Fictionalizing History: David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident

Abstract

In his second novel, The Chaneysville Incident (1981), David Bradley has presented a narrative text in which authenticated historical material is so charged with the expressive claims of fiction as symbolic action that the book may today already claim a unique position within Afro-American fiction-a narrative tradition well-known for its concern with history. As Bradley's statements in the short preface to the novel make explicit, he places himself within a collective endeavor for the ten years it took him to conceptualize and finish the book.' Bradley has drawn on archival research (his own and that of others) into family, community, and group history in order to invest the quest for personal and cultural self-definition of the central narrator John Washington with as much historical context as possible. A fictional protagonist who is himself a professor of history in Philadelphia, with family roots in a small town in western Pennsylvania, John in his investigation of the mysterious suicide of his father Moses Washington brings to light the unrecorded history of the rise and consolidation of the local community, where the covert power of Judge Scott (a white lawyer and real estate owner) and the even less apparent influence of John's father were decisive factors, and reveals as part of that local history the very efforts of Moses Washington to research and make coherent the recondite lives and political roles of his own ancestors in and beyond Pennsylvania. In his research John takes over his father's efforts to fill in the biography and political plans of their ancestor C. K. Washington, who was not only instrumental in leading the fugitive slaves of the local legend alluded to in the title to their heroic self-immolation, but who had also fought his own war against the system of slavery, from an anonymous origin as a slave in the old South to his collaboration with William Still and other authentic black and white abolitionists and