MICHAEL THELWELL
The answer to this question lies in the very real differences in attitude,
world-view and self-definition so glibly glossed over by the currently
fashionable terms "black consciousness" and "white consciousness." Part
of this response does have to do with what Christopher Lasch calls the
blacks' search for "a usable past." But this does not mean that Ameri–
can history is being subjected to "the meatgrinder of black nationalist
historical revision" with its implications of reckless invention and ideo–
logical rewriting. The question is more one of revising and expanding
certain orthodox white assumptions, and adding to the currently limited
arsenal of terms, categories and definitions through which white histori–
ans have structured black history.
Black necessity has less to do with
manufacturing
a history than with the excavation, articulation and
legitimization
of what has been ignored or misrepresented in our history.
Assume that it is possible for a twentieth-century white southern
writer to tune in on the thought patterns, beliefs, impulses and world–
view of a black slave in the eighteen-thirties. There are undoubtedly
literary terms in which such a psychological and historical leap is pos–
sible, and there are many instances, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy, of
seemingly successful re-creations of a remote or alien experience. But
for a white southerner writing from a black point of view, this kind of
leap necessitates disengagement from that pervasive accumulation of
white mythology about black people, and from that vast tradition of
literary cliche, racial stereotype and the romantic and sentimental
version of history that is his own particular cultural heritage.
It
also
requires his acquiring a sensitivity to aspirations, sensibilities and atti–
tudes, to a black cultural and linguistic tradition which is at odds with
most of his class assumptions.
That Mr. Styron was not oblivious to these problems can be seen
from his brilliant and candid essay, "This Quiet Dust,"
(Harper's
Magazine, April, 1965). (There is an interesting, but tangential, problem
implicit in the way in which Mr. Styron was able in his essay to engage
questions which he could not in his novel, and it is perhaps because the
novel is so much more intimate, less detached and less rational than
the essay.)
"My boyhood experience," he tells us in the essay, "was the typical–
ly ambivalent one of most native southerners, for whom the Negro is
simultaneously taken for granted and the object of unending concern.
. . . My feelings seem to have been confused and blurred, tinged with
sentimentality, colored by a great deal of folklore, and wobbling always
between a patronizing affection ... and downright hostility. Most im–
portantly my feelings were completely uninformed by that intimate
