Identifying with Slave Ancestors

The American slavery past has become a focal point of reference and identification in the context of African-American identity. As an ‘Ursprungsereignis,’ a collective root experience, and a foundational myth, slavery stands at the beginning of the African-American experience. Publications such as Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (2008) and Some Sing, Some Cry (2010) by renowned writers Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza demonstrate the persistent significance the history of slavery has gained in African-American literature and culture since the turn of the century. In the later decades of the 19^th century a generation of black intellectuals first initiated a conscious re-working of this collective past and, thus, helped to turn slavery from a national into a cultural trauma, as Ron Eyerman has shown:

In this sense, slavery was traumatic in retrospect, and formed a “primal scene” which could, potentially, unite all “African Americans” in the United States, whether or not they had themselves been slaves or had any knowledge of or feeling for Africa. Slavery formed the root of an emergent collective identity through an equally emergent collective memory, one that signified and distinguished a race, a people, or a community depending on the level of abstraction and point of view being put forward.⁸³

Slavery has become a constitutive element of African-American identity in that it represents a unique past that is shared by the members of this particular we-group. The collective memory of slavery as well as its social and cultural meaning is transmitted and preserved in cultural memory. It has become a key cultural narrative and represents a

83 Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 1-2.

“useable past”⁸⁴ that is “recollected by later generations who have had no experience of the ‘original’ event, yet continue to be identified and to identify themselves through it.”⁸⁵

In 20^th-century African-American theater these “later generations” are represented by characters such as Tommy, the heroine in Alice Childress’s play Wine in the Wilderness (1969). When Tommy retells the history of her family to the character Bill, she enters the past in reverse chronological order, talking about her parents first, then her grandparents, and ending with her great-great-grandparents who were slaves in Sweetwater Springs, Virginia:

TOMMY My great, great grandparents was slaves.

BILL Guess everybody’s was.

T^OMMY Mine was slaves in a place called Sweetwater Springs, Virginia. We tried to look it up one time but somebody at Church told us that Sweetwater Springs had become a part of Norfolk… so we didn’t carry it any further…

As it would be a expense to have a lawyer trace your people.

(WIW 750-751)

For Tommy, her slave ancestors from Sweetwater Springs stand for the origins of her family and of herself and she sees the beginning of her family lineage in slavery times.

When Tommy identifies herself as the fifth generation of her family in the United States, she consciously integrates herself into this family lineage. Although her family members were unable “to trace [their] people” due to a lack of money, the memory of Tommy’s slave ancestors is preserved and passed on in family memory and in Tommy’s “memory talk”⁸⁶ on stage. Their remembrance supports Tommy’s pride in her family story as a story of survival and resistance to white supremacy:

TOMMY (now on sure ground) I was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised here in Harlem. […] My mama raised me, mostly by herself, God rest the dead. Mama belonged to “The Eastern Star.” Her father was a “Mason.” If a man in the family is a “Mason” any woman related to him can be an

“Eastern Star.” My grandfather was a member of “The Prince Hall Lodge.”

I had a [sic] uncle who was an “Elk,”… a member of “The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World:” “The Henry Lincoln

84 Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: 194.

85 Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: 15.

86 Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (München:

Beck, 2008): 16. For more information on the presentation and meaning of family memory and family history in the plays considered here see chapter 6: “Learning from Absent Ancestors and Living Elders: Family Memory on Stage.”

3. Slave Ancestors and Mythic Geography: TheCultural Narrative of Slavery on Stage 40

Johnson Lodge.” You know, the white “Elks” are called “The Benevolent Protective Order of Elks” but the black “Elks” are called “The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World.” That’s because the black “Elks” got the copyright first but the white “Elks” took us to court about it to keep us from usin’ the name. Over fifteen hundred black folk went to jail for wearin’ the “Elk” emblem on their coat lapel. Years ago,…

that’s what you call history.

(WIW 750; italics and emphasis original)

As Tommy’s narration reveals, within only a few generations Tommy’s family worked itself up from slaves to active members in leading African-American fraternal organizations and sororities, fighting for integration and equality in a racial and segregated American society. For Bill, it is this family story that constitutes Tommy’s beauty as a black woman who has come “through the biggest riot of all, … somethin’

called ‘Slavery’ […]” (WIW 755; capitalization original). In an interview, playwright Childress once explained: “Events from the distant past, things which took place before I was born, have influence over the content, form, and commitment of my work. I am a descendant of a particular American slave, my great grandmother, Annie.”⁸⁷ Childress’s admiration of and identification with her slave grandmother is mirrored in the family story of her character Tommy who also proudly identifies with her slave ancestors.

This pride in the family’s slave origins is also shared by Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). In the final scene of the play Walter Lee rejects the bribe money that he is offered in return for not moving into their new home in an all-white neighborhood by explaining that his father and his family have

“earned” (RIS 553) it, as he says. He points out that his family “come[s] from people who had a lot of pride” (RIS 553) and who constantly fought for their rightful share in the American Dream. When he emphasizes that his son “makes the sixth generation of [his]

family in this country” (RIS 553), Walter Lee almost literally repeats the words that his mother Lena spoke to him a few moments before. Walter Lee indeed initially intended to accept the money and it was only when his mother reminded him of the family past and of his responsibility towards his ancestors that he changed his mind:

87 Alice Childress, "A Candle in a Gale Wind," Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Press, 1984): 111.

M^AMA Son – I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers – but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. (raising her eyes and looking at him) We ain’t never been that dead inside.

(RIS 551; italics original)

In the play Lena functions as the guardian of family memory in which the cultural trauma of slavery is re-interpreted as a source of pride and empowerment for the living family generations. For her, accepting the bribe money would mean accepting denigration of her ancestors and of everything the family has achieved since the time of slavery. Within five generations, the Younger family has worked its way up from “slaves and sharecroppers”

to the owners of a house. Walter Lee is a chauffeur and Lena’s daughter Beneatha goes to college in order to become a doctor, aspiring to a middle-class profession. By reminding her son of the family’s past and its legacy Lena points out that he and the other family members are only what they are and where they are because of their ancestors. Slavery stands at the beginning of the family’s continual social progression that is supposed to be continued in subsequent family generations. Lena holds her slave ancestors up as an example and does not want her son to disgrace their memory. She advises Walter Lee to show his son Travis “where [their] five generations done come to” (RIS 553), emphasizing his responsibility towards the memory of his ancestors who paved the way for his and his family’s well-being.

As the representative of the past, Lena cannot understand why her son does not appreciate the freedom and security that he could enjoy growing up in “a home” (RIS 532) in Chicago’s Southside. When Walter Lee, who is only concerned about getting rich, tells his mother that money is life, she replies:

MAMA (quietly) Oh – (very quietly) So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life – now it’s money. I guess the world really do change…

(RIS 531; italics original)

When Walter Lee explains that “[life] was always money, Mama” (RIS 531), Lena objects and reminds him of the atrocities and hardships that his ancestors had to struggle with in

3. Slave Ancestors and Mythic Geography: TheCultural Narrative of Slavery on Stage 42

the South. She points out that unlike previous family generations, Walter Lee has “a home” and does not “have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar” (RIS 532).

He and his family do not have to be “worried about not being lynched and getting to the North […] and how to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity too…” (RIS 532).

This differentiation and comparison between life in the South and life in the North is indeed a recurring motif in 20^th-century African-American theater by female playwrights.

The binary topographical distinction represents an integral element of the cultural trauma of slavery in that it is an enactment of the symbolic American North-South divide that is grounded in the cultural memory of the American Civil War as the war about slavery.