According to a criminal code of 1847, “Any white person assembling with slaves or free Negroes for purpose of instructing them to read or write . . . shall be confined in jail not exceeding six months and fined not exceeding $100.00.”
Much later, under Jim Crow, the General Code of the City of Birmingham of 1944 prohibited any negro and white, in any public space, from playing together in “any game with cards, dice, dominoes or checkers.”
Those laws are archaic and, in a way, silly. And while they are no longer enforced or enforceable, they have laid the carpet on which many writers have danced to great effect.
The cultural mechanics of becoming American are clearly understood. A citizen of Italy or Russia immigrates to the United States. She keeps much or some of the language and customs of her home country. But if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white. It may be comfortable for her or uncomfortable, but it lasts and has advantages, as well as certain freedoms.
Africans and their descendants never had that choice, as so much literature illustrates. I became interested in the portrayal of blacks by culture rather than skin color: when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color, as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels, I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy. In “Paradise,” the opening sentences launch the ploy: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” This is meant to be an explosion of racial identification, which is subsequently withheld throughout descriptions of the community of women in the convent where the attack takes place. Does the reader search for her, the white girl? Or does he or she lose interest in the search? Abandon it to concentrate on the substance of the novel? Some readers have told me of their guess, but only one of them was ever correct. Her focus was on behavior—something she identified as a gesture or assumption no black girl would make or have—no matter where she came from or whatever her past. This raceless community neighbors one with exactly the opposite priority—race purity is everything to its members. Anyone who isn’t “eight rock,” the deepest level of a coal mine, is excluded from his or her town. In other works, such as “The Bluest Eye,” the consequences of the color fetish are the theme: its severely destructive force.
I tried again in “Home” to create a work in which color was erased but could be easily assumed if the reader paid close attention to the codes, the restrictions black people routinely suffered: where one sits on a bus, where one urinates, and so on. But I was so very successful in forcing the reader to ignore color that it made my editor nervous. So, reluctantly, I layered in references that verified the race of Frank Money, the main character. I believe it was a mistake that defied my purpose.
In “God Help the Child,” color is both a curse and a blessing, a hammer and a golden ring. Although neither, the hammer nor the ring, helped make the character a sympathetic human being. Only caring unselfishly for somebody else would accomplish true maturity.
There are so many opportunities to reveal race in literature—whether one is conscious of it or not. But writing non-colorist literature about black people is a task I have found both liberating and hard.
How much tension or interest would Ernest Hemingway have lost if he had simply used Wesley’s given name? How much fascination and shock would be dampened if Faulkner had limited the book’s central concern to incest rather than the theatrical “one-drop” curse?
Some readers coming for the first time to “A Mercy,” which takes place two years before the Salem witch trials, may assume that only blacks were slaves. But so too might be a Native American, or a white homosexual couple, like the characters in my novel. The white mistress in “A Mercy,” though not enslaved, was purchased in an arranged marriage.
I first tried this technique of racial erasure in a short story titled “Recitatif.” It began as a screenplay that I was asked to write for two actresses—one black, one white. But since in the writing I didn’t know which actress would play which part, I eliminated color altogether, using social class as the marker. The actresses didn’t like my play at all. Later, I converted the material into a short story—which, by the way, does exactly the opposite of my plan. (The characters are divided by race, but all racial codes have been deliberately removed.) Instead of relating to plot and character development, most readers insist on searching for what I have refused them. My effort may not be admired by, or interesting to, other black authors. After decades of struggle to write powerful narratives portraying decidedly black characters, they may wonder if I am engaged in literary whitewashing. I am not. And I am not asking to be joined in this endeavor. But I am determined to defang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself.
This piece was drawn from “The Origin of Others,” a collection of Toni Morrison’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which is out September 18th from Harvard University Press.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-color-fetish/amp
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