"Such a Poor Word for a Wondrous Thing": Thingness and the Recovery of the Human in The Known World

Abstract

"Such a Poor Word for a Wondrous Thing":Thingness and the Recovery of the Human in The Known World Sarah Mahurin Mutter (bio) Musing on the aftermath of American slavery and the fate of its victims, Edward P. Jones marveled in one interview that "so many of them managed to make it on the other side" (qtd in Stander para. 7). If, as Philip Page has suggested, "the idea of passage" is indeed the "informing symbol" of African American literature, the related image of an "other side"—what one reaches in passing from Africa to the Americas, from south to north, from slave to free—seems especially rich (3). The epigraph of The Known World—"My soul's often wondered how I got over"—takes up the concept of the "other side." It alludes to a gospel song popularized by Mahalia Jackson, whose lyrics suggest not only the familiar spiritual image of "getting over" Jordan's river, of crossing from life into afterlife, but also, more generally, the exultation of passing from a space of suffering to a space of relief: How I got overHow I got overYou know my soul looks back and wonders how I made it over. . . I'm gonna wear a diademIn that New JerusalemI'm gonna walk the streets of goldIn that homeland of the soul . . . 1 [End Page 125] As the speaker "gets over"—geographically—Jordan's river, she also "gets over"—figuratively—her past traumas, her past sufferings. The most important claim of the epigraph, and of the song to which it alludes, seems to be verbal, in the grammatical sense of that word—that is, its meaning apparently rises and falls on the verb phrase, on the action it suggests: on the feat of passing, of crossing, of "getting over" to some "other side." But what of its nouns? Surely the "diadem" and the "streets of gold" are crucial: these heavenly props testify that the "other side" has in fact been reached. Although at one point The Known World suggests that it is verbs, not nouns, without which a "sentence . . . could not live," the novel's own prose absolutely teems with nouns: there are an astonishing 92 of them in its first paragraph (375). (The first sentence alone—"The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins"—contains twelve.) Fern Elston constructs her identity via a series of nouns ("Mother," "Teacher," "Wife"); a tombstone memorializes a man by listing what he was, rather what he did: His oldest child from his second marriage, Matthew, stayed up all the night before he was buried, putting his father's history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father's name on the first line, and on the next, he put the years of his father's coming and going. Then all the things he knew his father had been. Husband. Father. Farmer. Grandfather. Patroller. Tobacco Man. Tree Maker. (374-375) In the world of the novel, "history" is comprised of nouns, in the hope that such "subject aplenty" will work together, verbless as it is, to create narrative (375).2 Such is, perhaps, the same hope that motivates Stamford Crow Blueberry to build himself a surname from the seemingly-mundane objects at the center of his dramatic thunderstorm epiphany. Yoked together, the common nouns "Crow" and "Blueberry" carry far more than their own weights; they contain, and relate, the complex story of a changed man—which is, at bottom, another story of "getting over." The most important noun—the subject, which indicates the person who actually does the "getting over"—is not so easy to achieve, particularly when the human subjects of sentences are also human subjects of masters. Basic grammar teaches that a noun may be a person, place, or thing, but the individuation open to the human species, to say nothing of the complexity open to the human individual, makes it difficult to classify [End Page 126] the word "human" alongside the word "cup" or the word "button"; though all three...