The African American Historian: David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident

Abstract

. . . a black person, history is a challenge because a black person is supposed not to have any history except colonial one. We hardly know what happened to our people before time when they met Europeans who decided to give them what they call civilization. For a black person . . . from diaspora . . . it is a . . . challenge to find out exactly what was there before. It is not history sake of history. It is searching one's self, searching one's identity, searching one's origin in order to understand oneself. (Maryse Conde) figure of African American in David Bradley's Chaneysville Incident is almost antithesis of Hayden White delineates in The Burden of History, a person who needs to be liberated from burden of history. African American historian, Bradley would argue, needs to take on and reconfigure burden, but not by having recourse, as White suggests, to developments in Western culture, to literary modernism or even post-modernism. Bradley's historian, John Washington, goes outside Western tradition and taps into residue of African beliefs in African American culture (much as Paule Marshall's Avey Johnson does in Praise song Widow) to create an alternative and heroic history. Washington's powerful narrative of death of his forebear, C.K., and a group of escaped slaves is only made possible by history, and his groundwork as an bears much same relation to his fiction as does Toni Morrison's relation to her research and her fiction Beloved. ground of history and work of make possible fiction fills in gaps, but this effort, African American community, as novel demonstrates, has more than an archival gravity. Historical consciousness, leavened by imagination, allows us all, no matter what our experience and ethnicity, to know where we all stand in present. Hayden White, by contrast, has argued in order us to know where we stand in present historical consciousness must be obliterated, particularly if writer is to examine with proper seriousness those strata of human experience which it is modern art's peculiar purpose to disclose. Using figure of historian to represent extreme example of repressed sensibility in novel, novelists, White claims, have indicted historians either for a failure of sensibility or will, and as a result, the [fictional] historian's claim to be an artist appears to be pathetic when it does not appear merely ludicrous (Burden 31). Historians, both in and out of fiction, White contends, are seen as having no wisdom appropriate to unique conditions of this century, and Western . . . is justifiably convinced record as presently provided offers little help in quest adequate solutions to contemporary problems. White then pushes his analysis one step further, arguing artists have come to believe that 'the imagination' . . . constitutes fundamental barrier to any attempt by men in present to close realistically with their most pressing spiritual problems (Burden 39; emphasis added). White finds these assumptions at work in depictions of figure of in imaginative literature, but writers he alludes to in support of this contention are all male and, with exception of Edward Albee, all European. Using terms like Western man (Burden 41), White is concerned with traditional history and with canonized male writers of fiction. I would like to decenter his analysis of in fiction by looking at an African American writer, David Bradley, and his African American John Washington from Chaneysville Incident. If figure of white throughout this century is to be seen as a symptom of a large cultural failure in West, is figure of an African American to be viewed any less pessimistically? …