"No matter how 'fictional' the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory," Morrison explains. There was Garner, a dead child, and a trial. What was required, I would add, was empathy. An unemphatic Morrison would have passed on "fictionalizing" this story for a new generation. A transporting of ones self to a time when we were property for Americans on their way to being wealthy. Claiming, "self-reliance." Failing to mention the enslavement of people designated to produce the tobacco, cotton, sugar. For the benefit and rise of a whole race of people, their families, communities, towns and cities. For a whole nation, the United States to become a world power, a superpower.
And as it's power wanes, the nation turns once more to Black people: Maybe if we refuse them the right to vote, to representation, to existence?
"A rush of imagination is our 'flooding.'" explains Morrison.
We are still being told that slave narratives are "biased," "inflammatory," and "improbable." We're in the post-racism era, anyway. And anyway, we benefited from our enslavement. We learned "skills." We should be grateful.
But thanks to slave narratives, we know that life in those "black" sites meant we worked long hours, worked to death. We were beaten for the least infraction, and girls and women were raped routinely. "It was," as the late historian John Hope Franklin writes in The Militant South, 1800-1861, "a way of life which retained much of the feudal spirit and which, consequently, rested on an agrarian social and economic system where ideas of fealty to the lord, of personal honor, and of obligations to codes of soldierly conduct predominated." The Southern settlers dreamed of life lived as "a country gentleman, in noble splendor." An aristocratic in anything but a true democracy. And if a democracy, one for the wealthy class.
Throughout the USA!
In turn, freedom meant "freedom of mind and body," for white Americans. Enslaved Blacks made it possible to "trickle" down the privilege of being white, even if not a member of the wealthy class. "Planters believed that to preserve social and economic stability, the Negro," Franklin continues, "must be kept at the bottom-- by discipline, if possible, by force and violence, if necessary." For free enslaved Black would mean a destruction of the South, of its ability to make profits, of its ability to live a certain a way of life.
Chivalry, Franklin adds, was in the bullying by slaveholders toward the enslaved Blacks.
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