Darwin Turner lecture, "Slavery as Subject Matter for Fiction and Poetry by Afro-Americans," at the University of Iowa, June 21, 1974

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 21st, 1974, as part of the Sixth Annual Institute on Afro-American Culture held at the University of Iowa. Speaking on Slavery as Subject Matter for Fiction and Poetry by Afro-Americans is Dr. Darwin Turner, Chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa. Making the introduction is Dr. Bernard Bell, an Assistant Professor of English, American and Afro-American Literature at the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Bernard Bel...: In every age, we are awed by a few among us who are born with the rare gift of genius. The brilliance and achievements of these individuals is of such a magnitude that they stand head and shoulders above their contemporaries like titans. Such a man, I humbly submit, is our speaker this evening. Dr. Bernard Bel...: Before his defiance of the gods to bring enlightenment to his people, he won Phi Beta Kappa honors at 15 years old, earned his B.A. from the University of Cincinnati at 16 years old, his M.A. from the same institution at 18, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago at 25. He has taught at Clark College, Morgan State, Florida A&M, A&T College, as well as such Big Ten institutions as the Universities of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. His administrative background ranges from the chairmanships of English departments and the Deanship of graduate school and Black colleges, to his current position as Professor of English and Director of Afro-American Studies here at this institution. Dr. Bernard Bel...: So it's the late 1950s; he has held the distinction of being the president or in the highest executive committees as such prominent national organizations as the College Language Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the North Carolina/Virginia College English Association... getting my notes in order... the Modern Language Association, and the College English Association. Dr. Bernard Bel...: No Johnny-come-lately to the field of Afro-American studies, he wrote his Masters' Thesis on Negro-American Prose Fiction Writers of the 20th Century in 1949, and has subsequently authored, edited or co-edited more than a dozen books, including Katharsis, A Book of Poems; Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; Black American Literature: Essays, Poetry, Fiction, Drama; Black Drama in America: An Anthology; and In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Dr. Bernard Bel...: He has received numerous honors and awards from the Greek Honors' Societies, in drama and literature, as well as the major academic, private and professional organizations, like American Council of Learning Societies, Rockefeller Foundation, and College Language Associations. Dr. Bernard Bel...: I could go on endlessly with this litany of the outstanding intellectual and artistic achievements of our speaker, but the time has come for the titan himself to speak. In Blacker and less pretentious rhetoric, sisters and brothers, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to turn you on to a young gifted and Black brother who be's TCB'ing since way back when, Dr. Darwin Turner. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Thank you, Dr. Bell. I'm going to add you to the list of the Charles Davis introducers. Dr. Darwin Turn...: During this Institute thus far, we have considered the use of slave narratives as a source for a revised history of slavery, of Black people, and of America itself. We have also examined narratives for folklore and for more perceptive understanding of the personality and character of Afro-Americans. Finally, we have analyzed the style, the language, and structure of slave narratives as autonomous elements and in relation to Afro-American literature. In all these explorations, we have questioned the authenticity of the narratives, and we have looked for the most judicious, the most scholarly ways to use them in teaching and in research. Dr. Darwin Turn...: This evening, I wish to modify our directions slightly by talking in a less objective, and perhaps less scholarly, way about slavery as subject matter for fiction and poetry by Afro-Americans. Call this if you wish Black Slaves in the Pens of Afro-American Writers. Dr. Darwin Turn...: I assume that most people in this audience have heard the tale of the father who frequently read adventure stories to his son. Night after night, the boy heard how a brave man outwrestled bears, attacked alligators with only a knife, and killed lions. Finally, one night, the boy asked, "Daddy, why doesn't the lion ever win?" The father answered, "Son, the lion won't ever win until he starts writing the stories himself." Dr. Darwin Turn...: In the history of human civilization, however, the lions repeatedly have learned to write. As a consequence, nations and peoples have transformed their years of despair and degradation into romantic legends and myths of exaltation. From the midst of an Anglo-Saxon past comes an Arthur, who gathered about him knights who personified the nobility, the bravery, and the character of an entire nation. Who remembers that William of Normandy conquered the Saxons? Perhaps historians and students who were in academic institutions, but Arthur and Camelot are the eternalized ideal, told as romance, glamorized into legend, and finally, transformed into myth, to be modified and revived by poet laureates and novelists concerned with the myth, rather than with the actual man. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Think of a time when most Englishmen were slaves in their own land, pawns in the despotic political economic system headed by tyrannical Prince John, or so the story goes. Historians may insist that John was not a tyrant, but a propagandized victim of nobles who seized power from him. Historians may say this, but generations of readers know that Englishmen were saved only by Robin Hood, who righted wrongs, robbed the rich to help the poor, and restored Richard the Lionhearted to his rightful throne. Arthur became a myth for all time. Robin Hood was a legend for his own time. Dr. Darwin Turn...: When France was a fractured land threatened by power-hungry nobles inside and a powerful England outside, God sent Joan to save her land and to return in spirit whenever France was in need. Like Arthur, Joan transcended her own history to become a myth, celebrating the spirit of the nation and the people. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Other familiar examples could be cited from various cultures: Moses as a legend, Jesus as more than the son of God, as a mythic hero. Obviously, what I am suggesting is that from the history of their greatest tribulations, people have created saviors, heroes and heroines who actually lived, but whose glory transcended the few facts known about their lives. Some like Robin Hood and Moses are identified primarily with their own periods of history. They, as individuals, died with visions of triumph; nevertheless, they died. These, I call legendary heroes, parts of legends. Others, like Arthur, Joan, and Jesus, if you will, though identified with a particular time, are timeless symbols of the spirit of a people; the deaths of their bodies were but the beginnings of the lives of their spirits. I call these mythic heroes, or the elements of myth. Dr. Darwin Turn...: From such legends and myths, people derive inspiration, not to guide their personal, their daily lives, but to celebrate their concept of their group, their nation, their race. Perhaps some may say that we live in too cynical an age for myths. Probing the most secret recesses of our nation's heroes, historians and reporters reveal the frailties that inform us that men are but men, and women are not much better. Perhaps, but even in this disillusioned era, when credibility gaps seem to be the only truths, even in this era, legends and romances have been created by the imaginative and the enterprising. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Not so many years ago, television, in the South, at least, presented the Gray Ghost, Major Mosby, who, impeccably dressed, exuding charm and nobility, repeatedly evaded, outwitted, and defeated numerically superior Union forces. The legendary Mosby was merely another piece in that far larger, and sometimes too persuasive, legend that the Old South did not lose the war. Chivalrous gentlemen can never have lost to a disorderly band of ruffians led by a drunken, tobacco-stained general too ignorant to know that he was violating the sanctity of the home by separating the child-like slaves from their masters, the surrogate parents they loved. Dr. Darwin Turn...: If our time is unfertile for legend, it nevertheless can sprout a hardy crop of romance. Scarcely a generations has passed since Margaret Mitchell, ignoring such actual heroes as the Rob Lees, the Stonewall Jacksons, and even the Mosbys, repopulated the South with dashing Rhett Butlers, beautiful Scarlett O'Haras, sensitive out Ashley Wilkeses, and a horde of Blacks: devoted Mammys, comic Sambo maids, and Black beasts. Dr. Darwin Turn...: There's something about that list of characters. You recall when Hollywood was trying to cast the movie, for two out of those three white characters I named as archetypes, they had to go to England. Perhaps a shrewd or cynical reader might wonder whether Margaret Mitchell unwillingly suspected that the South, like Scarlett herself, was postponing to another day consideration of harsh reality, but most readers and viewers of Gone With the Wind see only the glorious world that would have endured but for a senseless war. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Needless to say, if people live only in dreams, they will die in delusion. They will be the arrow-armed Indian chiefs waiting for ghost warriors to lead them to victory against the rifles of the white eyes. They will be the Southerners who Mark Twain derided for living in the fantasy world of Walter Scott. While dreaming their myths, their romances, their legends, a people must work within reality, for personal, immediate, sometimes limited ends. There must be work in reality, but always, too, must be the transcendent vision of what they might be, and the vision must arise not from their triumph, but from their despair. Any slave can exalt in victory; only the truly heroic can transform defeat into exaltation. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In this respect, I believe, Afro-American writers have failed to utilize fully the materials from our period of captivity, the two and one-half centuries of legalized slavery in the United States. The reasons have varied from generation to generation: disinterest, a desire to forget, a feeling of shame, a consciousness of a white audience. Regardless of their reasons, rarely until recent decades have Black American novelists and poets sought to create romances or legends or myths from slavery and slave narratives. Dr. Darwin Turn...: If they have not ignored the subject matter, they have compulsively striven to authenticate themselves to white readers, to prove their veracity by validating their stories of slavery, to oppose romance with documented fact. In so doing, they have abandoned the field to other writers, chiefly Southern, who, unconcerned with objectivity, have shaped the subject matter of slavery into their own romanticized truths. Dr. Darwin Turn...: This evening, after this long, but I believe necessary, introduction, I wish to look at the manner in which Black novelists and poets have used and have failed to use slavery and slave narratives in their literature. Some literary historians insist that until Black people have unrestricted opportunity for personal development, all autobiographies and autobiographical novels by Blacks are merely 20th century slave narratives. Although this thesis may provide another paper for another evening, tonight I shall restrict my examination to works in which Black authors have used material from the period before emancipation. The only exception that I'll make is one fable about a Black where the whites never inform Blacks of emancipation until the 20th century. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Of course, in a restricted period of time, I can not examine fully all relevant works, but I believe that even a limited survey can suggest the nature of the uses of slave materials, the very reasons for the neglect of these materials, the direction in which Black authors seem to be moving, and the future courses which might be taken. Dr. Darwin Turn...: If one excludes the slave narrators themselves, who did more than most subsequent writers to weave romance and legend from slavery, the first Afro-American fiction writers to give serious attention to slavery published their novels before the Civil War: William Wells Brown, with Clotel in 1853, and Martin Delany, with Blake, or the Huts of America, in 1859. Interestingly enough, in these two books, two of the first two or three novels known to have been written by Black Americans... in these two, one finds the prototype of the manner in which Black writers most often have used slavery, and the prototype of the manner in which they might have used it. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Although his autobiographical narrative reveals him to be a suitable model for a legend, William Wells Brown, fugitive slave and abolitionist, did not write Clotel to exult Black people. Instead, he consciously contrived it to elicit support from white readers by denouncing slavery and exciting for sympathy for the enslaved. Sentimentally, he narrated the tragic story of a mulatto daughter of President Jefferson, or if you read the American edition, the tragic daughter of a Southern Senator, but note the obvious appeal to the white reading public. If a fair skin, a beautiful face, and a noble lineage cannot save one from slavery, then all persons need beware when the slave catchers come a-visiting. Furthermore, it was almost requisite for Brown to end Clotel's story tragically; she drowns herself in the Potomac rather than return to slavery. If he had exulted slaves too highly, he might have frightened potential sympathizers with the abolitionist cause, or he might have dissuaded them from offering support. Finally, characteristic of the defensiveness of this type of work, Brown, in his concluding chapter, identifies the sources of his story to persuade readers that he is writing truth, not romance. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In contrast, Martin Delany, in the unfinished novel Blake, wrote a romance about a slave who, without assistance from white abolitionists, proposes to end slavery by means of a plan never revealed to the reader. It is not only white political candidates who have secret plans that are never revealed. After freeing himself, Blake travels through the South, revealing his plan to a select few and fomenting insurrection. Before his plan has been put into action in the United States, he moves on to Cuba to join a revolution there. Such is the substance from which romantic heroes, legends, and even myths are created. Dr. Darwin Turn...: It's important to note that Delany, who favored immigration of Blacks, published the novel serially in the Afro-American Magazine. Writing for Black readers, Delany exalted a Black romantic hero without apology. Blake, however, was atypical even its own day. The best-remembered Black poets of the time leaned towards brown rather than towards Delany. Writing poems to earn money with which to purchase his freedom, George Moses Horton of North Carolina occasionally lamented the plight of a slave. The best known Black poet of the era, Frances E.W. Harper, attacked slavery as vigorously as she attacked other ills of society, but she evoked sentiment with generalized portraits no more detailed than might have been drawn by any white abolitionists writing from imagination rather than observation. For example, in The Slave Auction, she wrote, in part: "The sale began. Young girls were there, defenseless in their wretchedness, whose stifled sobs of deep despair revealed their anguish and distress, and mothers stood with streaming eyes and saw their dearest children sold, unheeded rose their bitter cries while tyrants bartered them for gold." Dr. Darwin Turn...: Unfortunately, the pattern of Blake remained buried in the pages of the Afro-American. One may suggest at least two reasons for the failure to follow the pattern. One, because the audience was small and the story was never completed, the story may not have been widely known; two, the next generation of Black writers was not as anxious to honorate Blake, whose attitudes and behavior stress independent actions by Blacks. Dr. Darwin Turn...: The next generation, most Black writers from emancipation to the end of the 19th century, offered conciliation in order to secure the support of white Americans in creating the integrated society which the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th and 15th Amendments seemed to prophesy. The best known poets and novelists, whether publishing privately or through white-owned firms, ignored slavery, or viewed in such varied ways as to suggest ambivalence. In the narrative poem, Not A Man, and Yet a Man, in 1877, Albery Whitman recounted the adventures of Rodney, a slave who, after heroic adventures, escapes to Canada, but Rodney and his sweetheart more closely resemble white romantic protagonists than prototypes for Black legend. Rodney is mulatto... I think the percentage given by Whitman is 85 percent Anglo-Saxon... and his loved one is a fair-skinned Creole. In part one of the poem, Idylls of the South, Whitman continued his focus on the tragic mulatto with his story of the ill-fated interracial love of Lena, a blue-eyed Octoroon slave, and her young master. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Although Charles Chesnutt is best known for fiction about the problems of mulattoes during Reconstruction in the last decades of the 19th century, in his first collection of stories, The Conjure Woman, 1899, he concentrated on an ex-slave and tales of slavery. Julius, the ex-slave, shrewdly manipulates his employer by appealing to the employer's wife with sentimental tales of the evils of slavery. Although one would wish that he, and not Joel Harris's Uncle Remus, were the Black storyteller to be remembered for the 19th century fiction, the truth is that Julius is one-dimensional and flat in comparison with Remus. Remus actually is closer to a mythic figure, but that, too, is another lecture. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Chesnutt exploited Julius for a series of tales... please do not take that statement as any kind of defense of Joel Chandler Harris and his creation of Uncle Remus; it is instead an unwilling observation. Chesnutt exploited Julius for a series of tales, then abandoned him and his stories in favor of issues which Chesnutt judged to be more critical: the needs of educated Blacks in the late 19th century. Dr. Darwin Turn...: The tune of conciliation, which characterizes end of the century fiction and poetry about slavery, is perhaps most explicitly expressed by Paul Laurence Dunbar in his poem, Ode to Ethiopia. Praising Blacks, Dunbar wrote: "No other race, or white or Black, when bound as thou were to the rack, so seldom stoop to grieving. No other race, when free again, forgot the past and proved them men, so noble in forgiving." Slavery had been evil, that generation of Blacks knew, but if they forgave and forgot what had been done to them, they thought, surely the white self would also forgive and forget. Dr. Darwin Turn...: With such optimism and naivety, Dunbar wrote proudly of Black champions, such as Frederick Douglass, and Black soldiers. He wrote sentimentally and propagandistically of the noble character demonstrated by slaves' loyalty to their masters, and he also wrote carelessly of the slaves' frivolities, which he felt proved that rather than grieving continuously, they had attempted to endure. Dr. Darwin Turn...: While Black writers of the decade were forgiving, forgetting, and otherwise vacillating, a generation of Southern white writers was mounting a solid front. Despite the enlightened efforts of such authors as George W. Cable of Louisiana, later of Ohio, and Albion Tourgée, a so-called carpetbagger from Ohio... despite these authors, the new Southern generation, disdaining any question of quantifiable fact, created its own romanticized version of the antebellum South. Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon, among others, wrote lovingly of proud, aristocratic noble masters; of beloved and loving, wise but respectful slaves; of moonlight and magnolias and beautiful girls in long white dresses on the verandas of Grecian manors; and Eden ruled by the serpent Lincoln, who overran the garden with scalawags, carpetbaggers, uppity freed men, and lustful Black beasts. Dr. Darwin Turn...: By the time the Negro writers of the Harlem Renaissance came to the fore in the 1920s, even more Black intellectuals were trying to forget slavery. For many who accepted the Southern romancers' visions of the Old South, the centuries of Sambo's bondage demeaned them, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their white countrymen. Although some acknowledged the beauty of the lamentations... call them if you will the sorrow songs, the spirituals which arose from slavery... many other Afro-Americans despised even these evidences of an Afro-American past. Such intellectual and cultural leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, Benjamin Brawley, and Alain Locke searched back through time and across an ocean to Africa. There, they sought authenticated evidence to validate their argument that the Negro's heritage was civilized, even if he temporarily had fallen outside civilization in his days of American slavery. In Africa, also, they sought the substance for myth. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Perhaps the so-called New Negro writers' attitude about the significance of slavery is most effectively revealed in Jean Toomer's Kabnis. In a scene near the end of that work, in a cellar, dying, is Father John, former slave, a voice of the past, but the voice is silent. No words give direction to the new generation of Blacks. When Father John finally breaks through his barrier of silence, he can say only, "The white folks sinned when they made the Bible lie." No legends or myths can evolve from a legacy as banal as this. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Yet, Father John was no more silent about the significance of the slave experience than were the Renaissance writers themselves. Novelists Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher wrote about contemporary life as though slavery had not existed. Novelist Jessie Fauset drew from the past only enough to suggest the origins of some of the economic and social dilemmas of Afro-Americans of her own time. When Countee Cullen in Heritage celebrated his ancestry, he looked back to a mythic Africa, rather than to a slave state self. Even Langston Hughes, champion of Black people, often seemed to look everywhere but to the slave heritage as a source for romance, legend, and myth. In his pageant, Don't You Want to Be Free, of course, he did include slavery as part of the capsulized history of Blacks; more characteristically, however, in a short story, he alluded to slavery in the title... the story is called The Slave on the Block... he alluded to slavery merely to suggest a parallel between the exploitation of the 19th century slaves by their masters and the exploitation of 20th century Blacks by northern patrons. Dr. Darwin Turn...: For a legend, Hughes looked to Africa, as in his poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, or to Haiti, where he celebrated a Black slave society that had rebelled successfully against a white ruling class, and where he lamented the way that color cast rivalries had caused the mulattoes and the Blacks to destroy each other. Dr. Darwin Turn...: An apologist might suggest that the confused decade sometimes known as the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation was no time for recreating legends from the past, yet white author James Branch Cabell continued to have an audience for such myths as Jurgen, and before the 1920s ended, young William Faulkner was beginning to create his modern myths. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In the next decade, the '30s, Arna Bontemps, with Black Thunder, 1935, became the first Afro-American novelist since emancipation to use slavery significantly and Blackly as subject matter. In the introduction to the 1968 reprint of the novel, Bontemps, recalling his initial attraction to the slave narratives in the Fisk University library, explains that when he decided to write a novel about a slave rebellion, he considered three rebellions: that of Denmark Vesey, that of Nat Turner, and that of Gabriel Prosser. Dr. Darwin Turn...: He rejected Vesey's as too vague, Nat's as too clouded with mysticism; that left Gabriel. The well-written novel is rich with an authenticity which Bontemps created by means of extensive research, not only into records concerning Gabriel, but also into many slave narratives. These provided him with an understanding of and a sensitivity to the conditions of slavery. Bontemps' artistic decisions, however, seemed to characterize the restrictions which Black writers often have imposed upon their use of slave materials. Dr. Darwin Turn...: First, in order to inform readers that oppressed Black people may lose patience, Bontemps selected a slave rebellion as his exemplum. In doing so, he unconsciously or unintentionally implied that only a group revolt can demonstrate Black peoples' heroism and desire for freedom. Such a fallacy has clouded the judgment of some scholars and authors, Frank Yerby included, who, ignoring the antebellum slave narratives and other unrecorded individual escapes from bondage, presumed to measure Blacks' desire for liberty by counting the number of actual rebellions. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Second, although Bontemps delineated Gabriel heroically, he followed the path of other Black writers who have felt the need to validate their history for a white audience. Bontemps, recall, rejected Nat as too mystical. This never seems to bother those who recreate the legend of Joan of Arc. He also felt compelled to select the story of one slave rebel, instead of presuming that he had the artistic freedom to select freely from all stories, or as one white writer was to say later, to "meditate on history." Dr. Darwin Turn...: Finally, Bontemps ended the work on a note which white William Styron exploited a generation later in his story of Nat Turner. At the end of Black Thunder, Gabriel and other leaders of the revolution have been executed, and their co-conspirators have either been sold down the river or have fled north. The only individual depicted on the final page is the slave Ben, who having betrayed the revolutions, fears that Blacks will kill him. Thus, the novel ends with a mood of defeat more despondent than the ending of Clotel. Certainly, Gabriel's actual rebellion failed, but a skillful author can salvage triumph from defeat, and as I am suggesting throughout this paper, a skillful author must transform despair into exaltation if he is to create romantic legends for his people. Dr. Darwin Turn...: When Bontemps wrote Black Thunder, America reverberated with rumors of revolution. The severe economic depression prompted Communists to hope that the moment had arrived for agitation, and perhaps, revolution. White writers were describing economic oppression. At the end of the decade, other Black novelists, such as William Attaway, in Blood on the Forge, 1941; Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children, 1938... other Black writers were describing contemporaneous labor unrest and political demonstrations, but except for Bontemps, they did not look to slavery or slave stories for models of unrest. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934, for example, Zora Neale Hurston established a time frame by tracing her protagonist, John Buddy, into his slave ancestry. But when Ms. Hurston actually wrote a novel about slavery, Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939, she set her story in Egypt during the Hebrew captivity, and she criticized the slaves as much as the masters. Dr. Darwin Turn...: A stronger voice during the '30s is that of poet Sterling Brown. Concerned with the folk roots of Black people, Sterling Brown celebrated the strength of slaves in Strong Men. The poem reads, in part: "They dragged you from homeland. They chained you in coffles. They huddled you spoon-fashion in filthy hatches. They sold you to give a few gentlemen ease. They broke you in like oxen. They scourged you, they branded you, they made your women breeders. They swelled your number with bastards. They taught you the religion they disgraced. You sang. Keep a inching along like a poor inch worm. You sang, by and by. I'm going to lay down this heavy load. You sand, walk together, children. Don't you get weary. The strong men keep a-coming on. The strong men get stronger." Dr. Darwin Turn...: Although he wrote Crispus Attucks McCoy, about a 20th century Black, Brown, in the poem, demonstrates how defeat can be transformed romantically and exultingly into triumph. "I sing of a hero, unsung, unrecorded, known by the name of Crispus Attucks McCoy. Born, bred in Boston, stepson of Garvey, cousin of Trotter, godson of Du Bois. No monastic hairshirt stung flesh more bitterly than the white coat in which he was arrayed, but what was his agony on entering the drawing room? To hear a white woman say slowly, 'One spade.' He threw up his job. His scorn was sublime, and he left the bridge party simply aghast. Lo, see him striding out the front door, a free man again, his infamy passed. Down at the Commons, the cradle of freedom, another shock nearly carried him away. Someone called out, 'Shine,' and he let loose a blue streak, and the poor little bootBlack sneaked frightened away. In a bakery window, he read with a glance, Brown Betties for sale, and his molars gnashed." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "Up came the curbstone, back went his trusty arm, swift was his gesture; at the plate glass, was smashed. On the sub, Crispus could have committed murder, mayhem and cannibalism when he heard a maid say to the chirrup opposite to her, 'Come over here, darling. Here's a little shade.' But down at the gardens he knew was his refuge: recompense for insults, solace for grief. A Negro battler, slugging Joe Johnson was fighting an Irishman, Battling Dan O'Keefe. The garden was crammed: mickeys, kikes, [inaudible], Pollocks, degos all over the place. Crispus strode in, regally, boldly, the soul representative of his race." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "The fight was even. When Joey hit Dan, the heart of Crispus shone with a steady glow. When Dan hit Joey, Crispus groaned. 'Foul! Oh, that dirty, lowdown so and so!' In the tenth round, Dan got to swinging. Joey was dazed and clinched and held. When suddenly, right behind Crispus, 'Kill the nigger,' somebody yelled. Crispus got up in all of his fury. Lightning bolts zig-zagged out of his eyes. With a voice like thunder, he blurted his challenge, 'Will the bastard who said that please arise?' 35,000 Nordics and Alpines, Hebrews and Gentiles, as one man arose. See how our hero, armed with his noble cause, onward with righteousness, to battle goes." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "They found an ankle in Dedham, a thigh bone in Maldon, an elbow in Somerville, both nostrils in Lynn, and on Boston Common lay one of his eyebrows, the cap of his knee, and a piece of his shin. Peabody Museum has one of his eardrums. His sound heart was found in Lexington. But over the reaches from Cape Cod to Frisco, the soul of our hero goes marching on." Disaster, martyrdom, but exaltation somehow comes out at the end. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Although Margaret Walker has a place later in this paper because of her novel Jubilee, even Margaret Walker, in her poetry, For My People, merely used slavery as a symbol of an ordeal through which Blacks had passed, or she looked beyond slavery to Africa for pride, as in the poem, Sorrow Home, which reads in part: "My roots are deep in Southern life, deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees, they know me." The folk heroes and heroines whom she commemorates or creates are not necessarily figures from slavery. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In 1946, during a decade in which Black novelists increasingly sought mainstream sales and recognition by writing about write protagonists, Frank Yerby published The Foxes of Harrow, a story located in antebellum Louisiana. A former student of Fisk University and a careful researcher of the backgrounds for his novels, Yerby probably was familiar with slave narratives, as well as other original sources of Black history. In fact, there's reason to believe that at least one of the incidents in The Foxes of Harrow, the steamboat explosion, is borrowed from William Wells Brown. Nevertheless, even while debunking the myths of the South in Foxes, Yerby wrote as though his sources were the records of white historians and his own imagination. The Black characters who have romantic potential generally are African, rather than Afro-American, a result of Yerby's thesis that accept for conjurers, Africans of high character died rather than submit to slavery. In contrast, their American descendants, even when pure-blooded Africans, were less heroic because they had diminished themselves in order to survive in America. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In subsequent novels about slavery in the South, Yerby generally has modified his theory only because his research into the history of Dahomey caused him to abandon some of his idealistic beliefs about African tribes. In Nyawasu, the African protagonist of The Dahomean, Yerby created a heroic figure worthy of legendary stature, as long as Nyawasu remained in Africa. But when last seen, Nyawasu was a slave in America. White men judged him ignorant because, considering white men stupid, he refused to talk to them, except when necessity commanded. Dr. Darwin Turn...: During the decade of the 1940s also, Robert Hayden first began to draw from Black history the materials which he worked into artistic and complex poems about Sankez, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass. Hayden clearly perceived the dramatic legendary value of Black heroes drawn from slavery. He asks his readers to see Harriet Tubman, woman of earth, whip-scarred, a summon, a shining; Harriet Tubman, who, when fear starts a-murbling, controls her fugitive band: "Hush that now, and she's turned on us, level pistol glinting in the moonlight. 'Dead folks can't jaybird talk,' she says. 'You keep on going now, or die,' she says." Wanted, Harriet Tubman, alias The General; alias, Moses, stealer of slaves. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Hayden asks us to understand that Frederick Douglass has become and is more than a man. "This man shall be remembered, oh not with statues rhetoric, not with legends and poems and wreathes of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives fleshing his dream of that beautiful, needful thing." Dr. Darwin Turn...: The past decade has been a period during which Black Americans have reexamined and celebrated their heritage in a search for identity and pride. During the same decade, more Black novelists and poets have drawn from the slave materials than at any other period since the Civil War. In the novel, A Different Drummer, 1962, William Melvin Kelley delineated the protagonist's slave ancestors to explain the strength of character which inspires the protagonist to burn his home, destroy his land, and leave the South forever. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Best known for her novel, The Street, 1946, Ann Petry more recently has celebrated Black history for Black teenagers, not only in her biography, Harriet Tubman, but also in her fiction work, Tituba of Salem Village. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In 1965, Ronald Fair published Many Thousand Gone: A Fable, about a 20th century Southern community where legalized slavery continues, because as I said earlier, nobody bothered to tell the Black people that emancipation had come. Similar in many respects to the antebellum narratives, the fable recounts the slave community's efforts to preserve and protect the first-born, the Black prince, the last pure-blooded African of the community. In a manner evocative of Martin Delany, Fair suggests that Blacks must liberate themselves. When whites of the community arrest the federal marshals who are supposed to save the Blacks, the Blacks free themselves and the marshals by burning down the town. The legendary potential of the story is restricted only by the fact that it is, after all, a fable, and the focal figures are non-heroic. They are an elderly Black woman, Granny Jacobs, and the Black community itself. Dr. Darwin Turn...: The two most distinguished fictional uses of slave materials during the past decade have been Margaret Walker's Jubilee, 1966, which won a Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, and Ernest Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. As she has explained in her essay, How I Wrote Jubilee, Margaret Walker proposed to tell the story of an ancestor of hers from antebellum days into the 1870s. In order to provide authenticity for the story, Margaret Walker read extensively in slave narratives. Here again, we find a Black author, like the slave narrators, documenting and validating the presentation. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Unlike Bontemps' Black Thunder, Jubilee ends on affirmation, but even the militant Randall Ware is too realistic to be of legendary stature. In short, Margaret Walker, in Jubilee, celebrates Black people by credibly delineating the struggle of slaves to become citizens. It is not criticism, but observation, to say that Margaret Walker has written too realistically to create that kind of romance from which a legend will grow. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In the highly-praised novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Gaines, using a narrative technique reminiscent of the federal writers' interviews of slaves during the 1930s, delineates the life of Miss Jane Pittman from childhood slavery before emancipation, into the freedom marches of the 1960s. In the novel, as in the slave narratives, are materials adequate for legends and myths. Like Margaret Walker, however, Gaines has researched and created the story so credibly that some of the legendary potential is diminished. Miss Jane, after all, is just Miss Jane, a mighty proud Black woman, but not a legend. Dr. Darwin Turn...: This is the point at which Black writers stand today. With two such distinguished novels as those by Margaret Walker and Ernest Gaines, what more can I, as teacher, literary historian, ask Black novelists and poets to do with slave materials and slave narratives? Dr. Darwin Turn...: First, I would like to see novelists and poets making greater use of historical figures, as Black dramatists have done since the 1930s. In addition to presenting slave history in pageants, a from and approach currently employed by some Black arts dramatists, playwrights such as Willis Richardson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Randolph Edmonds, May Miller, Waters Turpin, William Branch dramatized the stories of the great and the non-great: Frederick Douglass, the Crafts, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and other Afro-American slave heroes. Intended for Black audiences, these plays concern themselves more with legend and myth than with fact. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Second, perhaps I am asking novelists and poets to find in the slave tales at least the kind of romance suggested in the Poitier-Belafonte movie Buck and the Preacher, or the kind of legendary hero which Melvin Van Peebles tried... unsuccessfully, I believe... to create in Sweetback. While subtly woven Lilliputian bonds continue to restrict the Afro-Americans' freedom of movement, it may be too soon to ask Afro-American writers to celebrate their Blackness by recalling the generations of chains and whips. It may be too soon to ask that philosophical artists create myths. Nevertheless, I believe romances and legends are possible. Dr. Darwin Turn...: What better material for a legend is there than William Wells Brown, fugitive slave, conductor on the Underground Railway, internationally prominent man of letters? What better legend than Harriet Tubman, repeatedly risking her life to lead slaves to freedom? What better legend than Fred Douglass, who even in youth was vowing that no man would ever whip him again? Within slavery itself, even is one does not trace the slave beyond the boundaries of the plantation, within slavery itself, one can find romance is more exciting than that British-made television show The Prisoner, which enthralled television audiences for several seasons. Dr. Darwin Turn...: How can America's long-running television show The Fugitive be considered more exciting drama than the captures and narrow escapes of Henry Bibb, and let me read just in part: "I traveled on until I had arrived at the place where I was directed to call on an abolitionist, but I made no stop, so great were my fears of being pursued by the pro-slavery hunting dogs of the South. I pursued my journey vigorously for nearly 48 hours without food or rest." The Fugitive, I think, was always taking a bus. I never could figure out why he always had the money, but... Dr. Darwin Turn...: "Struggling against external difficulties such as no one can imagine who has never experienced the same, not knowing what moment I might be captured while traveling amongst strangers, through cold and fear, breasting the North Winds; being thinly clad, pelted by the snowstorms, through the dark hours of the night, and not a house in which I could enter to shelter me from the storm." Dr. Darwin Turn...: Or the moment of which he's captured: "I got a job of digging a cellar for the good lady where I was stopping, and while I was digging under the house, all at once, I heard a man enter the house. Another stepped up to the cellar door where I was at work. He looked in and saw me with my coat off, at work. He then rapped over the cellar door on the house side, to notify the one who had entered the house to look for me that I was in the cellar. This strange conduct soon excited suspicion so strong in me that I could not stay in the cellar. I started to come out, but the man who stood by the door rapped again on the house side for the other to come to his aid. He told me to stop. I tried to pass out by him, and he caught hold of me and drew a pistol, swearing if I did not stop, he would shoot me down. By this time, I knew I was betrayed. I asked him what crime I had committed that I should be murdered. 'I'll let you know very soon,' said he." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "By this time, others were coming to his aid, and I could see no way by which I could possibly escape the jaws of that hell upon earth. All my prospects of enjoying my own fireside were blasted and gone. When I saw a crowd of bloodthirsty, unprincipled slave hunters rushing upon me armed with weapons of death, it was no use for me to fight my way through such fearful odds, but I broke away from the man who stood by with his pistol to shoot me if I should resist. I reached the fence. I tried to jump over it before I was overtaken, but the fence being very high, I was caught by my legs before I got over. I kicked and struggled with all my might to get away, but without success. I kicked a new cloth coat off his back while he was holding onto my leg. I kicked another in his eye, but they never let me go until they got more help." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "By this time, there was a crowd on the outside of the fence with clubs to beat me back. Finally, they succeeded in dragging me from the fence. They overpowered me by numbers. They choked me almost to death." Dr. Darwin Turn...: How are such materials as these to be distributed if they are not published by the white presses? The answer is an old, though financially unprofitable, one for Black writers. They can be published at the expense of the author and his friends, and if necessary, they can be sold from door to door and church to church. Films can be produced by moneyed Black performers, such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Ossie Davis, who have already taken steps in this direction. Dr. Darwin Turn...: To reduce this discussion to the level of the absurd, let me offer to you the ending of a film version of a novel. I ask no royalties from anyone who chooses to use it in the future. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Two lean Black figures, guns blazing, rush from a house, leap on horses, and evade the Union cavalry. In the next scene, the two, still on horseback, are resting before an ancient oak tree. One says, "I'm afraid that's the end of the old man." "Yeah," says the other, "but there will be more of us. This is only the first round. The end hasn't come yet." "Where are you heading, Will," asks the first. "Guess I'll go out east and join up with Douglas and Garrison. What about you, Henry?" "I'm heading south to save those I can." The two figures shake hands, then ride towards opposite ends of the wide screen, while an unseen orchestra plays There's a Great Day A-Comin'. Dr. Darwin Turn...: I offer this incidentally as illustration of the reason I'll never write a novel. Anachronistic? Of course it is, but anachronism did not trouble Virgil when he wanted to subjugate a Carthaginian queen to an ancestor of Rome. Anachronism never bothered Will Shakespeare; what's an anachronism or two among friends? Sentimental melodrama? Of course, but the kind of sentimental melodrama that has furnished the substance of the legends and myths of civilized man. Let our Black scholars research the facts to validate the history of the achievement of Blacks in America. Let our Black social realists create credible characters from our past and our present, but let there be Black storytellers who, drawing from our tribulations, celebrate and exalt us by weaving the fantasies that cause a people to smile and to dream as they work. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Last year, Ruby Dee ended the Institute with a reading of a poem by Margaret Walker. This year, on what was to have been Margaret Walker's night, it seems even more appropriate to end my presentation, and simultaneously to end the 6th Annual Institute of Afro-American Culture, with the same poem, which admirably illustrates the manner in which a gifted writer can celebrate her people by transforming days of despair into exaltation. Dr. Darwin Turn...: "For my people everywhere, singing their slave songs repeatedly, their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power. For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing, ironing, cooking, scrubbing, sewing, mending, hoeing, plowing, digging, planting, pruning, patching, dragging along; never gaining, never reaping, never knowing and never understanding." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards, playing baptizing and preaching, and doctor and jail and soldier and school, and mama; cooking, playhouse, and concert; store and hair, company. For the cramped bewildered years we went to school, to learn to know the reasons why, and the answers to, and the people who, and the places where, and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were Black and poor, and small and different, and nobody wondered and nobody understood." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman; to laugh and dance and sing and play, and drink their wine in religion and success; to marry their playmates and bear children, and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching. For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost, disinherited, dispossessed and happy people, filling the cabarets and taverns and other people's pockets; needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something, something all our own." Dr. Darwin Turn...: "For my people walking blindly, spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless; tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who would tower over us omnisciently and laugh. For my people standing, staring, trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding; trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the Adams and Eves and their countless generations. For my people, let a new earth rise! Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth. Let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits, in our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control." Dr. Darwin Turn...: Thank you.