of the American Scene

Published with the contribution of the Euro-American Studies Department of the University of Rome Three

Modes and Facets of the American Scene Studies in Honor of Cristina Giorcelli ed. Dominique Marçais

Printed in Italy Copyright 2014 Renzo e Rean Mazzone Editori Italo-Latino-Americana Palma Palermo-Roma (Italia) São Paulo (Brasil)

ISBN 978 887704764X

t' Propertius, trans. H.E. Butler (London and New York: Heinemann and G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1929): IV.5.61. 15

Ovid, Tristia, Ex Ponto, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (London

Jnr¡'n¡v C. Srewenr

and

Cambridge: Heinemann and Ha¡vard U. P., 1939): Pont.II.4.28-29. 'o Virgil, Georgics, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge and London: Flarvard U. P. and Heinemann, 1965): IV-l19. '? Jean-Pierre Brun, "The Production of Perfumes in Antiquity: the Cases of Delos and Paestum," American Journal of Archaeology,104.2 (Apr.2000): 29192. Rose unguents were already being produced locally a century earlier. 's Mario Mello, Rosae: II fiore di Venere nella vita a nella cultura romana (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 2003), p. 77 . 'e lbidem, pp.81-2. ?0 Walafrid Strabo, On the Cultivation of Gardens fHortulusl, trans. James Mitchell (San Francisco: Ithuriel's Spear,2009), p.81. t' Joseph Forsyth, Renmrks on Antiquitíes, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion ín ltaly, in the Years 1802 and 1803,ed. Keith Crook (Newark: U. of Delawale P.,2001), p. i74. '2 Johann Gottfried Seume, A Stroll to Syracuse, trans. Alexander Henderson and Elizabeth Henderson (New York: Frede¡ick Ungar,1962),pp.I75-76, pp. 193-

THE INVISIBLE MAN: WHAI A EUROPEAN VISITOR' SAW IN THE AMERICAN CHARACTER "I

have not resided he¡e long enough to become insensible of pain for the objects which I every day behold." (De Crevecoeur, I'etters from an American Farnter)

The American Mind has never prided itself on confronting its darker secrets,jts contradictions, its schizophrenias, or perhaps as Ralph

94.

A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles (Chapel Hill: U. of '?3 Philip A. Stadter, North Carolina P., 1989): 165 (13.5)

- that Arnerica is the land of the free, the home of the brave, the location of virtue given to humaniry by God. Any divergence from that set of ideas quickly puts one'S claim to an American identity at risk."2 Nowhere is this more evident than when theories about the "American charactel" collide with the history of America's engagement with the Negro' ticular territory, but those who ascribe to a set of ideas

And nowhere was this collision more hidden than in the eariy canonical texts of American Studies, published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Leo Marx',s The Machine in the Garden is the classic statément of the American myth that what distinguishes America is our notion that our land is a biblical-like garden, a horn of plenty, a veritable Eden on Earttì, in which European man was renewed and

Marx details it, America would not hold onto this vision of the garden as its lodestar, except as a vision, an ideology, really, after its alas , as

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elite tasted the fruits of the machine - industrialization, urbanization, and enormous profits - imported like an apple from England and bitten into so deeply by the American psyche that by the end of the 19'h century it would be America that would be the center of industrial capitalism, not Europe. Yet curiously, as Marx also points out, Americans pe{petuated the notion of America as a garden and a land of rural virtue long after it embraced the machine. There are many interesting aspects of this story that Marx reveals, but for me the most interesting elements of the story are those that he leaves out. For example, in posing the central conflict of 19th century America as between its pastoral ideal and its industrial real, Marx renders the pastoral ideal a unity without disclosing that that pastoral America was created by the machine, the machine of capitalism and slavery. Moreover, in choosing Thomas Jefferson as the exemplar of that pastoral idealism and arguing that his Declaration of Independence was engendered by the desire to preserve the garden of America against the ravages of the European machine, Marx chose to rescue Jefferson from the central conflict that even Jefferson identified as his and his people during his time the conflict between the ideology of freedom and the reality of slavery. Of course, Marx is correct that Thomas Jefferson spilt much ink describing what might be called a pastoral America against the evils of the urban. And in doing so he set the political standard for the future - as there remains a profound political payoff for any leader who links images of rural America rvith the idea of our special virtue as a nation, a pure, simple, romantic notion of American character as that of the independent, freedom-loving farmer. But nowhere in Marx's analysis of Jefferson and his love of the garden does Marx raise the key question: without the Negro, could Jefferson have had his vision of America as a garden? For the key difference between the biblical garden and the American one is that the latter required someone to keep it up; and the gardener of the 18'n century Virginia Jefferson idealized in a web of metaphors was none

that is producing indigo, corn, and most importantly tobacco for salelo And if we add South Carolina to the metaphor, we get rice; if Georgia, wheat; and so one wonders why a historian blessed with the name Marx would not expose the materiality of the garden, that the American garden exists and persists because it operates within an interlocking system of transatlantic commerce which is dependent on the labor of slaves to turn a profit. The American garden is as dependent on the Negro as the biblical garden was dependent on Adam. In the biblical garden Adam did not have to work. In this sense, we see perhaps, ironically, why the notion of the American Adam was so feverishly attractive to the European: America would be the Eden where he would not have to work. In that sense, a true reading qf the Jeffersonian vision of the garden leads almost to blasphemy - the Negro comes close to being God, since he sustains the garden in which Adam eats. But the gardener whose labor sustains that of the Americal farmer, theAmericanAdam, remains invisible in Leo Malx's narrative. That's becauseAmerican Studies emerged as a discipline to do one thing really well - to exemplify one part of the American character, the relative

freedom of the white subject in American history, what politicos now call American Exceptionalism.5 But the exception to that Exceptionalist discourse was always the enslaved who pulled the blinders offthe eyes of those who looked atAmerica as a capitalist fantasy, and reabzed that it was the Negro who was the real machine in the garden, a machine that did not fit the fantasy of America as a garden, and thus was rendered invisible by those who distract us from his disturbing presence to point our attention to America as an idyllic garden that lost its way. What America really is becomes in this analysis a not so

idyllic garden that lost its gardener.

Denial, distraction, suppression of the contradiction of America between a garden of freedom and a hell-hole of enslavement is what

the philosopher Gilbert Morris calls "coveted schizophrenia."u Jefferson suffered from the schizophrenia that allowed him to write

Jefferson himself makes this plain in his Notes on Virginia, where we find the metaphor of America as a self-sustaining garden competing with another notion of America - that of the plantation

"all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with the right to life, Iiberry, and the pursuit of happiness." Leo Marx, Alfred Kazin, and others of the first generation of American S¡rdies writers and scholars suffered from the "coveted schizophrenia," because they

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other than the Negro.

reproduced this double vision of America in their works to somehow protect one side of American consciousness from seeing and hearing the other side of the American Enlightenment. In the 1990s, while I was a professor at George Mason University, Alfred Kazin visited the campus to give a series of lectures, beginning with Thomas Jefferson. 'When I raised the point in the question and answer period about the dependency of Jefferson's vision on the labor of slaves, I was almost shouted down with the argument that in Jefferson's time many white people had slaves, slaves were taken for gralted, etc. I was being chastised for spoiling a discourse on American virtue. My point was not that the Negro spoiled American virhre, but that the enslaved were constitutive of it. For without America's evil there could never have been the "fiee" American farmer of virtue. Nowhere is the double consciousness of America more power-

fully figured than in the first compelling look at America by

a

European, Letters from an American Farmer: Describing Certain

Provincial Situations, Manners, and Customs, Not Generally Known; and Conveying Some ldea of the Late and Present Interior Circumstances of the British Colonies of North America,1782.' For its author, the Frenchman J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, is the first to formulate the cultural production called an "American" and the first to do so with what art historian Kristen Thompson calls a

"sidelong glance" at the Negro.' In his invented persona of the "American Farmer," de Crevecoeur fabricates a correspondence with a European who wishes to know what distinguishes the American from other world "farmers."

As you are the first enlightened European I have ever had the pleasure of beìng acquainted with, you wilì not be surprised that I should, according to your eamest desire and my promise, appear anxious of preserving your friendship and cor¡espondence. By your accounts, I observe a material difference subsists between your husbandry, modes, and customs, and ours; every thing is local; could we enjoy the advantages of the English farmer, we should be much happier, indeed, but this wish, like many others, implies a contradiction; and could the English farmer have some of those privileges we possess, they would be the first of thei¡ class in the world. Good and evil I see is to be found in all socieúes, and it is in vain to seek for any spot where those ìngredients a¡e not mixed. I therefore rest satisfied, and tha¡k God that my lot is to be an America¡r farmer, instead of a Russian boor, or an Hungarian peasant.e

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The American fa.rmer is distinguished because he (and it is always in these male narratives, whetherAmerican or European) exists in a better "material situation" than that of the Russian "boor" and the a he

Hungarian "peasant," or even that of the English farmer. The American farmer has been raised up from the lowly position of other laboring agriculturalists because ofthe lush and forgiving natural environment, but also because of the freedom to profit from his exploitation of those natural resources in ways that the peasant and even the Engtsh farmer cannot. Further, there is a "contradiction" in the situation of comparing the English and the American faÍner, one in which there is no absolute good. "Good and evil I see is to be found in all societies, and it is in vain to seek for any spot where those ingredients are not mixed,"'o in the American environment as well as the English. And then, here comes that "sidelong glance": I thank you kindly for the idea, however dreadful, which you have given me of thei¡ lot and condition; your observations have confirmed me in the justness of my ideas, and I am happier now than I thought myselfbefore. It is strange that misery, when viewed in others, should become to us a sort of real good, though I am far from to hear that there are in the world men thoroughly wretched; they a¡e no doubt as ha¡rnless, industrious, and willing to work as we are. Ha¡d is their fate to be thus condemned to a slavery worse than that of our negroes."

What de Crevecoeur gives us is rather astounding - a dialogic notion of the social formation of the American farmer. What the American, read white, farmer benefits from is a "situation" in which he is freed from the kind of unremitting, unprofitable drudgery labor of the lowly "Hungarian peasant" to soff as an owner of his own property. The propeffy handed down to the "American farmer" from his father is a kind of inheritance not possible for most "negroes." But he at first does not value it until he comes to maturity and marriage and realizes that the unencumbered American farmer leads an ideal life with no indenture to york off, no shackles of "our unfortunate negroes" to wear, because "America" allows him to be at the top rather than the bottom of the system of agricultural production. Now de Crevecoeur is not prepared to say that theAmerican farmer is better off than the Russian boor, the Hungarian peasant, and the English farmer because of the oppression of the "negroes," but he does offer that "good and evil are to be found in all societies." There is the

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"sidelong glance." He will not indict this society because it is a society like all others, and hence, not "exceptional" in that regard. What makes it "exceptional" is that it has evolved a system of agricultural production that allows an exceptional amount of freedom and selfdetermination for the white farmer in America compared to that of other white farmers around the globe. And that elevation is linked, if only by glancing over at the other fellow who happens to be black and laboring in the same "garden," by comparison and "contradiction," to the Negro. For implicit in de Crevecoeur's analysis is the more drawn out critique of David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, that the liberation of the working class from the hor¡ors experienced by European working classes is the oppression and comparison with the black slave." De Crevecoeur is simply siting this process of identity formation in the American farmer, a process that will culminate a couple of decades later in the raciahzed identity of the American worker. fl-etter II] For in the third letter, de Crevecoeur def,ines the American as the culmination of a cultural process of liberation for European immigrants who found in America the social conditions for their "regen-

eration" as "men." In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes; to what purpose sbould they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nottring but the frowns of the rich, the severiry of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Every thing has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould, and refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war; but now by the power of transplantation, like all other plants they have taken root a¡d flourished! Formerly they were not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens.'3

hood in the 186 century was constructed in contradistinction to that of flora. Those who were not men were "useless plants - withered and mowed down by want, hunger, and wa-r; but now by the power of transplantation," these formerly "useless plants" have become "merì" atd"citizens," in a land where the "negroes" lacked the status and privileges of manhood or citizenship. Negroes were thus part of the "environment" and thus part of the "ground" onto which these European "plants" had been able to regenerate as men and become the envy of the world. Of course, de Crevecoeur's reference to "our negroes" is just a sidelong glance, as it does not intemrpt his main mission in his fictive letters from an imagined American farmer - the construction of

an archetype of the American farmer as the envy of the world

because he lives in virtuous harmony with a landscape that provides

him the means to be free. As a rhetoric of independence and selfdetermination, it reads as a powerful statement of cultural independence and social self-determination. It rings true as a postcolonial narrative of those suddenly freed from a yoke of their past and ignoring the yok And his portrait selves may have centuries of disrespect, humiliation, and starvation in Europe. And the American white man had not yet reached that point where he needed

We now know why Thomas Jefferson described black people in the same breath as flora and fauna in his No¡¿s on Virginia; man-

to stop cnticizingEurope in order to assert his racial superiority as a product of Westem Civilization. His sense of confidence, even arrogance, stemmed from what de Crevecoeur constantly emphasized the work of his own hands. Race, in that sense, hid what James Baldwin called the "graver deeper question was this: how could a elf as innocent, as virtuous, while at the ower over others to the point of cruelty? The two sides of the Alnerican character - the naf and the cruel victimizer - never meet in these canonical American Studies texts so that the American is forced to face the fact that once he becomes addicted to power, the nation and the American character ceases to be exceptional, and becomes like the rest of fallen humanify. In that sense, what we miss when we avoid the question of race in the formation of

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the American character is something more profound than guilt-tripping or conscience-tweaking, but failure to address the deeper moral issues that the American experiment conjures up not only for Americans, but for world history. Race, in this sense, stood in for and represented something deeper - the moral problem that those who are virtuous can never remain so when given enormous power. It is not that there was not something exemplary, propitious, and even spectacular about the opportunity to live free and relatively innocent for thousands of farmers in the mid-Atlantic; it is rather that freedom came at a price of the sin of overwhelming power over others, and the twisting effect such power and its exercise had over human beings. Moreover, added to this victory of the dark side over the virtuous comes the discursive slippage - that in telling the history of the arrival of the American character, that dark side is left out, and with it the history of those who inhabited the underground of American success called slavery. That tells us something fundamental about the American tradition of hushing criticism of the American racial project because such criticism is viewed as contradictory to patriotic Americanism. De Crevecoeur tries to escape this trap. As a European writing these letters as an American, he wears a mask; but it is one he can see through with his own eyes and witness the internal contradiction that is the American character when the entire new nation is brought into close view. Walking a tightrope allows him to reveal something Gothic about the American experience, when he travels to South Carolina. 'While all is joy, festivity, and happiness in Charles-Town, would you imagine that scenes of misery overspread in the country? Their ea¡s by habit are become deaf, their hearts are hardened; they neither see, hear, nor feel for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labours all their wealth proceeds. Here the horrors of slavery, the hardship of incessant toils, are unseen; and no one thinks with compassion of those showers of sweat and of tears which from the bodies of Africans, daily drop, and moisten the ground they till. The cracks of the whip urging these miserable beings to excessive labour, are far too distant from the gay Capital to be heard. The chosen races eat, drink, and live happy, while the unfortunate one grubs up the ground, raises indigo, or husks the rice; exposed to a sun full as scorching as their native one; without the support of good food, without the cordials of any chearing liquor.

fl0

This great contrast has often afforded me subjects of the most afflicting meditation. On the one side, behold a people enjoying all that life affords most bewitching and pleasurable, without labour, without fatigue, hardly subjected to the trouble of wishing. With gold, dug from Peruvian mountains, they order vessels to the coasts of Guinea; by virtue of that gold, wa¡s, murders, and devas-

tations are corÌnitted in some ha¡mless, peaceable African neighbourhood, where dwelt innocent people, who even knew not but that all men we¡e black. The daughter torn from her weeping mother, the child from the wretched parents, the wife from the loving husband; whole families swePt away and brought through storms and tempests to this rich metropolis! There, arranged like horses at afu¡, they are branded like cattle, and then driven to toil, to starve, and to languish for a few years on the different plantaúons of these citizens. And for whom must they work? For persons they know not, and who have no other power over them than that of violence; no other right than what this accursed metal- has given them ! Sftange order of things ! Oh , Nature , where art thou? - Are not these blacks thy children as well as we? On the other side, nothing is to be seen but the most difñrsive misery and wretchedness, unrelieved even in thought or wish ! Day after day they drudge on without any prospect of ever reaping for themselves; they are obliged to devote their lives, their limbs, their will, and every vital exertion to swell the wealth of masters; who look not upon them with half the kindness and affection with which they consider their dogs and horses.rs

"Letter IX. Description of Charlestown; Thoughts on Slavery; on Physical Evil; a Melancholy Scene" undoes the portrait of the "American" de Crevecoeur spent eight letters carefully constructing - the notion of the American as innocent, as virtuous, as the bearer of a moral sense lacking in the European. In fact, it is the black slave.who emerges as the innocent, the Adam, the worker in the garden of Eden, now literally a plantation, who labors like the serfs of Europe did. The black slave, however, works not in a feudal but modern system of capital circulation driven by the international exchange of bodies for goods in the transatlantic slave trading system. Why did he do it, why did he drop the mask of the American farmer and adopt that of a European man of conscience when he came to South Carolina? Some would argue it was simply a response to what he saw - that he saw the South Carolinians as essentially a different people, a contradiction to those of the midAtlantic. And he saw horror, the concrete manifestation of the heartlessness, the cruelty, and the vicious vindictiveness characteristic of

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southern white behavior when he came across "A Melancholy Scene." Walking through the woods after visiting at one of the prominent plantations, de Crevecoeur stumbles across a grizzly

it made in passing through the bars of the cage. "Tanke, you white man, tanke you, pute some poy'son and give me." "How long have you been hanging there?" I asked him. "Ttvo days, and me no die; the bi¡ds, the birds; aaah me!"'' have not resided here long enough to become insensible of pain for the objects which I every day behold," de Crevecoeur confides to the reader, announcing his foreignness, his outsider status in the text''8 Moved to find out why such a human twas so treated, de Crevecoeur goes back to the house of the planter with whom he was visiting and asks why this man remain in such a dismal situation. He is told that the enslaved man had killed an overseer and that "self-preservation"

"I

scene: I was not long since invited to dine with a planter who lived three miles from -, where he then resided. In order to avoid the heat ofthe sun, I resolved to go on foot, sheltered in a small path,leading through a pleasant wood. I was leisurely travelÌing along, attentively examining some peculiar plants which I had collected, when all at once I felt the air strongly agitated; though the day was perfectly calm and sultry. I immediately cast my eyes toward the cleared ground, from which I was but at a small distance, in orde¡ to see whether it was not occasioned by a sudden shower; when at that instant a sound resembling a deep

rough voice, uttered, as I thought, a few ina¡ticulate monosyllables.

I precipitately looked all round, when I perceived at about six ¡ods distance something resembling a cage, suspended to the limbs of a tree; all the branches of which appeared covered with large birds of prey, fluttering about, and anxiously endeavouring to Perch on the cage. Actuated by an involuntary motion of my hands, more than by any design of my mind, I fired at them; they all flew to a short distance, with a most hideous noise: when, horrid to think and painful to repeat, I perceived a negro, suspended in the cage, Alarmed and surprized,

and left there to expire! I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes, his cheek bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places, and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets and from the lacerations with which he was dishgured, the blood slowly dropped, and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown, than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood'ru

Stunned by what he saw, de Crevecoeur responded with a sense of conscience that another human being was treated so inhumanely: The living specûe, though deprived of his eyes, could still distinctly hea¡, and in his uncouth dialect begged me to give him some v/ater to allay his thirst. Humanity herself wouid have recoiled back with horror; she would have balanced whether to lessen such reliefless distress, or mercifully with one blow to end this dreadful scene of agonizing torture ! Had I had a ball in my gun, I certainly should have dispatched him; but finding myself unable to perlorm so kind an office, I sought, though trembling, to ¡elieve him as well as I could. A shell ready fixed to a pole, which had been used by some negroes, presented itself to me; filled it with water, and with trembling hands I guided it to the quivering lips of the wretched sufferer. Urged by the irresistible power of thirst, he endeavoured to meet it, as he instinctively guessed its approach by the noise

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required the master to kill this man with the highest level of cruelty possible. Perhaps what astounded de Crevecoeur as much as the "melancholy scene" was the complete absence of any sense of conscience foi this clearly inhumane punishment for his alleged crime' For us, though, the richness of the justification revolves around the term "self-preservation." In the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, for traversing the boundaries of a race-obsessed gated community in Florida, we know that "self-presewation" is a nanative of self-defense only available to the white subject. But here self-preservation means something wider and deeper - that to preserve the system of labor that de Crevecoeur details in Letters from an American Farmer, a system of violence to coerce people to labor without reward, de Crevecoeü has exposed self-preservation as a system of exploitation of others to pro-

vide for the comfof of the

self' In this scene, therefore,

de

Crevecoeur has contradicted the portrait of virnrous self-suffrciency that is the dominant narrative of Letters from an American Farmer. Yet the South Ca¡olina narrative is never put in difect conversation with the construction of the American Farmer in the rest of the book. De Crevecoeur's handling of this encounter in the woods remains as this meeting change the unsatisfying 'Are there two American overall portr bY the sweat of his brow Farmers, the in the Mid-Atlantic States, and the cruel lvhite man of the South, who lives by violence? After all, slavery in one sense exists all through the mid-Atlantic and into the North as well. Who is this man left hanging in the tree, dead but still alive? The violence of the scene of this black

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man hanging from a tree is matched by discursive violence that silences his voice as a subject of his own narrative. He is an object in a narrative filled with subjects, the abject rescued momentarily from historical anonymity, but treated still as a speaking object, not a speaking subject. The historical narrative murders his right to tell his whole story just as effectively as the plantation owner stages the murder of his body. For in all of the readings and interpretations of l¿tters from an American Farmer I remember from graduate school in American Studies, not once was there mention of this passage in the Letters in seminars and lectures on de Crevecoeur's portrait of the American. The African American remains invisible in de Crevecoeur's construction of "What is an American?" Litenry historian Saidiya Hartman has suggested that the only way out of reproducing this discursive violence is to break with the standard rules of historical narrative, and try to imagine and tell an impossible story - the story of the enslaved as its subject even when there is not enough evidence to render it unerringly. Error has produced the current reigning narrative of who is The American Farmer. De Crevecoeur cannot write the Letters from an American Farmer from the imagined subjectivity of the hoisted slave rather than the subject of the mid-Atlantic farmer. We then are called upon, Hartman argues, to use what she calls "critical fabrication," to use our critique of the text to "fabricate" a history that does not yet exist and intervene in the text to imagine what might have been said if the hanging man was engaged in the extended way that de Crevecoeur interviewed, lived with, ate with, and commingled with his other "American farmers."'n Taking up Hartman's challenge, I conclude by offering this Letter .from a Dffirent American Farmer, of what he saw before his eyes were plucked out: "Here I hang in a tree of agony. Instead of executed by a man who sentences me appropriately for a crime he believes I have committed, I am here plucked near to death by birds that make sport of my plight. Of course,I do not view my actions as a crime, but the first blow in what should be the American Revolution. No matter. I accept my fate. Except the birds ! They a¡e so cruel. It is as if very nature itself has turned against me, picking at the softest tissues of my body aad rendering them pools of blood. Oh God, where a¡t thou, now! AII the missiona¡ies fine wo¡ds, all the Voodoo gods who supposedly protect Africans, all the

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a¡e thee when I need thee, need Spirits flying around the Ghost houses - where a swift blow to the head or the hea¡t to relieve me of this agony, the pain of a life dripping out of me pluck by pluck as I hang here in infamy. Since you are listening, unlike the others,I can tell you my story. I have no other outlet for my pain as I wait to die. I was working as the other slaves on a plantation down here, deep in South Carolina, when acts of cruelty and abuse from the overseer led me to kill him with one swift blow of my own to his head way out in the fields. I could not take it anymore. I could not stand by and let him whip and torture women and men, beat them till the blood ran from their legs a¡rd backs, as they worked in the wet rice frelds of South Carolina, harvesting the rice that we, Africans, had brought from our Motherland and taught the white people how to grow in America. We, who were the geniuses of farming rice so that it took root and flourished in this hot, sticky, steamy climate, a climate so ¡eminiscent of the Congo for most of us that we found it hospitable not only to our rice, but also to millet, indigo, and most of all, ourselves, in contrast to the whites, who always complained of the heat, the humidity, and the wet thickness of the air. But we loved it here, and loved to plant, and grow, and hunt, and fish with our nets, something they seemed never to learn to do, always trying to use hooks and rods - how ridiculous - while we brought in hundreds of fish with nets just as we had done in Angola. Never mind that. In any event, I had been born in Angola, quickly caught as a young man by that's a funny word, I suppose, since they were my people's my neighboring - nation, and ma¡ched to the coastline, where I met the whites swom enemies who lusted after the comely women in the group, but beat and humiliated the proud men among us. I was not bothered much, being a very young boy, but I seethed at what I saw, a humiliation of our manhood in being so treated and tortured just because we were slaves. We had slaves in Africa, but they were not treated like this - beaten and tortured and sexed by men who cared nothing for us. No, our slaves were part of our extended family - at least the human family - not treated like dogs, beneatb, really, how one would treat a dog whom, in most cases, one would let run free. Upon coming to what they called Carolina, I could not believe, at first, how much it resembled our homeland. How fertile and wet the land was, but also how much more water there was all a¡ound us, in streams, rivers, flowing in and out ofthe land like fingers ofgod covering the land. I thought, "this can't be but so bad," especially as we were all taken in a group and set upon a plantation, as they called it, and allowed to work together, in gangs, as they put it, and also allowed to work in the way that we had wo¡ked our rice at home. Someone, an African, who could speak their language, told me that they had selected us from the many groups of Africans they brought here precisely because we were from Angola, were skilled in the growing of rice, and also because of our other skills at frshing, hunting, growing indigo, since surviving here was so diff,rcult for the whites. They died quite frequently and early from mala¡ia in our home country, but called yellow fever here the sickness

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1

something I had had briefly as a very young boy, but had never paid it no mind' deathly afraid ofthe sickness, and ran into town every , hoping that they would survive better there than out of that having a little contact with it was the best medicine and most of us were already weil inoculated against the disease before we

and smiled, as if he wanted to say something, perhaps something like, "Ah' a man among you! Well, you will get your reward for that!" But he could not speak. The hoe had buried itself in his head, and shortly, slowly, almost magi-

-

came here.

who had stolen s up to my action,

d Y

I

Now,

humaniiy.

wasÍroral to do it.

beatings to hand out to us on a regular basis. I came to hate these overseers the most because they lacked even the super-

people living off of the ìabor and the capital we producedl And they had the n"*" to carry themselves around as if they were superior to us, when it ';vas us

-

who m

Five

of us. we wo

ugh. The overseer was in the fields with the rest You could see the steam rising from the irelds ad fainted' while another was trying to get her

ion said he liked me, came out to what had haPPened. MY master raised mY hand' He left. Came awaY in chains, beating me with their sticks atl the way back to the house, poking me in the a¡se with the sticks, and mumbling how they would teach me a lesson for having killed one of their this overseer. own - even though they too had disliked I didn't ca¡e then. I was numb' I was also resolute and ready to die' But no! My superficially gracious master had something fa¡ more fiendish than simply åxecution in mind for me. I rcalize it why now. He feared me, because i had struck this blow for the dignity of humanity in the presence, in the plain view, of the other slaves. This all-powerful master was worried!

Having witnesses to my revolutionary act meant that there might be others who would-be inspired by my act, who might wa-nt to follow in the footsteps of a

r to take me out in

the

in a tree, where I now to protect myself from what he knew would befali me.

like

spirit not dead. hêar something, someone approaching. A man, who speaks with a funny accent, is uPon me. trees

a

Wait! I

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171

"Help me, help me, oh kind'sir. Help me. You see me suspended here. The birds are killing me slowly, plucking the life out of me. Please, have mer-cy on me. Kill me now!" "Monsieurl Mon Dieu! How did you come to be in this way?" "My master, that fiendish monster, has placed me here to suffer and to die for a crime that is a blow for liberty! I cannot explain. I can only beg of you to do what I would do for you if I were in your place. You cannot save me. I have lost my eyes; I have lost too much blood to live as a blind man. If you cut me down, where would I go without eyes to lead me? I only ask for the easiest gift that you can bestow on me - the gift ofdeath so that I can end this suffering! Please, have mercy on me!"

De Crevecoeur, now unmasked and no longer performing his idealized image of the American farmer, is brought face to face with the voice of the other American famer in the South who is actually tilling the fields without personal benef,rt. Here, in fact, de Crevecoeur finds the system of oppression of the working class that he previously said the American farmer had escaped. And if he answered the man's request, if he killed him in the South Carolina woods, he would banish, like so many historians and literary critics have done since de Crevecoeur, the reality of subjectivity that is also produced by the American garden. To his credit, de Crevecoeur will not kill this image, even as he cannot fully represent the man who authors a new script for de Crevecoeur of "What is an American?"

barbarism in a story that otherwise extolled the virtues of the American character. Indeed, the hanging man may have pleaded for at least a discursive justice from this Frenchman: "Tben, my witness, write of what you have seen here. Tell your people back in France, as you call it, the truth about this country, the whole truth, the good, yes, up North, where anotherAdam has gotten free by using the law on his side, but also the evil that is upon us in Ca¡olina - the evil that these masters do, who Live off our labor, who are not 'American farmers,' but instead the abusers and oppressors of the true American gardeners who are never recognized as such in this land. Tetl the truth if you will not lift a hand, and let my story live in infamy as your lack of humanity allows me to continue to live in agony as you walk on."

"Adieu."

The American character emerges as far more dialectical in Letters from an American Farmer than in L,eo Manç's Machine in the Garden or Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Vrginia. Aspects of the "American" rendered invisible by American interpreters of their own subjectivity are made visible by this early European visitor to the British colonies character today. America is still the 'Western

man; but de ideal for n is a plantation that is Part of an

Having come clean, de Crevecoeur rnay have been entreated by this hanging man to do what he did do, insert the story of South Carolina

international system of capital and global commodify circulation. Even more profoundly, de Crevecoeur suggests that the peculiarly unique subjectivity of the American is the mix of innocence with arrogance' the willingness to advertise one's virhres while pursuing aggressively the domination of others in the interests of "self-preservation." In some sense, de Crevecoeur combined the split off psychological elements of the modern personality exemplified by the American - the longing for an imagined past of harmony with an idealized landscape and the capacity to perform great acts of cruelty to sustain that mythic construction of the self. De Crevecoeur has made visible an Americarì man who is victim and victimizer, Christ and barbarian, virtuous but vicious, in defending his and her entitlement to a narrative of self-sufficiency, while others suffer to keep us in comfort. In that sense, Letters from an American Farmer shows the courage of one European observer who would not sanitize what he saw in America even if he could not, in the end, fully represent it.

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it!

I cannot kill a man. I cannot interfere in the I cannot do strange justice meted out in this strange country. You to me remind me of the Lord Jesus Christ strung up on a cross! Yet, I cannot tell ifyou are Jesus or one of the two thieves with whom he was crucified. I cannot intervene in what this nation's Pontius Pilate has done here. My name ìs J. Hector St. John de Crevecoenr, and I am but a visitor from France, a country on the other side of the same great ocean that separates you from your homeland' I am writing a book, Letters from An American Farmer for people to read back in F¡ance. I lrave no power here. I cannot risk the wrath of these barbarous people who have done this to you. I have been to Massachusetts and just stopped off here in Carolina to see the South on my way back home. I feel your agony, but I cannot lift a hand, for I am but an observer, a tecorder, a witness, and not an actor in this drama called America. I am sony."

"Mon Dieu!

SHrne

Nores ' Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man U9521(New York: Vintage P., 1995), p. 581. Charles Long, email to author, February 2009. I Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral ldeal ín Ameríca (New York: Oxford U. P.,2000). o Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State oJ Virginia U7851' 5 The most recent diatribe on American Exceptionaiism comes from Charles Murray in American Exceptíonalism: An Experiment in History (Values and Capitalism) (AEI P., 2013). For an overview of the concept, see htþ://2lstcenturycicero.wordpress.com/empire/american-exceptionalism/. Last visited on September 14,2013. 6 Gi-lbert NMO Morris, The Triptych Papers: Post-Colonialísm, Creolisation &

Worosrv

2

BARTLEBY, FOUCAULT, DE TOCQUEVILLE: CONTRADICTIONS OF INDIVIDUALISM

Individuatism is the preeminent American ideology. But, in fact, the term carries a number of different senses, in some ways overlap-

Epistemologies of Displacement (Createspace Books, 2010), pp. 63-5. 1 Lefiers from an American Farmer: Describing Certain Provincial Situations, Manners, and Customs, Not Generally Known; and Conveying Some ldea of the Late and Present Interior Circumstances of the British Colonies of North America,

1782. See htrp://xroads.virginia.edu/-hyper/CREV/contents.html. Last visited

September 14,2013. 8

Krista Thompson, "A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of Af¡ican Diaspora Art SITUATION, FEEL23) http://xroads.vir-

ginia.edu/-hyper/CREV/letter02.html.

as in

selfself-

Lockj\s

one'

Before it, although always alongside and overlapping with some of its constitutive elerñenß and with-each other, had been other senses of us and the civic, and also, in gendered the se nineteenth century.witnesses the nì?rginways, these other formations of selfhood by an ¡iáat¡ emergent and

"'Ibidem..

September 14,2013. '' James Baldwin, Noboc)y Knows My Name 11961l (New York: Vintage P', 1993), p. xiii. " Letters from an American Farmer: LETTER N. DESCNPTION OF CHARLESTOWN;THOUGTTTS ON SI'AVERY; ON PHYSICALEWL; AMEI'ANCHOLY SCENE. (p. 231) hup://xroads.virginia.edu/-hyperiCREV,4etter09.htrnl 'u

the ori determinati reliant indi

thering

yet, the very own undoing, established to

apParently all naming the disguising distinct formary and mutually undoing.

lbidèm, LETTER IX. REFLECTIONS ON NEGRO SLAVERY (pp.243-45)

http ://xroads.virginia.edu/-hyper/CREV/ietter09.html

" Ibidem,pp.244-45.

IX. REFLECTIONS ON NEGRO '" Letters from an American Farrner- LETTER SLAVERY (p.231) "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe,vol. 12, N. 2 (2008): l-14' 'n See Saidiya Hartman,

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