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  • 8/7/2019 Shapes of the Black American Past

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    Clark Atlanta University

    Review: Shapes of the Black American PastAuthor(s): John Henrik ClarkeSource: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 38, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1977), pp. 212-215Published by: Clark Atlanta UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/274685 .Accessed: 10/04/2011 21:38

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    PHYLONPHYLON

    disciplined account that engages us in the rhythm of Africa, her seasons andher people. The subject matter, if not quite the style, is reminiscent of CamaraLaye's Dark Child. But Haley's narrative becomes difficult in recounting theAfrican-American experience. The development of a distinctive African-Ameri-can culture is a complex chapter in our history. It does not lend itself to theclarity and simplicity which characterize Haley's portrayal of boyhood ineigtheenth century West Africa. How, for example, should the slave's accommo-dation and resistance to the slave master, his culture and his oppression betreated?

    Haley acknowledges African survivals among the slaves: gestures, facial ex-pressions, cries of exclamation and "these blacks' great love of singing anddancing." These traits, however, are interpreted as incidental and unconscious.What the author apparently considers as weightier matters of culture seem tosurvive only among the Kintes. For example, the slave community which Haley

    describes appears not to be composed of families. In sharp contrast to theKinte

    family unit, the other slaves in Roots appear as a collection of unattached in-dividuals. The implication is that most slaves lived outside the bonds of kinshipand marriage. At issue is not literary style or emphasis, but rather the interpre-tation of the African-American experience. While the Kinte family is among anelite in its oral tradition, it is not unique in its family structure and function.

    Recent scholarship on the slave family would have informed Haley's work.Haley's perception of average slaves comes apparently from prevailing assump-tions that their families were unstable, their marriages casual and their culturechaotic. Herbert Gutman, in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (which like Roots was published in late 1976), presents evidence that slavemarriages were of long duration; that families were structured in kinship net-

    works with strong intergenerational ties; and that some aspects of slave culture,specifically marriage customs and naming practices, apparently developed in-dependent of and in spite of Anglo-American culture and the circumstances ofslavery.

    This kind of evidence calls for further revision of the African-American story.With a careful reading of history and an imaginative working of art, the storywill continue to unfold in all of its complexity. Our debt is to Haley for in-troducing this story to the public and for engaging the nation in pursuit of itspast.

    Carole MerittEmory University

    SHAPES OF THE BLACK AMERICAN PAST

    THE SHAPING OF BLACK AMERICA. By Lerone Bennett, Jr. Illustrations by CharlesWhite. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1975.

    In his previous book, The Challenge of Blackness (1972), Lerone Bennett hassaid:

    If Black people are not what white people said we were, then whiteAmerica is not what it claims to be. What we have to deal with heretherefore is a contestation at the level of reality. We are engaged in astruggle over meaning, a struggle over truth. And it is my argument

    here that Blacks and not whites embody the common interest and thetruth of American society.

    In a collective way, this is what the present book, The Shaping of Black America,is about. In a general way this is what all of the books of Lerone Bennett are

    disciplined account that engages us in the rhythm of Africa, her seasons andher people. The subject matter, if not quite the style, is reminiscent of CamaraLaye's Dark Child. But Haley's narrative becomes difficult in recounting theAfrican-American experience. The development of a distinctive African-Ameri-can culture is a complex chapter in our history. It does not lend itself to theclarity and simplicity which characterize Haley's portrayal of boyhood ineigtheenth century West Africa. How, for example, should the slave's accommo-dation and resistance to the slave master, his culture and his oppression betreated?

    Haley acknowledges African survivals among the slaves: gestures, facial ex-pressions, cries of exclamation and "these blacks' great love of singing anddancing." These traits, however, are interpreted as incidental and unconscious.What the author apparently considers as weightier matters of culture seem tosurvive only among the Kintes. For example, the slave community which Haley

    describes appears not to be composed of families. In sharp contrast to theKinte

    family unit, the other slaves in Roots appear as a collection of unattached in-dividuals. The implication is that most slaves lived outside the bonds of kinshipand marriage. At issue is not literary style or emphasis, but rather the interpre-tation of the African-American experience. While the Kinte family is among anelite in its oral tradition, it is not unique in its family structure and function.

    Recent scholarship on the slave family would have informed Haley's work.Haley's perception of average slaves comes apparently from prevailing assump-tions that their families were unstable, their marriages casual and their culturechaotic. Herbert Gutman, in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (which like Roots was published in late 1976), presents evidence that slavemarriages were of long duration; that families were structured in kinship net-

    works with strong intergenerational ties; and that some aspects of slave culture,specifically marriage customs and naming practices, apparently developed in-dependent of and in spite of Anglo-American culture and the circumstances ofslavery.

    This kind of evidence calls for further revision of the African-American story.With a careful reading of history and an imaginative working of art, the storywill continue to unfold in all of its complexity. Our debt is to Haley for in-troducing this story to the public and for engaging the nation in pursuit of itspast.

    Carole MerittEmory University

    SHAPES OF THE BLACK AMERICAN PAST

    THE SHAPING OF BLACK AMERICA. By Lerone Bennett, Jr. Illustrations by CharlesWhite. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1975.

    In his previous book, The Challenge of Blackness (1972), Lerone Bennett hassaid:

    If Black people are not what white people said we were, then whiteAmerica is not what it claims to be. What we have to deal with heretherefore is a contestation at the level of reality. We are engaged in astruggle over meaning, a struggle over truth. And it is my argument

    here that Blacks and not whites embody the common interest and thetruth of American society.

    In a collective way, this is what the present book, The Shaping of Black America,is about. In a general way this is what all of the books of Lerone Bennett are

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    LITERATURE OF RACE AND CULTURE

    about. His books are inquiries into the contradictions in American society in itsrelationship to black people. Lerone Bennett writes history, social science, andpolitical science and engages in prophesy all at the same time. His talent reflects

    a special kind of development that needs to be looked at, at least briefly, if weare to understand his achievement as a social historian.

    He is of that new generation of restless black Americans who have givenbirth to what is referred to as the "Black Revolution." This movement literallydemanded a reevaluation of the part that people of African descent haveplayed in the making of America and the circumstances that brought them here.In his first book, Before the Mayflower (1961), Bennett began to answer thedemand for reevaluation of Afro-American history. This book ends with awarning that is also prophecy. "If we do not stand up and create the Americathat was dreamed," he says, "if we do not begin to flesh out the words of thecreed, the commonwealth of Silence will come to a definite and apocalyptic end."In

    his writing Lerone Bennett brings the reader face toface with the uncomfort-

    able truth about America's racial conflict. This is the essence of his value as asocial historian.

    The Shaping of Black America represents the flowering of his talent. All ofhis previous books seem to have been part of the preparation for the writing ofthis book, his most profound commentary to date on the nature of the blackexperience. He calls his book "an essay toward a new understanding of the longand continuing attempts of Africans and African descendents to possess them-selves and the new land." He calls attention to the need for "a new conceptualenvelope for Black American history." He says further: "It should be clear by nowto almost everyone that understanding the Black experience requires new con-cepts and a radically new perspective."

    At once, Lerone Bennett demonstrates what he means by new concepts and aradically new perspective in the opening chapter of his book called "The FirstGeneration." Because, as he says, "blacks lived in a different time and a differentreality in this country," it should then stand to reason that the honest interpre-tation of their history requires a different insight and a different frame ofreference. The book begins dramatically as follows:

    In August, when the shadows are long on the land and even the airoppresses, the furies of fate hang in the balance in Black America.It was in August, in the eighth month of the year, that three hundredthousand men and women marched on Washington, D.C. It was inAugust that Watts exploded. It was in August, on a hot and heavy

    day in the nineteenth century, that Nat Turner rode. And it was inanother August, 344 years before the March on Washington, 346 yearsbefore Watts, and 212 years before Nat Turner's war, that "a Dutchman of Warr" sailed up the river James and landed the first genera-tion of black Americans at Jamestown, Virginia.

    The Dutch ship and its cargo altered irrevocably the destiny of what was tobecome the United States. The seeds of the only original culture that America canshow to the world were arriving on this Dutch ship. Also arriving was the em-bryo of a conflict that, after more than three hundred years, is still' unresolved.Lerone Bennett refers to this cargo as "the black gold that made capitalism possi-ble in America." In this reference he is completely on the case. Nationally, it gaveAmerica the means to become a world power. Internationally it created thebasis for the industrial revolution and the maiden world of science and tech-nology.

    These first Africans were not chattel slaves. They were indentured servants,a major point that is often missed. Bennett deals with this aspect of slavery

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    PHYLON

    searchingly and very carefully shows how the indentured-servant status wastransformed into chattel slavery. After the period of indenture, this first gen-eration of blacks became early Americans in many ways. Some of them becamethe owners of land and slaves. Others became part of the craft and technologyclass that helped to tame a young and raw America. Labor was needed and thisis what these first blacks meant to the colonists.

    The indentured servant system was not created for the blacks who landed inJamestown, Virginia. The system was intact long before they arrived, withlarge numbers of white indentured servants. In the second chapter, Bennettexamines this rather neglected issue of white servitude. In the following passagehe explains some of the reasons for the neglect:

    Although great care has been taken to hide the fact, black bondsmeninherited their chains from white bondsmen, who were, in a mannerof speaking, America's first slaves. And as America moved, in themiddle of the seventeenth century, toward a fateful decision thatwould define it forever, increasing attention was directed toward thestatus of these white bondsmen, who pioneered in both servitude andslavery. To understand what happened to blacks in the second half ofthe seventeenth century, one must first understand what happenedto these whites in the first and second half of the seventeenth cen-tury. For they ran the first leg of the marathon of American servitudebefore passing on the baton of anguish to the reds and the blacks.

    Bennett continues his explanation in this manner:The second and possibly more important reason for the centrality of

    white servitude is that it was, as Eric Williams noted, "the historicbase upon which Negro slavery was constructed." In other words,white servitude was the proving ground for the mechanisms of con-trol and subordination used later in African-American slavery. Theplantation pass system, the slave trade, the sexual exploitation ofservant women, the whipping post and slave chain and brandingiron, the overseer, the house servant, the Uncle Tom: all thesemechanisms were tried out and perfected first on white men andwomen. Also tried out and perfected first on white men and womenwas the theory of racism. It is not the least of the paradoxes of thisperiod that Colonial masters used the traditional Sambo and theminstrel stereotypes to characterize white servants, who were saidto be good-natured and faithful but biologically inferior and sub-ject to laziness, immorality and crime.

    And thus the seed that was going to develop into modern racism was planted.That is worth noting. For the first one hundred years during the period ofEuropean exploration into the broader world, Europe as well as Africa was ahunting ground for slaves. Sometime during the second century of the settle-ment of America, the white slaves began to shake off their bondage. They becameracists rapidly in order to identify themselves with the rest of white America.They measured their identification and their status to the extent that theywere furtherest from the red man and the black man in appearance and inhuman consideration. It was only then that the color factor became prevalent inblack and white relationships.

    In his chapter "Red and Black" Bennett shows that the relationship betweenblacks and Indians was both good and bad. Some blacks joined whites in a fightagainst the Indians and some blacks joined the Indians in a fight against the

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