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Overview
Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet explores the meaning of blacks and blackness in Whitman’s imagination and, equally significant, also illuminates the aura of Whitman in African American letters from Langston Hughes to June Jordan, Margaret Walker to Yusef Komunyakaa. The essays, which feature academic scholars and poets alike, address questions of literary history, the textual interplay between author and narrator, and race and poetic influence. The volume as a whole reveals the mutual engagement with a matrix of shared ideas, contradictions, and languages to expose how Whitman influenced African American literary production as well as how African American Studies brings to bear new questions and concerns for evaluating Whitman.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609382629 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2014 |
| Series: | Iowa Whitman Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Whitman Noir
Black America and the Good Gray Poet
By Ivy G. Wilson
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2014 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-262-9
CHAPTER 1
Erasing Race
The Lost Black Presence in Whitman's Manuscripts
ED FOLSOM
A spectral black presence both haunts and energizes Walt Whitman's work. Black presences that once were there or should be there finally aren't. So much of what we can now say about Whitman and race comes not from what he published but from what he didn't—from what we might call his "discarded writings" instead of his "collected writings": the reported comments that Whitman made in conversations, the odd jottings on nineteenth-century racialist scientific theory that Whitman never used in a published work, the newspaper articles about blacks that he never reprinted, the wealth of unedited poetry manuscripts that frequently contain Whitman's lost race writings. As we unearth more manuscripts, as we keep discovering more reported conversations, as more of his journalism comes to light, we become increasingly aware of the ghost black in Whitman's work, because we see more and more places where we can determine that African Americans were on his mind when he wrote, only to fail to be included when he published. Whitman, it seems, systematically erased race from his published writings.
"Erasing race" is a phrase that has been thrown around a lot in recent years. It is often used in relation to legislative and judicial steps that have been taken in an attempt to overthrow affirmative action guidelines, supposedly making admissions and hiring decisions "race-blind." The phrase has also been used in relation to cyberspace, where Internet users experience an odd anonymity as they interact with strangers in a virtual world where race—which would be immediately obvious if two people in an online chat were facing each other across a real table—presumably becomes invisible. I am using the phrase here in a different, somewhat more literal sense: Whitman, in moving his poetry and prose from manuscript notes to the printed page, often erased the African Americans who were a key to the very inception of his ideas and images. Kenneth M. Price has noted how Whitman "was more daring on racial issues in his manuscripts than in more polished work," and I want to build upon Price's insight to suggest how those lifelong erasures often served as the now-hidden source of the radical energy of Whitman's poetry and prose.
Let's start with one of Whitman's most powerful images, a passage from "Song of Myself" that was cited frequently in the days and weeks following 9/11, when New York firemen became the new national heroes for their selfless work and sacrifice in the collapsing World Trade Center buildings. David Remnick in the New Yorker, for example, evoked Whitman's passage:
Walt Whitman remains the singular, articulated soul of this city, and in "Song of Myself" he seems to have projected himself forward a century and a half into our present woe, our grief for the thousands lost at the southern end of Manhattan, and for the hundreds of rescuers among them, who walked into the boiling flame and groaning steel:
I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken,
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
They have clear'd the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.
Largeness of empathy was Whitman's emotional gift and legacy. It is indecent to look for the good in an act of mass murder, and yet one would have to be possessed of a heart of ice not to have felt in recent weeks the signs of Whitman's legacy: a civic and national spirit of resolve, improvisation, and kindness when panic and meanness might also have been expected.
But Remnick's quote stops just short of the really puzzling part of Whitman's passage, where the poet's persona, his "I," continues speaking its transport into the "mash'd fireman":
I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,
Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.
Here Whitman channels the first impressions of the injured fireman as he is pulled from the debris, sensing the "hush" around him, stunned to feel no pain, bathed in the light of the crowd's torches, looking up at the "white and beautiful" faces. The "white and beautiful" faces?
The speaker's identification of the color of faces surrounding him is something most white readers, over the years, have read right by. But when we find in one of Whitman's early notebooks his notes that form the earliest draft of this passage, we are immediately struck by just who this "mash'd fireman" is: "Years ago I formed one of a great crowd that rapidly gathered where a building had fallen in and buried a man alive.—Down somewhere in those ruins the poor fellow lurked, deprived of his liberty, perhaps dead or in danger of death.—How every body worked! How the shovels flew! And all for black Caesar—for the buried man wasn't any body else." Edward F. Grier, who edited Whitman's early notebooks, dates this notebook before 1855 and makes the odd claim that the entries in this notebook "bear no direct relationship to the poetry of 1855–1856." Commenting on this particular passage, Grier proposes that "the jocularly racist reference to 'Black Caesar,' the comic victim, is in strong contrast to the treatment of blacks in the poetry." "Black Caesar" was indeed a common epithet for African Americans in mid-nineteenth-century America, a name often assigned to black servants.
Andrew C. Higgins has analyzed this notebook passage in relation to the final poem and argues that "Whitman revises the race of the trapped figure from black, in the notebook, to white in 'Song of Myself.'" But what if the speaker in Whitman's poem has shifted, at this moment, into Black Caesar himself, stunned to find himself saved from the collapsed building by the feverish efforts of the white crowd, who, having dug him out, are themselves stunned into silence by their discovery that their heroic efforts were dedicated to freeing a black man? Higgins argues that "Whitman makes no reference that would lead the reader to read [the fireman] as black; whether or not Whitman secretly saw the fireman as black, he had to know his readers would assume he was white."
But if the fireman in "Song of Myself" is silently black (with his blackness erased from explicit mention) and is in fact a free black fireman, then Whitman here offers us another version of the now-much-discussed "Lucifer" section of "The Sleepers," where he gives voice to the slave (also of course erasing or burying the "blackness" there, too, which was much more evident in the manuscript versions than in the final printed version). In the "mash'd fireman" section, the race of the speaker is apparently a hidden reference—the reader would not know that the figure of the fireman now speaking originated in a black person, but Whitman would know, and he would know that, by giving over his "I" to this person, he had on some level humanized poor Black Caesar. But the clue is actually there in the text and may be more obvious to African American readers than to white readers: a white fireman would have taken the white faces for granted and not have specified their color, but a black fireman in the 1850s would at the moment of rescue be struck by the circle of white rescuers around him; it is the only way that the specification of color at this moment makes sense. The reference to the "white and beautiful" faces then becomes even more poignant: of course a black man in the 1850s saved by whites would note the color of the faces that have rescued him. And Whitman's ghost-black fireman seems to continue to exert his perspective beyond the "mash'd fireman" passage, as, for example, a few sections farther on in "Song," when firemen reappear: "Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes ... / Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr'd laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames" (my emphasis). Here again, the persona still finds himself specifying the whiteness of the faces he observes. The white that is—to whites—normally transparent becomes instead opaque, worth mentioning, there.
This (black) fireman, his race erased yet still operative in the interstices of Whitman's poem, is perhaps part of the racial debris that is scattered throughout the 1855 Leaves of Grass, as Martin Klammer so effectively demonstrated in his groundbreaking 1995 Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of "Leaves of Grass." Klammer tracks Whitman's evolving attitudes toward race from his early temperance novel Franklin Evans through his Free Soil journalism, his growing disdain for slavery, and the emergence of his antislavery beliefs in the 1855 Leaves. As Klammer demonstrates, one of Whitman's first key race erasures occurs when we examine the notebook in which we see the original stirrings of Leaves of Grass, the so-called "Talbot Wilson" notebook, probably written in the early 1850s. Here, Whitman hesitatingly inscribes a whole new kind of speaking, and, breaking—for one of the first times—into the kinds of free-verse lines in which he would cast Leaves, he offers a wild attempt to voice the full range of selves in his contradictory nation:
I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves
I am the poet of the body
And I am
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.
This originating moment of Leaves of Grass has sparked a great deal of commentary. If nothing else, the passage reveals that at its inception Leaves was not an "abolitionist" work, at least not in the conventional sense of that term, for in abolitionist works the slave is pitted against the demonized slave master, and the irresolvable dichotomies of the nation are intensified. Whitman instead probes for a voice that reconciles the dichotomies, one inclusive enough to speak for slave and slave master—or that negotiates the distance between the two. This is the beginning of Whitman's attempt to become that impossible representative American voice—the fully representative voice—that speaks not for parties or factions but for everyone in the nation, a voice fluid enough to inhabit the subjectivities of all individuals in the culture. So Whitman in these early notes identifies the poles of human possibility—the spectrum his capacious poetic voice would have to cover—as it appeared to him at mid-nineteenth century: from slave to master of slaves. His dawning insight had to do with a belief that each and every democratic self was vast and contradictory, as variegated as the nation itself, and so the poet had to awaken the nation, to bring Americans out of their lethargy of discrimination and hierarchy to understand that, within themselves, they potentially contained—in fact potentially were—everyone else. The end of slavery would come, Whitman believed, when the slave owner and the slave could both be represented by the same voice, could both hear themselves present in the "I" and the "you" of the democratic poet, when the slave master could experience the potential slave within himself, and the slave could know the slave master within himself, at which moment of illumination slavery would end. It was a kind of spiritual and ontological abolition, a desperate attempt to speak with a unifying instead of a divisive voice, and by the time Whitman put this voice into print in 1855, the nation was only five years away from discovering how fully the forces of division and violence would overpower the fading hopes of unity and absorption of difference.
To accomplish this voice, Whitman imagines himself in a politically and sexually charged space—between the slave and the slave master. Politically, this space defined the gap between citizen and property, between those in power and those powerless. Sexually, this space was the charged and usually unacknowledged space that produced a mixed-race America—the hushed legacy of the peculiar institution as it produced interracial children who became at once the slave master's property and the slave's sons and daughters, as slave owners raped and impregnated their female slaves, creating sons unrecognized by their white fathers and creating additional wealth for the slave owner/father in the form of mixed-race progeny defined as "black." Karen Sánchez-Eppler reads the passage this way: "Claiming to reconcile racially distinct bodies, Whitman locates the poet in a sexually charged middle space between masters and slaves" where he can enact what Sánchez-Eppler calls "Whitman's poetics of merger and embodiment." Whitman's incendiary passage thus flirts with entering the great taboo subject of the nineteenth-century South—the widespread propagation of new slaves by white slave owners impregnating black women they owned. It is this sexual violence—perpetrated by many white slave owners on many slave women—that created a national fear that black male slaves, if emancipated, would wreak revenge by raping white women, a fear that generated, among other things, a seventy-five-year legacy of lynching.
Occupying that culturally treacherous space "between the masters and the slaves," Whitman, in a stunning move, goes beyond simply mediating and uses instead the image of penetration to gain access to both: "[begin strikethrough]And I e[end strikethrough] Entering into both [begin strikethrough]and[end strikethrough] so that both shall understand me alike." Kenneth Price, in his analysis of the passage, notes that "Whitman occupies and transforms the cultural space of violation," seeking to "remake penetration as a vehicle for purification." It is significant that Whitman in his inceptive moment insists on becoming the voice of both master and slave, in effect taking on a mulatto persona, the only persona who could contain the blood of the master and the blood of the slave and therefore speak as both. It is as if he momentarily and impossibly occupies the space of conception and, disappearing, is born as its speaking product, a new melded being with a new existence: "And I am."
It is a powerful passage, but what is perhaps most striking about it is that Whitman cancels it out, drawing a diagonal line through it, and the only lines from the passage that finally make their way into Leaves of Grass are "I am the poet of the body / And I am the poet of the soul." Whitman's radical evocation of a penetration of both slave and slave master is erased, though it appears to be the very source of the key statement of the poem that he would eventually name "Song of Myself." It is as if claiming the power to voice the extreme subject positions of American society—the slave and slave owner, black and white—somehow opened for him the way to speak both the body and the soul in a single unifying voice. Whitman originally learned to absorb dichotomies by confronting and speaking for America's most troubling bifurcation: black and white. America's tortured racial history, then, stands at the very conception of Leaves and, though erased, is evident in the scatter of racial moments throughout his book, including moments like that of the "mash'd fireman," black in conception even if his blackness has been invisible to most readers.
Klammer has effectively traced how race plays itself out in the 1855 Leaves, where "the representation of African Americans ... is unlike anything Whitman—or anyone, for that matter—had ever written." Whitman, Klammer argues, "portrays African Americans as equal partners with whites in a democratic future and as beautiful and dignified people, the paradigms of a fully realized humanity." And, Klammer points out, "African Americans play a crucial role in the major themes and turning points of what are generally considered the three most important poems of the 1855 edition—poems that were later titled, 'Song of Myself,' 'I Sing the Body Electric,' and 'The Sleepers.'" Klammer is eloquent about the ways Whitman inscribes African Americans into the first edition of Leaves, and, more recently, he has offered an acute analysis of how it is possible to track Whitman's gradual and partial erasure of African American presence in Leaves of Grass as the proportion of poems dealing with or mentioning blacks diminishes from three-quarters in 1855 to one-third in 1856 to one-fourteenth in 1860, only to approach the vanishing point after the Civil War, as the powerful "Lucifer" section is literally erased from the final version of "The Sleepers." And it is worth noting, as I have investigated at length elsewhere, that Whitman's erasures in the "Lucifer" section began even before the poem saw print: the manuscripts of the "Lucifer" passage show clearly that Whitman's original conception was much more explicitly about a black slave, a powerful identification that he had already partially obscured by the time he published the poem in 1855.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Whitman Noir by Ivy G. Wilson. Copyright © 2014 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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