Time on the Cross: White Fiction and Black Messiahs

Abstract

Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery is the title of one of the most controversial studies of this decade. Its opening sentence picks up the refrain: 'The years of black enslavement and the Civil War in which they terminated were our nation's time on the cross.' Yet nowhere is that title expounded or explained. It is expanded merely in an emotive crescendo that rises from 'a sense of shame' (at the system of slavery) to 'the worst holocaust of our history' (the Civil War).1 This is odd. For the Christian metaphor, arresting in itself, becomes doubly so in the 'cliometric' context of graphs, figures, and tables. What can Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman have intended? That America's black slaves were a crucified people? Apparently not. For the whole thrust of their study was to demonstrate that the severity of slavery had been grossly exaggerated. The whole American nation, then? But the Epilogue nails only the American negro to this crux: 'Time on the cross did not come to an end for American blacks with the downfall of the peculiar institution. For they were held on the cross not just by the chains of slavery but also by the spikes of racism' (p. 263). In a study where all aspects of plantation slavery (its relative responsibilities, managerial skills, life expectancy, social stability, sexual exploitation, and economic success) are put in doubt, this crucial password alone, it appears, is beyond question. Nor have some damaging critiques, most notably Herbert G. Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game, explored the equation.2 What links the economics of slavery with Jewish concepts of the scapegoat and the redeemer? The cross is one of the oldest and most artfully developed white metaphors for the black experience. So haphazard a revival seems, to say the least, suspicious. It is not the numbers game, therefore, that I wish to expose here; but, by retracing the black messianic theme through American literature, the covert symbolic game.