"Manumission and marriage?": freedom, family, and identity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale.

My knowledge, my clothes, my language, even, were shamefully second-hand, made by, and perhaps for, other men. I was living a lie, that was the heart of it. My argument was: whatever my origin, I would be wholly responsible for the shape I gave myself in the future, for shirting myself handsomely with a new life that called me like a siren to possibilities that were real but forever out of my reach.

--Andrew Hawkins, in the process of requesting manumission from Jonathan Polkinghorne in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale

The pursuit of political freedom is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection, and irresponsibility; because it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity, both collective and individual. Freedom thus conceived is precisely at odds with the adolescent pleasures held out by liberal formulations of liberty as license.... Freedom of the kind that seeks to set the terms of social existence requires inventive and careful use of power rather than rebellion against authority; it is sober, exhausting, and without parents.

--Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

Alongside an excerpt from an inaugural moment in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, I begin with an extended epigraph from political philosopher Wendy Brown, whose formulations of freedom echo Johnson's in a number of significant ways. Writing some thirteen years after the publication of Oxherding Tale, Brown similarly proposes an intervention in the prolonged interdisciplinary debates about identity, politics, and enfranchisement in late modern America. While readily conceding the import of identity politics to the evolution of progressive social and cultural engagement, both Johnson and Brown caution against overzealous investment in what Johnson terms "codified and institutionalized" formulations of identity ("Philosophy" 82). In their analyses, a politics that posits a historically fixed "identity" as the premise for social agency--that asserts as its core, for example, an authentic black or female Self inadequately considers a world of possibility beyond the constraints and confines of contemporary injustices. Indeed, for Andrew Hawkins, the protagonist of Johnson's neo-slave narrative, chattel status is fundamentally linked to the "shamefully second-hand" robes of prescriptive identity (17). Accordingly, it is in large part Andrew's philosophical dissatisfaction with the pre-designated parameters of his racially inherited identity that occasions his development of radical new thought (and action) about personal and political freedom, about physical and metaphysical manumission.

In Oxherding Tale, the historical event of American slavery is revisited and revised as a synecdoche for a more broadly conceived notion of African American bondage, past and present, physical, philosophical and psychological. While the plot ostensibly unfolds along the genetic lines of the antebellum slave narrative, following its first-person narrator from birth in bondage to freedom that is confirmed through marital status and property ownership, Johnson's strategic re-appropriation of the form works to address both historical convention and modern readings of the past. (1) History, as revisited through Johnson's novel, is already and conspicuously infused with the prejudices and preoccupations of the modern eye/I. For example, the reader is encouraged--goaded, even--by the narrator who periodically slips into late twentieth-century vernacular, to read the historical plots of black cultural nationalism and second-wave feminism as pretexts to an allegory situated in the nineteenth century. Consider the proto-feminist Flo Hatfield, described as "so liberated from convention that no one in Abbeville would touch her with a barge pole" (44-45), or again, the proto-black nationalist George Hawkins, who protests against engaging in mundane chores, arguing that "this was no work ... for one of the avant-garde of the African Revolution" (22). In this fashion, Johnson suggests that the past is never visible in pure form, and further, that this certainty of uncertainty becomes the vehicle for narrative possibilities of fun and freedom. In such a view, the past is re-presented as at once an inescapable inheritance--for Johnson insists, "all is conserved; all" (176)--and as an irretrievable enigma that must not be romanticized into static form--for the characters that cling to static conceptions of self and society become the novel's most tragic victims.

Among his chief literary influences, Johnson both counts and discounts the Black Arts Movement, whose peak years coincided with the early development of his ambitions toward writing. Johnson cites a 1968 lecture delivered by Amiri Baraka as an early calling that left him in an inspired "daze," eager to direct his artistic attentions to and for black America ("I Call Myself" 19). In the years that followed, Johnson would draft six "apprentice" novels (24), which, he notes, took shape "in the style of naturalistic black authors [he] admired ... and [were] also influenced by black cultural nationalism" (22). And indeed, many of the topical concerns of the Black Arts Movement and of black cultural nationalism continue to figure prominently in Johnson's work, including the legacies of American slavery, the production of the American race concept, and what Ashraf H. A. Rushdy concisely terms "the politics of property, identity, and violence" (5). The scope and method of Johnson's literary projects, however, shift dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as he comes to emphatically reject the politically prescriptive aesthetics of his Black Arts forbears--e.g., Baraka's poetic mandate to "Check yourself, learn who/it is/speaking, when you make some ultrasophisticated point, check / yourself,/ ... / ask / in your black heart who it is you are, and is that image black or white ..." (220-21). Unlike Baraka, Johnson urges a concerted move away from formulaic, always already known blackness. In "Philosophy and Black Fiction," an essay Johnson penned while working on Oxherding Tale, he warns,

   Fresh perception easily sours into formulae, into typicality, which
   is the end of thought. We've reached a point where to be Black
   (And, yes, we are talking about Black literature and Being here) is
   to exist within the easy categories of racial existence outlined by
   Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry, Eugene
   Redmond's Drumvoices, or the visceral but truncated version of
   Roots.... Accepting this interpretation (which, like all true
   perceptions, is partial, one-sided, and badly in need of
   completion) kills as surely as a knife thrust the
   evolution--expansion and efflorescence--of Black life. (82)

Countering the standard of authenticity with that of "expansion and efflorescence," Johnson, two years later, produces Andrew Hawkins, a character he would later name "the first protagonist in black fiction to achieve classically defined moksha (enlightenment)" (Oxherding xvi). Tellingly, Andrew's journey toward moksha (which is in large part coextensive with his movement from bondage to fugitive status to freedom) is plotted through repeated encounters with alluring and dangerous representatives of essentialist thought.

To reiterate, freedom, or moksha, replaces the ideal of authentic identity for Johnson, as the desire for a return to mythic origins (characteristic of much group-based art and activism of the sixties and seventies) is replaced by a gesture toward a risky and unforeseeable future, toward "possibilities that were real but forever out of my reach" (Oxherding 17). Freedom as envisioned by Johnson at this stage in Oxherding Tale requires not only release from physical bondage or reversal of its terms, but the transcendence of slavery's nefarious psychic effects. To approach such a standard, Johnson insists that we consider not only the ominous potentialities of repressive and/or retributive power, but also the positive potentialities of constitutive power, that we, in fact, aspire toward "shirting [ourselves] handsomely" with risky and thus boldly new life possibilities. Like Brown, then, Johnson privileges "freedom of the kind that seeks to set the terms of social existence [, which] requires inventive and careful use of power" (25; italics added).

At the same time, however, Andrew's progression toward freedom occurs alongside a curiously conservative and utopian gesture. While Andrew repeatedly insists upon producing a politics and personality that break free from the strictures of prescriptive identity, his journey is also one that ultimately surrenders to and upholds several central structures of social conventionality: marriage, property ownership, and the patriarchal nuclear family, to name a few. The charting of Andrew's development in terms of these traditional measures of (masculine) selfhood stands uncomfortably alongside Johnson's most promising formulations of radical political freedom. How, when, and why are conservation and conservatism extolled in Johnson's novel, and what might these nostalgic celebrations mean for the coincident pursuit of a risky and unforeseen future?

Early in the text, Andrew Hawkins approaches his stepfather/master, Jonathan Polkinghorne, to request manumission. A twenty-year-old, naive but theoretically savvy "mulatto" slave, Andrew constructs his entreaty as a simultaneous appeal to the high ideals of sociopolitical ethics, intellectual integrity, romantic love, and filial obligation. Together with his above-cited desire to participate in determining the shape and trajectory of the future, Andrew regards his manumission as the precondition for producing a freer world for his loved ones; he wishes, upon emancipation, to work to earn money that will enable him to purchase his lover, Minty, his father, George, and his stepmother, Mattie.

Freedom, Andrew explains, is the prerequisite for and the desired end of meaningful human existence. Exceeding legal status (though Andrew does, at this juncture, believe that the inauguration of free life requires a deed of manumission), it implies the complex responsibilities and rewards of adulthood. For Andrew, freedom materializes in part as a commitment to the creative, ever-evolving pursuit of an ideal Self--that "siren of possibilities that were real but forever out of my reach" (18)--but it is also comprised in intersubjective responsibility. As for Brown, freedom for the adolescent Andrew presumes a mature and responsible understanding of and accountability to the complex relationships between self and society. Accordingly, the idealized free Self toward whom Andrew strives becomes imaginable in the company of other free subjects. It is, after all, not only Andrew's dissatisfaction with the parameters of his life/identity, but also his love for the enslaved Minty that compel his appeal to Jonathan Polkinghorne. Gazing at his lover, Andrew reflects, "And, on God's own truth, I promised in that evanescent instant that she and I, George and Mattie [his father and stepmother]--all the bondsmen in Cripplegate's quarters and abroad--would grow old in the skins of free man" (15). Thus Andrew's desire to free himself emerges coextensively with his desire to free his family and, more generally, with his vision of diasporic communal freedom. (2)

Portrayed as such, the freedom that Andrew requests is sharply at odds with Jonathan Polkinghorne's presumably "free" life of indulgence, ignorance and comfort. Andrew's request indeed not only challenges Jonathan's status as propertyholder, but it moreover challenges his master's foundational values and world view. Andrew's depiction of freedom, in short, exposes both the moral failings of his master, and the degree to which the latter remains existentially unfree. Submitting his life's trajectory to inheritance, convention and chance, Jonathan rejects the social and philosophical responsibilities of seeking out freedom, of "shirting [himself] handsomely" (17) with a life and selfhood of his own making. Andrew's articulated desire for meaningful physical and metaphysical freedom thus underscores Jonathan's individual and symbolic hypocrisy. Failing--perhaps deliberately--to comprehend the scope of Andrew's request, a befuddled Jonathan scratches his head and blankly repeats, "You got out of bed to tell me all this? ... Manumission and marriage?" (18).

Though Jonathan's question is rendered in a comically obtuse fashion, it serves to highlight tensions between freedom and family, identity and community, which repeatedly resurface to trouble Andrew. Indeed, the scene of collective racial empathy from which I quote above is directly preceded by Andrew's appeal to God to "Give me Minty" (15; original italics). Andrew's vision of freedom, therefore, is from the start a conflicted one, which simultaneously wants the emancipation and subjection of those around him. Thus, even as Andrew critiques Jonathan's vision of freedom, Johnson critiques Andrew's and, through him, a tradition of androcentrism prominent within the genre of the slave narrative. The exaggerated representation of Andrew coveting Minty in the name of freedom self-consciously resonates with contemporary feminist critiques of the function of marriage in slave narratives, such as Carla Kaplan's claim that

   [i]t is marriage, after all, that engenders contractarian
   individuality. It establishes male possessive individuality through
   the exchange of women who mediate social relations not by being
   possessors of property but by being property. The entry into
   individuality available to [Frederick] Douglass necessitates a
   woman's exclusion from it. (109)

Andrew's desire for emancipation at this juncture, then, is at once earnest, generous, selfish, and insufficiently informed--a befitting point of narrative departure. More worrisome is the shape that Andrew's quest for freedom takes, and the coda it ultimately reaches. Specifically, if as Johnson and a number of his readers have asserted, Andrew triumphantly achieves freedom/enlightenment by the novel's end, then what sort of negotiation between family and self, collective consciousness and autonomy, legacy and originality, makes this narrative closure possible? (3) Minty, whose beauty instigates Andrew's quest for freedom, is all but forgotten by mid-text, and perishes grotesquely by the novel's end. George dies in bondage, and Mattie disappears altogether. What happens over the course of the novel to Andrew's early need to see George, Mattie, and Minty living lives of freedom alongside himself? In what ways and to what degree is Andrew's accomplishment of freedom/moksha dependent upon the elevation of his conservative desires for masculine privilege and hegemonic citizenship, and the subordination of his progressive desires for interpersonal responsibility and democratic life?

Wendy Brown's formulation of radical political freedom as necessarily "without parents" provides a provocative point from which to initiate this exploration of Andrew's negotiations of freedom and family. To be sure, Brown offers this turn of phrase figuratively to highlight the limits of thinking of freedom as solely a reaction against authority. Her extended argument, however, would seem to invite a more expansive interpretation of the phrase, whereby freedom also includes a deliberate and strategic severance from the past. (4) For Brown, echoing Nietzsche, the compulsive desire to revisit a haunting, unresolved past presents an imminent danger to the present and future of political subjects. The systemically disenfranchised subject is tempted to find solace in a strategically revalued "identity" characterized by rage and righteousness, but this identity proves grossly unemancipatory, ossifying instead into a "starkly accountable yet dramatically impotent" state (69). Circumscribed by an unyielding and yet unrecoverable past, politicized identity for Brown delimits political possibility, preserving as its core a cyclical script of injustice and moral vengeance, of trauma and the doomed, repetitive attempt to redress that past. (5) Meaningful attempts at freedom, then, must break from an overdetermined sense of history; they must "[triumph] over the past by reducing its power, by remaking the present against the terms of the past--in short, by a project of self-transformation that arrays itself against its own genealogical consciousness" (72).

Similar to Brown, whose focus is the "public" subject, Cathy Caruth theorizes possession by an irretrievable and yet unrelinquishable "private" history as the very essence of individual traumatic experience: "The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess" (5). In Caruth's formulation, trauma occurs and recurs when historical events appear simultaneously as irrefutable truths, and as being so far beyond the scope of what is imaginable that the traumatized subject is left unable to integrate the event into her understanding of the world. Thereafter, trauma is comprised in the mind's "insistent return" (5) to that unintegrated moment that represents, for the traumatized, "the crisis of truth" (6). The challenge of healing, then, exists in the internally riven need to "relieve suffering ... without eliminating the force and truth of the reality that trauma survivors face and quite often try to transmit to us" (vii).

In the character of George Hawkins, Johnson appears to make a case for reading black cultural nationalist representations of African American identity as inherently infused with self-defeating, traumatic memory. In such a reading, Andrew's journey to "healing," freedom, and enlightenment or moksha, requires a difficult ideological rejection of his father, which in turn functions symbolically as a rejection of African American group-based trauma as the primary basis for politicized identity: "I rejected (in George) the need to be an untouchable" (142; original italics). As suggested in the figure of Andrew, personal and political racial "healing" demands a dramatic transformation of one's relationship to the past, a deliberate "un-parenting" in which the past is confronted, re-appropriated, and thereby divested of its absolute authority over the present and future. Andrew must cease to understand himself as an effect of history, and instead realize his role in the making and remaking thereof.

This "triumph," however, is not without its complications, for we must also consider that in his Zarathustra-like moment of remaking and therein reclaiming the past, Andrew transcends blackness only by adhering to a rigid code of specifically white masculinity. His reformulated identity, in other words, does not break or transcend the code of violent (gendered and classed) racial binarism so much as it resituates him in a more powerful position within that scheme. In the novel's culminating chapter, Andrew redeems George by laying claim to those components of selfhood that eluded the father (property ownership, state-sanctioned marriage and kinship, etc.), but he also betrays George by turning a blind eye to the social infrastructures (slavery, patriarchy) that enable his albeit transgressive "passing." As Rushdy persuasively argues, "Andrew passes not so much when he denies his father and his race, or when he adopts a false history of the Harris family, but rather when he forgets the forms of violence that had earlier defined his social condition. He becomes white when he forgets how whiteness is made" (198). Thus, what Andrew rejects in George as part of his healing process is more than "the need to be an untouchable." He also rejects an expansive ideal of shared political freedom, that previously expressed need to see himself as one among a society of free subjects. How, then, does Andrew's strategic rejection of George transpire? How radical are its terms, and how thorough is its practice?

In an ironic retelling of various cultural myths of race and sex which form the farcical origination myth of Andrew Hawkins, George is cast out of the master's house for passively--though competently--complying with the plantation mistress's apparently overwhelming--if unconscious--sexual appetite. In a scene triggered by Jonathan's drunken suggestion of role-reversal and George's inability to give meaningful dissent, Anna's ungovernable, and here, racially taboo desire becomes the grounds for her humiliation, Jonathan's jealousy, Mattie's anger, and George's demise. Successively, Jonathan and Anna summon and reject George's sexuality without regard for George as a sexual (or social) subject. (6) Because of his race and caste, George is unable to refuse sex with Anna (engineered in part by Jonathan), or to navigate the sex act in a self-preserving fashion. George's powerlessness is made manifest in this episode of absurd and intimate objectification, and is fully realized in the traumatic "crisis of truth" that follows. His precarious but heretofore relatively comfortable life as a "house" slave is abruptly ended, as "George, who looked astonished for the rest of his life, even when sleeping, was sent to work in the fields" (7). Hereupon, George's profoundly attacked psychic self undergoes a dramatic rebirth, emerging in the model of contemporary politicized identity.

Consistent with Caruth's formulations, the post-traumatic self that George assiduously (re)produces returns "insistently" to the unintegrated moment of trauma: the moment before expulsion--that impossible and coerced role-reversal, the scene of the slave in the master's house (or more specifically, bedroom). It is in the fantasy of the retributive return to this moment that George cultivates his new racial politics. Underlying his vigorous commitment to the "world-historical mission of Africa" (21) is George's wounded and vengeful conviction that "you gonna feel daid ... until you back in the Big House and Master Polkinghorne is down heah--permanently" (105).

This strategy of reactive identification, however, proves insufficient. "Revenge as a 'reaction,' "writes Brown, "[as] a substitute for the capacity to act, produces identity as both bound to the history that produced it and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history" (73). Andrew says something very similar about George:

   My father kept the pain alive. He needed to rekindle the racial
   horrors, revive old pains, review disappointments like a sick man
   fingering his sores.... Grief was the grillwork the emotional
   grid--through which George Hawkins sifted and sorted events,
   simplified a world so overrich in sense it outstripped him. (142;
   original italics)

As represented by Andrew, George's racial identity is invariably constituted as vengeful reaction, as a moralized response to social disempowerment. This moral identity-as-reaction is in turn inherently, incontestably tied to the perpetuation of traumatic legacy. Grief, Andrew tells us, mediates George's relation to the world, as pain becomes a necessary precondition for a legible enactment of black identity or "Self." For, as Brown eloquently offers, "Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future--for itself or others--that triumphs over this pain" (74; italics added).

George thus emerges as a character with weak ties to the future, whose life and legacy consist predominantly of bodily, political, and metaphysical enslavement. Andrew's pursuit of radical freedom, then, transpires in part as a rejection of George's racially overdetermined Self. For Johnson, it seems, identity politics come to resemble the repetitive, self-defeating psychic apparatus of trauma. Fixed, compulsive, and dependent on an unintegrated past, politicized identity, like trauma, threatens to punish the subject through inflexible repetition. Understood as such, George's investment in politicized identity becomes an obstacle to the ideal of freedom, which Andrew must confront and refuse in order to progress.

I do not mean to suggest here that politicized identity serves no positive function, or that Johnson's narrative advances such an absolutist stance. Johnson advocates not a callous politics of "forgetting"--what some might rightly term a reprehensible forgiveness--but a rejection of formulations of Self built solely upon the fixed historical given of oppression. As Andrew's insightful nemesis Horace Bannon (a slavecatcher whose telling alias is "the Soulcatcher") warns, the statically conceived self ("identity') invites enslavement or death. Divulging the secret to his slavecatching and soulcatching success, he remarks, "You got to have somethin' dead or static already inside you--an image of yoself--fo' a real slavecatcher to latch onto" (174). Andrew's father, George, he contends, was his quintessential victim: "He was carryin' fifty-'leven pockets of death in him anyways, li'l pools of corruption that kept him so miserable he begged me, when Ah caught up with him in Calhoun Falls, to blow out his lights" (174).

Andrew's rejection of George, furthermore, is counterbalanced by an important scene of filial reconciliation at the novel's end. And indeed, throughout the text, Andrew yearns for his father's approval despite himself, and repeatedly measures himself against George's (unwittingly ambivalent) dictate that he "be y'self" (21, 35). (7) (We might also read this fatherly advice as an invocation of Johnson's literary forefather, Ralph Ellison, whose "invisible" narrator's similarly embittered grandfather offers the following deathbed advice: "our life is a war.... Live with your head in the lion's mouth." [16]) Some, including Gary Storhoff, in fact read the novel's end as Andrew's return to an (albeit reconceptualized) ideal of the father. In Storhoff's view, "Andrew in his enlightenment is reconnected with that to which he has always belonged, and apart from which he could not exist: his father" (92). In such a reading, Andrew's triumph, or ultimate freedom, exists in his ability to divest George's identity of its repetitive injury, which enables him to embrace George again. Reimagining and reproducing George through the image on Horace Bannon's dynamic "tattoo" cemetery, Andrew reclaims and frees history by "giving up its economy of avenging and at the same time perpetuating hurt" (Brown 73). Describing his vision of a free/enlightened (after)world, Andrew explains:

   [T]he profound mystery of the One and the Many gave me back my
   father again and again, his love, in every being from grubworms to
   giant sumacs, for these too were my father and, in the final face I
   saw in the Soulcatcher, which shook tears from me--my own face ....
   I was my father's father, and he my child. (176)

Here, Andrew is able to assimilate his father into his redemptive retelling of history by destabilizing George's role as "parent." In this sense, Johnson's narrative coincides both with Brown's vision of freedom as that in which one must participate "without parents," and with Caruth's notion of healing as a negotiation between the need to retell and the need to reappropriate traumatic experience to make it one's own. At the same time, however, Andrew comes into power (i.e., the ability to participate in the making of the world) precisely by assuming the role of the patriarch--both in Bannon's "tattoo," wherein Andrew figuratively births his father and implicitly, his history, and in his daily life, where Andrew as bourgeois householder together with his wife Peggy, "[turn] to the business of rebuilding, with our daughter Anna (all is conserved; all), the world" (176). Oxherding Tale thus ends by returning to the familial/r trope, even as it does so in the name of revision, newness, freedom, and enlightenment. Contrary to the aforementioned critique of institutional marriage embedded in Johnson's description of Andrew's fantasy of Minty, the novel's end appears to endorse the consecrating power of marriage by encoding Andrew's attainment of maturity and moksha therein. Indeed, it is through the relatively unproblematized resuscitation of this decidedly imperfect ritual that Andrew becomes legible as a citizen (as opposed to slave or fugitive status), and it is as such a patriarchal citizen that he makes his final ideological claims of liberating universalism. Additionally, while I concur with Johnson and Byrd that Andrew's narrative trajectory of repetition with change is consistent with Johnson's philosophy of Being, I wish to question the degree to which the change that is wrought meets an acceptable standard of radical freedom. (8)

As Rushdy, Jennifer Hayward, and Richard Hardack have cogently argued, Johnson's standard of liberating universalism--the ideology that finally allows Andrew to turn without danger to the past and optimistically to the future--is troubling here, for it seems to draw a false equation between de-racialized universality and whiteness. Hardack, for instance, finds that Johnson "ultimately promotes an evolution toward whiteness as a progression toward universality and the transcendence of history" (1037). Put another way, the development of Andrew's status from enslaved African American to fugitive "mulatto" to white bourgeois householder as a model for attaining moksha would seem to reify race-based social stratification and contradict the ideal of radical freedom laid out at the onset of Andrew's journey.

Contrary to the literary conventions of the "passing" novel, which typically dictate tragedy, as the protagonist's individual efforts vis a vis the structures of race and racism prove futile, Andrew's enlightenment and Oxherding Tale's narrative triumph coincide with his successful passing into the "white world." "Passing," as reconfigured by Johnson, ceases to be a doomed transgression foretelling narrative resolution in the ironic reiteration of the "color line," and instead is realized as a naively optimistic metaphor for racial transcendence. If, as Rushdy (among others) has suggested, "whiteness" exists as a non-vacant identity category premised on dangerous amnesia, much as "blackness" is premised on systemic oppression (198), then Andrew's passing is a muted triumph if it is a triumph at all. The forgetting that occurs here exceeds the terms recommended by Brown, for Andrew forgets not only the debilitating pain of his past, but also the social structures that allow him, but none of his kin, to "[blunder] into manumission" (Oxherding 159). Andrew's assimilation, I am arguing, tacitly accepts the terms of unfreedom with which the "white world" is negotiated.

Also questionable is the degree to which Andrew's journey approximates an adequate standard of radical political freedom with respect to gender. Specifically, even if we are able to accept Johnson's reconciliation of family and freedom, a traumatic past and a hopeful future through Andrew and George's relationship, is such reconciliation possible only between men, and more worrisomely, only through the repeated subjection of women (specifically, through the reproduction of the patriarchal nuclear family)? Is such reconciliation possible only through, still more succinctly, "manumission and marriage?"

It is useful at this juncture to revisit Johnson's distinctions between life and philosophy, between the complex, regenerative process of "Being" on the one hand, and attempts to approximate, rationalize, and subject Being on the other. Early on, Andrew's tutor, the eccentric Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, explains that the former is the province of Woman, and the latter that of Man. In Ezekiel's view, "All our works, male works, will perish in history--history, a male concept of time, will vanish, too, but the culture of women goes on, the rhythms of birth and destruction, the Way of absorption, passivity, cycle and epicycle" (31). While Andrew regards his mentor's formulations with rightful skepticism, questioning whether his source is an oracle of truth or a "crackpot Anarchist" (32), Ezekiel remains at the very least an influential contributor to Andrew's developing understanding of gender, life, and philosophy. And Andrew, in like fashion, will come to wonder whether "men were unessential, and in the deepest violation of everything we valued in Woman" (55), while in the same breath resenting the perceived apathetic omnipotence of Woman-as-Being:

   On my way to the hills, I entertained, nervously, pulling at my
   fingers, the possibility that the sexual war was a small skirmish--a
   proxy war, with women as the shock troops for a power that waited,
   mocking the thoroughly male anxiety for progress, ready to
   (s)mother the fragile male need to build temples to the moon;
   ready, as in Patrick's case, to remind us, without hope of
   redemption, that though men were masters--even black men, in the
   sexual wars--we could not win. (55-56)

The familiar dualism of women as both mystical creatures of nature and malevolently whimsical wielders of power is checked, at least in part, by Johnson's ironic authorial eye. The reader is informed, for example, that even as Ezekiel defines Woman as his object of study, "women frightened him" (29). (9) Similarly, Andrew's youthful romanticization of Minty's feminine form is rendered with such comic hyperbole that the reader cannot help but note Andrew's naivete, and bear it in mind as s/he encounters his grandiose theories of sex and Being. The mystification of women that pervades Johnson's novel is thus explicitly discredited (to a degree) by the author's strenuous efforts to expose the questionable authority of the source. Further, Johnson readily and repeatedly draws comparisons between the predicaments of (white) women and African Americans (men), suggesting at once the constructedness, the immorality, and the disabling effects of gender-based social stratification. "Again and again, and yet again," he reminds the reader, "the New World said to blacks and women, 'You are nothing.' It had the best of arguments to back this up: nightriders" (76). In these ways, the theme of what Johnson acknowledges as "genderized" Being (55) is contested and contextualized as a troubling, if pervasive, mythology. How, then, does mythology structure our understanding of the real? Specifically, how does a mythology of Woman as simultaneously that which cannot be but must be subjected inform Andrew's heterosexual relationships? Does such a premise--even if it is understood to be a fictive cultural production--allow for a genuine and meaningful pursuit of freedom? And to what degree does Johnson stand outside of these relationships as knowing critic? My contention here is that Johnson writes from inside this mythological construct, that he is at times remarkably aware and critical of it, but that it permeates the text on a subconscious level as well.

It is through his convoluted relationship with the irreverent slaveholder Flo Hatfield that Andrew begins to think in complex ways about sexual politics. Clever, sharp-tongued, and literally emasculating, "so liberated from convention that no one in Abbeville would touch her with a barge pole" (44-45), Flo might be compellingly read as a cutting--though at times, unexpectedly sympathetic--satire of contemporary feminism (much as George reads as a chronologically displaced black nationalist). Through his representation of Flo, Johnson's critique of identity politics as a modern political strategy is extended beyond the paradigm of black cultural nationalism to a separatist, self-aggrandizing brand of feminism that composes itself in reaction to and as the reversal of masculinist power. One example of this brand of feminism is suggested by the Redstockings' mandate that "we regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture.... In fighting for our liberation, we will always take the side of women against their oppressors" (128-29). (10)

As Byrd rightly observes, Flo is "dangerously solipsistic" (81), literally aspiring to the power of Leviathan at the expense of many men's lives. I would add, however, that Flo's self-righteous pursuit of her sexual desires is not arbitrarily brought about, but emerges--as for George--through tangible experiences of identity-based disenfranchisement, followed by identity politics' logic of reduction and reversal. Again aligning the social dispossession of white women and African Americans, Andrew reflects, "Predictably, we fought this massive assault on the ego, even inverted the values of whites (or men)--anything to avoid self-obliteration" (76; original italics). Accordingly, feminine sexuality, the source of Flo's oppression, is revalued and reclaimed as the basis for power, for politicized, enfranchised identity, rather than as a site of loss, lack, or submission:

"What do you feel when you touch me?" [Andrew asks Flo.]

"Me." Now her lips were on my fingertips. "I feel my own pulse. My own sensations." She laughed. "I have pulse everywhere."

"That's all you feel?"

"Yes." (53) (11)

Consistent with Johnson's earlier formulations of identity politics, Flo's "Way" is seductive in various ways, often giving the impression of indulgent autonomy, but ultimately proving incompatible with a politics of radical freedom for both herself and Andrew. Under Flo's rule, the "I" is constructed as a fixed locus of power (as that which is "all" and "everywhere"), thereby foreclosing the possibility of freedom as a shared, democratically malleable future. Flo's attempts to break free from the normative strictures of "appropriate" femininity are revealed to be devastatingly misguided, for rather than challenging the paradigm of masculine power, she reproduces it (with an important reversal, of course), and in the process, subjects her life and Andrew's to "a male fantasy ... with both Flo and me victims enslaved to an experience--a part of the masculine ego--that neither of us truly wanted" (71).

But what is it that Andrew ultimately rejects in Flo? It is neither her stagnating recourse to identity politics or her callous use of power alone that Andrew refuses, but, rather her callous use of power as Woman/Nature/Being. (12) The proverbial last straw in Andrew and Flo's relationship is, after all, not her cruel mistreatment of all of Leviathan's slaves, nor her imposition of destructive drug addiction on Andrew, nor even coercive sex per se, but rather sex that demonstrates Andrew's extraneousness as a man:

   Then Flo began to rub against me in a raw, hard way. It was, I
   thought, like using me as a kind of scratching post. What the
   action said was: What good are you? You have failed to rouse me. Be
   still while I satisfy myself. And ever she did this the pain was
   quick, the insult deep, the self-hatred more complete, and I did
   not, as she worked toward detumescence, truly exist. (73)

Andrew's resentment in this scene explicitly recalls his earlier-stated masculine anxiety that "men [are] unessential" (55), banished to a life of surrogate, and at best, artificial meaning. In this final sex act between the two, Flo generically, impersonally appropriates Andrew as a sexual object (a gesture that recalls George's coerced participation in sex with Anna Polkinghorne). Further, while engaged with Flo, Andrew becomes unable to remember the face of his mute, infinitely appropriable lover Minty, a loss that he equates with the loss of masculine selfhood. In a defensive attempt to interrupt this perceived assault, Andrew physically attacks Flo, and in so doing, regains a sense of identity. "Oh, I feel fine now" (74), he informs a bewildered Flo, upon truncating her sexual climax through violent physical force.

Can this deeply troubling scene of domestic violence be read as one that initiates Andrew's freedom? Certainly, the text encourages us to believe that freedom is not possible (for anyone) at Leviathan, and certainly, the venues of protest available to Andrew are scant at best. But what are the implications of imagining a black male freedom predicated on the rejection of specifically feminine white power? This question is particularly important if we read Andrew's attack against Flo not only as an individual, or "private," event, but also as an avenging rewriting of George's symbolic encounter with Andrew's white, and similarly seductive/dangerous mother, Anna Polkinghorne. Andrew's assault on Flo operates as an assertion of black male politicized identity in spite of Johnson's critiques thereof, and it does so explicitly through the rejection of a white feminist identity politics.

Simultaneously interpellated by cultural mythology and legal prohibition, called upon to exhibit extraordinary sexual prowess and to eschew the subjective experience of his own interracial sexual desire, the son finds himself reliving the preface to his father's demise. In these scenes, Johnson turns the "myth of the black rapist" on its head, rendering both George and Andrew as disempowered pawns in a game of feminized white sexual politics. While allowing father and son to revel in their mythic sexual reputation (in a way that at once seems to echo and poke fun at Black Arts conceptions of black male virility), Johnson pointedly and problematically redirects the "blame," proposing the inverse of the standard interracial rape plot: she wanted it, he had no choice. Ostensibly, Andrew's act of violence revises the tragic life of his father, for whereas George's submission to Anna yields the perpetuation of his slave status, Andrew's subordination of Flo (which, importantly, is physical, not sexual) (en)genders a new understanding of self and an accompanying new horizon of freedom. By "mastering" the racial/sexual shame that plagued his father, Andrew ascends to a world of greater freedom. Indeed, the novel's final scene reinscribes this notion of the subordination of (white) women's sexuality as the premise for (black) men's political and philosophical agency. Here, as Andrew Hawkins-turned-William Harris is shown Horace Bannon's tapestry of "tattoos," and through this image is also shown enlightenment, Flo is rendered as the passive sex object of one of her former male victims. Where once she represented the immanent threat of unwieldy feminine sexuality and, more specifically, untouchable white feminine sexuality, Flo is, in this picture of enlightened Being, a fleeting, compliant object of masculine desire, who is given "a goodly stroke" (175). Reversing the terms of the black rapist allegation and conquering Flo in the fantasy of that reversal, this scene would appear to be the one "successful" endeavor of politicized identity in Johnson's novel.

Another important possible interpretation exists and must be read alongside my above analysis of Andrew's participation in an androcentric legacy of purported freedom and enlightenment. Andrew's violent reaction against Flo, I believe, is consistent with Brown's critique of identity politics as perpetuating a hopelessly recriminatory cycle that reproduces an utterly unproductive stalemate between variously interested social groups. For Brown, borrowing Nietszche's concept of ressentiment or the "triumph of the weak as weak," the moral vengeance that lives within identity politics is harmful to both its bearer (consider George's pain) and its recipient. The subordinated class expresses its injury in ways incompatible with relief, while the subordinating class is likely to incur "guilt turned to resentment" (67). Reacting defensively to moral attack, the subordinating class acts to reinstate its hegemony in the moral terms set out by the injured. Thus, for example, allegations of reverse racism are made, or feminism itself becomes "the f-word," and through these acts, the original pain of the subordinated class is revived, and their righteousness rekindled.

As I have outlined above, Flo's character is developed in accordance with the standard formula of identity politics: she produces a self-righteous "I"--in the form of unapologetically dominant sexual agency--at the site of her social disempowerment, which is perceived by Andrew as an affront to his masculine integrity. Flo's claims to sexual rights and recognition are met with Andrew's (and Johnson's) swift move to "put her in her place," not through a philosophical discounting (which Andrew would certainly be capable of) but through her bodily and psychic humiliation. Whereas George--who to some degree at least, shares in Andrew's "identity"--is redressed with words, Flo, whose identity as woman is perceived as an imminent threat, is redressed with felt, moralizing vengeance. My point is not that Flo is a kind or progressive lover, but that her lover's and the author's treatment of her as woman/feminist is marked by guilty anxiety as well as the recriminatory anger of ressentiment-infused identity politics.

Flo's villainy is contrasted with the benevolence of her successor, the similarly clever but sexually benign, socially marginalized, and eminently good Peggy Undercliff. Like Flo, Peggy knowingly exceeds the parameters of stereotypically "appropriate" femininity (dumb submission, lack of intellectual curiosity or prowess, irresolution, etc.). Again like Flo, Peggy is born into considerable socioeconomic privilege, such that her local political power, if indirect, is still more than negligible. Whereas Flo challenges her experience of disenfranchisement, however by constructing and enacting a fantasy of vengeful, self-centered sovereignty, Peggy more closely approximates Ezekiel and Andrew's philosophies of feminine Being, absorbing the triumphs and injustices of the world, and eluding sentiments of resentment and recrimination even in the context of dissent. As Storhoff notes, "She seems to have an intuitive, 'mindful' understanding that every moment, every choice has intrinsic moral value" (82). Indeed, as readers have noted, Peggy's appearance in the novel provides the plot development through which Andrew/William matures, and begins his "moral transformation" (Storhoff 84). William R. Nash, for instance, finds that Peggy "becomes for Andrew the salvation that Marx described to Ezekiel" (115).

But to what degree does Peggy's "Way" of uncommon compassion and inquisitiveness alongside curiously hackneyed domestic sentimentality approximate freedom, and to what degree do her tendencies toward "absorption" and "passivity" (to revisit Ezekiel's formulations) invite an undesirable and certainly unfree co-optation by the regulatory conventions of white bourgeois family life? Whereas Johnson's representation of Flo suggests a complex, if troubling, engagement with sexual politics as an integral part of grappling with the Self, his recourse to Peggy appears as a capitulation to an idealized notion of marital unity. Recall, too, the earlier cited scene in which Johnson critiques Andrew's naive, if consuming, desire to marry Minty. Whereas early in the novel a knowing narrator winks at the reader while describing Andrew's formulaic desire, and indeed goes so far as to illuminate the tensions between "manumission and marriage," by novel's end the narrator's skepticism appears to wane considerably. Turning to the sentimental image of transcendent, unifying love, the grounding political traditions of marriage--coverture, and the subjection of "private" life to state regulation, to name two examples--are suddenly dismissed as worldly concerns beneath the nobler virtue of romantic love. Consider the scene of Andrew/William's and Peggy's wedding, which begins as a "gaudy" and "unnecessary" performance (140), a parody of gender-inscribing ritual played out by two knowing cynics. Despite their skepticism, it soon becomes a ceremony whose ritual import overwhelms the cynicism of its participants:

   And, all at once, the guests weren't there. Only the Minister, the
   Woman, the Man. We stood, I felt, translated, lifted a few feet off
   the ground, exchanging replies in old, old voices in a different
   tongue we borrowed from our better selves--the people we were
   intended to be--some parallel world ... a realm of changeless
   meaning for which the only portal was surrender. (140)

To whom do Andrew/William and Peggy surrender? To what vision of history, with what sorts of investments in power, discipline, and variously construed forms of unfreedom? The way in which Andrew/William revisits the past here is decidedly different from the complex, rigorous, and deeply challenging process by which he negotiates Self, family, and legacy in relation to his father. Andrew/William's exhaustive processes of grappling with guilt, questioning assumptions and conventions, and arriving at a studied understanding of "being and race" are sharply at odds with the epiphany of self-transcending marital union, which by contrast, appears unearned and cliche. Tellingly, while the former processes culminate in an ever-dynamic, interactive vision of the past alongside the present, the latter culminates in a "realm of changeless meaning," a mythic notion of the past as a grand and unalterable force that consumes and appropriates subjects in the present.

If, as I have suggested above, we read Peggy as a symbolic revision of Anna Polkinghorne and Flo Hatfield (i.e., as draft three of the white mistress who must be subdued), then the implications of gender-based unfreedom appear still more vexing. For whereas Anna and Flo are "inassimilable" characters in part because they refuse to be defined by and through Andrew, Peggy becomes assimilable--in fact, becomes the reproductive organ of Andrew's tale--precisely by her contrasting eagerness to be addressed as "Wife." I do not wish to argue that Peggy and Andrew's relationship is entirely without redemptive features, or even glimpses of freedom. However, the ideal of collaborative union embodied by the two seems more often than not to collapse into the very tropes of heterosexual romance that have repeatedly proven problematic for women in pursuit of both personal and political freedom. As Hayward observes:

   Peggy first appears as an independent, intelligent woman with a
   highly developed sense of irony. All this changes after her
   marriage, which Andrew presents as her salvation since it (he)
   rescues her from the "metaphysical outrage" of lesbianism or old
   maidenhood. Immediately after the ceremony, Peggy acquires the
   habit of crying, happily, at the drop of a hat, as if this is a
   positive sign of femininity she had been obliged to repress.
   (68-69)

In Hayward's reading, the change in Peggy's behavior encourages the reader (and Andrew) to believe that her earlier discontent was not a political symptom of women's oppression, but a romantic symptom of her bathetic lovelessness. Andrew's appearance thus "frees" her to assume the complementary feminine "Way" of "absorption and passivity." What is more, her assumption of the position of dominated Being allows Andrew to finally triumph over his enslavement by a deep-seated masculine anxiety. With the curiously abstracted declaration "Wife bore a girl" (176), Andrew situates himself as the husband and father of Being rather than as an alienated and irrelevant outsider to Being. Peggy's intuitive but necessarily naive body promises to materialize in his image the vision of universal integration that Andrew/ William arrives at philosophically, and this symmetry comprises Andrew's final attainment of moksha.

With his concluding utterance of (self-) possession, "this is my tale" (176), it would appear that Andrew/William has made noteworthy progress, over the course of the novel, in the stated goal of becoming an active participant in the shaping of his future. In ways that I have explored at length, Andrew's narrative meaningfully suggests that both political and psychic freedom require the abandonment of history's false promise of redemption, even as they also require a mindful integration of Self into a grander scheme of (historical) Being. (13) Less convincing, however, is Andrew/ William's implied response to Jonathan Polkinghorne's provocative question, "manumission and marriage?" For if, as I believe, Andrew/William's explorations of "Being and race" meaningfully, if incompletely, probe at the tensions between self and society as well as between history and modernity, then his explorations of Being and gender are left disappointingly unresolved. Woman remains, to redirect the words of the eccentric teacher Evelyn Pomeroy, "a creature of romance" (127)--ultimately unknowable, and only assimilable once she has been subjected. (14)

Moreover, it would appear that the shortcomings of Johnson's treatment of gender and race coincide with those moments in which Andrew's narrative trajectory departs from a standard of dynamism, newness, and unpredictability: for example, where Andrew's sexuality is consolidated in the conventional form of "husband," or where his racial identification seems to lose its urgent ambivalence. Returning to Brown's formulations of radical political freedom, wherein "the pursuit of political freedom is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection, and irresponsibility; because it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity, both collective and individual," Andrew, at novel's end, would appear to be variously unfree. The challenge of producing narrative closure without the literary conventions of "familiarity, insularity, and routine," however, would of course be no small task, and I would be remiss to not acknowledge the unique artistic challenges of pursuing such a standard of radical freedom. In both life and literature, and perhaps to a lesser degree in political philosophy, the task of mindful memory, of conserving, creating, and striking a viable balance among these, remains a formidable undertaking, appearing at best as "real, but forever out of [our] reach" (Oxherding 17).

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "Poem for Half White College Students." The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. Berkeley, CA: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991. 220-21.

Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Byrd, Rudolph P. Charles Johnson's Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005.

--, ed. I Call Myself an Artist: Writing by and about Charles Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999.

Caruth, Cathy ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Coleman, James W. "Charles Johnson's Quest for Black Freedom in Oxherding Tale." African American Review 29.4 (Winter 1995): 631-44.

Crouch, Stanley. "Charles Johnson: Free at Last!" Byrd, I Call Myself 272-77.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1980.

Gleason, William. "The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale." Black American Literature Forum 25.4 (Winter 1991): 704-28.

Hardack, Richard. "Black Skin, White Tissues: Local Color and Universal Solvents in the Novels of Charles Johnson." Callaloo 22.4 (Fall 1999): 1028-53.

Hayward, Jennifer. "Something to Serve: Constructions of the Feminine in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale." Black American Literature Forum 25.4 (Winter 1991): 689-704.

Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

--. "I Call Myself an Artist." Byrd, I Call Myself 3-33.

--. Oxherding Tale. 1982. New York: Penguin, 1995.

--. "Philosophy and Black Fiction." Byrd, I Call Myself 79-85.

Kaplan, Carla. "Narrative Contracts and Emancipatory Readers: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Yale Journal of Criticism 6.1 (Spring 1993): 93-119.

Leak, Jeffrey B. "Wrestling With Desire: Slavery and Black Masculinity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale." Byrd, I Call Myself 289-305.

Little, Jonathan. Charles Johnson's Spiritual Imagination. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997.

Nash, William R. Charles Johnson's Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003.

Retman, Sonnet. "'Nothing was Lost in the Masquerade': The Protean Performance of Genre and Identity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale." African American Review 33.3 (Fall 1999): 417-37.

Redstockings. "The Redstockings Manifesto." Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. Ed. Miriam Schneir. New York: Random House, 1994. 125-30.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Storhoff, Gary. Understanding Charles Johnson. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004.

Notes

(1.) In his study of neo-slave narrative as genre, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy suggests that this chronologically split address is characteristic of the form in which neo-slave narratives emerge in the late 1970s, responding simultaneously to historiographical conceptions of American slavery and the cultural context of the 1960s and early 1970s. See Rushdy 6-7.

(2.) It is worth noting that this scene is written with an overtly ironic tone that mocks Andrew's sentimental idealism even as the narrative celebrates his heroic gesture.

(3.) Johnson writes, "Andrew Hawkins was the first protagonist In black American fiction to achieve classically defined moksha (enlightenment)" (Oxherding xvi). See also chapter two of Byrd, Charles Johnson; Crouch; and Retman.

(4.) See especially Chapter 3, "Wounded Attachments."

(5.) It is important to emphasize that Brown, much like Johnson, is not wholly dismissive of identity politics and that her analyses do not stem from a callous, amnesiac relation to the past, but from productive frustration with the shortcomings of this political strategy decades after its emergence. Even as she proposes an energetic critique of politicized identity's view of history, Brown also advises that "erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves such integral elements of the pain inscribed in most subjugated identities that the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructed Nietzschean form, seems inappropriate if not cruel" (74).

(6.) If George's consent is conspicuously compromised, then so too is Anna's. The plantation mistress, after all, is asleep when the events in question take place. The reader, like Andrew, is "never privileged to hear" Anna's account of the evening's multivalent violations (7), but would be remiss not to acknowledge the striking parallels between George's and Anna's sexual disempowerment. These parallels are revisited in the novel's exploration of Andrew and Flo's relationship. Similarities, however, do not necessarily breed alliance, and in the case of Anna and George it would appear that each regarded the other (together with Jonathan) as the perpetrator of their violation. Thus the sleeping mistress, seen through George's eyes, is described with verbs that connote power if not intent: Anna "soldered herself to George. She crushed him in a clinch so strong his spine cracked" (6).

(7.) As Leak rightly notes, "in order for Andrew to be himself, he must claim that part of himself which his father refuses to acknowledge" (292).

(8.) For Andrew, as for Zen's fabled oxherd, psychic freedom requires the abandonment of History's false promise of redemption, as well as the integration of Self into a grander scheme of Being. This lesson is rendered most vividly in the dynamic interweaving of life etched into Horace Bannon's physical and metaphysical being. "Not tattooes at all," Andrew insists, but an "impossible flesh tapestry," simultaneously contained on but not staid by the consolidated form of Bannon's body (175). Importantly, Andrew sees the image of his father (as well as past and possible images of himself) within Bannon's tapestry. The ideological rejection of his father, then, is mitigated by this necessary retention. "All is conserved; all," as the process of conservation is itself revealed to be dynamic and evolving. For a more thorough analysis of Johnson's philosophy of Being, see Johnson, Being and Race; Byrd, Charles Johnson; Little; Gleason.

(9.) In corroboration, Leak persuasively argues that Ezekiel's theories of gender are (mis)informed by the systemic erasure of Ezekiel's mother's perspective from his understanding of his familial past (297-99).

(10.) Though I offer this quote as the type of formulation that is a possible object of Johnson's critique, I would also strongly caution against overzealously decontextualizing this statement from its rhetorical and sociohistorical frames.

(11.) I offer this as one of several possible readings of the scene, not to discount Flo's cruelty, callousness, and egoism, but to trouble interpretations of the scene as apolitically self-indulgent.

(12.) Flo's name is itself suggestive of menstruation, that much mystified process often thought to give evidence of the uniquely "natural" properties of women.

(13.) I paraphrase Brown here, who likewise posits, "We know ourselves to be saturated by history, we feel the extraordinary force of its determinations; we are also steeped in a discourse of its insignificance, and, above all, we know that history will no longer (always already did not) act as our redeemer" (71).

(14.) Evelyn concludes an ironic discussion with Andrew (who is passing) with the question, "The Negro is a creature of romance, isn't he?"