Thinking Through Crisis

Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics

James Edward Ford

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780823286911
  9780823286904
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823286928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner, 2020 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association
Honorable Mention, MSA First Book Prize

In Thinking Through Crisis, James Edward Ford III examines the works of Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes during the 1930s in order to articulate a materialist theory of trauma. Ford highlights the dark proletariat's emergence from the multitude apposite to white supremacist agendas. In these works, Ford argues, proletarian, modernist, and surrealist aesthetics transform fugitive slaves, sharecroppers, leased convicts, levee workers, and activist intellectuals into protagonists of anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements in the United States.

Thinking Through Crisis intervenes in debates on the 1930s, radical subjectivity, and states of emergency. It will be of interest to scholars of American literature, African American literature, proletarian literature, black studies, trauma theory, and political theory.

NOTEBOOK 1

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

Richard Wright, the 1927 Flood, and the Citizen-Refugee

The water was risin’ up at my friend’s door

The water was risin’ up at my friend’s door

The man said to his women folk, “Lord we’d better go”

You know I can’t stay here,

I’ll go where it’s high boy,

I would go to the hilly country

But, they got me barred

—CHARLEY PATTON, “HIGH WATER EVERYWHERE”

Mmmm, I can’t move no more

Mmmm, I can’t move no more

There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go

When it thunders and lightnin’ and when the wind bout to blow

When it thunders and lightnin’ and when the wind bout to blow

There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go

—BESSIE SMITH, “BACK WATER BLUES”

THE CITIZEN AND THE REFUGEE

Many Americans pondered how US citizens could become refugees in an instant back in August and September 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and government on all levels failed to protect the public. “Refugee” and “looter” jumped from the lips of journalists, politicians, and television viewers. This seemingly spontaneous change in civic identity raises questions about the quotidian relationship between citizen, refugee status, and the state. The ease with which the change occurred suggests that citizenship already carries within it the threat of refugee status. The citizen-refugee not only identifies the onrush of a politics of abandonment, it also bespeaks the disciplinary procedures of mainstream institutions and economies while it lurches into new possibilities of self-organization. To think through this issue, I turn to Richard Wright’s novella “Down by the Riverside” in his classic Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). Wright composed the novella while reflecting on what would eventually be known as the precursor to Hurricane Katrina—namely, the 1927 Mississippi River Flood, another instance when the same convoluted debates over citizenship, refugee status, and the state dominated popular discourse.

Wright’s novella focuses on the tribulations of Brother Mann; his pregnant wife, Lulu; their son Peewee; and Grannie, Lulu’s mother. They will all drown if they remain in their home. Unfortunately, the shock of the flood put Lulu into labor four days earlier, and she has yet to give birth. It is incumbent on Brother Mann to find a boat and row through the racist township to the relief camp to save Lulu and their unborn child. In the 1930s, Wright looks back at the mistreatment of 1927 flood survivors to see, in microcosm, the racialized exclusions that would burden the country’s most disadvantaged populations. Wright read Trigant Burrows’s The Social Basis of Human Consciousness (1925), which urges psychology to give primacy to the social over the individual and revels in humans banding together. Burrows’s book triggered a “whole train of thought” for Wright: “I decided to use the flood to show the relationship between the two races in the South in a time of general tragedy.”¹ Race complicated recovery efforts in the Mississippi delta. In Wright’s hands, those efforts serve as a synecdoche for the nation’s racialized response to the Great Depression.

By analyzing Wright’s novella to study this citizen-refugee structure, I veer from his claim in Black Boy that Uncle Tom’s Children moves dialectically from unsuccessful individual revolt to multiracial working-class solidarity.² Based on this logic, the second story of the collection, “Down by the Riverside,” should be read primarily for shortcomings or for its pessimism, an immature stage in Wright’s literary apprenticeship that reached its destination with the realism of Native Son (1940) two years later. When read strictly as Wright’s preparation for Native Son, “Down by the Riverside’s” own formal and intellectual intervention falls from view. No wonder early reviewers called the narrative an unconvincing set of coincidences. Abdul R. JanMohammed’s contests this dismissal and instead considers “Down by the Riverside” to be an account of death-bound subjectivity. But JanMohammed removes it from any specific time or place, despite Wright’s emphasis on historical and geographical particularity for every story in Uncle Tom’s Children.³ Cheryl Higashida asserts that Uncle Tom’s Children “does not merely subordinate the Woman Question to other political themes” but “insists that issues of gender—especially those pertaining to African American working-class women—are integral to conceptualizing revolutionary praxis and subjectivity.”⁴ Feeling that “Down by the Riverside” is the least successful of the stories in promoting this view, she condemns the novella’s focus on hypermasculine revolt.

In contrast, I read the novella as a theorization of political possibility opened in the unexpected relationship between citizenship and refugee status. Granted, the novella does not overtly portray collective revolt. But when restored to the context of mass-media and government documents about the 1927 flood, the novella identifies two components for concerted action: it asserts the critical intellectual and performative capacity within the dark proletariat, and it captures the Event—namely, when the dark proletariat confronts, works through, and comes out on the hither side of the fear of actual death, triggering an internal transformation that grants the courage to risk changing society. These elements are essential to any break with the petrification that comes from racial violence, economic exploitation, and gendered discrimination, ironically placed under the heading of “relief.” By making Lulu the novella’s ethical center, Wright distinguishes this narrative from his other, more disconcerting representations of women characters. Her going through labor to give birth in the flood metaphorizes the story’s greatest challenge: restoring the pre-flood debtor’s economy or establishing a new, more egalitarian structure in the delta region. With this thesis, I can detail how the narrative says no to the sharecropping economy and says yes to “the faint stirrings of a new and emerging life.”⁵

Far from simply being Wright’s training ground for Native Son, Uncle Tom’s Children frames the most precarious forms of life as capable of collectively resisting the politics of abandonment troubling late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life. The literary and philosophical entry points for such a project can be found where life no longer poses a technical problem for representation but an ethical problem for a “process of becoming.”⁶ The fragility of mainstream representations of citizenship and their institutional supports marks a larger process of social transformation requiring an alternative vocabulary that focuses on singularities, multiplicity, and the commons, rather than the individual, the subject, and property. It would also pay attention to the microworlds that authors place within the space of “domestic realism” so that the former challenges the naturalness of the latter; thus, naturalism questions the structures realism takes for granted.⁷

SHARECROPPING, GUILT, AND INDEBTED MAN(N)

“Down by the Riverside” initiates an “ontological reframing” that “open[s] the field from which the unexpected can emerge, while increasing our space of decision and room to move as political subjects.”⁸ Readers unaccustomed to this ontological reframing may expect a realist story that, in its effort to assert its technical accuracy, turns a reality into the only possible reality. Possibility tends to connote available options made in the likeness of what is already considered “real,” thereby reducing futurity to the logical extension of the status quo.⁹ The story’s events become horrific coincidences designed to elicit sympathy for flood victims who should have known better. But Wright accepts the task of presupposing contingency and the restlessness carried by humans mistaken for inanimate objects, even in the Mississippi delta.¹⁰ He does not just add one more likely possibility among others. He offers readers an altogether different orientation to possibility.

In the epigraph to Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright calls into question the common viewpoints shaping and being shaped by the Mississippi delta region’s daily operation. The epigraph comes from a Southern song, which asks, “Is it true what they say about Dixie?” After describing the South in pastoral terms, the song concludes: “If it’s true, that’s where I belong.”¹¹ In Wright’s hands, the conditional clause undoes the song’s self-assured descriptive function, which renders ontology a function of technical representation. With “Down by the Riverside,” the conditionality inscribed within the epigraph gets transferred to Brother Mann’s waterlogged home. The song’s failure to account for conditions in the flooded delta region admits the limits of domestic realism. Brother Mann’s precarious home environment indicates its inability to frame the narrative that follows. This soon-to-be collapsed home calls into question the Manns’ belonging in the delta and unsettles the politics of conventional realism grounded in property: “Each step [Mann] took the old house creaked as though the earth beneath the foundations were soggy. He wondered how long the logs which supported the house could stand against the water. [The steps] might wash away at any moment … then they would be trapped.… Through a dingy pane he saw yellow water swirling.… It was about six feet deep and still rising; it had risen two feet that day.”¹² Those who live on the edges of realist depiction often get blamed for not conforming to that aesthetic framework’s rules, when aesthetic conformity yields diminishing political returns. This realism has real-life consequences, especially when considering the condemnations hurled at the survivors of the 1927 flood and Hurricane Katrina. On May 23, 1927, H. L. Mencken, columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun, explains the mere trickle of donations for victims of the recent flood. Framing his entire argument in terms of domestic realism, he claims that the United States has “no longer house[d] a happy family” ever since Southern backwardness began to weaken national solidarity. Mencken failed to understand that his comments presuppose that some people deserve to perish because of where they live and who they are. “Most of those who have lost their lives [in the 1927 flood] … might have escaped without difficulty,” Mencken says. “They were warned weeks in advance and high ground was nearly always well within their reach. But thousands of them remained.… It is hard to work up any very active sympathy for such people.”¹³

What stinging irony to read Mencken saying that New Orleans is the exception to his rule about the South: “The destruction of New Orleans would have put a far different aspect upon the matter, for New Orleans is a civilized city and everyone who has ever been there cherishes a pleasant memory of it.… If the city had suffered any serious damage, contributions for its relief would be pouring in today.”¹⁴ Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that New Orleans was no less vulnerable to realist condemnations. Many objected strenuously to Mencken’s harshness, but few exposed the limits of his realist account, which functioned as if the victims should have already known how to survive a flood that swallowed an entire region of the country—as if people who, in some cases, had never left the city limits or their farms should magically know to leave the city and have the resources to do so; as if those with the most precarious relation to citizenship would not be taking a greater risk by leaving their homes to face armed vigilantes, the police, and military than by staying put; as if Southern infrastructure could support such mass evacuations, which it cannot.

Only when the Manns—and by extension Wright’s readers—abandon the home can a new narrative take shape by challenging assumptions about the collective potentials and risks of departure. But Wright refuses to dispatch Brother Mann to face peril alone. Wright’s free indirect discourse weaves back and forth between first- and third-person points of view, making the reader his unwilling companion on a journey common enough to people like the Manns but not one many readers would experience otherwise. Free indirect discourse offers a way of reading literature for signs of “transindividuality,” which provides access to the interiority of an “alternate social body” irreducible to the relation between “individual and state.”¹⁵

The main character and the narrator seem to blend at crucial moments of the novella, thinking and acting in unison. This narrative style includes forms of life that cannot consistently say “I” in ways supported by mainstream political, civic, and economic institutions. With thought and action being coextensive in this social body, they mark a potentiality not found in liberal subjecthood. The liberal subject’s privileges and protections come from (the fantasy of) resigning its force over to the state. The alternate social body lacks these privileges and protections but maintains its force, which remains a constant threat to politics as usual. “Down by the Riverside” introduces readers to this simultaneous threat and potentiality for those excluded from liberal protections.

Wright reminds readers of the experience of the excluded—and the chance that their numbers can increase rapidly with the slightest change in environmental and political factors—through the frequent refrain from the narrator and Brother Mann, “Ef only tha levee don break!”¹⁶ In each case, the narrator speaks of a collective vulnerability that is never reduced to Brother Mann’s individual plight. Wright does not begin with a triumphant hero but with an ambivalent, fearful, feverish, guilty man. Brother Mann admits guilt for not leaving as soon as the government provided boats for this purpose. Mencken would take this admission at face value and pronounce Brother Mann’s fate as sad but well deserved. That judgment would protect the liberal equation of the individual with the state from the charge of racial bias. But when Wright has Brother Mann admit that he stayed to get a head start on other sharecroppers by planting seed in the floodwaters, Wright displaces personal recrimination for another form of guilt that brings political structures and civil society into account. The archive of the 1927 flood—government documents, autobiographical sources, newspaper exposés, editorials, and correspondence—confirms Wright’s effort. In The Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927: Official Report of the Relief Operations (1928), the American Red Cross explains that sharecroppers learned the technique of “mudding in” so that they could plant during floods rather than waste time waiting for the floodwaters to recede.¹⁷ This information begs the question of why sharecroppers would learn to plant during a flood if it were in their rational self-interest to leave. Here we find a fugitive discourse, in which the truth runs astray from the report’s desire to reaffirm forcing flood survivors into submissive subjects of economy, law, and a racialized civil-society. Similarly, this fugitive discourse strays from the terms that are now popular for understanding life outside these structures.

“Bare life” cannot account for this situation. Instead of relating that concept to the broken link between birth and nationhood in which some develop into citizens according to the logic of the bildungsroman and others do not, Wright’s economically vuln...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• Introduction: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity to Motion
• Notebook 1. Down by the Riverside: Richard Wright, the 1927 Flood, and the Citizen-Refugee
• Notebook 2. “Crusade for Justice”: Ida B. Wells and the Power of the Multitude
• Notebook 3. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: Theorizing Divine Violence
• Notebook 4. Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain: An Anthropology of Power
• Notebook 5. The New Day: Notes on Education and the Dark Proletariat
• Conclusion: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity to Motion—A Race for Theory
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List