Syndetic Redemption: Above-Underground Emergence in David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident

Abstract

I've got to hide, he told himself. His chest heaved as he waited, crouching in a dark corner of the vestibule. He was tired of running and dodging. Either he had to find a place to hide, or he had to surrender. (Richard Wright) I was in the car a second and in high just too quick. Jim and Slim helped me throw my bags into the car and I saw the sun rising as I approached the Crescent City. (Zora Neale Hurston) Bondin' and mendin', attachin' and blendin', so many solos there is no endin'. (Rakim [E. Griffin]) ... one of the bounties of Black culture is our ability to hear / if we were to throw this away in search of less (just language) we wd be damning ourselves. (ntozake shange) A Path: Hibernation to Emergence Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man begins and ends with the narrator positioned in underground space which can be seen as an expression of modernist understandings of cultural process as a solitary and stationary exercise of mind. narrator of Ellison's text, like his ancestor Fred Daniels in Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground, finds himself alienated from an aboveground reality which reacts to his black body by negating his mind, denying his voice, and limiting his physical movement. Both figures retreat into womb-like, solitary, underground space where their minds swirl, attempting to resist the assumptions of the white supremist, aboveground world.(1) Ellison's Invisible Man charts the territory, but his narrator's theorizing does not allow him to emerge from the hole and forge a viable connection between underground process and aboveground existence, black mind and black body. In this essay I will explore how David Bradley's Chaneysville Incident responds to these problems by creating a narrative structure which I will call the emergence narrative that redefines the patterns of hibernation and excavation described by Robert Stepto and Craig Werner. Demonstrating how the excavation of history can subvert inhibiting philosophical assumptions, Bradley's written text reveals how an oral, communal process can constitute an above-underground mode in which descendants and ancestors achieve living reciprocal relationships. Robert B. Stepto's From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative posits a kinetic theory of Afro-American narrative which culminates with Ellison's Invisible Man engaged in what Stepto calls a hibernation narrative. Invisible Man's static and secluded position in hibernation reflects the profound difficulties experienced by black intellectuals as they attempt to use their and black communal or tribal literacy (Stepto 167) in the aboveground world. In Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, Craig Werner refines Stepto's narrative of hibernation by contrasting the Afro-American narrative of excavation (James Baldwin, David Bradley, Gayl Jones, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison) with the Faulknerian narrative of repudiation. For Werner, excavation narratives attempt to redeem the complexity of formerly unknown or unacknowledged pasts. failure to acknowledge the complexity of historical experience in Faulkner's narratives of repudiation points to the central importance of the process delineated in Baldwin's Just Above My Head: To be forced to excavate a history is also to repudiate the concept of history, and the vocabulary in which history is written; for the written history is, and must be, merely the vocabulary of power.... Power clears the passage, swiftly: but the paradox, here, is that power, rooted in history, is also the mockery and the repudiation of history. (418) In Chaneysville Incident Bradley draws on West African epistemologies to respond to the problems of power, history, and passage. John Washington struggles to enact ontological and epistemological shifts which enable him to use the ancestors' call in connection with his own present-day process in telling and knowing the familial tale. …