Racialized Morality
in Lance Jeffers’ Witherspoon
One
main idea in my commentaries on African American literature pertains to how the
traffic in race (or if you prefer,
racial discourses in the United States) stands in defiance of the caution that scientific
research would impose on discussions of human endeavors. [1]
Obviously, the word “race” refers to a concept in classification schemes that
lacks strong empirical backing; evidence from DNA tests, for example,
challenges the legitimacy of casual talk about the concept. From the perspective of modern science,
“race” is a concept that has limited value. On the other hand, in the United
States of America, “race” is a devastatingly powerful tool for achieving a
virtual reality of unity, for maintaining various ideologies of power, and for
keeping a nation bemused about how it is constituted. Americans persist in speaking reductively of
race in binary terms of black and white, especially in forms of mass
communication that are blatantly political and in works of literature that
critics argue are aesthetic. In this
sense, the concept of race has profound consequences for how we read what
purports to be non-fiction and for how we read novels that are forthright in
revealing their origins in a racialized matrix.
The most famous novel is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885); an example that is
closer to our own time but virtually unknown is Lance Jeffers’ novel
Witherspoon (1983).[2]
Literary
analysis, the thinking which obtains in our reading of literature, should
ultimately see race as a social fiction that has metaphysical properties. Race is imprinted in the consciousness of
Americans. It complicates our grasping
of many things that are not overtly announced in American literature, particularly
its moral dimensions. The color coding
of race is refracted in American literature through the ineluctable presence of
the Other, the person who is different.
Toni Morrison used a most creative critical rhetoric to secure that
point in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
and the Literary Imagination. The color coding can most effectively delude
readers who protest that they are colorblind.
It is not an accident that if such readers seek to describe major
American poetry, they tend to focus on examples marked by whiteness. And I doubt it is an accident that Eric
Sundquist’s study To Wake the Nations:
Race in the Making of American Literature does not have the term “morality”
in its index. Nevertheless, it is impossible to have a serious discussion of American
literature as a vast body of works without attending to the intersection of
race and morality, even when “race” wears the mask of “ethnicity” or
“multiculturalism.”
It
is conceivable that we might find instances of American literature that are
devoid of race, but those instances would be the purest forms of science
fiction. They would not be realistic. Our guilt and our race-driven impulses dispose
many American readers to prefer works that roll over them like water on Teflon
rather than works that pinch human consciousness. But non-trivial, realistic works from any
culture do seem to bite moral consciousness.
Within the field of twentieth-century African American literature, it
might be argued few writers have agonized more thoroughly about the nexus of
morality and race, about racialized morality than Lance Jeffers
(1919-1985). Like Toni Morrison’s
well-known Beloved, his novel Witherspoon makes us uncomfortable with
our complacency.
Best
known as a poet and for his achievements in the collections My Blackness is the Beauty of This Land (1970), When I Know the Power of My Black Hand (1974), O Africa, Where I Baked My Bread (1977) and Grandsire (1979), his accomplishment as a fiction writer is not be
slighted. He did, after all, have his
short story “The Dawn Swings In” published in The Best American Short Stories 1948. In 1983, he published Witherspoon, a novel that keeps good company with ‘Sippi by John Oliver Killens and Meridian by Alice Walker.[3] Jeffers’ novel, which focuses on the protracted
struggle of Reverend Lucius Witherspoon in deciding what is the right thing to
do, stands up well among other realistic works set in the Civil Rights
period. It deals relentlessly with the
human fragility and doubt that are so often effectively veiled by heroic public
action.
In
broad outline, Witherspoon resembles
an amplification of the plot sketched in Richard Wright’ s short story “Fire
and Cloud, ” devoid of the specific
Marxist implications. Like
Wright’s Reverend Taylor, Jeffers’ Reverend Witherspoon has to face how moral
considerations are positioned and repositioned in the American South by the
inevitable presence of race. The major question in both works is “What is the
right thing to do?” Wright and Jeffers
historicize the moral dilemmas by showing that they cannot be resolved outside
the circle of American racial dynamics.
Both authors complicate matters by suggesting Christianity can render
black male characters impotent, unable to commit necessary acts, unless the characters radically and racially
reinterpret Christian belief and its
moral imperatives. Taylor and Witherspoon are ministers, but the narrative
constructions of their personalities, their psychologies, are remarkably
different. All African American
preachers are not alike. Jeffers and
Wright defamiliarize the stereotype of the black preacher by portraying Taylor
and Witherspoon as tormented individuals.
Jeffers focuses more strongly than Wright on complex depiction of the
preacher’s conscience in the making of moral choices. Witherspoon
is a dramatic instance of how the writer’s poetic and aesthetic choices can
triumph over the clichéd response readers are likely to give any novel that on
the surface seems to be about civil rights and race relations. Wright feared many readers of his story got
off the hook by way of pity and tears.
Jeffers, on the other hand, throws readers into the pitiless depths of
internally and externally determined morality, i.e., morality racialized. Jeffers’ fictional strategies ensure that we grasp
why the usual black/white dichotomy undermines claims for the universal and
transcendent workings of virtue.
In our most
simplistic readings of the drama of twentieth-century civil rights struggles,
we may mistakenly conclude that it was moral superiority (the non-violent resistance strategies Martin
Luther King, Jr. and others adapted from the praxis of Gandhi) that won the
fight. This is but one part of a complicated history of struggle. For Lance Jeffers, however, it was right
action chosen by individuals rather than right action chosen by groups that was
crucial. It is because Lucius Witherspoon is not portrayed
as a melodramatic hero that our engagement with the particulars of racialized
morality can be so intense in reading the novel. The novel’s deepest unsettling question is: How is a black man to
behave? By Witherspoon’s own measure,
the daring men and the defiant men (Willie Armstrong, Corwul and others) are models
of black manhood. These men are, like the God of the Old Testament, men of war;
they do not imitate the meek Christ of the New Testament. Witherspoon’s own moral growth results in accepting the
dangers of obligation, in burying the dead with dignity (in the face of
threatened white mob action) and in assisting a rebel marked for certain death
to escape and find relative safety in Atlanta, Georgia. Witherspoon’s growth depends very much on
recognizing the essential impotence of conventional “wisdom in the South in the
time of temper and temperament and terror”(78).
He has to recognize the immorality of pragmatic compromise and how
Reason, abstracted from the concreteness of a situation, does not necessarily
underwrite or validate morality.
Witherspoon would be untrue to himself if he were to assume moral decisions can be made outside
the parameters of the concrete.
In partial support
of this assertion, I offer two observations that Lance Jeffers made about the
function of literature and David Theo Goldberg’s description of how race and
morality are symbiotic in American society, a description made ten years after Witherspoon was published. In the essay “The Death of the Defensive
Posture: Toward Grandeur in Afro-American Letters” (1970), Jeffers proposed:
The black writer of the seventies,
battling to free his people, will continue the noble tradition of his
predecessors: to face down hell and see through it and beyond it in the name of
man. But the black writer of the
seventies will go even further. He will
explore the unexplored continent of himself and his people, will seek out the
hidden caves and springs of beauty and hell, will seek out the hell and the
complexity within his bones and with the viscera of his people. He has had the courage to stand fast before the American hell; now he will further
explore, without flinching, his own nature and the nature of his people,
unafraid of what he will find, disregarding the negative response of any
man. Self-discovery is painful; the
black writer will not shrink from the pain of self-discovery”(259-260).
In
“To Sharpen the Sword of Our Struggle” (1983), the keynote address for the
fifth and last National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard
University, Jeffers contented that this hell-facing literature would be moral.
Good literature is moral. And immoral or amoral literature is wretched
and failed literature, however fluent, however polished, however it attracts
the praise of the white literary establishment, which is essentially racist,
whose perceptions and principle and goals are quite different from ours. For good literature is moral, and the
morality of good literature is not degeneracy, however cloaked in polish,
however dramatic; the morality of good literature is the cause of human
evolution, external and internal; and, to Blackfolk, the cause is also political
power which effectively seizes respect (7).
Against
Jeffers’ poetic and idealist formulations about morality, exploration, and the
work of fiction, one should place David T. Goldberg’s cool and rational
description in Racist Culture of how
the modern moral order seems to function:
As Hobbes noted, a moral order
permits those expressions it does not explicitly prohibit. In the case of discriminatory exclusions it
can be conclude more strongly that what the moral order fails explicitly to
exclude it implicitly authorizes. The
moral formalism of modernity establishes itself as the practical application of
rationality, as the rational language and the language of rationality in its
practical application. Modernist
moralism is concerned principally with a complete, rationally derived system of
self-justifying moral reasons logically constructed from a single basic
principle. But in ignoring the social
fabric and concrete identities in virtue of which moral judgment and reason are
individually effective, in terms of which the very content of the moral
categories acquires its sense and force, moral modernity fails to recognize the
series of exclusions upon which the state of modernity is constituted.
Thus, Goldberg can insist
persuasively that “the colonizing of the moral reason of modernity by
racialized categories has been effected for the most part by constituting
racial others outside the scope of morality” (39). In short, the Other conjured in the European
imagination after the Enlightenment is banished from the realm of morality and
has no entitlement to make moral decisions, except in some unspeakable realm of
existence.
I
link Jeffers’ poetic vision of what good fiction should do with Goldberg’s
vexed description of European moral hegemony in order to re-establish the
grounds on which Frantz Fanon discussed “racism and culture” in 1956. From the angles of psychology and cultural
anthropology, Fanon was so accurate about the systemic nature of race and
racism as permanently linked theory and practice. I will try to make my point
in language less convoluted than that used by Jeffers and Goldberg.
Witherspoon as a novel articulates the
title character’s moral agon externally in just the frame of impossibility that
Goldberg sketches. The frame of impossibility
also has psychological consequences that have to be dealt with in a writer’s
construction of character. The geography of the American South is the site for
Witherspoon’s making of moral choices, but Witherspoon’ s agency is not
constrained by that geography. The
ultimate site wherein his moral agency is operative is his mind as that is
represented in the novel. His mind and
his will are not imprisoned by the terms of exclusion implicit in what Goldberg
describes as the modern moral order. His
agency operates in a frame of African American moral values that have long
struggled to be more than verbal assertions or confirmations of a flawed
Western moral order of things. Close
attention to how decisions about good and evil have been depicted in African
American novels that fit into the modes of realism in fiction does invite us to
consider what racialized morality ordains.
What Jeffers makes his readers face, rather
brutally, is that African American morality, historically understood, sometimes
supplements and sometimes opposes the announced values of Western
morality. African American morality is
often stronger because it is constituted more in action than in language. Within the African American frame it is the
doing rather than the saying that counts.
The testing of accountability, which I take to be one of the objectives
Jeffers had in mind as he thought about good literature, is remarkably
conducted in the person of the black preacher Witherspoon. The novel exploits
the African American tradition of
Christian critique that was powerful in fiction and non-fiction until the last
two decades of the twentieth century.
Why and how it has now diminished is a topic for a different lecture.
I
have deliberately not made a plot summary of Witherspoon or mentioned the special moral anxiety Witherspoon must
deal with regarding adultery. I do not
want to spoil the reading of Witherspoon,
the thrill of discovering exactly what Jeffers meant when he used the wording
“facing down hell.” My remarks are an
invitation to test through one’s own reading how this virtually ignored novel
gets at the matter of racialized morality. One clue for discovery, I will say,
is in Witherspoon’s recognition of his double in the man he is helping to
escape certain death at the hands of a lynch mob and in his reconciliation of
his outer and inner selves.
In
Witherspoon, Jeffers was trying to
deal with why race and racial problems are positioning agents in the making of
moral judgments. He succeeds very well
in tantalizing readers to ask why many characters in our racially complex
American literature might be called ethical criminals.[4] Witherspoon is indeed a novel that
should be reprinted and made available for critical reading.
WORKS
CITED
Goldberg, David Theo. Racist
Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Cambridge: Blackwell,
1993.
Jeffers, Lance. “The Death of the Defensive Posture: Toward
Grandeur in Afro-American Letters.” The
Black Seventies. Ed. Floyd B. Barbour. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970.
253-263.
____________. “To Sharpen the Sword
of Our Struggle.” SAGALA No.4 (1984):
4-11.
____________. Witherspoon. Atlanta: George
A. Flippin Press, 1983.
[1]
Even within the hard sciences, “race” can be a minor issue. Irresponsible use
of the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) database by people who do work in
genetics can produce ethical arguments
regarding “racial profiling” or use of genetics in the service of racial
predictability. See Newsome, Melba. “The
Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA
Profiling.” Wired, October 5, 2007. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/207/10
[2]
Twain made the racialized matrix quite explicit in describing Huckleberry
Finn’s crisis of conscience regarding his agency in assisting the fugitive
slave Jim. The crisis is brought to a clear focus in Chapter XVI when Huck
feels extreme guilt for doing the wrong
thing in helping Jim to escape slavery and equal guilt for doing the right thing in lying about Jim’s
racial identity to save him from being captured by slave catchers. Thus, Twain
exposed the hypocrisy of Christianity and the institution of slavery.
[3]
It is noteworthy that Witherspoon is
not mentioned in Bernard W. Bell’s The
Contemporary African American Novel (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2004), in The Cambridge History of
African American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) or
in Thadious M. Davis’ Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
[4]
For a provocative discussion of this subject, see Hayes, Floyd W.”The Paradox
of the Ethical Criminal in Richard Wright’s Novel The
Outsider: A Philosophical Investigation.” APA Newsletter 11.1 (Fall 2011): 16-22.
Racialized Morality
in Lance Jeffers’ Witherspoon
One
main idea in my commentaries on African American literature pertains to how the
traffic in race (or if you prefer,
racial discourses in the United States) stands in defiance of the caution that scientific
research would impose on discussions of human endeavors. [1]
Obviously, the word “race” refers to a concept in classification schemes that
lacks strong empirical backing; evidence from DNA tests, for example,
challenges the legitimacy of casual talk about the concept. From the perspective of modern science,
“race” is a concept that has limited value. On the other hand, in the United
States of America, “race” is a devastatingly powerful tool for achieving a
virtual reality of unity, for maintaining various ideologies of power, and for
keeping a nation bemused about how it is constituted. Americans persist in speaking reductively of
race in binary terms of black and white, especially in forms of mass
communication that are blatantly political and in works of literature that
critics argue are aesthetic. In this
sense, the concept of race has profound consequences for how we read what
purports to be non-fiction and for how we read novels that are forthright in
revealing their origins in a racialized matrix.
The most famous novel is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885); an example that is
closer to our own time but virtually unknown is Lance Jeffers’ novel
Witherspoon (1983).[2]
Literary
analysis, the thinking which obtains in our reading of literature, should
ultimately see race as a social fiction that has metaphysical properties. Race is imprinted in the consciousness of
Americans. It complicates our grasping
of many things that are not overtly announced in American literature, particularly
its moral dimensions. The color coding
of race is refracted in American literature through the ineluctable presence of
the Other, the person who is different.
Toni Morrison used a most creative critical rhetoric to secure that
point in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
and the Literary Imagination. The color coding can most effectively delude
readers who protest that they are colorblind.
It is not an accident that if such readers seek to describe major
American poetry, they tend to focus on examples marked by whiteness. And I doubt it is an accident that Eric
Sundquist’s study To Wake the Nations:
Race in the Making of American Literature does not have the term “morality”
in its index. Nevertheless, it is impossible to have a serious discussion of American
literature as a vast body of works without attending to the intersection of
race and morality, even when “race” wears the mask of “ethnicity” or
“multiculturalism.”
It
is conceivable that we might find instances of American literature that are
devoid of race, but those instances would be the purest forms of science
fiction. They would not be realistic. Our guilt and our race-driven impulses dispose
many American readers to prefer works that roll over them like water on Teflon
rather than works that pinch human consciousness. But non-trivial, realistic works from any
culture do seem to bite moral consciousness.
Within the field of twentieth-century African American literature, it
might be argued few writers have agonized more thoroughly about the nexus of
morality and race, about racialized morality than Lance Jeffers
(1919-1985). Like Toni Morrison’s
well-known Beloved, his novel Witherspoon makes us uncomfortable with
our complacency.
Best
known as a poet and for his achievements in the collections My Blackness is the Beauty of This Land (1970), When I Know the Power of My Black Hand (1974), O Africa, Where I Baked My Bread (1977) and Grandsire (1979), his accomplishment as a fiction writer is not be
slighted. He did, after all, have his
short story “The Dawn Swings In” published in The Best American Short Stories 1948. In 1983, he published Witherspoon, a novel that keeps good company with ‘Sippi by John Oliver Killens and Meridian by Alice Walker.[3] Jeffers’ novel, which focuses on the protracted
struggle of Reverend Lucius Witherspoon in deciding what is the right thing to
do, stands up well among other realistic works set in the Civil Rights
period. It deals relentlessly with the
human fragility and doubt that are so often effectively veiled by heroic public
action.
In
broad outline, Witherspoon resembles
an amplification of the plot sketched in Richard Wright’ s short story “Fire
and Cloud, ” devoid of the specific
Marxist implications. Like
Wright’s Reverend Taylor, Jeffers’ Reverend Witherspoon has to face how moral
considerations are positioned and repositioned in the American South by the
inevitable presence of race. The major question in both works is “What is the
right thing to do?” Wright and Jeffers
historicize the moral dilemmas by showing that they cannot be resolved outside
the circle of American racial dynamics.
Both authors complicate matters by suggesting Christianity can render
black male characters impotent, unable to commit necessary acts, unless the characters radically and racially
reinterpret Christian belief and its
moral imperatives. Taylor and Witherspoon are ministers, but the narrative
constructions of their personalities, their psychologies, are remarkably
different. All African American
preachers are not alike. Jeffers and
Wright defamiliarize the stereotype of the black preacher by portraying Taylor
and Witherspoon as tormented individuals.
Jeffers focuses more strongly than Wright on complex depiction of the
preacher’s conscience in the making of moral choices. Witherspoon
is a dramatic instance of how the writer’s poetic and aesthetic choices can
triumph over the clichéd response readers are likely to give any novel that on
the surface seems to be about civil rights and race relations. Wright feared many readers of his story got
off the hook by way of pity and tears.
Jeffers, on the other hand, throws readers into the pitiless depths of
internally and externally determined morality, i.e., morality racialized. Jeffers’ fictional strategies ensure that we grasp
why the usual black/white dichotomy undermines claims for the universal and
transcendent workings of virtue.
In our most
simplistic readings of the drama of twentieth-century civil rights struggles,
we may mistakenly conclude that it was moral superiority (the non-violent resistance strategies Martin
Luther King, Jr. and others adapted from the praxis of Gandhi) that won the
fight. This is but one part of a complicated history of struggle. For Lance Jeffers, however, it was right
action chosen by individuals rather than right action chosen by groups that was
crucial. It is because Lucius Witherspoon is not portrayed
as a melodramatic hero that our engagement with the particulars of racialized
morality can be so intense in reading the novel. The novel’s deepest unsettling question is: How is a black man to
behave? By Witherspoon’s own measure,
the daring men and the defiant men (Willie Armstrong, Corwul and others) are models
of black manhood. These men are, like the God of the Old Testament, men of war;
they do not imitate the meek Christ of the New Testament. Witherspoon’s own moral growth results in accepting the
dangers of obligation, in burying the dead with dignity (in the face of
threatened white mob action) and in assisting a rebel marked for certain death
to escape and find relative safety in Atlanta, Georgia. Witherspoon’s growth depends very much on
recognizing the essential impotence of conventional “wisdom in the South in the
time of temper and temperament and terror”(78).
He has to recognize the immorality of pragmatic compromise and how
Reason, abstracted from the concreteness of a situation, does not necessarily
underwrite or validate morality.
Witherspoon would be untrue to himself if he were to assume moral decisions can be made outside
the parameters of the concrete.
In partial support
of this assertion, I offer two observations that Lance Jeffers made about the
function of literature and David Theo Goldberg’s description of how race and
morality are symbiotic in American society, a description made ten years after Witherspoon was published. In the essay “The Death of the Defensive
Posture: Toward Grandeur in Afro-American Letters” (1970), Jeffers proposed:
The black writer of the seventies,
battling to free his people, will continue the noble tradition of his
predecessors: to face down hell and see through it and beyond it in the name of
man. But the black writer of the
seventies will go even further. He will
explore the unexplored continent of himself and his people, will seek out the
hidden caves and springs of beauty and hell, will seek out the hell and the
complexity within his bones and with the viscera of his people. He has had the courage to stand fast before the American hell; now he will further
explore, without flinching, his own nature and the nature of his people,
unafraid of what he will find, disregarding the negative response of any
man. Self-discovery is painful; the
black writer will not shrink from the pain of self-discovery”(259-260).
In
“To Sharpen the Sword of Our Struggle” (1983), the keynote address for the
fifth and last National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard
University, Jeffers contented that this hell-facing literature would be moral.
Good literature is moral. And immoral or amoral literature is wretched
and failed literature, however fluent, however polished, however it attracts
the praise of the white literary establishment, which is essentially racist,
whose perceptions and principle and goals are quite different from ours. For good literature is moral, and the
morality of good literature is not degeneracy, however cloaked in polish,
however dramatic; the morality of good literature is the cause of human
evolution, external and internal; and, to Blackfolk, the cause is also political
power which effectively seizes respect (7).
Against
Jeffers’ poetic and idealist formulations about morality, exploration, and the
work of fiction, one should place David T. Goldberg’s cool and rational
description in Racist Culture of how
the modern moral order seems to function:
As Hobbes noted, a moral order
permits those expressions it does not explicitly prohibit. In the case of discriminatory exclusions it
can be conclude more strongly that what the moral order fails explicitly to
exclude it implicitly authorizes. The
moral formalism of modernity establishes itself as the practical application of
rationality, as the rational language and the language of rationality in its
practical application. Modernist
moralism is concerned principally with a complete, rationally derived system of
self-justifying moral reasons logically constructed from a single basic
principle. But in ignoring the social
fabric and concrete identities in virtue of which moral judgment and reason are
individually effective, in terms of which the very content of the moral
categories acquires its sense and force, moral modernity fails to recognize the
series of exclusions upon which the state of modernity is constituted.
Thus, Goldberg can insist
persuasively that “the colonizing of the moral reason of modernity by
racialized categories has been effected for the most part by constituting
racial others outside the scope of morality” (39). In short, the Other conjured in the European
imagination after the Enlightenment is banished from the realm of morality and
has no entitlement to make moral decisions, except in some unspeakable realm of
existence.
I
link Jeffers’ poetic vision of what good fiction should do with Goldberg’s
vexed description of European moral hegemony in order to re-establish the
grounds on which Frantz Fanon discussed “racism and culture” in 1956. From the angles of psychology and cultural
anthropology, Fanon was so accurate about the systemic nature of race and
racism as permanently linked theory and practice. I will try to make my point
in language less convoluted than that used by Jeffers and Goldberg.
Witherspoon as a novel articulates the
title character’s moral agon externally in just the frame of impossibility that
Goldberg sketches. The frame of impossibility
also has psychological consequences that have to be dealt with in a writer’s
construction of character. The geography of the American South is the site for
Witherspoon’s making of moral choices, but Witherspoon’ s agency is not
constrained by that geography. The
ultimate site wherein his moral agency is operative is his mind as that is
represented in the novel. His mind and
his will are not imprisoned by the terms of exclusion implicit in what Goldberg
describes as the modern moral order. His
agency operates in a frame of African American moral values that have long
struggled to be more than verbal assertions or confirmations of a flawed
Western moral order of things. Close
attention to how decisions about good and evil have been depicted in African
American novels that fit into the modes of realism in fiction does invite us to
consider what racialized morality ordains.
What Jeffers makes his readers face, rather
brutally, is that African American morality, historically understood, sometimes
supplements and sometimes opposes the announced values of Western
morality. African American morality is
often stronger because it is constituted more in action than in language. Within the African American frame it is the
doing rather than the saying that counts.
The testing of accountability, which I take to be one of the objectives
Jeffers had in mind as he thought about good literature, is remarkably
conducted in the person of the black preacher Witherspoon. The novel exploits
the African American tradition of
Christian critique that was powerful in fiction and non-fiction until the last
two decades of the twentieth century.
Why and how it has now diminished is a topic for a different lecture.
I
have deliberately not made a plot summary of Witherspoon or mentioned the special moral anxiety Witherspoon must
deal with regarding adultery. I do not
want to spoil the reading of Witherspoon,
the thrill of discovering exactly what Jeffers meant when he used the wording
“facing down hell.” My remarks are an
invitation to test through one’s own reading how this virtually ignored novel
gets at the matter of racialized morality. One clue for discovery, I will say,
is in Witherspoon’s recognition of his double in the man he is helping to
escape certain death at the hands of a lynch mob and in his reconciliation of
his outer and inner selves.
In
Witherspoon, Jeffers was trying to
deal with why race and racial problems are positioning agents in the making of
moral judgments. He succeeds very well
in tantalizing readers to ask why many characters in our racially complex
American literature might be called ethical criminals.[4] Witherspoon is indeed a novel that
should be reprinted and made available for critical reading.
WORKS
CITED
Goldberg, David Theo. Racist
Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Cambridge: Blackwell,
1993.
Jeffers, Lance. “The Death of the Defensive Posture: Toward
Grandeur in Afro-American Letters.” The
Black Seventies. Ed. Floyd B. Barbour. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970.
253-263.
____________. “To Sharpen the Sword
of Our Struggle.” SAGALA No.4 (1984):
4-11.
____________. Witherspoon. Atlanta: George
A. Flippin Press, 1983.
[1]
Even within the hard sciences, “race” can be a minor issue. Irresponsible use
of the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) database by people who do work in
genetics can produce ethical arguments
regarding “racial profiling” or use of genetics in the service of racial
predictability. See Newsome, Melba. “The
Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA
Profiling.” Wired, October 5, 2007. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/207/10
[2]
Twain made the racialized matrix quite explicit in describing Huckleberry
Finn’s crisis of conscience regarding his agency in assisting the fugitive
slave Jim. The crisis is brought to a clear focus in Chapter XVI when Huck
feels extreme guilt for doing the wrong
thing in helping Jim to escape slavery and equal guilt for doing the right thing in lying about Jim’s
racial identity to save him from being captured by slave catchers. Thus, Twain
exposed the hypocrisy of Christianity and the institution of slavery.
[3]
It is noteworthy that Witherspoon is
not mentioned in Bernard W. Bell’s The
Contemporary African American Novel (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2004), in The Cambridge History of
African American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) or
in Thadious M. Davis’ Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
[4]
For a provocative discussion of this subject, see Hayes, Floyd W.”The Paradox
of the Ethical Criminal in Richard Wright’s Novel The
Outsider: A Philosophical Investigation.” APA Newsletter 11.1 (Fall 2011): 16-22.
