Josh Massey

Alternating Sounds—Phonographies of Resistance in Postbellum American Literature

Josh Massey

The notion of “matter” is interesting. To matter means to be material, and to be material means to be visible, but what happens when things are made not to matter, or don’t matter? To not matter is to be immaterial, to not exist, to be invisible; but in what ways does invisibility mean non-existence? This conflict between seeing and being creates a blindness to things oppressive society does not wish to see. 1 The aforementioned relationship is constructed by an oppressive society towards African Americans, through the slave trade, Reconstruction, and eventually the Jim Crow era. The African-American is seen by an oppressive society in ways that make their interests and desires disappear, and the literature of the late 19th and early 20th century works to create and reproduce this relationship. An image or discourse of the African-American structured by the minstrelized oppositions between the “happy-go-lucky darky” and the criminal occults any other vision of the African-American, creates a significant risk for those who do not want to play the part of a “happy-go-lucky darky,” because they may instead be labeled as a criminal. 2 This binary definition of African-Americans causes their true social and individual forms to be invisible to oppressive society. However, their invisibility is not constrained to the realm of sight, but also interferes with the realm of African-American sound. Their sounds, whether made through voice, instrument, or other medium, can be appropriated and taken out of context. Because of this, “black” music seems to exist in a sphere that is separate and outside (or inside) of the influence of oppressive society; however, it is active within that society. African-American music resists the segregation that works to devalue and belittle its creators; it seeps into the senses of the oppressive majority, affecting its members in ways they cannot explain or stop, forcing its listeners to recognize that there is a problem that needs to be addressed in society as a

1 The “invisible man” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man experiences this issue—he becomes invisible because oppressive society does not wish to see him in the way he wishes to be seen. Without worrying about being seen, he is able to transgress in society in ways he could not fathom doing before.

2 To play the part of the “darky” begs mockery, while being seen as a criminal begs lynching. whole. 3

The “blackness” attributed to the African-American is a “blackness” of a fantasy necessary to sustain and support the construct of “whiteness”. 4 Oppressive society has to create a visual image of a stereotypical African-American, so when they listen to “black” music, they wish to hear the sounds of a stereotype. By defining “black” music, “white” music is created as a binary opposite which is viewed in a positive light and accepted by society. 5 This raises many questions, and leads us to ask: What makes black music black? On the surface, the obvious answer is that it is performed by African-American artists, but are there lyrical topics, instruments, or rhythms that make “black” music black? More importantly, how have African-Americans transformed blackness into a creative and critical resource for aesthetic and political work? W.E.B. Du Bois starts to answer this question in his book, The Souls of Black Folk. He writes of the African-American as “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world…a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (8). To him, the self-consciousness of an oppressive society impedes the ability of African-Americans to be self-aware; they know themselves as they are known by others, while also knowing that they are different—a difference not defined by the

3 Hip-hop and rap today are examples of this—even though they may say things that are not suitable for the ears of the youth of America (as determined by their parents), they still find a way to communicate their messages to the masses.

4 Susan Gubar’s Racechanges explores whiteness and blackness as being both two separate entities, while also being completely intertwined. In the chapter, “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” she introduces her arguments by examining a vase that has to heads on it—one with “white” features and one with “black” features—that face away from each other. They both make up the same whole head, but their separate halves will never be able to see each other, and when one views the vase, they will only be able to see a side-profile of each head, or one head at a time. Essentially, the vase, though almost a thousand years old, “whose mysteriously doubled features speak to the complementarity of Western and African images of womanly beauty,” gives us a visual image of how race, though socially constructed in order to create separate spheres of being, really creates intermixed spheres of being where perceived “whiteness” and “blackness’ interact constantly (3).

5 “Black” music in the 1950s was rock music, while “white” music was rock ’n’ roll, which is just “black” music played by white people.

“other world,” but by their own “work and striving” (5). The second-sight African-Americans have is sound, which doubles sight, and alters the ways by which “white” people see and know “black” people (and themselves, in relation to those whom they’ve denigrated). Through second-sight, or sound, African-Americans can understand themselves outside of the stereotypical image of them that is created by oppressive society. 6

African-Americans have many ways to express their second-sight, but the most effective way may not even be through vision, but through voice. The voice doubles vision, thus rendering the transparency of vision into the opacity of voice. White people no longer “see” or know black people (or themselves) immediately. Music offers a way for African-Americans to express themselves by complementing or supplementing sight in ways oppressive society cannot interpret or understand. This causes oppressive society panic and confusion that they must remedy quickly, at the risk of losing the image of an African-American necessary for them to identify as “white”. This creates the insistence that African-Americans play the part of “negroes” or “blacks”. In Mel Brooks’ film, Blazing Saddles, this happens in a very apparent way when the white boss asks a group of African-American railroad workers to sing a “good ol’ n*gger work song”. After a minute of conversation, they break into an acapella version of “I Get a Kick Out of You”, while the now larger group of white overseers stares in awe. 7 The boss stops the song after some time, amid great confusion, and says that he wants to hear an “actual song,” like “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” or “The Camptown Ladies [sic]”. None of the African-Americans claim to know the songs, so the overseers sing and dance around while they laugh and point, mockingly. By acting as they think African-Americans act, they have made fools of themselves, raising an interesting point: Do whites play the part of stereotypical African-American better than African-Americans do? 8 My answer is yes. The stereotypical African-American, or “darky” is a creation of the white imagination derived from a fantasy of an “inferior” race, and is meant to justify the economic exploitation and political domination of African-Americans. This means that white people should be able to play the part of the “darky” better than African-Americans can, because, after all, they created it.

6 While you can close your eyes and block out any vision of things you don’t want to see, it is much more difficult to block out sound from things you do not want to hear. No matter what, it seems to seep into your senses.

7 “I get no kick from champagne; mere alcohol, doesn’t move me at all; so tell me why should it be true; that I get a belt out of you? Some get a kick from cocaine…” (Blazing Saddles)

8 Blackface, after all, is a way for whites to exercise their own objectively racist views of African Americans through an entertaining and denigrating medium. C harles Chesnutt writes extensively about this in his novel The Marrow of Tradition. In “The Cakewalk,” the titular event is put on by southern aristocrats in order to impress northern businessmen who are interested in “the negro problem” and who are looking to invest in cotton mills in North Carolina. They want to be assured that the labor problem is solved (since slavery is no longer legal) and to see that all is well down south. Their need to witness “this spectacle of a dying race, unable to withstand the competition of a superior type” (Chesnutt, Marrow 115), is put on at the expense of the dignity and pride of those involved. 9 The desire to see the “joyous, happy-go-lucky disposition of the Southern darky and his entire contentment with existing conditions” (117) causes one of the main characters (and one of the primary antagonists of the text), Tom Delamere, to dress in blackface as his uncle’s servant, Sandy, and go to the cakewalk himself. Naturally, Tom, a white man, wins the competition because he is white, which causes Sandy to be expelled from his church (for sacrilegious activity) and eventually leads to him being framed for murder. Tom Delamere is the best dancer because he is the best at acting “black.” The cakewalk is a competition which relies on the African-American acting as closely to the “darky” as possible in order to fulfill the racist image of the African-American needed to win the prize. Acting in this way for reward is problematic for the African-American community because it reinforces the racist image of African-Americans that oppressive society relies on as a method of advancing their oppression. 10 Because of a minstrel structure of “race,” which criminalizes those who refuse to be obedient, docile and content with their conditions and status, the African-American is characterized as either a “happy-go-lucky” negro or a criminal. To refuse the former is to risk becoming the latter, which is why Sandy is eventually seen as the chief suspect in the murder of Miss Polly Ochiltree (even though it was Tom Delamere who killed her). His actions force the reader to look at the white performance of “race,” and how the white man indeed performs the actions of the “negro” better than the African-American does.

Second-sight promises a resolution in the creation of new African-American expressive forms (the affirmative form of blackness), but double-consciousness does not. An African-American musician is conflicted because there are really two artists in one body. One is the artist who appeals to African cultural ideals, and the other is the artist who appeals to American ideals. They cannot be perfectly balanced, and the entire career of an African-American musician is spent in vain trying to get as close to a balance as possible. African American artists are conflicted in their performance

9 A revitalized south was a work in progress, and in many ways, still is today.

10 See Eric Sundquist’s chapter on Charles Chesnutt in his To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature for more on the play of the “negro”, among other things.

because the “white world” demands compliance with European (not American) forms and despises black cultural productions. Because of this, Du Bois writes of the conflict that African American artists have to deal with. They cannot express their blackness to their heart’s content because the “white world” will criticize and ostracize them because they cannot or will not conform to European cultural ideals. They have to find a way to turn African and American music into African-American music, or in other words, they have to find a way to escape white contempt while also pleasing themselves and their audiences. (Du Bois 9).

While white listeners danced and jived to ragtime, black musicians were busy playing it. The job of the black musician, as highlighted in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, is to play to the expectations of the white listener and then rag them. The term rag is interesting, because it is a verb, meaning “to make fun in a loud or boisterous manner,” and also a specific instrumental technique: he is syncopating the songs. The ex-colored man rags the classical music he plays, and uses the content of his songs as a commentary of the society he lives in. The ragtime Johnson plays serves as a way to make fun of the oppression he faces as an African-American man immersed into a society that doesn’t want him, or only wants him for their entertainment. When he makes fun of his white listeners, they unknowingly dance and act merrily, because their bodies are acting out meanings of which they are not aware. The ignorance of oppressive society requires a great deal of work, and in this case, their bodies undo the work of consciousness associated with “double-consciousness” and “vision.” There is also an aspect of slavery associated with the ragtime performer only know as “ex-colored man”. His patron, the unnamed millionaire, has him play at his home for parties, but also when he is alone and wants to be able to think and meditate upon things. Sometimes, he has ex-colored man play for hours on end while he sits with his eyes closed, almost dozing. He plays even when he is extremely exhausted because he cannot stop, at the risk of going unpaid. Because of this, he describes his millionaire as a tyrant who possesses a “supernatural power used to drive [him] mercilessly to exhaustion” (Johnson 95). In this aspect, the millionaire acts as master and the ex-colored man as slave, as the latter is forced to play at any and all times the former wants him to play, whether he wants to or not. Because of this, the African-American musician seems re-enslaved to white society, no matter their professionalism and independence. 11 Thus is slavery generalized to the whole of society: rather than the property of a single master, the black performer must work for all. Here, however, his patron seems inseparable from a master.

11 African-Americans have struggled, and will struggle, to escape the ensnaring chains of slavery that still, in many ways, surround them today.

In one scene, the ex-colored man plays at is gap is literal, as seen at a house party thrown by the millionaire. Beginning with some classical pieces, he segues into playing ragtime. He is separated from his listeners by a door, but the door serves as more than just a literal partition. As the first note of the rag started to play, the conversation stopped suddenly. It was a pleasure to [ex-colored man] to watch the expression of astonishment and delight that grew on the faces of everybody. These were people—and they represented a large class, —who were ever expecting to find happiness in novelty, each day relentlessly exploring and exhausting every resource of this great city that might possibly furnish a new sensation or awaken a fresh emotion, and who were always grateful to anyone who aided them in their quest. (55)

The music of the ex-colored man disrupts the imagination of the white listeners, making them acknowledge his existence in a society that doesn’t. By playing his ragtime at the house party, he makes his listeners notice him (through the door) as the previously unseen source of their novelty. The separation of the source of the music (the ex-colored man) and the sound of the music (the noise coming from the other room) becomes the occasion of a disturbance.

While some white Americans take the noises of African-Americans for granted, others take advantage of them. Obviously, people like Paul Whiteman used music that they called “dignified jazz” to gain immense profit, but sometimes people would take advantage of black music in a way that doesn’t involve monetary profit. 12 In The Great Gatsby, at one of Gatsby’s massive parties, the jazz band starts to play Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World, which causes a huge stir in the audience. When the music is playing, Nick cannot help but staring at Gatsby, and the text is rather vague, because we cannot tell if it is a look of desire, desperation, or admiration. Nick wants Gatsby in some way, but it is unclear if it is in a sexual way, a fraternal way, or both. 13 Other people in the crowd swoon and fall, and start to act uncontrollable ways. Women were “putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls” (Fitzgerald, Gatsby 50). The allure of the piece causes its listeners to have strong desires for each other, and to transgress in ways they have not before, but in the origi

12 Paul Whiteman worked with the notion that while black music was savage, white music, or rather, an version of black music infused with European-American instrumentation, was civilized. See Man Ray’s Noire et blanche (1926) for an interesting juxtaposition between blackness and whiteness, or African and European standards of art and beauty.

13 Nick Carraway’s homosexual tendencies (see the end of Chapter 2) are of interest, as the emergence of the transgressive individual and the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual was occurring around this time.

nal manuscript for The Great Gatsby, a completely different sense is provoked: a sense of confusion, but also a sense of realization. Nick describes a series of interruptive notes that seemed to fall together accidentally and colored everything that came after them until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were oppossed [sic] to it outside. But what struck me particularly was that just as you’d get used to the new discord business there’d be one of the old themes rung in this time as a discord until you’d get a ghastly sense that it was all a cycle after all, purposeless and sardonic until you wanted to get up and walk out of the garden. It never stopped— after they had finished playing that movement it went on and on in everybody’s head until the next one started. Whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet. (Breitwieser 65)

In the manuscript, the partygoers come to the harsh realization that the piece is just a cycle, “purposeless and sardonic,” just as life seems to be. In the novel, the partygoers sing and dance gaily, while Nick stares at Gatsby with a sense of desire, which the song seems to evoke from him. Fitzgerald seems to be writing his manuscript from a seemingly controversial point of view in which African-American music can be insightful, and can have intellectual meaning and feeling. The original text addresses the audience in ways the published text does not wish to understand. Just as Nick Carraway says Gatsby’s smile allows one to see oneself just as one wishes to be, rather than as one is, the text’s deletion of these troubling sounds suppresses the realization that who one wishes to be, or what (i.e., “white) is an illusion.

To ruminate further upon the notion of black versus white jazz, it seems no amount of alcohol can create these effects that the “black” jazz seems to create. Jazz History of the World was debuted in Carnegie Hall, to much sensation, according to the novel, but this piece presents an interesting enigma. This is “not black jazz, Carnegie Hall not being a common venue for black bands, and Vladimir Tostoff being an uncommon name in African-American communities” (Breitweiser 62). This imposter jazz is not African-American, but still has some of the nuances present in African-American jazz (instrumentation, rhythm, etc.), which is what causes the sensations that are seen in this scene of the novel. Another, very important question is also posed: Does white performance of black jazz bring forth the soul, spirit, or duende that the African-American performance of black jazz does?

When white artists try to capture and interpret black sound in their own way, something goes awry, and the desired effect cannot be created. The removal of black voice not only affects the world of music, but also that of writing. Charles Chesnutt usually writes his stories in the frame of the African-American laborer, Uncle Julius. In only one of his stories does he sway from the point of view of Julius to his employers, John and Annie. In “The Dumb Witness,” Chesnutt writes the entire story from the perspective of John, the carpetbagger, and the story suffers because of it. Eric Sundquist describes it as “a conjure tale without conjure and a Julius tale without Julius” (389). The language, inflection, dialect, and storyline as a whole change from the perspective of Julius to the prospective of John. The story is about an ex-slave named Viney, who was the slave mistress of her master, Malcolm Murchison, for many years. When she heard her master was going to remarry, she “broke out in a scene of hysterical violence” and “pleaded, remonstrated, [and] raged” (Chesnutt, Witness 762) until her master was able to calm her down. Afterwards, she went and told his fiancé something that caused her to break off the engagement. In retaliation, Viney’s master cuts out her tongue, and “puts it out of [her] power to dip [her] tongue where [it was] not concerned” (763). Viney is the only person who knows where the inheritance left by Murchison’s uncle is, and she lives a life of (for the most part) silence, rather than telling him where his questionably rightful inheritance is. When she does talk, she speaks in ‘“meaningless inarticulate mutterings,” the “discordant jargon” deriving from “no language or dialect, at least none of European origin,” which at last pours forth in “a flood of sounds that were not words,” represents a very particularized form of power” (Sundquist 390). Here we see two repressed voices: the voice of Viney, and the voice of Julius—both stolen by the oppressive society they are forced by circumstance to live in.

Eric Sundquist has linked African-American language to both property— “material wealth and social power that is the functional expression of literate control of language”— and literary power— “to the voice of culture as it is ranged along the color line” (Sundquist 391). Because John tells Julius’ story, he removes his literary power in favor of his own, and effectively removes the African-American element of Chesnutt’s conjure stories in order to showcase the white appropriation and theft of black culture. The sound of Julius’s voice is lost, but so is its significance: form and content are inseparably related in dialectal performance.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois describes the negro folk song as “the rhythmic cry of the slave”, which, he says, “stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas” (180-181). In other words, African-American music is both the sole and the soul of American music. The soul of American music highlights the neglect that all African-Americans face, but is easily misunderstood by those who have not experienced the plight of the African-American. It is the “singular spiritual heritage of the nation, and the greatest gift of the negro people” (181), but this gift is misconstrued and abused. Artists like Paul Whiteman have done something terrible to African-American music by removing the African-American element from it. What are the blues without the plight of the artist? Or

without that artist’s self-conscious political relation to his, her, their work – the work without its critique and negation of an oppressive society? What does it mean when a white artist sings a song that is written by, sung by, and relates to the struggles of an African-American in an oppressive society? This is the process by which African-American music is Americanized (even though “America” is essentially black) into forms like white jazz or turned into minstrel music by racist bigots. When the music of African-Americans loses its political identity with the “work and striving” of African Americans, then it cannot defend African Americans against invisibility, that is when the African-American becomes invisible. Because of this, African-Americans may discover a new way of seeing (knowing) themselves in sounds which double sight, displacing the visual by the acoustic image.

The sorrow songs that Du Bois describes are “a music of unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways” (182), and transcend the boundaries of the English language and American music. African-American music was originally African music and American music, and the African music of the past was not sung in English, but in the indigenous languages of the many tribes and sects of Africa. The original words of the African folk songs have been lost through many years of enslavement and repression of African ideals (religion, spirituality, gender roles, etc.). The music of African slaves is much older than the music of their masters, and Du Bois wants to show that. He speaks of an old song with no identifiable language in the lyrics—an “often crooned heathen melody” (182) that has been passed down to generation after generation of enslaved and free African-Americans. The music and culture of African-Americans was not lost in the middle passage hundreds of years ago, but instead, it was just altered. Though the words may be lost, the sound continues to speak of what cannot otherwise be said. In this way, the sound becomes what Nathaniel Mackey calls a “phantom limb,” a way of touching what touches you.

“In these songs,” Du Bois writes, “the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment” (185). He warns his readers that if they get caught up in the racist repertoire of “coon” songs and “gospel” hymns that they might lose sight of the true “negro melodies” (184). These songs lose sight of the true plight of the African-American, and lose the key element of mourning—the mourning for those lost to slavery and to the violence of Jim Crow, the mourning for the broken promises of freedom and equality first offered by the American Revolution, and eventually renewed by Reconstruction—that all African-American songs possess. The mourning serves, however, as a reminder that morning will soon come—that the light of freedom will one day show itself.

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. “Late Sunday Morning.” Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. 27-31. Print.

Breitwieser, M. “The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eye-Witness.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 47 no. 3, 1991, pp. 17-70. Project MUSE. Web. 10 Oct. 2016.

Chesnutt, Charles W. “The Cakewalk.” The Marrow of Tradition. Ed. J. Sundquist. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print.

Chesnutt, Charles W. “The Dumb Witness.” Stories, Novels, and Essays. Comp. Werner Sollors. New York: Library of America, 2002. 756-69. Print.

DuBois, W.E.B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Library of America, 1990. 7-15; 180-190. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Chapter III.” The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1953. 39-59. Print.

Hughes, Langston. “These Blues I’m Playing.” Short Stories. Ed. Akiba Sullivan Harper and Arnold Rampersad. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. 50-65. Print.

Johnson, James Weldon. “Chapter VIII.” The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 51-58. Print.

Sundquist, Eric J. “Charles Chesnutt’s Cakewalk.” To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1993. 313-92. Print.