An end of Southern history: the down-home quests of Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead.

Since something seems to be ending, the time has come to ask how much force the historical South still exerts in the black literary imagination. Not that the postmodern South's concrete locale, its regional traits, as well as the speech and manners of its people have faded entirely out of existence. Rather, the time has passed when any one ideological discourse of the South can claim objectivistic grounding as authoritative history. And this is to say that no secure sectional outlook remains--in contradistinction to a national perspective--by which our next Faulkner, Wolfe, O'Connor, Welty, Warren, Richard Wright, or Alice Walker could confidently claim, "This is the essence of the South, just as I am explaining it to you."

Not the material South, but the idea of the South, has long been grounded in essentialist assumptions. The popular notion of southern mystique, primarily a white discourse, assumed the region had a uniquely defining and noble core, an objectively verifiable and innate essence--constituting a kind of regional exceptionalism--that required writers to "explain the South" to intrusive outsiders. Of course, black explanations of the South differed dramatically. In African American literature, explaining the South to outsiders began as early as the fugitive slave narratives, in which writers such as Frederick Douglass spoke past white southerners to northern audiences who would be more receptive to depictions of the South contradicting the slaveholders' defense of the region. Thus, from our postmodern perspective, the historical South is seen as a clash of social constructions, a site of dueling texts that contest the essence of the South as each vies for privileged, unitary status. Today, that contest of historical discourses that we call southern history is in its terminal phase.

To say that history can end, argues Francis Fukuyama in The End of History, is not to say that sequential, factual events stop happening. It means that when in the contest of political ideologies, one finally prevails--he cites democratic capitalism's triumph over communism--then "history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process" is over (xii). Factual events continue, but they do not change historical presuppositions. Extending Fukuyama's idea to the South, I find not only that long-held yearnings (whether white or black) for a unitary, monolithic southern history are dissipating but that, surprisingly, in black narratives of the South comes the most dramatic turning away from former assertions of single regional essence.

This postmodern turn from essence would seem wholly unexpected. Who, after all, would least likely forget the oppressive weight of white historical myth and then not counter it? For so long, claiming the South as home (or "down home," if one has left) has run squarely against the experience of oppression, marginality, and white ideological constructions denying the full and central place of black folk in the South. Quite understandably, black discourse always promoted an opposing or resistant truth. In fugitive slave narratives, the South was taken to be of pure and simple essence-it was a house of bondage and thus a "home" from which exile was highly desirable. Douglass, despite immense attachment to southern blacks he left behind, carefully constructed his public self as an exemplary and representative American--not a southerner but a fugitive of the South (recomposing this same identity theme in three autobiographical versions). Similarly, Charles W. Chesnutt evoked successfully in his conjure tales a distinct black culture operating on different assumptions from the slaveholders' social system. Yet, because of close familial ties to whites on the other side of the color line in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he viewed the central failure of southern society as its blindness to a common human family. Frustrated with the region's inhumane restrictions he, too, abandoned the South. (1) Even Ohio writer Paul Laurence Dunbar sought emotional links to down-home pastoral roots, but failed. In Folks from Dixie, In Old Plantation Days, and other commercial exploitations of the plantation myth, he failed to ground black identity in any authentic regional reality because such stories inescapably reinforced white supremacist premises of the myth. (2) So for such writers, the South, both as a place of oppression and as an ideological construct, exerted a strong and deeply problematic force on the literary imagination, in that the mere act of defining it was contestatory and ambivalent.

In the Harlem Renaissance, when strongly positive valuations were first given to blackness and folk culture, the urge toward essentialism increased. One thinks of Langston Hughes's declaration of a collective, historical racial unity in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," and of his embracing Negroness in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," proclaiming, "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame" (309). With the publication of Cane in 1923, Jean Toomer (who termed himself an essentialist) lyrically depicted the South as having a fecund black essence that was needed by the spiritually deracinated North. (3) One thinks as well of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, that memorable folk immersion in a sacral black South of the everglades' idyllic "muck." (4)

Later, the Black Arts era saw further essentialist tendencies. Nonetheless, the civil rights victories of the mid-1960s and other social changes were altering the South, influencing a new generation of black writers to perceive it with new assumptions. One product of the southern civil rights shift is Yusef Komunyakaa from Bogaloosa, Louisiana, whose early poetry expresses clear anger at violence and inhumanity in southern culture. Nonetheless, his major output is more national than southern, and, as I have discussed elsewhere, in remarkable Vietnam War poetry such as "Tu Do Street" and "Facing It," the nation replaces the South as the object of his resistant perspective. Likewise, South Carolina-raised novelist Percival Everett, who usually downplays his southernness to identify with the West, in the story "The Appropriation of Cultures" dramatizes the Confederate flag's being adopted into black culture--a moment with the distinct feel of postcolonial cultural hybridity. Similarly, the biracial James McBride is his autobiographical The Color of Water deconstructs racial essentialism, dramatically fleeing the North to find in the South his ancestral Jewish roots and a sense of emancipated self. (5)

Something, as I have said, seems to be ending. The idea of the South as "down home" has subtly shifted. Once a contested monolith, the singular South has morphed into multiple narratives of a South that function with increased freedom from the past. Through two writers in particular, Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead, we can trace the arc of this postmodern shift. Both writers have employed resistant readings to dislodge the unitary (and implicitly white) master discourse. In Morrison's fiction, a powerful sense of historical black presence makes visible a micronarrative of myth and "rememory" that was previously suppressed. In Whitehead, history itself is disassembled into absence. Through his slippery play of social constructions, in which all discourses are constituted more by presuppositions than empirical fact, no core sense of southern essence is left standing, and the field is left open and free for personal appropriation.

Morrison's signature narrative aim is to evoke black historical presence out of its chronological disappearance, or absence. As Rafael Perez-Tortes puts it, Morrison's "fictional characters and communities ... transform an essential absence into a powerful presence" (91). In her germinal essay of 1984, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," Morrison explains her fictional project as evoking "the presence of an ancestor" because, as she perceived in examining black fiction, "It was the absence of an ancestor that was frightening, that was threatening, and it caused huge destruction and disarray" (343). For that reason she wished to make her art expressive not only of her individual self but also of "the tribe," alluding thereby to the collective wisdom gained from black ancestral experience (341). As she noted, "the novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before.... We don't live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don't sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago" (340). Morrison's South, therefore, functions at least rhetorically as an archetypal source of wisdom, a metaphorical down-home Ur, from which she hopes to retrieve for present needs a usable ancestral tradition. Likewise, in her noted essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (1989), she argues that the "Eurocentric" and " 'universal' criteria of Western art" suppress black cultural presence; accordingly, she called for increased awareness of "Afro-American presence on modernity" (209, 210).

So palpable is the past that Morrison evokes into imaginative presence that her postmodernity seems somewhat open to question. On one hand, her concept of race clearly is postmodern. There is no fixed, core racial essence in the nature of things, she would argue, only a socially constructed binary antithesis of white/black that has operated very destructively in the American experience, as her fiction vividly documents. On the other hand, Morrison's tactics for evoking history into a "presence" have distinct qualities of essentialist thinking (especially in her early career at the height of black cultural nationalism). Terms such as "rootedness," "foundation," "mythological archetypal stories," "the tribe," and "presence" come close to suggesting there is a foundational black essence (opposable to a white essence) issuing from the historical South, and before that from Africa. Noting this apparent contradiction, Dwight A. McBride argues cogently that such language actually is an "essentializing gesture" or a "strategic essentialism," not the rhetoric of transcendent truth claims. Morrison, he argues, not intending blackness to mean a "true" and universally "fixed" entity, evokes a "racial essentialism based on experience" (134, 15, 133). If Morrison's fictions are quests for a "tribal" cultural legacy, then the historical, slave-era South is integral to her concept of blackness and the construction of history.

In "Rootedness," Morrison argues that the conspicuous superstition and magic in Song of Solomon enhance rather than limit her work. Her aim is not to posit and prophetically access a mythical reality, but to capture a quality of folk reality and black cultural perspective that she seeks to preserve:

   I could blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound
   rootedness in the real world at the same time with neither taking
   precedence over the other. It is indicative of the cosmology, the
   way in which Black people looked at the world. We are very
   practical people, very down-to-earth, even shrewd people. But
   within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could be
   called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing
   things. But to blend those two worlds together at the same time was
   enhancing, not limiting. And some of those things were "discredited
   knowledge" that Black people had; discredited only because Black
   people were discredited.... That kind of knowledge has a very
   strong place in my work. (342; italics added)

In other words, she aims to give "presence" to black cultural experience through a rhetorically heightened, metaphoric rendering of its history. Investing her narrative with an air of superstition, magic, myth, and the lore of flying Africans--all this being a "discredited" discourse at odds with the prevailing modern rationalism--she intrudes black presence dramatically into US consciousness. Morrison's phrase another way of knowing things, therefore, cuts against essentialism, employing an alternative black discourse to destabilize the culturally privileged, white "way of knowing things" and render it, too, a "discredited knowledge." When there are multiple ways of knowing things, the master discourse's presumption of making all truth claims is implicitly questioned. Moreover, when all perspectives appear relative and "constructed," then in the destabilized and free play of discourses the meaning of "history" is up for grabs.

Song of Solomon, as an evocation of the cultural past, rewrites US history by exposing its central black/white racial binary. Rediscovery of the past is presented in personal terms, in the identity issues of the protagonist, Macon "Milkman" Dead, whose last name suggests both the pastness of the past and his deracination from ancestral cultural values. Significantly, the name "Dead" was a mistake. A drunken Yankee soldier scrawled it on the wrong line of a legal document, assigning it to Macon's newly emancipated, illiterate grandfather in an act of discourse construction that suppressed a man's individual black presence (also paralleling slaveholders' assigning white names to Africans, marking the death of African identity). Raised on the shore of Lake Superior in northern Michigan, Milkman is geographically and psychically far removed from the South of his ancestors. In name and emotions he is "dead" to the absent past. His search for lost family gold in the South forms an unwitting quest for cultural heritage, which has been suppressed by his assimilationist and sterile worship of riches over humanity. The narrative quest culminates in fictional Shalimar, Virginia, where the treasure he finds is not material gold but knowledge and love of his ancestral line.

Before the journey, his mentor Aunt Pilate perceives his selfish immaturity and lectures him on the meaning of blackness, which for him initially is only monochromatic:

   And talking about dark! You think dark is one color, but it ain't.
   There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some
   just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves
   and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is
   pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green?
   Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a
   cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks
   loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be
   a rainbow. (40-41)

On one level, Pilate's words suggest blackness cannot be reduced to a timeless, unitary essence--it is more like a polychromatic rainbow. On another, she foresees that Macon will remain blind to blackness until he appreciates its rich cultural specificity--the full weight of its historical presence. In sum, to mature he must learn "another way of knowing things." (6)

Even though he cannot perceive it, that other way of knowing things is all around him in the culture of his fictional hometown, Mercy, Michigan. If the North once was hoped to be the Promised Land of milk and honey, or freedom and civil fraternity, those beliefs have long been dashed. In Mercy, where until Milkman's birth in 1931 blacks were not allowed in the public "charity hospital," there has been no charity. For that reason, black citizens call it "No Mercy Hospital." Thus, in the town's name lies the central moral issue of the novel, the question of whether US national experience has been driven by motives of mercy or no mercy, charity or no charity. (7) Likewise, the officially named Mains Avenue is proudly called Doctor Street by the black community, in reference to the town's one black professional living on it; but town "maps" (documents encoding the white master discourse) officially designate no such place. When the post office declares that mail will be delivered only to Mains Avenue addresses, not to the more commonly written Doctor Street ones, black folk start to call it "Not Doctor Street" (4). In these paired naming binaries, a signifier of the official discourse (mercy) has suppressed black reality into a gap or absence, but is in turn dislodged by the voice of black communal wisdom (no mercy), that other way of knowing things. (8)

This double coding of names is one of the novel's explicit themes and highlights Morrison's contesting of historical discourses. A very important discourse is the oral one constructed by the grandfather of Milkman. That first (and misnamed) Macon Dead was an emancipated slave (Jake) who migrated north to Montour County, Pennsylvania (an actual place), and then through heroic work built up a productive farm. Illiterate but orally inventive, he constructed his own version of national history by naming his farm Lincoln's Heaven, his horse President Lincoln, the foal Mary Todd, the cow Ulysses Grant, and the hog General Lee (51-52). But illiteracy--his lack of control over discourse--was his doom. The Butlers, an envious white family, duped him into signing away his entire property on a document of their devising. Later, as he was sitting outside at night desperately guarding the threatened farm, a shot in the back blew him five feet into the air. This brief "flight," happening in his Promised Land, tragically repeats the mythical one of his Virginia ancestor the flying Solomon, and like that is linked to American oppression--characterized in this novel as "no mercy."

Song of Solomon thus sets against the privileged, unitary truth of official history a black folk perspective, the result being a binary of discourses in linked tension, "with neither taking precedence over the other" (to use a phrase from "Rootedness"). Throughout, it is the names of things that first assert the fluid, constructionist nature of historical narrative, enabling Morrison to evoke into presence that which has been officially suppressed, that is, "unspeakable things unspoken."

Morrison's deployment of unofficial, alternative history clearly is contestatory. The grand narrative of official US history emphasizes rationalism, progress, and benevolence. Thus, if the relentless taking of Indian lands once was benignly called Manifest Destiny by those controlling American narrative, from the Native American perspective surely it was Manifest Doom. Morrison's essentialist maneuvers, such as her use of the flying African folk myth, therefore arise from a desire to wrest control of metanarrative by destabilizing its presuppositions, exposing huge factual and emotional gaps in official historical discourse. Disrupting rational, progressive discourse with its resistant opposite--myth, fantasy, and the uncanny--Morrison exploits a dramatically contrary way of knowing things that is counter-rational, disruptive, and liberatory.

In her version of the fantastic myth of flying Africans, before Solomon flies off to Africa, he alights briefly to leave behind a male baby. (Family tradition does not say whether the historical man actually ran for freedom in the North or lost his life prematurely in slavery.) Tragically, in the family's mythical account Solomon's flying quest for liberation was inescapably selfish--yielding a circumstance of "no mercy" for his abandoned children and wife, who would suffer immensely from his absence. In that way, externally imposed oppression began a cycle of internal damage, and the effects carry through generations. When Solomon's descendent, the original Macon Dead, proudly develops farm property in Pennsylvania, he is reversing the psychic pain of having been impersonal property. He is shot, however, and, as generations pass, their accumulating emotional losses alter into needier, more selfish obsessions with property, these being debasements of the transcendence figured in Solomon's problematic and solitary winged freedom.

The folk myth of Solomon is a strongly oral discourse suggestive of a potent and unitary rootedness, or the wholeness to be found in ancestral lessons. The theme of wholeness is at the moral center of the novel. It offers a tacit critique of Solomon's fragmenting a family by his flight, this in reaction to the fragmenting oppression of slavery (America's "no mercy"). Later, it offers a critique of Milkman's own selfishness. In all instances, the myth counters such moral lapses with values of "mercy" missing in American experience. It is Milkman's father who first warns him that in the face of disintegrative forces, "You want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth" (76). Symbolically, Milkman finds the whole truth in his mythic journey into the South. Although Morrison's aim is to dislodge official discourse, her dramatic narrative tactics seem strongly essentialist. As James H. Evans, Jr., argues, Milkman's southern journey is cast as a ritual entrance into a primordial, unitary state of awareness (that is, the whole truth prior to fragmentation in time). That kind of ritual arises, he explains, from the theological desire to re-enact a sacral state "in which the participant becomes the contemporary of her gods and mythical ancestors," thereby accessing a timeless state where one is co-eternal with the godhead (155). (9) Evans argues that Milkman's southern immersion is, like "ecstatic vision in the churches," about "the recovery of origins" and is important in providing "the grounding which is necessary for a diaspora people to preserve their identity' (15, 16). (10)

Pilate, his spiritual guide, prefigures Milkman's entrance into primordial consciousness. In this regard, Morrison's narrative has strong essentialist trappings, seeped in religious themes and ritual. Pilate's "absence of a navel," which sloughed off after birth, and her serving of eggs to Milkman (27, 39) suggest an originating state preceding the creation of time, flesh, and death. Her living on "Darling Street" in a house lacking electricity, where "progress" seems unknown, suggests love in a primordial spiritual state (27). Various narrative hints liken her to the maenads who worshipped Bacchus. "Pervading everything" in the house where she illegally makes and sells wine "was the odor of pine and fermenting fruit" (39). Repeated pine reference echoes the thyrsus, a staff crowned by a pinecone and carried bv the maenads. Her fruity and winy smells further recall the wine that along with song and dance induced in celebrants a frenzied state.

In the novel's opening scene, as crazed life insurance agent Robert Smith is about to take a suicidal leap from the cupola of Mercy Hospital, one of the bystanders is Pilate. She breaks into a children's song, the ancestral childhood rhyme about Sugarman (Solomon), while another bystander, Ruth Foster Dead, spills red velvet decorative petals. This scene proves a communal ritual, a summoning of Solomon's ancestral spirit to be present as Smith takes his precarious flight. There are other rituals as well. When Milkman hears children sing the same song during a ring dance in Shalimar (in another ritual), "their sweet voices reminded him of the gap in his own childhood," that gap being absence of the ancestor (299). Also in Shalimar, Milkman has a love affair with a woman named Sweet. In such a way, language suggesting sweetness--Sweet, Sugarman, and the fruity sweetness of Pilate's house--is linked to the milk of Milkman's name to evoke the Promised Land of milk and honey. As Morrison speeds up the narrative pace in the southern chapters, she likens Milkman's ritual male quest to a frenzied, orgasmic climax.

Milkman's affair with Sweet is the third of three initiation rituals marking his entrance into the sacral. The first is his test by fighting when, in Solomon's General Store, he uses a broken bottle to fight off an angry local named Saul (267-68). The second is the nighttime hunt in which local men deliberately test citified Milkman's ability to find his way in dark woods. "What kind of savages were these people?" he wonders while floundering about among the trees (276). But soon "his self--the cocoon that was 'personality'--gave way" (277). Existing now in a primordial order before personality, Milkman discovers the inchoate shouts, hollers, and barks of hunters and dogs are an intuitive language: "It was all a language.... No, it was not a language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down." Preceding the construction of discourse, which always controls and limits, the history Milkman recovers is mystically atemporal, outside the empirical order. Further, the communion of man and dog (Morrison characterizes it as "Language in a time when men and dogs did talk to one another") echoes the maenads' ceremonial eating of animal flesh to ingest the deific life-force (278).

Of numerous uncanny events (all bearing essentialist suggestiveness), the most important are returns of ghosts. The ghost of Jake returns repeatedly, just after he is shot, to help guide his children Pilate (age 12) and Macon (age 16), who are wandering abandoned and scared through the woods. Then Jake's ghost appears at a cave entrance to beckon them in (168). Here, in a surreal scene in the cave's darkness, they see the vision of a weird white man who attacks them, literally forcing them to stab him to death in defense. Years later Pilate returns in guilt to gather those bones, hoping respectfully to find them a proper place. Not knowing they are the bones of her father Jake, she irrationally carries them in a green sack wherever she moves. Years later Pilate confides to Milkman about Jake's ghost, "I see him still. He's helpful to me, real helpful. Tells me things I need to know.... It's a good thing to know he's around" (141). So he is, in the green sack, and at times such as when Pilate gives birth to Reba, and the ghost reappears to command her enigmatically, "Sing. Sing" (147).

This listening to ancestral wisdom is the lesson learned finally by Milkman but not by his friend Guitar Bains of the Seven Days, a secret society of black men who randomly kill any available white person after news accounts of whites killing a black person. In Guitar's philosophy of racial essentialism, whites are genetically separate and inferior to blacks. Milkman asks him, "Why don't you just hunt down the ones who did the killing?" To which Guitar answers, "There are no innocent white people.... White people are unnatural. As a race they are unnatural" (155-56). No mercy, in other words. His moral confusion, which leads to fragmentation rather than wholeness, is summed up when he says, "What I'm doing ain't about hating white people. It's about loving us" (159). Clearly, the black/white binary that has so severely damaged America has damaged him.

In sum, despite Milkman's mystical immersion in the primordial community of Shalimar, Morrison's South is not invested with an organic regional essence. Rather, it is a site of opposing discourses by which the very notion of monolithic history is questioned. From the flying African to the suicide of a man at (No) Mercy Hospital, the story contests any totalizing view of racial and national essence. Morrison's juxtaposing of different ways of knowing things does not, therefore, privilege one way over another (a design as limiting as the Seven Days' agenda) but shows that history is narrative, and any story (every story) limits what is sayable. What Song of Solomon seeks to evoke is the unsayable. As Morrison writes in "Rootedness," "to blend those two worlds together [the empirical and the uncanny] at the same time was enhancing, not limiting."

Written 10 years later, Beloved (1987) depicts a haunted house in which a slave girl's ghost seems to return in love and anger to put a spell on the mother who killed her. The story is based on the celebrated Margaret Garner incident of 1856, in which Garner escaped from Kentucky to Ohio and then frantically killed her toddler daughter when slave catchers came to retrieve them. Morrison's balancing of naturalistic explanation (that is, the ghost perhaps is imagined by those in grief and psychological extremity) with the uncanny (that is, the ghost might be real) destabilizes expectations of unitary narrative. Once again, southern history becomes postmodern construction rather than an empirically supportable certainty, and thus, as Linda Krumholz argues, "Beloved reconceptualizes American history" ("Ghosts of Slavery" 107). (11) Because conventional history fails to make all truths of slavery fully sayable, particularly the psychic ones, Morrison evokes uncanny, "unspeakable," and painful realities that elude rationalistic discourse. As Sethe (the fictionalized Garner) knows so painfully, "every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost ... it was unspeakable" (Beloved 58). And when a neighbor named Stamp Paid stops near the house, he is confused by its peculiar haunting sounds. Superstitiously "he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead," and he concludes they are "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (198, 199).

Morrison's strategy in Beloved, as in Song of Solomon, thus is to convey black "presence" by going outside historical discourse's logical framework, employing the fantastic. Of course, a breakdown of the logical is exactly what trauma is. Generally taken to depict what Freud termed "the return of the repressed," Beloved dramatizes Sethe's psyche being overwhelmed by the disordering, fragmenting force of remembered horror. As the story opens we are told, "Her past had been like her present--intolerable" (4). Her story is hardly individual, for Sethe embodies the emotional readjustment of a generation of freed slaves in the years following the Civil War. As Sethe's suitor, Paul D, reflects, "During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything" (66). Merely entering her house for the first time, he is caught momentarily in what he experiences as "a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood", and this "wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry" (8, 9). Morrison describes the emotional struggles these characters face as "a matter of keeping the past at bay" (42), and the "serious work of beating back the past" (73). It is Paul D's arrival on the scene that actually provokes this turmoil. As Sethe's heart reawakens after years of emotional repression, her love for Paul D unavoidably revives love for the daughter she slew, and as one character observes, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts" (35). For much of the novel Sethe is overcome by that love and grief, experienced as a haunting by a ghost that died in wrong circumstances. Only in the end, when Sethe reorganizes her psyche, is she able to accept Paul D's offer of a new life of love.

As a psychic history of slavery, therefore, Beloved is a critique of conventional historical discourse, which is a text inscribed by those in control and carries the limitations of their presuppositions. Critics have noted this novel's central trope of inscription, beginning with references to the ink that Sethe makes for her owners on the Sweet Home farm in Kentucky. Handmade from "cherry gum and oak bark" (6), it becomes the medium by which Sethe is defined by her owners as subhuman. This ink is used by schoolteacher, the white Mrs. Garner's brother-in-law and new manager of the farm, in his writing of a book about the nature of blacks. Sethe recalls his pseudo-scholarly writings:

   He liked the ink I made. It was her [Mrs. Garner's] recipe, but he
   preferred how 1 mixed it and it was important to him because at
   night he sat down to write in his book. It was a book about us but
   we didn't know that right away. We just thought it was his manner
   to ask us questions. He commenced to carry round a notebook and
   write down what we said. I still think it was them questions that
   tore Sixo [a slave] up. Tore him up for all time. (37)

Sixo's decision to stop "speaking English because there was no future in it" (25) is his repudiation of a discourse that controls him by denying his humanity. When Sixo is later beaten, schoolteacher's aim is "to show him that definitions belong to the definers--not the defined" (190). Likewise, Sethe's mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, is controlled by white inscription. She asks Mr. Garner, "why you all call me Jenny,?" and he replies, "Cause that what's on your sales ticket, gal." When he asks her what she calls herself, her reply is, "Nothing.... I don't call myself nothing" (142). That is to say, she has no identity outside the enslavers' language.

At bottom, what white discourse presupposes is the subhuman, bestial nature of black people. A turning point in the novel comes just before Sethe's break for freedom. In the interest of scientific observation, schoolteacher has his two nephews do an experiment on Sethe as he takes scholarly notes. One ties her down in the barn while the other milks her as if she were a cow, which she remembers as "schoolteacher writing in ink she herself had made while his nephews played on her" (98). This experiment is part of the scientific racism that motivates schoolteacher such as when, says Sethe, he would like a phrenologist "wrap ... string all over my head, 'cross my nose, around my behind. Number my teeth" (191). One day he has a nephew record Sethe's human and animal characteristics in neat columns of a notebook: "No, no. That's not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don't forget to line them up" (193). Clearly, the truth claims asserted by such discourse are inadequate. In the guise of logical, rational observation, schoolteacher's text is a construction premised on white superiority. Later, when newspaper accounts of Sethe's murder of her child include pen and ink portraits of her, Paul D remarks that the likeness is wrong. "That's not her mouth," he says (154), and, "This ain't her mouth. I know her mouth and this ain't it" (156).

Finally, the only reliable history is the human body--before ideological representations of it--because material substance precedes discourse presuppositions. The milking of Sethe's body is a grim parody of the black mammy's nursing of white infants, a stereotype used in the racial discourse of slave-holders to assert mutual love between the races. Here, the life-sustaining nutrition needed by Sethe's own two year-old (the one she soon kills to save from growing up in slavery) and her baby on the way (Denver) is stolen by white boys who treat her as livestock. The act is fragmenting in other ways as well. It is witnessed from the loft by Halle, Sethe's husband, and it turns him so insane that he fails to join her in the escape to Ohio. There, in turn, she is left vulnerable to the slave catchers and kills their child. So not only is Sethe's womanly role denied in the milking, Halle's male role is shattered as well because, unable to attack her abusers, his role of protector is destroyed. Further, his traditional role as procreator is voided, for he sees that at any time Sethe arbitrarily can be subjected to sexual violation. Indeed, after Halle loses his mind, he is seen by Paul D to be smearing churned butter and clabber over his face. Clabber is the soured, thickened milk that separates from butter during churning and is used for buttermilk. In a debasement of the dream of a Promised Land of milk and honey, we see in this pivotal scene the souring of the nutritive milk and love needed by all of Sethe's fragmenting family.

Similarly, Paul D at one point is made controllable by having a bit put in his mouth, rendering his body into an animal's, and rendering him unable to make oral discourse (69). When first hearing of Sethe's murder of her child, Paul D's first reaction, based on an erroneous understanding of her situation and motives, is to tell her, "You got two feet, Sethe, not four" (165). Temporarily, even he falls sway to the master discourse that posits blacks as subhuman. It is Baby Suggs, in her days as a Holiness preacher, who establishes the body as the textual norm of the novel. Preaching in the clearing behind their Ohio house, she avoids theological discourse altogether: "She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more." Her message instead is an affirmation of the flesh: "Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.... You got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved ... hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize" (88-89). On her back, Sethe's own flesh bears a huge, ugly scar where it was whipped into an open wound by schoolteacher's nephews after she told others about their nursing of her. To Amy, who befriends her during her escape, the scar resembles a "chokecherry tree" (79). Perhaps the common, wild chokecherry is the kind of sour cherry used by Sethe in making her ink. If so, her flesh bears the inscription of exploitative discourse in a way that no book text can. Succinctly, she says at the novel's end, "I made the ink, Paul D. He couldn't have done it if I hadn't made the ink" (271).

In her preference for psychic history and the gothic fantasy of haunts, Morrison thus endorses the end of objective history as we normally know it. The flesh precedes reason. Trauma is the abandonment of reason. These, not the linear and logical presentation of facts (as in schoolteacher's constructed narrative), are the ingredients of Morrison's historical narrative. In place of objective, chronological ordering Morrison adopts as her method of discourse a variation of what Sethe calls, in a malapropism, her "rememory": "I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not" (35-36). The explanation that follows is empirically implausible, but it is an apt description of how the past remains present in the psyche as a construction that seems concretely real:

"Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

"Can other people see it?" asked Denver.

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was [slavery in Sweet Home, Kentucky] before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm--every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there.... Because even though it's all over--over and done with--it's going to always be there waiting for you." (36, italics added)

There is no literal way this kind of encounter can happen--one cannot bump into someone else's memory from another time as if it were concretely real now--except through the medium of art, which creates for readers word pictures that come alive in the reading act. In Sethe's articulation of her psychic duress is an explanation of how ghosts that Sethe sees can also be seen by other characters in the book, and by the reader. It is fruitless, then, to parse each narrative incident of this book for its plausibility as either ghostly or naturalistic event. In the disordered psyche, even outlandish pictures can seem real, as if they are "there waiting for you."

In the psyche, too, memories of past events are chronologically conflated because they are able to arise in any order. The character Beloved may be a ghost from Sethe's painful past, or simply a wandering girl of the present who has lost her mind. In her the past and present live side by side. If the memories she releases in Sethe are of things past, even as word pictures in the psyche they are contemporaneously present. In one of the book's most unusual tactics, when Sethe and Beloved remember the past (particularly their mothers), these memories become like long-enduring "thought pictures" conflated with experiences of earlier generations in slavery, even with events of the Middle Passage. This shared experience happens most vividly in Beloved's internal monologue, which begins: "I am Beloved and she is mine." The "she" may be Beloved's unknown mother (if Beloved is just a wandering girl), or it may be Sethe herself (if Beloved is the returning ghost of Sethe's murdered child), or it may be an ancestral figure from earlier times (who in the monologue fills her basket in coastal or African fields).

In the farm known as Sweet Home, then, Morrison shows not just an inversion of the stereotypical plantation South with its "shameless beauty" (6). She shows the inversion of love that is manifested always, in the past or present, where oppression happens. Just as "Mercy" is the moral touchstone of Song of Solomon, in this novel the central value is a single word, "Beloved," or one who is loved. That is the sole word on the tombstone of Sethe's dead child. As one word on granite rather than a complete discourse, it is a uniquely postmodern reading of what really once happened "down home." For if any other words were joined to it, they then would comprise what Morrison so deeply distrusts in this book, a constructed discourse rather than an emblem of one whom, in the living flesh preceding discourse, has been loved. (12)

There are times, to be honest, when the South only reluctantly accepting this postmodern turn from essence. Witness, for example, the still erupting confederate flag controversies, in which essentialist tendencies of the master discourse are distilled in the semantically loaded term "heritage." For advocates of the confederate flag, the word heritage suggests simple and classic southern essence, not a hegemonic, controlling discourse that suppresses other narratives of the South.

In South Carolina recently, "HERITAGE NOT HATE" was the motto used in a 1990's political effort to prevent the confederate flag's removal from atop the statehouse dome. It was the latest incarnation of an old idea, seen first in antebellum defenses of the South that argued slavery was necessary and that because slaveholders were benignly protective of their slaves, "the peculiar institution" was one of beneficence ("not hate"). That grand old narrative of a noble social order persists today, although its status as historical truth is being demythologized (in fits and spasms) into a clash of dueling texts. Thus, in downtown Columbia, South Carolina, on Martin Luther King Day of 2000, nearly 50,000 marchers in chants and posters coined an opposing text in the slogan "YOUR HERITAGE IS MY SLAVERY." They created there a perfect postmodern moment, showing in interplay of texts "another way of knowing things." No cogent reason exists, they were saying, for essentializing 400 years of southern heritage with a flag selected from the four-year slice of history in which slavery was ended by bloody force.

In current US literature, no more purely postmodern treatment of the South exists than Colson Whitehead's acclaimed novel John Henry Days (2001). In the guise of its historical recreation of a legendary black hero, the novel in fact undermines the whole project of traditional historical explanation. Endorsing no particular historical rendering but questioning all renderings of history, Whitehead operates with remarkable freedom from the burden of the past. In this respect he epitomizes the final, most dramatic shift from previous traditions in black literary representation of the South. Eschewing binary oppositions, he does not antithetically counter the white grand narrative with an Afrocentric history claiming its own core truth. He dramatizes instead the slipperiness of all historical representation. Had he been marching in Columbia on that day in 2000, his placard might have read, "HERITAGE IS SLANT."

John Henry Days asks, Is American history a continual, ritual killing of its black citizens? Was John Henry a sacrificial hero in that ritual? No clear answers are attainable. Whitehead's African American protagonist is J. Sutter, a cynically jaded New York magazine journalist who travels south to Talcott, West Virginia, to cover a festival marking the issuance of the John Henry Folk Heroes stamp. At the festival a white stamp collector named Alphonse Miggs "goes postal," so to speak, and shoots wildly into the crowd. Whitehead's open ending does not clarify whether J. Sutter is one of those killed. Miggs's motives are not clear either. He may be virulently racist or simply disconnected from social reality. Nor is any historical truth about John Henry clear, for in this text, history is the same as publicity writing--truth all depends on slant. And slants abound. Was John Henry a sacrificial racial martyr? Or was he a non-ethnic symbol of common man against the machine? Was he a southern hero contesting the Yankee owner of a stream drill? Was he indeed a victim of anything at all? The folk sources are not clear. By parallel, is J. Sutter an updated version of the ritual racial martyr? The initial of his first name, J., might or might not link him to the hero named John. Because only his initial is given, he may be (like a folk stamp) no more than a paper-thin simulacrum, or false copy, of the real and original hero. In the end all history is simulacrum, its empirical content lost in the social constructions of journalistic spin.

Both the frame story of Sutter and the core story of John Henry invite readers to construct rather than receive historical truth. In his prologue, which is a collection of 14 folk reports of John Henry's legendary life, Whitehead undermines the objectivistic assumptions of historians. Here he juxtaposes accounts that invalidate each other, imitating the cetological excerpts at the beginning of Moby-Dick where Melville's sub-sub-librarian futilely tries to grasp the transcendent reality of the whale through moldy old texts. Some reports refer to John Henry's dying in a tunnel accident. In contradiction, others say he died in a contest with a stream drill. One states he was a white man, another that he was coal black, another that he was chocolate, and another that he was a yellow Jamaican. Exploiting huge discrepancies in folk sources (drawn mainly from Guy B. Johnson's 1929 folklore study), Whitehead reports Henry variously as large, as medium, and as small, weighing 230 pounds in one version, and 150 pounds in another. In one account he is hanged for murder, and in three accounts he dies long after the alleged steel-driving contest--cases in which no heroic martyrdom is possible. Only one of the prologue reports is an eyewitness's, beginning, "The last time I saw John Henry" but concluding, "I don't know a thing about John Henry driving steel in a contest with a steam drill, and I don't think I ever saw one at the tunnel." One other person, a hobo, asserts personal knowledge of Henry; but since he was "drunk on Dago Red," the person interviewing the hobo says, "I'm discounting everything he said" (6).

Thus, if Melville's search for the white whale's essence was a metaphysics of Romantic presence (transcendent reality is present in its intuition), Whitehead's is a metaphysics of absence (social presuppositions constitute our constructs). Misleadingly, he frames J. Sutter's adventures as a southern immersion narrative in which J. will confront the brute essence of southern culture. But the southern reality he encounters is wholly nonreferential. A speaker at the festival says, "you can't help but get caught up in the great history of this region" (66), yet that is exactly what Whitehead denies. (13)

J. Sutter enters the South knowing only its most atavistic stereotypes. As a black New Yorker he fears the worst, thinking obsessively, "The South will kill you" (14). The South that he constructs is a savage land where he will be consumed ritually in a blood kill. His ignorance of southern actualities stems from "the standard amount of Yankee scorn for the South, a studied disdain that attempts to make a callus of history." Arriving at the airport he exclaims, "What a dump," and recalling another West Virginian hero, the famous test pilot Chuck Yeager, Sutter muses, "No wonder he took flight." In the trope that governs his perceptions, he sees himself as a colonialist explorer venturing into a jungle of savage whites, all of this a reversal of the Eurocentric perception of a "civilization" being in binary antithesis to a "savagery." Thus, his great fear is that "these people are liable to eat me" (15). He is unnerved by the confederate flag decal on his taxi. Taking southerners to be provincial ignoramuses, he assumes the driver "probably thinks a laptop is some new kind of banjo" (19). The taxi goes by "a barbarism of shacks and rusted trucks" (20). Sutter listens to the driver's "bumpkin patter," and in paranoia wonders if the driver will "Boil him up in a pot, ritual sacrifice helps the crops grow" (21). Like John Henry, he fears, "If anything goes down in this cannibal region ... the story of J.'s martyrdom will live on in black fable," and he repeats, "The South will kill you" (50).

That very evening Whitehead's protagonist nearly dies in a ritual of consumption. But it is rare roast beef, not the South, that takes him down and invalidates his governing trope. Long ravenous, Sutter enjoys a generic buffet at the Millhouse Inn, where with other publicity hacks he gulps free booze and raids the roast beef station for its prime slices. The scene is mock-heroic, this ecstasy of consumption framed by a local entertainer's singing to the diners of the legendary John Henry. Sutter's own heroic exploit is to swallow a huge chunk of roast beef. (Is the inside joke that, like John Henry and Captain Ahab, he bit off more than he could chew?) Down to the floor he falls, gagging and thinking in absurd paranoia, "This place will fucking kill him" (78). Other diners surround him, helplessly (and irrelevant to race) not knowing how to aid, while he thinks in convulsive panic, "They know how to watch a nigger die" (79).

Hilariously, the episode's rendering of regional essence is a sham. Whitehead has fabricated this whole section as a cultural pastiche of empty externals. The Millhouse Inn is no mill house, its fake waterwheel attached for the commercial manipulation of an agrarian myth. The inn's architecture also is a false mix of colonial, antebellum, and modern elements. Its disparate assemblage embodies not authentic period essence but an illusion of southern history. Thus, Whitehead offers simulacra of originals that no longer exist, just as the prologue's accounts of John Henry fail to embody the original man.

Likewise, J. Sutter's last name implies falseness. Together with the Millhouse Inn, it alludes to Sutter's Mill, site of the California gold rush, suggesting that the gold Sutter makes as media hack is false currency. The American Dream, Whitehead seems to imply, has abandoned content of character for contemporary seductions of style. Thus, both J. Sutter and John Henry are postmodern characterizations, each an external surface lacking essence and depth. As Whitehead once suggested in an interview, a mere postage stamp is a pathetic and false semblance of history: "What kind of monument was a postage stamp? It was so banal that it addressed something about our debased age. And the fact that there was an actual press release for it resonated with me, after years of reading press releases for this or that album, book or TV show" ("I Worked").

What is most at stake in John Henry Days, therefore, is the constitutive nature of reality. Wryly, and in the manner of Jean Baudrillard, Whitehead notes, "the real is so hard to come by these days" (44). The pseudo-South that J. Sutter enters-very much a Baudrillardland--is no different from the rest of his postmodern landscape. Everywhere, a hyper-reality (realer than the real) is generated through technology and communications media. A constant traveler, J. spends more time in a vast network of airport terminals than an actual America. The first section's title, "Terminal City," refers to the technological, metropolitan world insulating him from authentic experience. To survive in this new reality, J. cleverly scrounges for others' discarded cashier receipts, using them to increase his travel reimbursements. A parody of John Henry's heroic manual labor skills, J.'s actions substitute false receipts of experiences for original pleasures he never had. In one mock-heroic incident, J. callously plucks a discarded airport news shop receipt from the carpet before a curious little boy can grab it. The receipt "proves" that J. has purchased gum or a magazine that he never purchased. A sham paper slip now constitutes an ironic reality, just as the publicity articles that J. writes offer readers imitations of real experiences. Although the ballad may assert, "Lord, Lord, John Henry was a man," what is a John Henry stamp but a copy of the man? Literally only a receipt for money paid to the postal service, it is a paper-thin simulacrum.

In John Henry Days, historical truth finally becomes a casualty of the cyber-reality generated by media writers. The climax of the novel is the shooting of festival-goers, and this event occurs at the beginning, not the end, of the novel. So, what the reader seeks is not a surprising concluding event but to see how news reports will spin it. By novel's end there is only one clarity: all narrated events are nonreferential. The initial news story of the shooting is written by a novice news intern named Joan Acorn, and her perception of events is indeed "nutty." She reports that three people are shot, but she neither identifies nor describes them. She reports that it was Alphonse Miggs who shot the victims, whereas later investigation indicates that a policeman firing at Miggs killed him as well as bystanders. In the panicked confusion of reporting her first big story, Joan identifies Miggs as a postal worker, but he is not. His only connection to the post office is that he is a collector of railroad stamps, and Joan probably twists the cliche of "going postal" into a reportorial fact. The sum of Joan's journalism schooling is a single "Intro Journalism class" (25). Most ironically, Joan's intern experience is not in news reporting but covering fashion. That is to say, she reports on the stylish seduction of surfaces. So even if Joan is an eyewitness, she does not transcribe reality so much as arrange stylish semblances of it.

In short, for Whitehead, history is story as soon as it happens. After the killings, he isolates the first moments in which each eyewitness will begin to construct a different version of events. Here springs, he remarks, the initial violence of truth: "In these first few minutes a thousand different stories collide; this making of truth is violence too, out of which facts are formed" (24 italics added). If, as he succinctly suggests, truth is constitutive of facts, then narrative precedes the intelligibility of empirical data. So, truth is more slippery than the white whale. It can never be intuited or discovered, only concocted by those hurling their linguistic harpoons. What, then, is the significance of the heroic John Henry? What is the truth of southern history? And what of value can J. Sutter personally retrieve from the historical South? The answers to such questions are constructions, socially mediated not objectivistically transparent.

Whitehead's subject, then, is not historical events themselves but how spin them. Unlike Morrison, for whom the burden of suppressed history intrudes into the present and violently disrupts, Whitehead plays ironically and wittily with contemporary constructions of truth. Choosing not to counter a totalizing master narrative with an alternative, black micronarrative, he exposes all history as suspicious text. Who was the real, genuine John Henry? The answer depends on slant. Certainly, he is not the returning ghost of a violent racial past. Whitehead's aim being not to "explain" the South but to suspect its myths, he is remarkably free from the traditional burden of southern history. Radically postmodern, he approaches "down-home" in the spirit of appropriating it rather than suffering, contending with, fleeing, or returning to it in psychic need. For that reason John Henry Days is, as a southern immersion narrative, a far cry from stories such as Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright's Black Boy, and Ellison's Invisible Man. In those stories the South had palpable historical and cultural essence, whether searing and oppressive or, within the black group, nurturing and restorative.

Because Whitehead gives us bemused skepticism rather than tragedy, and irony not political engagement, he may fail to satisfy readers long accustomed to seeking a solid stance for progressive social action. After all, if one is singing "We Shall Overcome" while marching on behalf of a civil rights cause, one needs to believe in a fixed, transcendent principle--some grand narrative of higher justice- that explains and indeed impels one's civil protest. Yet importantly, Whitehead's irony does have a vitally progressive potential--namely its radical tendency toward openness, not fixity. In the following passage he describes John Henry at work with other railroad men, while dismissing any historical myth we might attach to the scene: "Behind him the other workers are bent over the track, small and human compared to the black titan in the foreground. Building the country mile by mile. This is the forging of a nation. This is some real hokey shit" (40). Captivity to all "hokey" or false narratives is what Whitehead determinedly resists. That resistance to the constraints of binding narratives is exactly the postmodern moment that we now occupy, a moment in which Whitehead might echo Martin Luther King, Jr.-dare one say?--though with entirely postmodern spin, "Thank God Almighty, we're free at last." We come to the end of an arc, traced here through Morrison's fiction to the emergence of Whitehead, spanning the postmodern turn from essentialism.

In this context, it is significant that J. Sutter never immerses in an actual South, never becoming its captive. He is the captive of something else, a generic and centerless American culture that offers simulacra in place of real things. Sutter's story is not about the power of a region but about a contemporary, postmodern man's being enmeshed in the virtual cyber-realities of a technological world. Perhaps, as Whitehead implies, the South (like the rest of the US) is being absorbed into a bland, indistinguishable "Terminal City." If so, then southern history has, somewhat in Francis Fukuyama's sense, ended. Its factual events continue to occur, but the contest of discourses has ended.

So although they are different kinds of writers, Morrison and Whitehead both render the historical South not as an essentialized region but as a social construction. The past-haunted Morrison, through the shocks of fantasy and trauma, recovers a historical black presence long omitted from mainstream consciousness. Whitehead, an urbane ironist who takes all history as narrative, relentlessly treats the South today as a simulacrum of what it once was. Whether in nightmare or journalistic spin, the South of these two writers is a land not of fixed verities but of contested stories. In their ingenious and probing ways, on one hand, they seem to be driving a stake more deeply into the heart of that master discourse once called "Dixie." On the other hand, Dixie itself no longer holds an iron bit on those who might define it, and how.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1990.

Davis, Cynthia A. "Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction." Bloom 7-25.

Evans, James H., Jr. Spiritual Empowerment in Afro-American Literature. Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen P, 1987.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon, 1992.

Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Hughes, Langston. "The Negro and the Racial Mountain." 23 June 1926. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Nathan Irving Huggins. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 305-09.

Johnson, Guy B. John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1929.

Krumholz, Linda. "Dead Teachers: Rituals of Manhood and Rituals of Reading in Song of Solomon." Furman 201-29.

--. "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook. Eds. William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 107-25.

McBride, Dwight A. "Speaking the Unspeakable: On Toni Morrison, African American Intellectuals and the Uses of Essentialist Rhetoric." Peterson 131-52.

Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. 1858. Ed. H. Bruce Franklin. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Plume, 1998.

--. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998.

--. "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." Black Women Writers (1950-1980). Ed. Mad Evans. New York: Anchor, 1984. 339-45.

--. Song of Solomon. 1977. New York: Plume, 1987.

--. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature." Bloom 201-30.

Page, Philip. "Furrowing All the Brows: Interpretation and the Transcendent in Toni Morrison's Paradise." African American Review 35 (2001): 637-50.

Perez-Torres, Rafael. "Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread-Beloved as Postmodern Novel." Peterson 91-109.

Peterson, Nancy, ed. Toni Morrison Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

Ramsey, William M. "The Compelling Ambivalence of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." The Southern Literary Journal 27.1 (1994): 36-50.

--. "Dunbar's Dixie." The Southern Literary Journal 32.1 (1999): 30-45.

--. "Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt." The Southern Literary Journal 33.2 (2001): 30-43.

--. "Jean Toomer's Eternal South." The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (2003): 75-89.

--. "Three Black Writers and the Postmodern South." The Southern Literary Journal 37.2 (2005): 119-39.

Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Whitehead, Colson. John Henry Days. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

--. "I Worked at an Ill-Conceived Internet Start-Up and All I Got Was This Lousy Idea for a Novel." May 2001. New York Times Online. 18 Oct. 2002. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13zale.html>.

Notes

(1.) See Ramsey, "Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt."

(2.) For a more detailed treatment of Dunbar, see Ramsey, "Dunbar's Dixie."

(3.) I explore Toomer's essentialist rendering of the South in "Jean Toomer's Eternal South."

(4.) For a discussion of the cracks in Hurston's unitary black South (i.e., her ambivalence toward the idealized black essence that she posits), see Ramsey, "The Compelling Ambivalence of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God."

(5.) The discussions of Komunyakaa, Everett, and McBride are in Ramsey, "Three Black Writers and the Postmodern South.".

(6.) As Krumholz argues, "Pilate tries to teach Milkman about blackness as a cultural, physical, perceptual, and spiritual entity.... In Pilate's description, blackness is shifting and multiple" ("Dead Teachers" 212-13).

(7.) Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1858) similarly examines American moral history in terms of a central ethical norm, phrased in Chapter One as the tension between Charity and "No Trust."

(8.) As Davis explains, in the name pairs, black terms are "unofficial; the black experience they represent is denied by the city fathers who named Mains Avenue and Mercy Hospital." Thus, "Blacks are visible to white culture only insofar as they fit its frame of reference and serve its needs." However, "invisibility is not non-existence" (8).

(9.) In TheirEyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston suggests a similar state in depicting Janie's life with Tea Cake in the everglades.

(10.) Stepto's argument clearly applies here in that Milkman's ritualized descent into the South forms a classic immersion narrative in which he seeks through identity with the ancestral folk group a relief from alienation. My own argument focuses on the South as a site of contested discourse rather than mythic essence.

(11.) Terming the ghost Beloved as "the trickster of history," Krumholz demonstrates that the novel takes the reader through a ritual recovery of history and from history" ("The Ghosts" 119), concluding that the novel "reconstructs slave history in a way that history books cannot, and in a way that cannot be appropriated by objective or scientific concepts of knowledge and history" (123).

(12.) Although Paradise (1998) is set in fictional Ruby, Oklahoma, not the confederate South, it, too, questions the status of official history. An incomplete inscription on the town's communal oven, "the furrow of His brow," becomes a contested site within the black community as to the meaning of their history. Page cogently explores those discourses (the older generation remembering the quotation originally as, "Beware the furrow of His brow," the younger generation favoring, "Be the furrow of His brow," and the newest version being, "We are the furrow of His brow"), arguing that Morrison invites her readers into a co-creative role so as to undermine fixed historical discourse.

(13.) Whitehead's narrative situation here is a postmodern departure from Stepto's thesis that southern immersion protagonists seek an antidote to the alienation of those who have previously fled the folk group in individualistic ascent. In John Henry Days, where all is simulacrum, the idea of downhome culture is a construct rather than an organic essence. There is no communal antidote for the protagonist, who in fact has not entered the South with a pronounced need for, as Stepto calls it, "tribal literacy" (167).

William Ramsey is Professor of English at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC, where he teaches southern, African American, and American literatures.