“Belated Impress”: River George and the African American Shell Shock Narrative

Abstract

The whites had taught how to rip A Nordic belly with a thrust Of bayonet, had taught how To transmute Nordic flesh to dust. And a surprising fact had made Belated impress on his mind: That shrapnel bursts and poison gas Were inexplicably color blind.--Sterling A. Brown, Sam Smiley (1932) Early in Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), a black World War I veteran finds himself m a hospital. The year is 1919, place is Ohio, and Shadrack has been there more than a year. During his first engagement with enemy, in 1917, he witnessed the face of a soldier near fly off; he watched as the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether drip and slide of brain tissue down its (8). This scene of horror leaves blasted and permanently (7), and while these are only combat experiences of Shadrack's that narrative exposes, they might easily account for shell shock he suffers in aftermath. When narrative finally comes to a close almost fifty years later, in 1965, Shadrack remains energetically mad (173), still troubled by memories of gone things (174)--among them, perhaps, face and head and brain of a soldier he once knew. (1) Unaware in 1919 that his condition will prove to be a permanent one, Shadrack glances down at divided meal tray that has been left for by a nurse: In one triangle rice, in another meat, and in third stewed tomatoes. A small round depression held a cup of whitish liquid. Shadrack stared at soft colors that filled these triangles: lumpy whiteness of rice, quivering blood tomatoes, grayish-brown meat. All their repugnance contained in neat balance of triangles--a balance that soothed him, transferred some of its equilibrium to him. Thus reassured that white, red and brown would stay where they were--would not explode or burst forth from their restricted zones--he suddenly felt hungry and looked around for his hands. His glance cautious at first, for he had to be very. careful--anything could be (8) Unlike brain that unexpectedly dripped down back of his comrade, unlike face that flew away and head that disappeared, Shadrack's meal seems to know its place. Confined, contained, and balanced in orderly triangles of his tray, colored foods maintain a segregated distance. Still, caution and care must be taken, for threat of contamination remains. The repugnant lumps, quivering blood, and grayish-brown meat might cross thresholds at any moment, might blur and stew together, might become bodies and brains; anything, in short, might suddenly be anywhere. Anxious, confused, frightened, Shadrack realizes that he doesn't know or what he was (12)--his memory, his identity, his sense of selfhood have vanished. Picked up for vagrancy soon after his hospital discharge, Shadrack confronts his reflection in grim confines of his prison cell: There in toilet water he saw a grave black face. A black so definite, so unequivocal, it him (13). Just as Shadrack is astonished by wartime events of 1917 that leave forever disrupted, he finds himself astonished by his blackness--a remarkable repetition that links shell shock of Western Front with constructions and politics of race in period. Encountering his blackness separately from--and before--any renewed contact with his self, Shadrack doesn't come to know who but rather what he is. This abject scene of identification deftly stages W. E. B. Du Bois's conceptualizing of African American subjectivity in terms of double-consciousness: this sense of always looking at one's self through eyes of others (Souls 11). Shadrack, a veteran of First World War, an American who went to France to Make World Safe for Democracy, gazes into a toilet at indisputable and definite color of his skin. …