Terence Martin
-88-
Romance and Race
Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.
— Ishmael, Moby-Dick
Henry Whistler, writing during the English expedition of 1654-55 against Spanish Jamaica, described Barbados as "the dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish." In this hub of excrement he lamented how a rogue could so easily become a gentleman, a whore a lady. Both Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), and Lady Maria Nugent, in her Jamaica journal, observing the behavior and appearance of white ladies on their plantations, complained about these surprising hybrids of the New World. Long writes: "We see…a very fine young woman awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a Negroe-servant." Lady Nugent focuses on the shock of hearing the English language corroded by the drawling, dissonant gibberish of negro domestics: "Many of the ladies, who have not been educated in England, speak a sort of broken English, with an indolent drawling out of their words, that is very tiresome if not disgusting." Nugent and Long speak from the position of a dominant culture: threatened by the fact of creolization, a contamination, as they see it, of the pure civilities of Mother England. A latter-clay Rochester in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) looks at his white creole wife Antoinette and momentarily confounds her with the negro servant. "She raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth turned down in a questioning, mocking way. For a moment she looked very much like Amélie. Perhaps they are related, I thought. It's possible, it's even probable in this damned place."
What happens to romance when we turn to those places where -89- everything was allowed because thousands were enslaved, where the fact of slavery — the conversion of person into thing for the ends of capital — turned all previous orders upside down? If "masters" claimed civilization on the backs of those they called polluted or bestial — claims ever threatened by evidences of a terrible brutality and abandon — they had to clarify their identity against a background of hybridization, forced intimacies, and pollution. Perhaps we can no longer understand what we mean by romance in the Americas without turning to the issue of slavery. The forced intimacy of what Pierre de Vassière, writing about creole life in Saint-Domingue from 1629 to 1789, called "a very strange familiarity" between those who called themselves masters and those who found themselves slaves made the old practices of idealization unworkable. In plantation isolation, the extremes of differences were blurred in an odd promiscuity, where those who were supposedly inferior became absolutely necessary to those who imagined themselves superior.
If being master or mistress was so addictive a pleasure that the slave as ultimate possession (what Edgar Allan Poe in his review of James Kirke Paulding's 1836 Slavery in the United States praised as dependent upon, indeed goaded by, the use of the word "my," that "language of affectionate appropriation") became a necessary part of the master's or mistress's identity, then we are up against a situation where the terms of exclusivity or control, proclaimed and repeated, are somehow confounded by the facts of slavery. What happens to such words as "power," "purity," "love," or "filth" when, as an anonymous planter from Saint-Domingue put it, you have "tasted the pleasures of a nearly absolute domination"?
The development of romance in the United States was linked in unsettling ways to the business of race. Out of the ground of bondage, the curse of slavery, and the fear of "servile war" came a twisted sentimentality, a cruel analytic of "love" in the New World: a conceit of counterfeit of intimacy. So Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (1851) presented Ishmael and the cannibal Queequeg locked in a marital embrace. In Pierre (1852) the dark, mysterious Isabel and Pierre perform the spectacle of husband and wife, finally to be reciprocally neutered in a stony apocalypse. In Benito Cereno (1856) Don Benito and Babo act out a masquerade of servitude and attachment that -90- Melville will take to its most alarming extreme in the negative romance Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856). Poe's Eureka (1848) ends with an apocalypse startling in its eroticism: "a novel Universe swelling into existence and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart divine." The atoms in the intensity of their "spiritual passion," in their "appetite for oneness," will at last "flash…into a common embrace." This essay on the "Material and Spiritual Universe" Poe called a "Romance."
Speaking about the epic adventures of fugitive slaves in his lecture The American Scholar (delivered 1849), Theodore Parker declared that "all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the white man's novel." The facts of slave life, once turned into heroic and sentimental romances, turned negroes into matter for idealization. Critics as diverse as Winthrop Jordan, William Andrews, Eric Sundquist, and Gillian Brown have noted how the cult of sentiment with its emphasis on self-denial, piety, and pathos signaled a turn away from the ethical problems of slavery. Further, like the idealization of women, which narrowed their realm to the domestic haven of home — a pristine place of comfort and compensation — the conversion of the negro into a figure for romance or a call to formal lament turned the oppressed, whether slave or ex-slave, man or woman, into an object in someone else's story, deprived of the possibility of significant action. The very question of love, as Ann Douglas argued in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), had to be de-natured when both ministers and ladies found themselves marginalized and awash in a language of spirit that allowed another reality to perpetuate itself. While Sarah Hale of Godey's Lady's Book celebrated the powers of feminizing and angelic "influence" on the brute, money-making men, the divide between those who wielded the terms of mastery and power and those who were busy sanctifying, serving, and suffering increased.
"What then is the American, this new man?" To answer St. John de Crèvecoeur's question in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) demands that we recognize that the Declaration of Independence always meant independence for white men only: an exclusion implied in the title of Lydia Maria Child's essay, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). A Calvinist fear of pol-91- lution and dread of the flesh would find ready objects and necessary victims in those marginalized by the curse of color: the blackness that marked for the racist imagination depravity and corruption.
In the first half of the nineteenth century more Africans than Europeans arrived in the Americas. William Bird wrote to Lord Eymons as early as 1732: "They import so many Negros hither, that I fear this Colony will some time or other be confirmed by the Name of New Guinea." It is therefore not surprising when reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Custom-House (the preface to The Scarlet Letter [1850]) to note that he describes the street running through the old town of Salem as having "Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other." In "Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migration: Some Comparisons," The American Historical Review (April 1983), David Eltis writes: "In every year from about the mid- sixteenth century to 1831, more Africans than Europeans quite likely came to the Americas, and not until the second wave of mass migration began in the 1880s did the sum of that European immigration start to match and then exceed the cumulative influx from Africa…. In terms of immigration alone, then, America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century."