The African American historian: David Bradley's 'The Chaneysville Incident.'

. . . for a black person, history is a challenge because a black person is supposed not to have any history except the colonial one. We hardly know what happened to our people before the time when they met the Europeans who decided to give them what they call civilization. For a black person . . . from the diaspora . . . it is a . . . challenge to find out exactly what was there before. It is not history for the sake of history. It is searching for one's self, searching for one's identity, searching for one's origin in order to understand oneself. (Maryse Conde)

The figure of the African American historian in David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident is almost the antithesis of the historian Hayden White delineates in "The Burden of History," a person who needs to be liberated from the burden of history. The African American historian, Bradley would argue, needs to take on and reconfigure that burden, but not by having recourse, as White suggests, to developments in Western culture, to literary modernism or even post-modernism. Bradley's historian, John Washington, goes outside the Western tradition and taps into the residue of African beliefs in African American culture (much as Paule Marshall's Avey Johnson does in Praise song for the Widow) to create an alternative and heroic history. Washington's powerful narrative of the death of his forebear, C.K., and a group of escaped slaves is only made possible by history, and his groundwork as an historian bears much the same relation to his fiction as does Toni Morrison's relation to her research and her fiction Beloved. The ground of history and the work of the historian make possible fiction that fills in the historical gaps, but this effort, for the African American community, as the novel demonstrates, has more than an archival gravity. Historical consciousness, leavened by the imagination, allows us all, no matter what our experience and ethnicity, to know where we all stand in the present.

Hayden White, by contrast, has argued that in order for us to know where we stand in the present the "historical consciousness must be obliterated," particularly "if the writer is to examine with proper seriousness those strata of human experience which it is modern art's peculiar purpose to disclose." Using the figure of the "historian to represent the extreme example of repressed sensibility in the novel," novelists, White claims, have indicted historians either "for a failure of sensibility or will," and as a result, "the [fictional] historian's claim to be an artist appears to be pathetic when it does not appear merely ludicrous" ("Burden" 31). Historians, both in and out of fiction, White contends, are seen as having no wisdom appropriate to the unique conditions of this century, and "contemporary Western man . . . is justifiably convinced that the historical record as presently provided offers little help in the quest for adequate solutions" to contemporary problems. White then pushes his analysis one step further, arguing that artists have come to believe that" 'the historical imagination' . . . constitutes the fundamental barrier to any attempt by men in the present to close realistically with their most pressing spiritual problems" ("Burden" 39; emphasis added). White finds these assumptions at work in depictions of the figure of the historian in imaginative literature, but the writers that he alludes to in support of this contention are all male and, with the exception of Edward Albee, all European. Using terms like "contemporary Western man" ("Burden" 41), White is concerned with traditional history and with canonized male writers of fiction.

I would like to decenter his analysis of the historian in fiction by looking at an African American writer, David Bradley, and his African American historian John Washington from The Chaneysville Incident. If the figure of the white historian throughout this century is to be seen as a symptom of a large cultural failure in the "West," is the figure of an African American historian to be viewed any less pessimistically?

In discussing history and historians, White seems primarily concerned with the stranglehold that nineteenth-century historiography has had on the field, and how narrative history and the idea of objectivity in historical writing have vitiated history throughout this century. He wants histories attuned to what he perceives as our needs: "We require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos are our lot." By rejecting the influence of "modern art and modern science" ("Burden" 50), contemporary history, White alleges, has chosen to remain blind to developments in this century, although since he first published this essay in 1966, one could argue that history has begun to take its blinders off. Significant changes have occurred from below, such as the rise of non-narrative history, oral history, the Annales school, and the merging of history and cultural studies in post-colonial studies. As Linda Hutcheon has observed, "There seems to be a new desire to think historically, and to think historically these days is to think critically and contextually" (88).

Along with the desire to rehistoricize has come the desire to include the previously marginalized, what Hutcheon calls the "ex-centric," those who have previously fallen outside the purview of history. The attention to the once marginalized "be it in class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity" is part of an "implied recognition that our culture is not really the homogeneous monolith . . . we might have assumed" (12). David Bradley's historian John Washington is not only "ex-centric" in his experience, but also in his choice of academic specialization: "'I specialize in the study of atrocities. . . . History is just one long string of atrocities . . . . You could say that history is atrocious. The best way to find out what they did is to find out where they hid the bodies'" (186). As an academic specialist, Washington shares a sense of despair at the repetitiveness of history, and the phrase history is atrocious recurs in the novel. This feeling of despair only fuels his anger to find out "where they hid the bodies," an activity that is both metaphoric and literal. He conceives of his task as an historian as bringing to light, excavating, what's been buried - forgotten on purpose.

As a successful African American scholar, John Washington has adopted a stance toward history that is necessarily more complicated than that of a white historian. He realizes, of course, the degree to which African Americans have been constructed and negated by Western culture, and the degree to which much of African American experience remains undocumented and irrecoverable. As he says early in the novel, what's lost is often the "stuff of background, the material of understanding, the real power of history" (48). Alienated by reason of experience and family history, he is driven by that very alienation to do history, to try to recover, to exhume. As he says to Judith, his white lover, being an historian means" 'hating for things that still mean something. And trying to understand what it is they mean, so you can hate the right things for the right reasons'" (274). Clearly, Washington's alienation as an historian is quite different from the sense of cultural rupture experienced by Willa Cather's historian Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor's House. Washington, unlike St. Peter, cannot look back nostalgically to a period when the world seemed whole, for he is alienated from the narrative of mainstream American history and culture from the ground up. The areas that he investigates and writes about are directly connected to his own experience and the experience of other African Americans. Thus, he would probably disagree violently with White's contention that "historical studies" have to be transformed "in such a way as to allow the historian to participate positively in the liberation of the present from the burden of the past" ("Burden" 41).(1)

One might say, quite cynically, that mainstream American history has managed quite well throughout most of this century to liberate the present from this burden when it comes to the history of African Americans. Clearly, though, histories can be turned against History and can become weapons in the battle to pluralize our collective historical memory. Consequently, the "historical imagination" is not for Washington "the fundamental barrier" to understanding the present (White, "Burden" 39); rather, it is a tool needed to help understand the present as well as the past. Washington's position of "ex-centricity" would seem, then, to reverse White's formulation. Both see traditional History as an inadequate representation, and while White argues that historians must search for alternative encodings of history in literary modernism, Bradley consistently sees (and Washington sees at the end of the novel) that oral history and the African American vernacular tradition provide alternative ways to encode and represent. Washington can only understand his own position in the world by delineating the enduring conditions of oppression, and by grounding that understanding in African American vernacular culture.

If Bradley has created an historian who dramatizes the necessity of history for African Americans, Bradley himself seems to think of academic historians in rather negative terms - persons close to those described by White. In response to a question about how history is used in the novel, Bradley has remarked:

I hate history on account of my father, because my father refused to have any fun with the stuff. And it's . . . a style of black history, name history; you read a biography or a book, it consists almost entirely of names, no faces, no events, and you don't know what's going on. I mean it's boring. It was boring to me. I like stories. (Blake and Miller 27)

As Peter Levy has pointed out, the kind of historian Bradley describes here is something of a straw man (27), but it's also important to realize that Bradley is reacting to a particular style of "black history, name history," one that relies on research in primary sources, "the graveyards and the courthouses" (Blake and Miller 26), a kind of history that bears more than a passing resemblance to traditional African oral histories as embodied in the figure of the griot. Name history also has some of the undernarrativized qualities that Hayden White has identified in the annals and the chronicle. Annals suggest narratives, but do not develop them; the chronicle, on the other hand, does narrativize, but it neither departs from the "order of chronology" nor does it conclude so much as "simply terminate" (White, Content 17). An example of this hybrid, name history is what Bradley's mother Harriet Bradley wrote about the evidence of the grave markers of the runaway slaves, on which the novel is based: "On the Lester Imes farm below Chaneysville one can still find the markers for twelve or thirteen graves of runaway slaves. Mr. Imes relates that when the slaves realized their pursuers were closing in on them, they begged to be killed rather than go back to the Southland and more servitude. Someone obliged" (73). The next paragraph goes on to mention eight more unrelated names, none connected to what Imes told Mrs. Bradley. Clearly, although a ghost of a narrative is suggested, she is not interested in developing that suggestion. The point for this hybrid, name history is not to narrativize, but to collect data, data that consist in this case of the names of the early African American inhabitants of Bedford County, Pennsylvania.

As much as Bradley may hate this kind of history, he is indebted to it because it has conserved part of the historical record - the names and the suggestions of stories that would otherwise be lost. And although Bradley may hate name history as a form of historical discourse, I would suspect that he would acknowledge the theoretical function and importance of naming in African American discourse as a way of both affirming and negating experience and identity. Furthermore, Bradley's problematic relation to his mother's text - he hates name history, yet it provides him with the donnee of his novel - would seem to mirror his character's ambivalence toward his lover Judith, an ambivalence that is resolved only at the novel's end. Bradley's relation to his mother's text also might be seen as an expression of divided loyalties - an ambivalence toward both the Western literary tradition and a vernacular, oral African American tradition.

Bradley's impatience with this kind of history makes him want to create a story, and, as one of Bradley's interviewers, Susan Blake, has observed, he has mirrored the processes of his character. Both author and character discovered an "historical situation, researched it, and told a story about it" (28). The third of these processes, the telling of the story, Hayden White has argued, is always interpretative. All historical narratives encode particular views of history, and the narrative patterns chosen by the historian are themselves interpretations.

The historian's ability to perceive patterns is literalized in the novel, and Bradley uses the word pattern, in the interview, in one particularly telling context. He says that, in finding and then interpreting the gravestones, Washington "discovers . . . the pattern, which allows him to reconstruct the family structure" (25) of the escaped slaves. Discerning in the "pattern" of the physical objects a narrative pattern, Washington has not, as one of Bradley's interviewers suggests, liberated himself from "all that academic apparatus that stands between him and his ability to imagine, to imaginatively re-create history." Rather, as Bradley says, Washington has "to learn to do both things at the same time" (30) - to use the ground of academic historical research to empower the imagination.

While Washington's faith in history contrasts sharply with White's characterization of fictional historians and with Bradley's disdain, the novel seems almost to brood over the problem of the imagination, for reasons that are directly connected to African American experience. Early in the novel, Washington says that, as a boy, he "had no imagination" (27), and he apparently sees this lack of imagination as a crucial impediment to his ability to write narrative history. Even though Judith calls him a "superscholar," his own reflections on doing research and writing history are haunted by a failure seemingly made inevitable by this lack. For instance, Washington writes of his first real research as a failure:

. . . I had seen the facts, there was no shortage of facts; but I could not discover the shape that they filled in. There were, it seemed, too many gaps. . . . I simply could not imagine what I should see. Could not imagine what it was I was looking at part of. I had everything I needed, knowledge and time and even, by then, a measure of skill - I could follow a fact through shifts and twists of history, do it and love it. But could not imagine. And if you cannot imagine, you can discover only cold facts, and more cold facts; you will never know the truth. (146-47)

Washington taught himself to be an historian by researching his father, Moses, who died when John was ten years old. What his father left him as a legacy was an attic full of books, newspapers, and notebooks - an archive - and the son "intuitively" realizes that his father had been "researching something" (142). His research into his father's archive, throughout his teenage years, has come to have a dual focus. By trying to figure out what and why his father was researching, he is trying to understand his father. And he fails. He was unable to make "any of the burning inductive leaps that take you from here to there and let you really understand anything" (147). Later, as an adult, "hot-shot historian," Washington returns to these materials only to experience the same sense of frustration. If, he says, ". . . I could learn to imagine just a little bit, I could understand. But I had no faith I would do it; I had never done it before" (224). In the face of the "gaps," the lacunae in the historical record assembled by his father, and of African Americans in general, Washington feels impotent, unable to interpret, but he also feels continually impelled to interpret, to imagine.

According to Hayden White, the imagination plays an important role in the work of the historian, and he distinguishes two uses of the imagination in an historian's work. The first, which is "peculiar to the modern conceptualization of the historian's task," is "to enter sympathetically into the minds or consciousnesses of human agents long dead, to empathize with the intentions and motivations of actors impelled by beliefs and values that may differ totally from anything the historian might himself honor in his life, and to understand, even when he cannot condone, the most bizarre social and cultural practices" (White, Content 67). The second use of the imagination comes into play when the historian composes "a narrative in which to represent his findings," when "imagination is disciplined by its subordination to the rules of evidence which require that whatever is imagined be consistent with what the evidence permits one to assert as a 'matter of fact'" (67). In White's terms, then, Washington can neither enter into the consciousness of historical subjects nor can he write an historical discourse in which evidence empowers the imagination at the same time that it disciplines it. Although he is a "super-scholar" by the account of his white lover Judith, his predicament as an historian is like that of Mr. Compson in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! who laments, "It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they don't explain and we are not supposed to know. . . . Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen. . . . They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula . . . . you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens" (124). Obviously, Mr. Compson lacks a crucial bit of recoverable knowledge that of Charles Bon's parentage - but his interpretative problem is much the same as Washington's - that is, an inability to "to enter sympathetically into the minds or consciousnesses of human agents long dead." But what remains unknown for an African American historian signifies in a way that other historical unknowns do not, because where the bodies of the dead are buried was not an act of conscious evasion of the evidence of crime for the slaveholders - like the Soviets hiding the bodies of the Polish officers they killed in the Katyn Forest in 1941 - but an act of not even deliberate forgetting - like burying an animal somewhere in the backyard. The graves of slaves are most often not worthy of mark or remark, and when Washington, as an historian, confronts their absence, and the presence of the slaveholders, his imagination must try to catalyze the relation of that absence to that presence.

In his meditations on his failings as an historian, however, Washington has almost obsessively linked the word imagine with the word understand. This connection is important because the word understand appears throughout the novel in still another context. John continually tells his white lover Judith that she cannot understand. As she says to him in one of their painful confrontations,

"I was thinking all the time there was something wrong with you. But it's me, isn't it? I've got this horrible skin disease. I'm white. . . . That's it, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said. "That's it exactly. Only you don't understand what it means" (73).

Being unable to understand means, in the lexicon of this text, being unable to imagine, and Judith's imaginative failure through most of the novel makes her into the kind of historian Washington conceives of himself as being - one who is unable to formulate any satisfactory cross-cultural understanding. Judith is unable to cross the gap to understand what her whiteness means to him, and the gap is so wide that he is unable to cross it to let her know; together they have been unable to create a common discourse that would bridge that gap and create understanding. As he says late in the novel, "There was a lot that I needed that she would never understand. For she was a woman and she was white, and though I loved her there were points of reference that we did not share. And never would" (384). So the novel would seem to arrive at a double impasse. His white lover (and by implication the white reader) cannot understand his or his people's experience, and he cannot understand the mystery that was part of his legacy from his father. Thus, he feels disabled as an historian.

This legacy/mystery is multifaceted: One aspect of it has to do with what his father was researching, while yet another is the mystery of Moses Washington's death and, even more remotely, what happened to his great-grandfather, C.K. Washington. Moses Washington, an expert hunter, seemingly died in a hunting accident, while C.K. Washington simply disappeared. C.K., an escaped slave himself, planned and executed escapes of groups of slaves from the deep South, and he kept an extensive record of his activities, including a journal, while Moses himself had done extensive research. This archive has come down to John Washington, almost as patrimony.

C.K.'s journal simply breaks off on December 23, 1859, and as John says, "'That's the end of it; a period at the end of the sentence. That's the way history is sometimes. Sometimes you don't even get periods'" (367). Judith, though, in trying to understand what he asserts she is incapable of understanding, pushes him and refuses to accept that date as the terminus of all understanding of C.K. When John complains that "'there aren't any facts . . . . '" she responds, "'So get more facts.'" And when he states that "'there aren't any more facts,'" she answers, "'Then forget the facts'" (391). The injunction with which she concludes is one that almost all historians would see as resulting in an abandonment of the "science" of history.

Despite his resistance and despite the absence of facts, John Washington finally creates understanding by using his imagination. Given all that cannot be known, he creates a fiction of C.K. Washington's last days, as if in acknowledgment of the limitation of the methods of history when it comes to the experience of African Americans. Early in the novel, Washington has characterized the historian as a "poor unimaginative fool," who is "really only a frustrated novelist," a person who "tries to put it all together. And fails" (49). In the last astonishing pages of The Chaneysville Incident, the historian becomes a teller of stories, a fabulator, a griot almost, who accounts for, as a traditional historian cannot, what has gone unrecorded. As John says early in the novel, speaking as an academic historian, ". . . what a man's dying really means" is that "his story is lost" (48). But for those capable of using the imagination, the absence of a first-person autobiographical narrative does not mean that the story is inevitably lost. In this novel, as Klaus Ensslen has written, "History can only become meaningful through active imaginative appropriation of its raw material, which is to say by an act of imaginative completion" (286).

This imaginative completion, however, is more complicated than Ensslen's analysis allows for. I would argue that, while it is an imaginative completion of the story, it is also a rejection of Western assumptions about history. As James Baldwin wrote in Just Above My Head: "To be forced to excavate a history is, also, to repudiate the concept of history, and the vocabulary in which history is written; for the written history is, and must be, merely the vocabulary of power, and power is history's most seductively attired false witness" (512).(2) Excavating and then imagining a history, I would argue, is to repudiate a Western conception of history, and that repudiation does not leave one historyless, but rather it gives the historian the opportunity to make a kind of history less implicated in dominant discourses, and more open to other ways of structuring and organizing, ways that are collective and antithetical to the Western tradition. Repudiating the concept of Western history, Washington has appropriated an African concept of time, one that's been articulated by Woye Soyinka, who writes that "traditional thought" embodies "not a linear conception of time, but a cyclic reality." Soyinka knows that his conception of time is not unique either to

the Yoruba or to the African world view. . . . the degree of integrated acceptance of this temporal sense in the life-rhythm, mores and social organisation of Yoruba society is . . . a reflection of that same reality which denies periodicity to the existence of the dead, the living and the unborn. The expression "the child is father to the man" becomes, within the context of this time structure, not merely a metaphor of development . . . but a proverb of human continuity which is not uni-directional (10).

Washington himself is aware of how porous the boundaries are that separate the living from the ancestors in traditional belief, and he realizes in this context that his father's suicide was a gesture of return, an act of faith in tradition, in cyclic African reality: He kills himself on the exact spot where C.K. died in the faith that he would join those ancestors. As Washington says, "'You don't throw your whole life away if you're not sure that the dead really are there, waiting for you'" (389). While Washington doesn't join the ancestors at the end of the novel, he does finish the story of C.K. in a locus of repetition: Old Jake's cabin, where he used to listen to the old man's stories. After coming to what seems to be a final impasse, John remembers the hunting advice of Old Jack: "'You figure too much, Johnny. . . . Quit tryin' to figure where he's at an' jest follow him.'" Immediately after this memory, John says to Judith, "'You want a story, do you?'" She replies, "'What? . . . I don't understand.'" "'Fetch the candle,'" John responds (393). In repeating exactly the words that Old Jack used to say to him, John not only recreates a ritual out of his childhood, but he also takes the position of Old Jack, his mentor, who educated him after his father's death, and Old Jack was a man whose wisdom was in his "stories." Taking Old Jack's role, John becomes almost a ritual storyteller, a bearer of collective wisdom, while Judith, conversely, assumes the role of John when he was young, a neophyte, an initiate.

Using the trope of hunting, John finishes the story of C.K. and tells how a famous slavecatcher used a group of escaped slaves to help catch a famous planner of slave escapes. C.K. is the hunted in the final section of the novel, and as the hunted, he realizes he must be doing more than "'gathering facts and ordering them'"; he must be "'really thinking, looking at the overall pattern of things and figuring out what the facts had to be'" (396). In order to survive, C.K. must imagine what the hunter, the slavecatcher Pettis, is trying to do; he must create his strategy out of his understanding of the hunter. In choosing, then, to tell the story from C.K.'s point of view, Washington, as historian/hunter, must understand both the hunted and the hunter. He must understand the hunter through the hunted; he must understand the white slavecatcher through the escaped slave.

But the trope of hunting also functions to describe Washington as an historian, and the failed deer hunt in the middle of the novel is a signal that he is still unable to give up completely his desire to "'figure'" (in the words of Old Jack) in favor of a more intuitive and subjective ability to "'feel'" and "'follow'" (393). He is unable to give up figuring until the moment he enters ancestral time and can translate the voices on the wind, the voices that Old Jack insisted he heard "'maybe five, six times in [his] whole life.'" The voices are those of the escaped slaves who, Old Jack asserts, "'ain't ghosts; they ain't dead. They're jest runnin' along. An' the sound you hear is the sound of 'em pantin''" (63), a sound awaiting translation.

Moving into traditional time, John and Judith enter into a cycle and repeat (with a difference) the relationship of C.K. and Harriette Brewer. Judith has identified John with his ancestor ("'. . . you want to be just like him,'" she says [344]), and while it may seem that there could be no convergence between a white psychologist and a woman who escaped from slavery before the Civil War, there is. The first form of convergence is Harriette's ancestry: She is half-white. Her mother fled "'because the child she was carrying belonged to her master'" (355). (There is a devastating pressure on the word belonged.) Although Judith has no African ancestors, she is implicated in the story by reason of her white ancestors (who owned slaves), and although Bradley says she's peripheral to the novel, her presence in the telling of the final story is absolutely crucial. She's not merely a stand-in for the white reader, because through discovering his love for her, Washington can explore the love of C.K. and Harriette, a conjunction that Bradley emphasizes by having Washington and C.K. simultaneously experience the same metaphoric thawing, one that indicates an opening up to the other. As Washington says, ". . . I realized something strange was happening. Because I was no longer cold." He's complained of his inability to get and stay warm throughout the novel, and when Washington resumes his story, Harriette physically warms C.K., but the gesture has more than physical resonance:

". . . he had not known about the other cold, the cold inside, the glacier in his guts that had been growing and moving, inch by inch, year by year, grinding at him, freezing him. He had not known that. But he knew it now. Became he could feel it melting. The heat . . . came from her, from . . . . the warmth of her hands that cupped the base of his belly." (413)

Through telling the story to Judith, John unfreezes his own glacier, and he discovers in ancestral time his love for her.

In order to tell the story, Washington must imaginatively assume several subjects positions, and in order to tell a satisfactorily structured story, he must also imaginatively understand, one other character - the white miller, Iiames. But this understanding only comes gradually during John and Judith's visit to the Iiames' family graveyard. Next to that graveyard they discover another, in exactly the same pattern as the white family's. At first, they believe that what they have uncovered in the snow (excavated almost?) are the graves of the slaves that Iiames owned, but ". . . as I shivered, the number of them came to me: one man, four women, seven children; twelve" (380). John realizes he's found C.K.'s grave.

After John finishes the story, Judith returns to the interpretive problems of the graveyard, and she asks who buried them and, for the first time in the novel, drinks a hot toddy along with John. After rejecting a number of possibilities, John says:

"They were buried next to a [white] family graveyard. They died there, but they didn't have to be buried there. They were buried with the same spacing as the family stones. . . ."

"You're saying that the [white] miller - what's his name? Iiames? - you think he took the time to bury them like that, to figure out who loved who?"

"Yes," I said. "That's what I believe."

"But he was white," she said.

"I know," I said.

"Why would a white man . . . why would you think a white man . . . ?"

I heard the soft squeaking of the chair as her body stiffened, as she turned to try and see my face. (431)

Klaus Ensslen argues that John has, by interpreting "the very spacing and grouping of the graves," demonstrated the "empathy" of the white miller, Iiames, and "his ability to endorse imaginatively the value of their final gesture" (286) of suicide, but what Ensslen fails to see is that, in asking her final question, Judith has not only "follow[ed] the example of Iiames," but transcended it. Entering the world of the story, Judith is speaking from within the experience and presuppositions of the African American community. As Bradley has said in an interview, her question here "indicates an absorption into John's point of view" (Blake and Miller 32). Earlier, she would have been willing reflexively to insist on the existence of some whites of good will. Here, Iiames's burial of the "bodies of the fugitives as an act of atonement and love" (Werner 735) - this act by a white man - is utterly incomprehensible to her, and her recognition of how far she has come in understanding is signaled by her body's "shifting." This act of "empathy" transcend Iiames's empathy because Judith is the only white character in the novel to succeed in empathetically understanding the other from the other's point of view. Her understandings, her entrance into the "minds or consciounesses of human agents long dead" (White, Content 67) suggests the power of narrative to transform subject positions, to take a reader inside alien cultural assumptions. And the novel ends with John no longer asserting that Judith cannot understand, but with his hope that she will be able to continue to understand.

In entering ancestral time, John Washington becomes, as Jane Campbell has observed, a griot (149), a bearer of genealogies, a teller of tales. Although Campbell does not push the point, I would argue that the oral quality of Washington's narrative is an explicit challenge to Western conceptions of "objective" and "scientific" history. While Washington explicitly compares the historian to the Western novelist, he enacts a different set of cultural assumptions when he tells the story of C.K.'s death, assumptions which exist, he says, in all African Americans "independent of our volition" (213). In having recourse to these alternative cultural assumptions, Bradley is employing what George Lipsitz has called (adapting and modifying a term from Foucault) counter-memory, which Lipsitz defines as

a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story. Counter-memory looks to the past for the hidden histories excluded from dominant narratives (213).

What Bradley has done is to write a counter-history in this novel, one that resists dominant History and rewrites it in resolutely local terms. Although Bradley and Washington have at their fingertips local historical detail, it's only in the telling of the final story that the detail can begin to challenge "the hegemony of dominant discourse." As Lipsitz concludes, "Story-telling that combines subjectivity and objectivity, that employs the insights and passions of myth and folklore in the service of revising history, can be a powerful tool of contestation" (212-13). Employing counter-memory as a way of moving into ancestral time, Washington has entered the tradition of African American writing, for as John M. Reilly has written: "It is the search for possibility, rather than reportage or protest, that distinguishes the African American writer's engagement with history" (99).

Like other African American writers, Washington's completion of C.K.'s story is counter-writing, part of the extended effort of African Americans to write themselves rather than being written. Old Jack, early in the novel, reflects this awareness when he says, simply, "'. . . a man with no say is an animal'" (42). What Bradley has done is to give those fugitive slaves buried in Chaneysville their final say, because in Harriet Bradley's history they are victims: They "begged to be killed" and "someone obliged" (73). David Bradley has created a powerful and terrible image of African American agency - a heroic mass suicide - an image as powerful and terrible in its own way as Sethe's killing Beloved in Morrison's novel. In both works, the writers transform the limitations of the historical documentation into "community legend" (Wilentz 83), a community legend that finds its sources in Western conceptions of history and in the African American vernacular tradition, one that is made possible through the creation of a common discourse between John and Judith, a discourse powered by the agency of storytelling, a search "for one's origin in order to better understand oneself" (Conde 204).

Notes

1. One might argue that a novel like Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale not only participates in the desire for this kind of liberation but also enacts one such liberation.

2. I am indebted to Craig Werner for his detailed and collegial feedback on an earlier draft of this essay, and especially for pointing me to his essay in The Southern Review. Not only was this essay quite useful in rethinking and revising this essay, but it also gave me the reference to Baldwin's novel.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. New York: Dial, 1979.

Blake, Susan L., and James A. Miller. "The Business of Writing: An Interview with David Bradley." Callaloo 7 (1984): 19-39.

Bradley, David. The Chaneysville Incident. New York: Harper, 1981.

Bradley, Harriet, and Thomas C. Ambler. The Kernel of Greatness: An Informal Bicentennial History of Bedford County. State College, PA: Hives, 1971.

Campbell, Jane. Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1986.

Conde, Maryse. "Afterword: An Interview with Maryse Conde." With Anne Armstrong Scarboro. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Trans. Richard Philcox. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992. 198-213.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Ensslen, Klaus. "Fictionalizing History: David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident." Callaloo 11 (1988): 280-96.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Levy, Peter. "Truth and/or Accuracy: An Historian's Assessment of David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident." Pennsylvania English 16 (1992): 20-36.

Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

Reilly, John M. "History-Making Literature." Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism. Vol. 2 of Studies in Black American Literature. Ed. Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot. Greenwood: Penkevill, 1986. 85-120.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World. New York: Cambridge UP. 1976.

Werner, Craig. "Tell Old Pharaoh: The Afro-American Response to Faulkner." Southern Review 19 (1983): 711-35.

White, Hayden. "The Burden of History." Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 27-50.

-----. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

Wilentz, Gay. Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Matthew Wilson is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Writing at Penn State Harrisburg. He has taught in Poland and Saudi Arabia, has recently had an essay published in College English, and has published essays on John Edgar Wideman, John Updike, and Philip Roth.