesnutt's attempt to counter the stereotypes of the plantation tradition and to resist the coercive control of the white publishing industry, others view his conjure tales as capitulation to white powers in exchange for celebrity. Writing in the 1960s, Amiri Baraka in Blues People: Negro Music in White America counts Chesnutt among the blue-veins² who “wanted no subculture, nothing that could connect them with the poor black man or the slave.”³ In his assessment, Baraka apparently overlooks or misinterprets Chesnutt's “The Wife of His Youth,” in which Chesnutt emphasizes the importance of reconnecting those ties severed by slavery, specifically by crossing intraracial color and class lines. The protagonist of the story, Mr. Ryder, is a “blue-vein” who is faced with escaping his past and marrying a fair-skinned beauty of high society, or acknowledging the dark-skinned, worn wife of his slavery days. He chooses the latter, and the choice suggests that Chesnutt advocated racial unity even at personal cost.

Several critics find Chesnutt's use of stereotypes, for example the chicken-stealing Negro, problematic. Broadhead asks in the introduction to The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, “Does the author of these stories unknowingly subscribe to racist stereotypes of his own?” (19). Such criticism does not recognize the subversive strategy of shifting the focus away from the stereotypical behavior to the oppressive values that either invent the stereotype or engender the actions. Essentially, Chesnutt tells John and by extension the white reader that he is the master and creator of the problems he confronts.

Ellison illuminates this strategy in his criticism and illustrates it in his novel Invisible Man. Referring specifically to the minstrel character, Ellison explains that the masks of inhumanity with which the Negro has been fitted are not the creations of the Negro but of the white man. He notes that the Negro's acceptance of the mask is a rejection of the identity. Writing in the Partisan Review, Ellison elucidates the fact that the black trickster is not so much a “‘smart-man-playing-dumb’ as a weak man who knows the nature of his oppressor's weakness.”⁴ Thus, by agreeing with the oppressor's stereotype, the trickster can engage in behaviors of which he would never be thought capable.

Other critics, in accepting the subversive role of Uncle Julius McAdoo, question Chesnutt's success in countering stereotypical depictions of the Negro and morally elevating the white reader. They note that while McAdoo manipulates his employer John, ultimately he remains under white control. Further, they point out that McAdoo is not subversive in every tale, proving the limitations of his resistance. Henry B. Wonham reads “Hot-Foot Hannibal” as evidence of this point, explaining that McAdoo is not a conniving subversive ex-slave in the tale, but rather manipulates to further the romantic relationship of his white superiors.⁵ As such, McAdoo reinforces his status as a faithful retainer whose ultimate purpose is to serve the needs of his employer. Wonham sees Chesnutt's Uncle Julius tales and his color-line stories as exhibiting ambivalent racial allegiances in that they suggest that dialect and folktales inexorably link Negro characters with their degrading past.

Wonham reads Chesnutt's fiction as suggesting that his characters cannot escape the debasement of slavery as evidenced by McAdoo's constant backwards gaze and Chesnutt's bourgeois character Ryder's use of dialect. He argues that just as McAdoo and Ryder cannot escape the shackles of slavery, even as they use them to their benefit, neither can Chesnutt escape the “straight-jacket” of dialect. Wonham attributes Chesnutt's inability to escape dialect not to the pressures of publication, as many critics do, but to his own cultural and political ambivalence. It seems that Wonham poses this argument to relieve Chesnutt's critics, Howells and Page, of reproach for attempting to limit the author's fiction to the plantation tradition. He fears that contemporary critics “demonize” Howells and Page for the political and economic power they wield over Chesnutt.

While Wonham correctly assesses that Chesnutt's and McAdoo's predicaments are parallel, he errs in his view that the similarity lies in their inability to escape the specters of the past. Rather, they share the recognition that despite institutional constraints, the individual can rely on his heritage in maneuvering within the “straight-jackets” of control. Wonham forgets that while the conditions Chesnutt recounts through McAdoo may be painful, the oral tradition on which both author and character rely is not an unpleasant specter of slavery but a useful retention of an African heritage. Performance and indirection are African oral strategies employed to confront the powerful with their acts of oppression. McAdoo adopts this strategy in his conversations with John and Annie; Chesnutt takes the same approach with his reader. Dialect becomes, for the author and the character, a skill used to authenticate the oral performance.

Chesnutt allows John to misread McAdoo and assume that the ex-slave's mind remains “enslaved.” He does so to emphasize the fact that it is John whose mind is “enslaved” by the hubris of white supremacy. Because he believes that he has the superior intellect and “knows” Negroes, John arrogates the power to determine what Julius should value from his past. John's misunderstanding and stereotyping facilitates McAdoo's control of his own circumstance because it allows the ex-slave to educate his superior and profit from performing the role he is expected to play.

A similar dynamic is at play in Chesnutt's fiction. He employs a popular genre, makes use of its conventions, and benefits from his excellent performance. At the same time, he subverted the conventions of the genre, attempting to teach his readers so that they might benefit from it as well. Critics such as Wonham assume that because Chesnutt wished to dispense with the conventions of the plantation tradition, he necessarily felt trapped by a degrading symbol of his downtrodden heritage. Choice itself was at issue for Chesnutt rather than the choices open to him. He valued Negro folk culture, as evidenced by his studies of superstition and conjuring, his interviews of conjure doctors, and his fidelity to reproducing folk life and speech. Chesnutt's resistance within and outside the literary world was the same. Like his character Julius McAdoo, he did not struggle against a heritage by which he was embarrassed, but against an institution that attempted to control his possibilities. Chesnutt wished to determine the objects of his esteem as well as the tools of his liberation. He did not wish to “escape” Negro dialect or folk culture, but to use them as he deemed appropriate.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

Hurston shares Chesnutt's desire to preserve the conjure tale, as evidenced by her characterization of Moses in her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain. In the novel, Hurston recreates the Pentateuch,⁶ recasting Moses as a conjure man who frees the Israelites from bondage with the use of magic. She draws parallels between the Israelites and enslaved Negroes in America but also uses elements of the African oral epic as she views Moses through African-American folk tradition.

The novel closely follows the story of Moses from the Bible. The Pharaoh of Egypt has issued a decree that all males born to Hebrews will be put to death. Jochebed and Amram bear a son under these circumstances and set him afloat in the river to save his life. The Hebrews believe that Moses is discovered and adopted by Pharaoh's daughter to be raised as a prince of Egypt. In his young adulthood, Moses kills an Egyptian for severely punishing a Hebrew slave. He is confronted by the possibility of his Hebrew heritage, and choosing exile, flees into Midian. He meets and works for Jethro and marries Jethro's daughter Zipporah. After several years, God calls Moses to free the Israelites. In a contest of miracles against the priests of Egypt, Moses triumphs after sending several plagues upon the kingdom, and Pharaoh frees the Israelites. Moses leads them across the Red Sea and leaves them as he ascends Mount Sinai where he receives the Ten Commandments. In his absence, the Israelites return to idolatry and build a golden idol. Enraged, Moses smashes the commandments and the Lord restores them and comes down to live among the people. The novel concludes with Moses looking into the promised land and turning to descend “the other side of the mountain.”⁷

In her foreword to the novel, Deborah E. McDowell locates Hurston's retelling of the Pentateuch within a long and distinguished tradition, ranging from the spirituals of the slaves, through Dunbar's “Ante-bellum Sermon,” to those most famous lines in Martin Luther King's sermon: “I've been to the mountain top.” A study of spirituals and Negro folk sermons reveals the predominance of Moses in the forms and explains his importance in the ideology of the slave. He becomes a significant figure in the slave's liberation theology because the Africans' lack of belief in a heaven demanded a physical, geographic Promised Land. As such, slaves could identify strongly with a Moses who could lead his people to an earthly freedom. Frederick Douglass recalls that when the slaves sang “O Canaan, sweet Canaan, / I am bound for the land of Canaan,” they were not speaking of heaven but of Canada: “We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”

In addition to the employment of biblical typology, Hurston's use of a black idiom and the storytelling structure of the novel further equate the story with slave experience. Percy Hutchison, in his 1939 New York Times Book Review essay, draws a connection between Hurston's use of dialect and the popular play The Green Pastures, based on Roak Bradford's novel (28). Of course, Hurston was not inspired by Bradford to use dialect in Moses, Man of the Mountain. She had used black idiom in her previous works and had addressed its importance in folk culture in her critical essays as well.

Hurston makes her strategy for using dialect clear in the novel. When Moses meets Jethro, he tells him, “I want to talk the dialect of your people. It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say” (92). The dialect marks Moses as a member of his new community just as it associates the entire story with the experience of the Negro. As Moses is taken into the Egyptian culture and later reintegrated into the Hebrew community, so too was his story subsumed by the Christian tradition and reclaimed into African oral tradition by African-American folk speech. Hurston recognized that the story originally was passed down orally and was meant to inspire the listeners with the heroic deeds of the central character. The dialect restores the performance quality of the story and reinforces its relationship to the African oral epic.

Additionally, Hurston structures the novel to suggest that the story of Moses' life is the birth of a folk hero told as a tall tale that becomes a legend or an oral epic. When Jochebed tells her daughter Miriam to watch and see where the basket bearing her son goes, Miriam fails at the task. She falls asleep and awakens with no idea of where the child has gone. Distracted by watching the princess of Egypt bathe in the Nile, Miriam forgets her brother until she returns home and is questioned. As her mother appears to be angry enough to strike her, Miriam is inspired to tell her mother something to calm her. She says that the princess has taken the child and will raise him as her own.

The manner in which Hurston conveys this episode suggests that Miriam makes up the tale and that everything else in the story is no more than a legend. The gossip spreads quickly and soon everyone in Goshen knows the tale. By the time Miriam tells her father that the princess has taken the baby, she adds, “And she wanted me to come to the palace to take care of the child for her” (32). Like most tall tales, her story grows with each retelling.

Hemenway, in his biography of Hurston, suggests that legends are created and accepted because people “need” to believe them (264). Similarly, Levine explains that the continued oppression of black people creates “a continuing need for a folklore which would permit them to express their hostilities and aspirations for folk heroes whose exploits would allow them to transcend their situation” (370). Certainly Jochebed wants to believe that her child lives; however, his adoption by the princess is important to the community as well. In the novel, Hurston writes, “They did not question too closely for proof. They wanted to believe, and they did. It kept them from feeling utterly vanquished by Pharaoh. They had something to cherish and chew on, if they could say they had a Hebrew in the palace” (34). Moses then becomes a folk hero for the Hebrews.

Hurston has the same purpose in mind when she claims Moses for the Negro people. In drawing parallels between the biblical Moses and the Moses of Negro folklore, Hurston assumes a shared motive for the creation of the legendary hero. Just as Miriam and Jochebed relish having a Hebrew in the palace, so too the Negro knows he has a relative in the big house. Hurston connects the high and low and the Negro and white man through this assertion. She reminds the reader of the shared humanity of the slave and the slave master, whether in ancient Egypt or in Georgia.

Because of the biblical references to Moses in Negro folk songs and sermons, contemporary critics readily recognized the novel's place in the African-American folkloric tradition. However, they failed to draw the connections among black folk tradition, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and a West African spiritual heritage as reflected in Hurston's study Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Like the preacher in Dunbar's “Ante-bellum Sermon,” Hurston pretends she is “preachin' ancient” and “not talking 'bout today” inMoses, Man of the Mountain. In assuming the double voice of the Negro preacher, Hurston does both. She speaks about Negro “freedom in a bibalistic way” at the same time that she acquires a more ancient voice—that of Guedé, the voodoo messenger of God.

Tell My Horse and Moses, Man of the Mountain are complementary texts. Hurston's study of voodoo in Haiti provides the lens through which to view her revision of the Pentateuch. She assumes the double voice of Guedé, the loa (spirit) of the lower classes that serves as a mouthpiece to speak truth to power. Hurston explains that in Haitian voodoo practices the loa “mounts” (possesses) its horse (human host). During the spirit possession, the loa speaks to, and sometimes about, those present, ostensibly to give a message to the horse. Hurston writes, “Parlay Chevel Ou (Tell My Horse), the loa begins to dictate through the lips of his mount and goes on and on.”⁸ Like the slave song or the folk sermon, Guedé is a medium through whom the powerless can express their feelings and beliefs to those in power. Guedé is the messenger through whom you approach Damballah, the god frequently associated with Moses. By employing this medium, Hurston is linking African and African-American spiritual wisdom and employing Moses to remind her readers that God intended everyone to be free.

Hurston states explicitly in her introduction to Moses, Man of the Mountain that she is drawing upon an African worldview in her characterization of Moses as a conjure man. She explains that the “worship of Moses as the greatest one of magic” is rooted in African spiritual belief but “is not confined to Africa. Wherever the children of Africa have been scattered, there is the acceptance of Moses as the fountain of mystic powers” (xxiv).

Hurston identifies Moses with Damballah Ouedo, the serpent god revered in Haiti, and suggests that the symbol of the snake links the two heroes. She explains that when Moses turns a “rod” into a serpent in his attempt to persuade Pharaoh to free the Israelites, he is borrowing a well-known African magical practice. According to Hurston, African witch doctors have the power to hypnotize a snake so that it becomes rigid and appears to be a rod. Witch doctors use the serpents as canes until they choose to turn them back into snakes. Moses performed this feat in his battle with the Pharaoh's priests and used simple logic to defeat their magic. Having learned the practice from the priests in the palace, Moses was aware of the kind of snake the priests used. He selected a serpent that “fed on the variety that the king's men of magic used, so he knew what would happen the moment that the magicians turned their 'rods' into snakes,” Hurston explains (118). In characterizing the magical duel in a traditional African worldview and acknowledging its continuation in the New World, Hurston gives primacy to the natural world. In the manner of her African ancestors, she draws God closer to the people and frees him to walk the earth. Further, Hurston raises the possibility that an African and/or Asian tradition of Moses pre-dates Christianity and that the miracles in the Pentateuch are folk beliefs and folktales.

Throughout the novel, Hurston explains the power that Moses wields not only in terms of an African-American conjure man, but also in comparison to the African oral epic. When Moses finds his position in the palace has been jeopardized and he is exiled, his experience parallels that of the endangered prince in the African oral epic Sunjata. As in the case of Sunjata, Moses lives in exile for many years but learns powerful magic that will restore him to a position of power. Sunjata's return to the palace and his success in the battle of magical powers is analogous to the story of Moses. Further, Sunjata defeats the evil king by killing the symbol of his spirit, the white cock. The act connects Sunjata with Damballah, as the Haitian god's sacrifice is the white cock, and by killing this particular bird, one offers a sacrifice to Damballah.

The magic that Damballah, Moses, and Sunjata use is derived from the same source, according to traditional African spiritual belief. The natural, spiritual, and moral orders of the universe work together to bring justice for the oppressed. Hurston describes Moses as acquiring his power from his relationship to nature and his ability to listen to and honor it. His ability to part the Red Sea, for example, comes from knowledge of its tidal patterns: “it is all a matter of the hour and the tide and you can wade across the sea,” Moses learns (77).

Similarly, when the Lord commands Moses to pick up the snake during their first encounter on Mount Sinai, Moses feels “a curious tremor of life that somehow communicated itself to the hand of Moses and from his hand to his arm and from his arm throughout his body. … Moses was amazed that the writhing serpent on the ground could have become so quickly the lifeless thing in his hands. It was a walking stick carved in imitation of a snake” (126). This description suggests the African magical practices associated with Damballah and implies that Moses maintains a special relationship with nature. Finally, all of the power that Moses possesses is used in the service of justice. He becomes the messenger of God's moral order as he confronts Pharaoh, as well as when he ascends Mount Sinai to learn God's words and to bring His “chart and compass of behavior” to the people (233).

Moses, Man of the Mountain did not receive a great deal of critical attention, in part because contemporary critics were not able to appreciate the value of Hurston's reclamation process. Ellison, for instance, estimates that the novel contributed nothing to Negro fiction.⁹ However, Hurston's novel, though flawed, represents an important step for the uses of folklore in African-American literature. It reconnects African-American folklore to its African heritage and posits for consideration the possibility that “pagan” African spiritual beliefs influenced Christianity.

RALPH ELLISON'S INVISIBLE MAN

A great deal has been written about Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man, since its publication in 1952. Although a complex novel, it is in structure and theme a traditional Bildungsroman or initiation story. Invisible Man is the story of an unnamed protagonist's search for identity. Ellison effectively outlines the plot in an interview presented in Shadow and Act:

After all, it's a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality. Each section begins with a sheet of paper; each piece of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of his identity, or the social role he is to play as defined for him by others. But all say essentially the same thing, “Keep this nigger boy running.” Before he could have some voice in his own destiny he had to discard these old identities and illusions; his enlightenment couldn't come until then.

(177)

Framed by a prologue and epilogue that establishes the story as a memoir, Invisible Man is divided into three sections. The movement of the novel is from the South to the North in the direction of the flight toward freedom and economic independence as represented in slave narratives and hoped for during the Great Migration. Thwarted in the traditional quest, the protagonist then goes underground, but, as Ellison explains, his descent is not into darkness but into light.

Ellison employs numerous motifs in the novel in addition to the quest for identity. The paired motifs of invisibility/blindness, death/resurrection, and lightness/darkness unite the novel. However, each section makes use of motifs specific to the protagonist's strategy for defining himself.

Ellison's essay “Harlem Is Nowhere” offers a blueprint for reading Invisible Man. It sets out the themes and establishes the major motifs of each section of the novel. The essay discusses the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic in Harlem, which Ellison says “represents an underground extension of democracy.”¹⁰ The opening line of the essay describes where “the confused of mind who seek reality” must go to reach the clinic, and the directions to Lafargue encapsulate the psychological journey of Invisible Man's protagonist: “One must descend to the basement and move along a confusing mazelike hall to reach it” (302, 294). Further, Ellison delineates in the essay “the three basic social factors shaping an American Negro's personality” which the clinic addresses, and they too are reflected in organization and themes of the novel: “he is viewed as a member of a racial and cultural minority, as an American citizen caught in certain political and economic relationships; and as a modern man living in a revolutionary world” (295). The three sections of the novel illustrate Invisible Man's struggles against each of the aforementioned social factors.

In the first section, Invisible Man attempts the strategy that Du Bois advocated for uplifting the race: education. He receives a scholarship to one of the most respected institutions in the South. The section begins with Invisible Man listening to advice from his grandfather with regard to race relations before he embarks on his journey: “Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”¹¹ The advice, as well as the dialect in which it is dispensed, suggests one of the major motifs of the novel: the mask of minstrelsy.

Recognizing the dual consciousness of the Negro as “a member of a racial and cultural minority,” Ellison arms several of his characters with minstrel masks that symbolize the necessary duplicity in black/white relations as suggested in the grandfather's advice. Among several characters, Trueblood and Bledsoe employ masks, and their masks present them as less intelligent, less capable, and less powerful than they truly are. Trueblood, a poor tenant farmer who impregnates both his wife and daughter, represents the worst stereotype of Negro lasciviousness. In his conversation with Mr. Norton, the trustee, Trueblood seems a deviant Uncle Remus as he settles in to tell his story of incest. His dialect marks him as uneducated, and his explanation of the incest demonstrates that he is unintelligent, acting on instinct. However, he is described as a brilliant raconteur whose tale keeps him financially secure.

Similarly, Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the college, seems a simple lackey for the white trustees of the institution; however, he explains to Invisible Man that he is playing a role:

“I'se big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it's convenient, but I'm still the king down here. I don't care how much it appears otherwise. … Let the Negroes snicker and the crackers laugh! Those are the facts, son. The only ones I even pretend to please are big white folk, and even those I control more than they control me.”

(142)

Bledsoe recognizes the power of the stereotype; he puts on the minstrel mask and takes on the dialect to portray the role that empowers him. Ellison is not suggesting that masks are effective in self-definition, however, as he demonstrates when Todd Clifton assumes the ultimate mask of minstrelsy, the clown, and sells Sambo dolls in the streets.

In his response to Stanley Edgar Hyman's essay “The Folk Tradition,” Ellison explains the complexity of the minstrel mask. He rejects Hyman's thesis that the minstrel is a trickster figure created by blacks to mask their intelligence in confrontations with whites. Rather, Ellison suggests, the minstrel is wholly a white creation. When blacks assume the mask, according to Ellison, they engage in self-humiliation. Further, the white audience's need to attribute the mask to blacks represents “a psychological dissociation from this symbolic self-maiming,” he writes (196). When Trueblood, Bledsoe, and Clifton don the mask, they do so because they understand the prejudices of the oppressor. They are taking the advice of Invisible Man's father and “yesing” the oppressor to death. As he wears the mask, the Negro is incredulous that the white man can be taken in by a mask he created. Ellison writes that the Negro has learned an American lesson: “that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask” (218).

Invisible Man has not learned to use the minstrel mask, as Bledsoe so aptly points out. The young protagonist decides he must put aside the quest for education for a while in order to finance his dream. The second section of the novel takes Invisible Man north in search of a job and illustrates the protagonist getting “caught in certain political and economic relationships.” Like countless others who moved north during the Great Migration, he has high hopes of acquiring a good position. The major motif in this section is that of man as an automaton or mechanism. Invisible Man has automatically followed Dr. Bledsoe's orders and distributed, unopened, several letters to northern businessmen. Essentially, the letters say “Keep this nigger boy running.” Attempting to deliver his last letter, Invisible Man encounters young Mr. Emerson and learns from him the content of the letters. Invisible Man discovers that his unthinking obedience has been detrimental because he has served as the mechanism of his own manipulation. He gives up his dream for an education and becomes just another member of the working class.

Invisible Man finds employment at the Liberty Paint Company. There he meets Lucius Brockway, who works in the bowels of the factory, formulating the ingredient that makes Optic White paint brilliant white. Brockway describes Invisible Man and himself as “the machines inside the machine” (217). While the metaphor suggests Brockway's function in creating whiteness, it also represents the role that Negroes played in the labor disputes during the Great Migration. Often brought in as strikebreakers to prevent the organization of unions, Negroes found themselves being used for the benefit of white business. Brockway not only foregrounds the freedoms and privileges by his blackness, he also unwittingly serves their purposes by fighting against the labor union that would aid his cause. Brockway keeps both the paint and the paint factory white.

The third section takes Invisible Man into the “revolutionary world” of the Brotherhood. The controlling motifs that have infused the entire novel come to dominate the final section. Throughout Invisible Man, Ellison employs the motif of invisibility and its complement, blindness. Once he has assumed the position of spokesman for the Brotherhood, Invisible Man is described as being blinded by the lights as he stands on stage to deliver his speech. He cannot see that he is invisible to the brothers and, like Clifton, is no more than their puppet.

Invisible Man begins to recognize the significance of blindness when he learns that Brother Jack, the leader of the organization, has a glass eye. In a blind rage, Jack dislodges his eye, and it shoots across the table between the two of them. Invisible Man is stunned:

A glass eye. A buttermilk white eye distorted by the light rays. An eye staring fixedly at me as from the dark waters of a well. Then I was looking at him standing above me, outlined by the light against the darkened half of the hall.

(475)

Brother Jack's literal blindness mirrors his moral blindness as regards the Brotherhood's exploitation of hopeful blacks. As Jack lectures him about the meaning of sacrifice, Invisible Man realizes that the Brotherhood cannot see him and asks himself, “Which eye is really the blind one?” Invisible Man's experiences eventually bring him to the realization that he shares in the prologue of the novel: he is invisible not because he is a specter but because people refuse to see him.

Although Invisible Man has been deemed a failed Bilddungsroman, it is not without hope. The answer to the protagonist's search for self lies within the symbols of the novel. Ellison argues that the psychological instability of Negro Americans “arises from the impact between urban slum conditions and folk sensibilities.”¹² He suggests that when Negroes left the South to pursue the “myths” of success, equality, peace, and full democracy, they left behind “a body of folklore—tested in life-and-death terms against his daily experience with nature and the Southern white man—that serves him as a guide to action” (299). According to Ellison, the loss of folklore leads to irrationality.

Folklore functions in the novel on both symbolic and structural levels. Centrally, Ellison equates folklore with self-reliance. He states in “The Art of Fiction: An Interview” that folklore announces “the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as to the definition of reality” (172). It follows then that Invisible Man must embrace his folk heritage as a demonstration of his self-confidence and self-reliance in order to render himself visible.

Ellison demonstrates Invisible Man's alienation from his folk culture in the episode in which he arrives in Harlem and encounters the blues-singing man who calls himself “Peter Wheatstraw, the Devil's only son-in-law” (176). The man interrupts his blues song to ask Invisible Man, “is you got the dog?” (173). Invisible Man does not respond, not because he is “denying” his roots, as the man fears, but because he has forgotten them. “I liked his words though I didn't know the answer. I'd known the stuff from childhood, but had forgotten it,” he says (176). The man's message is a warning about the dangers in Harlem. He identifies himself in his multiword description as a conjure man with the “shit, grit, and mother-wit” to survive in the city. He hoped that the young man had enough of one of these characteristics to survive as well.

Invisible Man indicates the potential to persevere as he tries to remember Jack the Rabbit or Jack the Bear, “who were both long forgotten now” (174). An understanding of the man's message or the memory of the folktales of the wily trickster rabbit would indicate that Invisible Man had the “mother-wit” to escape the dangers of the city. Unfortunately, Invisible Man walks witless into Emerson's office.

Ellison indicates his protagonist's growing enlightenment through the use of folklore as well. In the hospital episode following the explosion at Liberty Paint, Invisible Man responds to the doctors' questions with lines from folksongs and tales, and in playing the dozens by insulting the questioner's mother. His ability to recall Buckeye the Rabbit when he cannot remember his own name indicates that the culture is deeply embedded and can be called upon as a form of resistance.

Invisible Man uses folklore to protect himself during the Harlem riot as well. When mistaken for Rinehart, he assumes the identity to make his escape. Ellison explains that Rinehart is a symbol of chaos, a call to riot used by Harvard students.¹³ In this sense, Rinehart typifies the role of the African hare—a trickster figure that personifies chaos and by its existence holds out the promise of peace.

In each instance, Ellison employs folklore as a symbol of wisdom or wit and as an essential element in the formal structure of the novel. Folk characters offer Invisible Man a means of avoiding or escaping his difficult circumstance. Had he any mother wit, Invisible Man could have prevented the fiasco with Norton and the humiliation with Emerson. As he learns, his wit allows him to escape from the psychiatric clinic as well as from the riot. He eventually understands the necessity of escaping underground.

Ellison's prologue and epilogue include Andy Razaf's jazz song “Black and Blue,” performed by Louis Armstrong. In framing his story with the Louis Armstrong song, Invisible Man demonstrates that he has embraced his folkroots as a means of survival. Further, the choice of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” confirms that the protagonist recognizes the conditions that conspire to define the Negro in America. As Ellison suggests in his criticism, embracing your roots and trusting your own reality is the key to the search for self. The conclusion of the text finds Invisible Man underground, surrounded by light and listening to Armstrong. Ellison explains in Partisan Review that the descent underground is not into hiding or concealment but rather “is a process of rising to an understanding of his human condition” (221). In an act of reversal, the protagonist descends not into darkness but into blackness. Invisible Man rises to the light.

PAULE MARSHALL'S PRAISESONG FOR THE WIDOW

The search for identity and the loss of cultural heritage is a recurring theme in the fiction of Paule Marshall. The author of eight works, Marshall returns in each to examine the dilemma of the New World African's dispossession, and what it takes to reclaim a lost heritage.

Marshall was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel and Ada Burke. As the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, Marshall saw first-hand the struggle of living in the “new world” with “old world” values. In three important essays, Marshall delineates the values from her childhood experience that inform her fiction. “Shaping the World of My Art” addresses the importance of tradition to Marshall in both her personal and professional lives. She locates herself firmly in the African-American literary tradition and recognizes the complementariness of African-American and Bahamian heritage.

“To Da-duh, In Memoriam” is an often-referenced essay that describes Marshall's visits to her grandmother, whom she affectionately calls “Da-duh.” From the matriarch of the family, Marshall learns the importance of the ancestor in her life and fiction. She also discovers a deep appreciation for Barbados as she and Da-duh verbally joust in comparing the wonders of New York and the island. Finally, “From the Poets of the Kitchen” paints a portrait of the friends of Marshall's mother who gathered in the kitchen after a difficult day as domestics and talked about their lives. These women spoke in a language that Marshall saw as poetic; thus, from these women she inherited a love of oral and feminine traditions.

Marshall began her literary career in 1954 with the publication of her first short story, “The Valley Between.” After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Brooklyn College in 1953, she worked as a librarian, a staff writer for Our World magazine, and as a lecturer or professor at several universities, including Yale, Columbia, and Cornell. Her first novel was Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), a female Bildungsroman.

Praisesong for the Widow (1982) is not unlike Brown Girl, Brownstones as each illustrates its protagonist's search for identity. Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, Praisesong for the Widow tells of Avey Johnson's spiritual awakening. Avey is the widow of the book's title; she discovers during a luxury cruise that her life is empty. She recalls how she and her late husband Jay once reveled in life, until they began the pursuit of prosperity. After attaining all of the accoutrements of success—financial security, a home in the suburbs, luxurious vacations—Avey recognizes that they have lost the “sweetness” of life. The recognition comes too late, however, as Jay has passed away, and Avey has only material possessions to comfort her.

While taking a luxury cruise with her friends, Avey is troubled by recurring dreams in which her deceased great aunt beckons to her and finally attempts to drag her back to the spot the two of them used to visit during Avey's childhood. As a child, Avey visited her Great Aunt Cuny each summer in Tatem, South Carolina. The two would visit Ibo Landing, the legendary location where a shipload of Africans disembarked and walked across the water back home to Africa.

Disturbed by dreams of Great Aunt Cuny and also by other visions on the ship, Avey chooses to leave her cruise and waits in a hotel in Grenada until she can catch a flight home to New York. That night in the hotel, she relives her years with Jay and confronts the loss of their loving relationship. The next day, Avey goes for a walk and meets Lebert Joseph, the owner of a beachfront rum shop. Joseph calls attention to the acculturation that has left Avey bereft of her heritage. He asks her, “What you is? What's your nation?” Avey is unable to answer.

Joseph convinces Avey to join the islanders on their annual excursion to the “out island,” Carriacou. During the course of the excursion, Avey undergoes a physical purging, a ritual bath, and the Big Drum Dance, through which she experiences a spiritual rebirth. She reconnects with her African heritage and vows to encourage other African Americans not to lose sight of their culture.

Marshall employs three major themes in Praisesong for the Widow: the individual and collective search for identity, the cost of assimilation and achievement of the American dream, and the reconnection of the Diaspora with the homeland.¹⁴ She divides Praisesong for the Widow into four sections: “Runnagate,” “Sleepers Wake,” “Lave Tete,” and “The Beg Pardon.” Each section of the novel examines a step in the process of reclaiming the self from each of the three types of losses that Avey Johnson experiences. Marshall suggests that African Americans who embrace Eurocentric, New World values sacrifice themselves in the process. Assimilation and material success means severing the ties to one's cultural heritage. The route to recovery is to retrace the journey of the original historical separation, the Middle Passage.

Given the goal of reconnecting the African Diaspora with the homeland, the structure of the novel replicates the journey. The movement of the novel traces the triangular trade route of slavery, reversing its course. It begins in White Plains, New York—the North of freedom and the destination of escaping slaves. From New York, Avey finds herself on an island in the West Indies, the location where acculturation began for many captive Africans. Avey also goes in her dream to an island off the coast of South Carolina where many slaves were smuggled after slavery legally ended. Finally, Avey travels spiritually from Carriacou to her homeland in Africa to be reconnected with her people.

Marshall fills the novel with the cultural signs of African-American and African peoples. Her characters are archetypal but not in a traditional sense. While Avey is the traditional lost soul in search of her identity, she also is a chosen avatar who must accept the charge of learning and transmitting her culture to future generations. Lebert Joseph is Papa Legba, an African deity, God of the Crossroads, Keeper of the Gate. His daughter, Rosalie Parvay is a priestess who completes Avey's ritual cleansing to prepare her for the Big Drum Dance. Marshall employs a great deal of symbolism to assist the reader in identifying these characters and to unravel the novel's meaning.

The title of each section offers insight into the themes of the novel. “Runagate” is taken from Robert Hayden's poem of the same title. A runagate is a fugitive slave, a role Avey assumes in this portion of the novel. She begins running away from her dream of Great Aunt Cuny and as such attempts to escape the call to reclaim her heritage. Great Aunt Cuny represents ancestral knowledge as she tries to take Avey back to Ibo Landing, the passage home to Africa. Here Marshall incorporates an African-American folktale of the magical African type, similar to the flying African. In the Ibo Landing story, a cargo of Ibo Africans were brought ashore off the coast of South Carolina—Tatem Island in the novel. When the Africans looked around them, they could see into the future and became aware of the life of slavery that awaited them. Rather than submit to enslavement, the entire cargo, all chained together, turned and walked across the water back home to Africa.

During each of her childhood visits to Tatem, Avey heard the story of the pure-born Africans who could walk on water. She questioned Aunt Cuny's story only once, when she asked, “But how come they didn't drown, Aunt Cuny?”¹⁵ Avey received a stony stare. Finally Aunt Cuny responded, “Did it say Jesus drowned when he went walking on the water in that Sunday School book your momma always sends with you?” (40). Aunt Cuny's comment not only draws parallels between African spiritual beliefs and Christianity, it also equalizes them. In passing along this knowledge to Avey and reappearing to her in the dream, Aunt Cuny is inviting Avey to claim her African heritage and value it alongside her American beliefs. Avey's refusal to join Aunt Cuny on the walk to Ibo Landing is a rejection of her African past.

In addition to her troubling dreams, Avey is disturbed by other visions on the cruise ship. Each vision draws a connection to the African Diaspora and the ensuing oppression of blacks in America. The Peach Parfait a la Versailles that Avey is unable to swallow refers to the treaty of Versailles, the terms of which included the division of African countries among European powers. The quoit game reminds Avey of police brutality directed toward African-American men. The bikini-clad sunbather who turns into a skeleton as he reaches for Avey symbolizes the stultifying grasp of America. Avey tries to escape all of this as she leaves the cruise ship, aptly named the Bianca Pride—white pride.

The title of part two, “Sleeper's Wake,” refers to both a ritual of death and an awakening. In this section, Marshall textures the Johnsons' lives with elements of their folk culture: blues, spirituals, and dialect poetry. Avey relives her time with her husband and remembers the pressures that turned him into the serious “Jerome” as opposed to her sweet “Jay.” As poor newlyweds, the two enjoyed what Avey describes as the “sweetness” of life. On Saturday nights the couple listened to the blues—Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, or Big Bill Broonzy. At other times, they pretended to dance at the Savoy Ballroom to the music of Mr. B., Lady Day, or Ella. They shared intimate Sunday mornings listening to spirituals and gospel on the radio—the Five Blind Boys singing “Dry Bones,” the Fisk Jubilee Choir, and Wings Over Jordan. Sometimes Jay joined in: “'Them bones, them bones, them-a dry bones,' he sang in a deep field-holler of a voice” (124). Sometimes Jay recited poetry to Avey: Hughes's “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Dunbar's “Little Brown Baby,” or Johnson's “The Creation.” Even their lovemaking was spiritual, evoking “a pantheon of the most ancient deities”: Erzulie, Yemoja, Oya (127).

Although Marshall refers to African-American cultural markers, she does not explain them, expecting the reader to know the titles and authors of the poems or to recognize “Mr. B.” as Billy Eckstine and “Lady Day” as Billie Holiday. She provides the reader a cultural lesson as she takes Avey on her cultural and spiritual journey.

Jay and Avey's romantic days came to an end with the birth of their daughters and mounting financial pressures. He took courses and worked multiple jobs to climb the ladder of success. In the process, the romantic play ended. He became conservative and began to criticize Negroes who had not chosen his path. Jay eventually worked himself to death, and Avey finally realizes during her stay at the hotel, years later, exactly how much they lost. The memories serve not only as a wake, the death ritual of standing watch over Jay's corpse, but also initiate Avey's awakening. Now she can begin the ritual cleansing that will prepare her for her reconnection to her African past.

Section three of the novel, “Lavé Tête,” introduces the African spiritual leaders who assist Avey on her journey. The title refers to a vodun or condomblé ritual head washing in which an initiate from the religious community undergoes a spiritual cleansing. He or she is freed of the mental barriers to spiritual healing.

One of the inscriptions for the section reads, “Papa Legba, ouvri barriere pou' mwê” which translates, “Papa Legba, open the door for me.” The inscription refers to the role that Lebert Joseph will play in Avey's healing. As the God of the Crossroads, Joseph confronts Avey with her cultural dilemma and encourages her choice to move forward with the reclamation process. At the rum shop, when Avey cannot name her ancestor's nation, Joseph is not surprised. “It have quite a few like you. People who can't call their nation,” he says (175). Joseph goes on to explain how he prays for people like Avey:

“That's why,” he was saying, “when you see me down on my knees at the Big Drum singing the Beg Pardon, Idon' be singing just for me one. Oh, no! Is for tout moun',” he cried. … “I has all like you in mind. 'Cause you all so that don' know your nation can't take part when the Beg Pardon or the nation dances is going on.”

(174-5)

Joseph accompanies Avey on the excursion boat and worries about her as the motion makes her ill. She purges physically during the voyage and relives the Middle Passage when several old women take her below on the ship to care for her. In the darkness of the deckhouse on the Emmanuel C, Avey feels like a “multitude … lay packed around her in the filth and stench of themselves” (209). She recognizes the voyage of her ancestors across the Atlantic in the hulls of slave ships.

In this section Marshall once again connects African spiritual belief and Christianity. As Avey is comforted and escorted to the deckhouse by the old women, she remembers the ladies from her childhood church. The women remind her of the church mothers who support the shouters filled with the Holy Spirit. Additionally, Avey remembers a sermon about Christ's resurrection. Marshall employs sermonic tradition in the moving speech and connects Avey's memory with her present experience as well as with the name of the boat, the Emmanuel C, which means the Lord is with us. At the same time, the old women represent the old parents who assist in ritual cleansing, and the scene, no doubt, reflects Avey's spiritual resurrection in both the African and Christian sense.

Once on the island of Carrioucou, Avey undergoes the last of her cleansing rituals. With her mind cleared and her body freed of internal contaminants, it is time for Avey's ritual bath. Rosalie Parvay administers this ritual. She and her housekeeper bathe Avey discreetly. Avey feels renewed after the bath and partakes of a ritual meal. Joseph soon joins the women and escorts them to the location of the Big Drum Dance. He literally opens the gate so that Avey may pass into her final ceremony.

Watching the dancers, Avey is overcome with the urge to join them. She moves into the circle and begins to do the dance she had watched her Aunt Cuny perform back in Tatem: “Her feet of their own accord begin to glide forward, but in such a way they scarcely left the ground. Only the broad heels of her low-heeled shoes rose slightly and then fell at each step” (248). Avey performs the Carriacou Tramp, a variation of a ring shout danced by slaves and their descendants in America. The “nondance” developed when slaves were forbidden to perform the ceremonial dances of Africa during Christian religious services when dance was unacceptable. In order to engage in their sacred African rites without violating the rules of their masters, slaves began the ring shout. To the slaves, it could not be considered a dance because they never crossed their feet or raised one foot entirely from the ground.

Avey's performance of the Carriacou Tramp/ring shout identifies her as a descendant of the Arada nation. Having found her clan, she can return to White Plains with a renewed sense of self. Avey plans to sell her home in New York and return to Tatem. She wants to take her grandchildren there each summer to teach them about their heritage.

Marshall not only reconnects the Diaspora for her character, Avey Johnson. She performs the same service for the reader. In including the orature of African Americans, the spiritual rituals of Haitian and Afro-Brazilian peoples, and the history of the slave trade, she offers a map for reclaiming a heritage that has not been fully lost.

TONI MORRISON'S SONG OF SOLOMON

Like Invisible Man and Praisesong for the Widow, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon advocates a return to familial and cultural sources of wisdom and wholeness. It too is a Bildungsroman, the story of Milkman Dead's education and journey to enlightenment. Milkman's quest is both a Western and West African archetypal journey. He moves from innocence to awareness but also self-centeredness to communal commitment.

Macon Dead Jr., “Milkman,” learns from his father that the road to personal identity is paved with gold. His father, the wealthiest man in town, encourages him to believe that the possession of objects and others leads to self-possession. Macon Sr. counsels his son, “Let me tell you right now the one important thing you'll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself and other people too” (55). Consequently, when Milkman embarks on his journey, he is not in search of his identity but is looking for what he considers his property.

Milkman's aunt, Pilate, opens the novel. She is standing in the street, singing a song she learned as a child as she watches a member of the community who declares he can fly. The song and the power of flight are connected, and frame the novel. Pilate, Macon Sr.'s sister, is poor and has few possessions. Of her material belongings, she cherishes two: the single earring she wears and a green bundle that hangs from her ceiling. Both are, in a sense, gifts from her father. Pilate and Macon's father, a landowner, was killed by covetous whites in full view of his children. Hiding from the killers in a cave, Pilate and Macon were startled by a white man, whom Macon then attacked with a rock and left for dead. Years later, the spirit of Pilate's father came to her and said, “Sing. Sing,” and “You can't just fly off and leave a body” (147). Pilate thinks that her father is troubled about the white man she and Macon left in the cave, so she returned to Pennsylvania, collected the bones from the cave, and carried them back home in the green cloth that now hangs in her home.

Macon remembers the incident in the cave as well, and he recalls that the old man had a sum of gold with him which the children also left behind. Believing that Pilate went back for the gold and that she now keeps it in her green cloth, Macon convinces Milkman to steal it. Finding only bones in the cloth, Milkman deduces that the gold must still be in the cave, and embarks on his journey to retrieve it. The treasure that he discovers, however, is not gold, but his heritage.

Morrison's characters in Song of Solomon are like those in her other novels. They are cultural orphans, African Americans living in isolated communities, in search of themselves and what is valuable from their past. Morrison includes in each of her works the presence of an ancestor, a wise elder, who offers guidance to those who undertake the search for self. Pilate plays this role in Song of Solomon. She is the keeper of the symbols of the Dead family's heritage. Through her, Milkman can find his past, his spirit, and his name.

Song of Solomon marks the first time that Morrison creates a male protagonist, and she draws upon her father's friends to paint an accurate portrait. In an interview with Thomas LeClair, Morrison remembers that she never knew the real names of her father's friends: “They used other names. A part of that had to do with cultural orphanage, part of it with the rejection of the name given to them under circumstances not of their choosing.”¹⁶

Here Morrison describes Milkman and his best friend Guitar. Their names burden them. Milkman earned his first name by nursing too long and lost his true last name courtesy of the Freedman's Bureau. Guitar's first name is an unfulfilled desire, and he rejects his last name because it is a gift of the slave master. Names become central in Song of Solomon, symbolic of one's true identity and the link with the ancestral past. Morrison draws upon African beliefs regarding the importance of names and naming to explain how the motif functions in the novel:

If you come from Africa, your name is gone. It is particularly problematic because it is not just your name but your family, your tribe. When you die, how can you connect with your ancestors if you have lost your name?

(28)

When you die without anyone knowing your name, you become a ghost that haunts, rather than an ancestor—one of the living dead who intercedes on behalf of the clan with the gods. The Deads face this problem in the novel. Morrison notes that “It is if we don't keep in touch with the ancestor that we are, in fact lost.”¹⁷ The family then symbolizes the lost and, therefore, the cultural orphanage that the Dead family suffers.

Due to his spiritually bankrupt state, Milkman has no sense of family, community, or race consciousness. His contempt seems directed at the women in his life. He holds a privileged position in his family and treats his sisters disrespectfully. He cannot acknowledge that they are trapped in their home by their father's control, so he offers them no support or encouragement. He is more disrespectful to his cousin Hagar. The two become involved in an intimate relationship, and Milkman has no difficulty dumping her when he no longer desires her.

Milkman's friend Guitar also accuses him of having no love for his people. Guitar's “love” of black folks is so strong that he joins a group called the Seven Day. The organization exists for the sole purpose of murdering white people in retaliation for the murder of African Americans. When Guitar explains the goals of the group—to make white people think twice before they kill blacks—Milkman does not understand. He feels no allegiance to the cause; thus, Guitar believes he has no commitment to his race.

Macon Dead has elevated himself above his community with his money and has lost all ties with his ancestors because he does not know his name. When he is signed up for the Freedman's Bureau, the drunken government worker who fills out the form locates the information in the wrong boxes. Macon's birthplace becomes his first name and the deceased status of his father becomes his last name. Pilate, on the other hand, can serve as ancestral presence for Milkman because she knows her first name. To name her, Pilate's father opened the Bible and let his finger fall on a word. That word, Pilate, became his daughter's name. After the appropriate nine-day wait was done, Pilate received her name. Her father wrote the word/name on a piece of paper and placed it in the Bible. When Pilate was old enough, she fashioned an earring from her mother's snuff box, folded the paper and placed it inside, pierced her ear, and wore her name for the rest of her life.

In this episode, Morrison follows both a personal and a cultural ritual in Pilate's naming. Morrison's mother, Ramah Wofford, received her name in the same manner as Pilate. Secondly, the nine-day wait comes from the Fon culture of Benin, Africa. Fon children are given a “day name” on the day of birth but do not receive a “personal name” until eight days later. Both rituals tie Morrison's characters to the cultural heritage of black people.

Morrison reclaims African customs and African-American folklore throughout the novel. It is an African custom, for example, that leads Pilate to discover her father's message and subsequently helps Milkman find their family's heritage. Pilate learns from Milkman that her father's body floated up from its shallow grave and someone disposed of it in the cave in which she and Macon hid. When she returned years later, the remains she retrieved were not the white man's but her own father's. In wrapping his remains and taking them with her, Pilate practiced a ritual method of contacting the spirit of the deceased called “carrying the corpse.” The nails and hair of the deceased are rolled in a mat and wrapped in a blue cloth. The survivor then carries the corpse in order to keep the ancestral connection intact.¹⁸

It is this close contact with her father's spirit that allows Pilate to discover that “Sing” is a name rather than a command. Further, “You can't just fly off and leave a body,” is not addressed to her, but to her grandfather, Solomon. The story that Milkman learns about his ancestry and passes on to Pilate comes from an African-American folktale about flying Africans. Several versions of the tale have been recorded. The story is based on the belief that the Gullah (Gola, Africans from Angola) people had special powers, including flight. The flying-African tales are associated with stories of the Ibo people who walked across the ocean back to Africa. Both tale types have come to symbolize the rejection of oppression and the spiritual return “home” after death.

In the case of Milkman's ancestors, Solomon belonged to the clan of Africans who could fly. When he took off for Africa, he tried to take his son Jake, but dropped him. Jake grew up to marry Singing Bird. Jake's “message” to his daughter Pilate is really to his wife and father, both of whom he lost.

Morrison's reclamation of her cultural heritage extends beyond her use of African-American folktales and African rituals. In Song of Solomon she also employs the structure and themes of a traditional African oral epic. “The Son of Nzambi Mpugu” is a traditional quest tale in which a young man is beset with problems because he has lost his heritage. He does not know his mvila, or clan name. In order to reclaim his heritage and save himself, the young man must return to his father's homeland in search of the clan name. He encounters a series of obstacles that test his morality. By overcoming the obstacles, he evolves from “vulnerability and impotence” to “autonomy and strength.”¹⁹

Milkman's journey mirrors that of the son of Nzambi. Both are in search of their clan names. Just as his African precursor must physically defend himself in his homeland, so must Milkman. He must protect himself not only from the men he insults in Danville, but also from Guitar, who wants his life. Guitar has followed Milkman in search of the gold in order to fund a murder for the Seven Days. He believes he has been betrayed when Milkman tells him there is no gold.

Like the son of Nzambi, Milkman also must recognize his father who is mistaken for someone else. All of the Deads mistake the corpse in the green cloth for the patriarch of the family. In discovering his grandfather's mistaken identity, Milkman finds his family's past. And, finally, Milkman must acknowledge his destructive potential by accepting responsibility for his careless use of his cousin Hagar that results in her suicide. When he returns home, Milkman carries Hagar's corpse, in a sense, as Pilate gives him a shoebox of Hagar's belongings. In accepting the box, Milkman assumes responsibility for the pain he caused Hagar and her family. Milkman also must acknowledge that he must stand up to Guitar as well, even if it means taking his life. The novel actually ends with the two in an embrace of death.

Milkman's archetypal journey brings him full circle to Pilate and her song of flight that readers encounter at the beginning of the novel. He no longer is a cultural orphan because he has discovered and reclaimed the true names and ancient properties of his past.

Morrison has called her fiction “literary archaeology,” in that she reclaims from obscurity what she finds valuable in the past. In each of her novels, folk values and folk beliefs are what are important because they sustain her characters through life. For Morrison, folk culture is the foundation on which personal and collective freedom can be built. She advocates in her fiction and criticism that African Americans claim their past in order to claim the center of their existence.

Notes

1. Matthew R. Martin, “The Two-Faced New South: The Plantation Tales of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt,” The Southern Literary Journal 30, no. 2 (spring 1998): 17-37.

2. Following emancipation, several “blue-vein” societies sprung up in which Negroes could gain membership only if their skin was light enough to expose the veins at the wrist. Chesnutt's short story “The Wife of His Youth” describes one such society.

3. Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 131-2.

4. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Partisan Review 25, no. 2 (spring 1958): 220, reprinted in his Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964).

5. Henry B. Wonham, “The Curious Psychological Spectacle of a Mind Enslaved: Charles W. Chesnutt and Dialect Fiction,” The Mississippi Quarterly 51, no. 1 (winter 1977): 55-70.

6. The Pentateuch refers to the first five books of the Bible, which deal with Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage.

7. Deborah McDowell, “Foreword: Lines of Descent/Dissenting Lines,” in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), 288.

8. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: J. B. Lippincott, Inc., 1938).

9. Quoted in Hemenway, 273.

10. Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1953, 1995), 294-302.

11. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1996).

12. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 296.

13. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 181.

14. Diaspora refers to the dispersion outside of their homeland of any indigenous group.

15. Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1983).

16. Thomas LeClair, “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” New Republic (21 March 1981): 25.

17. Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, edited by Mari Evans (New York: Anchor, 1984), 339-45.

18. Jeffrey Parrinder, African Mythology (New York: Bedick, 1967).

19. MacGaffey.