Another Version: Michael S. Harper, William Clark, and the Problem of Historical Blindness

Abstract

F. Jay Haynes, GREAT FALLS OF THE MISSOURI RIVER, 1880. Courtesy Montana Historical Society. A n o t h e r V e r s i o n : Mic h a e l S. Ha r p e r , Willia m C la r k , a n d t h e Pr o b lem o f H is t o r ic a l Bl in d n e s s E l i z a b e t h D o d d In the many literary versions of the American West, “facts”— historical events— may seem to stand out as famous landmarks, like stone outcroppings along the Oregon Trail. As perspective changes, historical facts reflect the midday sun or are bathed in late-light sub­ tlety; they are both the lone tree along the Platte that everybody sees and the elusive city of gold that no one can find. Black poet Michael S. Harper has maintained a keen interest in American history throughout the three decades of his publishing career, ranging from events in the Civil Rights Era-South to Colonial New England to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. In the living body of his poems, his­ torical events are often the hard, sharp irritants which, as in the freshwater mussel, induce layer after layer of response. Writing of Harper’s latest collection, Honorable Amendments, Judith Kitchen identifies this demand for response as a challenge for readers to change our lives. Kitchen says, “We do not know what we need to know to read these poems, and somehow our not knowing is a part of the way they open up the world. First, we are asked to realize how little we know of what has shaped this country; second, we are treated to what we do know from another perspective; third, we are asked— no, required— to alter our own perceptions to encom­ pass those of the poems” (399). Not only in the poems themselves do we find the “requirement” that Harper makes of readers; in an interview, Harper once said, “I think the important thing about Americans is that they’re not very good historians. And Americans are really bad historians when it comes to moral ideas because they can’t keep them in their heads very long.. . . [0]ne of the things you ought to realize is that my vantage point on American letters is a bit askew because the dualism I bring to it is one, I think, any ethnic who is fairly conscious brings to a reading of mainstream America” (“Interview” 119). W A L 3 3 (1 ) S p r in g 1 9 9 8 While Harper clearly invokes DuBois, perhaps most obviously in two poems published in the 1970s, chanting refrains like “doubleconscious brother in the veil” and “double-conscious sister in the veil,” he goes on to fully embrace the question of how “the question of the color line” has shaped American history and shadows its future.1 Harper suggests that in order to enter our own history, American readers— white and minority alike— must not only look behind the veil of race but learn to look from behind it— that is, through it. Double-consciousness may be necessary, Harper implies, to achieve full consciousness, what he also calls “conscientiousness” (“Man/ Woman” 60). Harper describes himself as “an initiate of subjective correlative; that is, a slant affinity to modernism as practiced by the innovators. I am immersed in redefinitions and refinements of ‘an American self’” (Rowell 785). While much of Harper’s work is centered in the East, where he has lived for nearly three decades, often treating African and Native American figures, he has also extended his redefinitions to address the nation’s myth of the West. Though he has touched on the ideas of political and geographic expansion elsewhere, a single, brief, per­ plexing poem deserves close attention from students of western American literature and history.2 Examining the famous Meriwether Lewis and William Clark exploration in a poem titled “Clark’s Way West: Another Version,” Harper presents his “askew” vision of Jeffer­ sonian America’s dream of empire. From the center of his first book, Dear John...