African and Afro-American Roots in Contemporary Afro-American Literature: The Difficult Search for Family Origins

Abstract

AFRICAN AND AFRO-AMERICAN ROOTS IN CONTEMPORARY AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE DIFFICULT SEARCH FOR FAMILY ORIGINS Elizabeth Schultz* In the spirituals, black Americans first started to sing of their feeling of homelessness; in the blues, they continued to sing it. This yearning for a home, the loss of a place and a people, and the consequences of dislocation and disinheritance have also been pervasive in much of the literature written by black Americans. Abraham Chapman perceives this feeling as being a formative factor in Afro-American history and literature: The Negro in America has been denied a proper location and place, has been in perpetual motion searching for a proper place he could call home. During slavery, the flight to freedom was the goal—the search for a home, a haven, the search for a possibility of secure belonging. After the Civil War, and to this day, this historical reality has expressed itself in the great migration from the South to the North and the patterns of flight and migration which are inherent in the spatial and plot movements in the novels of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. This . . . reality, of the uprooting and dislocation, gave the Negro writer ... a focus of denial of a place.1 Such rootlessness led Richard Wright in his autobiography, Black Boy (1937), to brood on "the cultural barrenness of black life" and to wonder if "clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another."2 In 1976 and 1977, however, two fictionalized accounts of the black American family—Alex Haley's Roots and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon—were published, revealing a reality radically different from that described by Wright. Giving emotional life to much of the data in two socio-historical works published in the same years—Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976) and Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977)—Haley's and Morrison's works demonstrate the 'Elizabeth Schultz is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She has published widely on black American literature in Black American Literature Forum, American Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a comparative study of Henry James and the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki. 128Elizabeth Schultz continuity of traditions within black American families. Stanley Elkins, commenting on the shift in emphasis in recent scholarship away from the consequences of oppression, dislocation, and disinheritance, notes that although these new works "involve "a search for culture ... by now there is very little in any of it about damage."3 Haley's fictionalized family history and Morrison's novel, in addition to a body of other black novels and family chronicles, reflect not only the damage done by the system of slavery, defacto and de jure, but also the culture achieved in spite of such damage; they imply that in the AfroAmerican family, the roots of culture have at times become gnarled and obscure, but their transmission, re-creation, and discovery has been more joyous than anguished. Both Haley's and Morrison's works demonstrate the difficult necessity for the past to illuminate the present as well as the future and for the individual to attain freedom within the embrace of the family; they insist upon the fact of a proud sense of familial and racial identity, based on the memories of an African past and constantly shaped by an American present. Song of Solomon goes on to insist that the identity cannot be merely assumed; it must be "fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual" by each generation anew. The condition of homelessness and rootlessness, of dislocation and disinheritance, was determined for the Afro-American by the historical facts of his removal from Africa to America and by the denial of the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" under the terms of the peculiar institution. For the black American, this absence of roots, synonymous with the absence of a culture, a family, and a historical and personal past...