Stevens 1 The “New” In “Neo”-Enslaved Narratives: Reframing Social Justice Themes as Slavery’s Material Legacies Prologue: Pondering My Position May 25th, 2020—the news erupted with the allegations of another Black man dying at the hands of law enforcement. This time it was George Floyd, suffocated by the knee of now-former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck, restricting his ability to breathe, for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. A convenience store clerk suspected Floyd of paying with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill for a pack of cigarettes; the clerk phoned the police; the police trained their guns on Floyd; Floyd peacefully complied with the officers’ orders. When confronted with being placed in the back of a police car, Floyd reacted, saying he was claustrophobic. Officer Chauvin responded by kneeling on Floyd’s neck, a common control method used by law enforcement. Witnesses heard Floyd telling Chauvin that he could not breathe, but Chauvin persisted. Floyd’s murder set off the largest race and policing protest in United States history. The news of the crime and the outrage it sparked enveloped the U.S. media. It was this reporting that made me aware of the Black Lives Matter activist group. It was this murder that woke me from my white-privileged social slumber. I had no inkling that people of color were continuing to struggle against racism. In my mind, the Jim Crow era of extreme violence and legally unanswered racism was over; “Americans have come so far since then,” I thought. I was confronted with my ignorance as Black Lives Matter protests took place in cities nationwide. I learned terms such as “systemic racism” and “police brutality.” I did not know what I did not know, so I vowed to learn about what Malea Powell calls “meaner events.” These are the events that are shameful and brutally honest about America’s centuries-long racist culture that the white, hegemonic cultural narrative conveniently ignores. Stevens 2 In 2020, I also began my graduate studies. Coincidentally, as I was hearing about systematic racism, I was also studying literature that highlighted the deeply skewed power dynamic in American culture, namely postcolonial literature. As I studied different theoretical lenses, the unjust hegemonic narrative of America became apparent. I echo Aja Martinez, who also experienced a cultural awakening: "I have been awakened to an awareness of [racism] through a combination of maturing into adulthood [and] taking courses in which literatures about social injustice and post-colonialism have been provided" (33). I felt (feel) an urgency to learn about racism in contemporary American culture and reposition myself as an ally to people of color instead of continuing as another ignorant white woman. I did not know where to begin my repositioning, so I kept (keep) studying. I found the words of Frankie Condon encouraging: White antiracist epistemology needs to begin . . . with our individual and collective awakening to that which we do not know, with our reach toward “the art of seeing the unknown everywhere, especially at the heart of our most emphatic certainties” (Carse 1987). And rather than eliding that which we do not know or attempting to disguise our uncertainty, white antiracist rhetoric requires a long lean into our collective ignorance and, from that place and time of unknowing, the voicing of wonder about what the world has been, is, and might be. (26) I decided to lean longer into the racial dilemmas I did (do) not know by including themes of race and power in my literary studies. This longer lean led me to discover the neo-slave narrative genre, or, as I prefer to call it, because of the negative connotations and dehumanization of the word “slave,” neo-enslaved narratives. These narratives are collectively agreed to be counternarrative works written after World War II by Black authors that feature antebellum enslavement yet are resistant to the hegemonic sanitizing of said enslavement. In other words, the narratives that detail the violent physical and mental realities enslaved people experienced during the antebellum era, and that shine a light on the dehumanization that took place for Stevens 3 centuries at the hands of white people. This is done to contrast the accepted historical narrative established by white society in order to minimize the brutality of slavery and the plantation economy. As my literary studies included more Black American literature, I began to see themes of systemic racism, such as racial profiling by police officers, mass incarceration, and dehumanization through commodification. These systems are the material legacies of slavery and the plantation economy. For example, racial profiling by police officers has roots in early American history and the creation of slave patrols. These patrols controlled the movements of the enslaved population while keeping the white population and their property “safe.” Thus, white people were socially ingrained with the criminalization of Black life and supremacy over Black people throughout American history. Because modern and contemporary American culture grapples with social issues that are the direct descendants of slavery, I argue that neo-enslaved narratives explore beyond the plot of antebellum slavery and that expanding the definition to include literature that highlights the struggles of Black characters with social issues represents slavery’s material legacies. These struggles are often highlighted through depictions of slavery’s material legacies, such as racial profiling. The standing definition of neo-enslaved narratives limits the genre and forces the stories to be formulaic by outlining what literary forms (character point of view, plot structure) and tropes are acceptable. For example, currently neo-”slave” narrative scholarship defines the genre through the forms of “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (Rushdy 3). In other words, neo-”slave” narratives are agreed to be novels published as early as the 1960s that feature a protagonist that speaks in the first person and is describing life as an enslaved person during the antebellum era of American history, which includes descriptions of an enslaved person’s living conditions, their cruel enslaver, accounts of chattel slavery auctions, instances of failed escapes, and the brutalities of enslaved life. Stevens 4 It is problematic for readers to presuppose that Black authors will or should emphasize stories of antebellum-era slavery in their works; it is reductive to their craft and life experiences. Therefore I argue that the themes of social inequality in Black American literature can be seen as slavery’s material legacies, and thus deserve to be included in the neo-enslaved narrative genre. Black authors have more to say concerning slavery than recreating the terrible conditions enslaved people experienced. Additionally, when considering the inclusion of novels highlighting slavery’s material legacies, I posit that neo-enslaved narratives were written earlier than the commonly agreed upon time of the 1960s and the publication of Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee. Stories of counternarratives and resistance against the hegemonic white narrative have existed for decades. Tim A. Ryan, associate professor of twentieth-century American literature, asks, “Are the writings of African Americans since the 1960s inherently more significant than those of [before the 1960s]?” (9). As early as the Harlem Renaissance, novels addressed social issues caused by slavery’s material legacies. While traditional historiographic portrayals of slavery and their modern and contemporary offspring are valuable to American literature, expanding the neo-enslaved narrative can reposition the genre in a way that foregrounds the issues of deep-seated injustice and racism in contemporary American culture. I see genre as a method of highlighting these works in a helpful way that brings attention to the themes Black authors wrestle with as they experience the unbalanced power dynamics of American culture that have been perpetrated throughout history. I do not pretend to fully understand the complicated issues of slavery or the racism, ranging from rude to deadly, the Black community still experiences. I do not intend to speak over minority voices. In my process of recognizing my own subconscious racism, I am attempting to demonstrate the underlying issues slavery’s material legacies have wrought on the Black community in hopes that all people can come to a better and more sympathetic understanding of American history and how the injustice of slavery still haunts us. Using fiction and its genres has the potential to help readers Stevens 5 unaware of the troubling material legacies of slavery come to a more supportive understanding. We cannot heal what we refuse to recognize. Setting the Stage: Contextualizing the Literary Landscape Understanding the different literary genres and social concepts that ultimately brought me to my argument of expanding neo-enslaved narratives is important. First, there cannot be a neo-enslaved narrative genre without a tradition of enslaved narratives. Traditional “slave” narratives were personal accounts, often claimed to have been “taken from the mouth” or “written in the words” of enslaved fugitives, that depicted the brutal life on a Southern cotton plantation. These stories were told in the first person; however, enslaved people (kept illiterate by their enslavers to keep them servile) required assistance from an amanuensis: a sympathetic, literate people, typically white people, to take down their accounts. Many traditional “slave” narratives we are familiar with today used an amanuensis to ensure their stories were told—authors such as Harriet Tubman. Regardless, the purpose of traditional “slave” narratives was twofold: to highlight the historical life of one person that is also representative of an entire group of enslaved people and “to persuade other people . . . [that are] probably not black—that [enslaved people] are human beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery” (Morrison 299). The audience for these narratives was primarily white Northerners, people that did not have as much knowledge of the physical, mental, and emotional demands white Southern enslavers heaped on enslaved Blacks. Black authors of traditional “slave” narratives understood that simply recounting their horrific experiences was not enough to ensure sympathy and antislavery sentiments from their readers. To forward the abolitionist cause, Black authors knew they had to quell the violence and vileness of their experiences because “The milieu . . dictated the purpose and the style” of their narratives, and thus many Black authors often “patterned [their narratives] after the sentimental novel that was in vogue at Stevens 6 the time” (Morrison 301). Black authors wrote quest stories that romanticized enslaved people’s journeys northward to freedom. The autobiographical quest stories previously enslaved Black people wrote typically feature a plot that “begins with bondage, . . . and leads to some form of deliverance or vision of a new world: moral or political awakening, flight, rebellion, or social reform” (Bell 36). Folded into the plot of the struggle for freedom are the elements of physical and mental violence, such as “the struggle for literacy, whippings, . . . renaming” and other tropes, such as “cruel masters, despair and a failed escape, conversion or epiphany, a successful escape, . . . and celebration (qualified or not) of freedom” (Newman 26-27). The retellings and variations on these same themes created stock conventions for the traditional “slave” narrative genre. Readers of these tales were in awe of the bravery and initiative Black people took to free themselves from slavery. True stories of improbable escape captivated the imaginations of white readers, such as that of Henry “Box” James, who shipped himself to the North in a packing crate to escape. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said of Black authors of traditional “slave” narratives, “they are among the heroes of our age, . . . Romance has no stories of more thrilling interest than theirs. Classical antiquity has preserved no examples of adventurous trial more worthy of renown” (Bell 29). Traditional “slave” narratives compelled many white Northerners to oppose slavery throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the bibliographic research undertaken by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the earliest autobiographical, traditional “slave” narrative on record is a 1745 confession of Jeffery, who was executed for murdering Mrs. Tabitha Stanford (North American Slave Narrative). Of the over two hundred autobiographical accounts of slavery between 1745 and 1999, only a handful are still mentioned in modernity: Olaudah Equiano (Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789)); Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845)); Sojourner Truth (Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Stevens 7 Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828 (1850)); Solomon Northup (Twelve Years a Slave (1853)); Harriet Ann Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)); and Booker T. Washington (The Story of My Life and Work (1900)). Each of these accounts gives white readers a glimpse into the life of an enslaved person, albeit a white-washed version of the truth. We understand now that “the slave narrative is a particularly sharp example of a minority culture forced to present itself inside a majority straightjacket” (Newman 26). Additionally, Toni Morrison recognized the self-censoring Black authors undertook when she stated, “In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things, and they “forgot” many other things” (301). Black authors understood that white people would be reading their works and could not fully speak their minds or relate the full extent of their suffering in order to create a story that white people could accept. It was not until the early nineteenth century that fictitious accounts of slavery narratives became popular. The most well-known fictitious “slave” narrative is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was a staunch abolitionist and well-read in the genre of traditional “slave” narratives. Stowe was able to model the graphic incidents the character of Uncle Tom experiences on the real-world violent encounters described in autobiographical slavery accounts. On the heels of the newly passed 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required the capture and return of runaway enslaved people to their enslavers, Stowe’s novel on slavery was arguably the most-read novel of the nineteenth century and helped stoke the slavery debate. The autobiographical and fictitious traditional “slave” narratives laid a solid foundation for the genre of neo-enslaved narratives. However, “slave” narratives seemed to disappear from the Black American literature bibliography for nearly a century but reappeared in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. This resurgence of the fictional slavery narrative genre is termed “neoslave narratives,” with Margaret Walker’s Jubilee as the commonly agreed upon inaugural neo-enslaved narrative novel. Stevens 8 Many of the same themes and tropes of traditional “slave” narratives can be found in the neo-enslaved narratives. The genres diverge at the point where the focus of revolt is more critical than escape: traditional “slave” narratives highlight the struggle to escape and find freedom, whereas neo-enslaved narratives highlight the whitewashing of Black characters, such as Uncle Tom, as passive enslaved people that lack agency (Newman 31). The goal of neo-enslaved narratives is to defamiliarize modern readers with the whitewashed narrative of antebellum slavery and remove the veil that Black authors of traditional “slave” narratives were forced to drop over “proceedings too terrible to relate” (Morrison 301). Neo-enslaved narratives defamiliarize readers from the literary myths and stereotypes traditional “slave” narratives forged by telling a slavery story in a way that challenges the enduring, hegemonic history of the South and uncovers the terrible proceedings early Black authors could not relate. Fictional neo-enslaved narratives present readers with characters that understand the repercussions of chattel slavery that, while generations removed from the terrible institution, are forced to inherit. Fictional neo-enslaved characters are not afraid to remove the veil that shrouded the violence and vileness that the autobiographical slavery accounts covered. These characters also locate themselves as members of a community that shares experiences of systemic oppression and confrontations of white supremacy in their everyday lives. Navigating the Narrative I am interested in bringing fiction stories written by Black authors that grapple with the lived experiences brought on by the consequences of antebellum slavery into a similar genre space where they can be more easily identified. Making space in an existing genre, such as neo-enslaved narratives, for these stories will, first, help readers to locate specific stories about contemporary racial issues and, second, will emphasize the aspect of slavery in America’s social justice issues. I focused on four American neo-enslaved narrative novels that span the decades of the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement: Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes Stevens 9 (1930); Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937); Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952); and If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (1974). With four rich decades of Black literature, many novels stand as examples of neo-enslaved narratives featuring slavery’s material legacies. I focused on four novels that have a broad reach in American culture. Analyzing more than four novels, at this point in my research, would not allow me to explore the novels to the depth the works deserve. As my research of neo-enslaved narratives and Black literature progresses, I aim to include more novels in order to analyze slavery’s ever-changing material legacies. These four novels helped me further understand slavery’s material legacies and how they are representations of neo-enslaved narratives. I asked two questions as I analyzed: 1) how does this novel demonstrate slavery’s material legacies in its plot? And 2) how do the novel’s characters epitomize slavery’s material legacies? To answer these questions, I first had to define what constitutes “slavery’s material legacies.” Slavery’s material legacies are the unforeseen social productions, such as socioeconomic fallout from the failure of Reconstruction, which led to issues such as that are still affecting the Black community generations after slavery. I first focused on the moment slavery “officially” ended because traditional “slave” narratives highlight the struggles of Black people during antebellum slavery. Second, I focused specifically on the socioeconomic fallout generations after enslaved people were freed. The subsequent generations of previous enslaved Black people, the modern Black community, are still being affected by slavery’s material legacies. Socioeconomic fallout includes assemblages of intergenerational poverty and intergenerational trauma that were allowed to be passed on unhindered through oppressive institutions like Jim Crow laws and now take the form of wealth gaps, criminalization of Black bodies, racial profiling, etc,. However, slavery’s material legacies are more than intergenerational poverty and trauma; intergenerational poverty and trauma remain within the boundaries of a specific family. Slavery’s material legacies affect the entire American Black population, leading to a horrible combination of historical poverty and trauma. Stevens 10 Unfairly, white society expects individuals and their families to overcome historical oppression and the institutions the systems of oppression developed while remaining victims of the same systems. Tracing the Threads: The Literary Tapestry of Neo-Enslaved Narratives The concept of neo-enslaved narratives was born out of Bernard W. Bell’s study of traditions in African American novels. Bell coined the term “neoslave narrative” in his book The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987). Many scholars have built on Bell’s concepts, namely Ashraf H. A. Rushdy in Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of A Literary Form (1999) and Arlene R. Keizer in Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (2004). As American culture and its racial intersections evolve, scholars adapt Bell’s initial concept to better understand the genre of neo-enslaved narratives in their respective moments. Bell highlights the effects of W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness on Black authors. As double consciousness emphasizes how Black authors walked the thin line of social tension and Black cultural identity, we can see the Black community constantly adapting to a white hegemonic culture in order to “survive and then to thrive, both individually and collectively” (Bell 340). The never-ending adaptation the Black community has been undertaking since being taken by white, pre-American colonists into slavery in 1619—dehumanization and commodification by whites, Jim Crow and segregation, and countless forms of systematic racism—is ingrained in Black stories. Bell claims that Black literature is engrossed in achieving “freedom from all forms of oppression” (341). Black literature also celebrates “the spiritual resiliency of a people to survive, individually and collectively, with dignity and to realize fully their human potential” (342). Bell sees these themes throughout all of Black literature. However, not all Black literature can, or should, be categorized as neo-enslaved narratives. Bell pinpoints “neoslave” narratives as a fairly recent, postmodern “fabulation,” or a Stevens 11 hybrid style of writing that is “less realistic and more artistic kind of narrative; more shapely, more evocative; more concerned with ideas and ideals, less concerned with things” (284) as opposed to the traditional narratives of enslaved people. According to Bell, writers of the “neoslave” narrative genre use elements of myths and “traditional slave narratives” to oppose racism, relying on “the artifice of the storyteller . . . than on social realism to stimulate our imaginations” (285). Bell cites Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee (published in 1966) as the first significant example of the neo-slave narrative genre. Jubilee features an enslaved, biracial female protagonist set during the Civil War. Walker constructs the novel with “residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom” with an unironic, omniscient narrator, episodic structure, and unromantic, historical “black folk” themes (289). In other words, Jubilee is a fictitious rendition of a traditional “slave” narrative. Bell’s definition of “neoslave” is based on its moment in literary time; “neoslave” literally means “new slave,” with “new” referring to the postmodern literary period in which Walker published her novel. In addition to focusing on the literary timing of a “neoslave” narrative, Bell focuses on plots highlighting antebellum slavery. Ashraf Rushdy agrees with Bell’s argument that neo-enslaved narratives are postmodern creations that began specifically in the 1960s as accompanying responses of the Black Power movement to civil rights issues. Rushdy builds on Bell’s original premise of “neoslave” narratives in his 1999 book Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. To delineate his take on the neo-enslaved narrative, Rushdy first changes the formatting of the genre name itself by capitalizing “Neo” and separating the original term “neoslave” with a dash: “Neo-slave narrative.” Beyond the aesthetics of the term, Rushdy defines the genre as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (3). In addition to the changes in form, Rushdy argues that “Neo-slave” narratives are more than narratives concerned with escaping bondage; he claims “Neo-slave” narratives contain a “social logic” that speaks to the renewed discourse of Stevens 12 slavery in the 1960s and “engage in dialogue with the social issues of its moment of origin” (5). Through this modified lens, Rushdy focuses on novels published in the 1970s and 1980s. If Bell answers the question, “what is the ‘neoslave’ narrative genre?” then Ashraf Rushdy answers the question, “why do authors write in the “Neo-slave” narrative form?” Rushdy gives us two answers: first, Black writers wanted to reclaim the narrative form. Shortly after Walker published Jubilee, William Styron (a white author) published The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967. White literary critics of the time dub Stryon’s work as the first novel to adopt a “traditional slave” narrative form by incorporating the first-person narration from the “slave’s point of view” (4), overlooking Walker’s novel and rich contributions to African American literary history. Leaders of the Black Power movement took issue with Stryon’s novel, pointing to problems such as a white person assuming the voice of a Black enslaved person, the appropriation of African American culture, and Stryon’s allegiance to the “traditional historiographical portrait of slavery” (4). Published on the tails of a Black author’s story of slavery, Stryon’s novel can be seen as an example of the historiographical narrative within the (white) American literary canon. Rushdy’s second answer to the “why” of neo-enslaved narratives focuses on contemporary Black authors's desire to revisit their ancestors' literary form. “Traditional slave” narratives were a literary form that allowed enslaved people a forum to express “their political subjectivity” (7). Through the structure of “traditional slave” narratives, Black “Neo-slave” narrative authors were able to grapple with what it means to reproduce an early literary form that presupposes race as a point of “authenticity for the author” but requires a raceless narrator “for the primarily white, northern readership” (7). In other words, Black authors of “traditional slave” narratives had to repress their African American heritage and their opinions of the slavery experience and economy in order for their experiences to be palatable for both white audiences and the white publishing houses—the entities that wielded the control over what content was accessible to white readers. Both of Rushdy’s answers to the question of “why use the Stevens 13 Neo-slave narrative form?” demonstrate Black authors’ ability to make authoritative statements on the “historiographical tradition whose often romanticized representation of slavery was enabled by the exclusion of firsthand African American perspectives” (6) and allow Black authors comment on American cultural politics. Authors of the “Neo-slave” narrative form are keenly aware of the cultural and social implications of the genre. Rushdy claims “Neo-slave” narratives are “both history-laden . . . and present-minded” (228), which allow the genre to highlight the humanity of enslaved people rather than the commodification while simultaneously “reevaluating the nature and role of the antebellum slave community as a means of dismantling the quickly growing countermyth of the ‘idyllic slave community’” (229), a myth promoted by the traditional historiographical portrait of slavery. Arlene R. Keizer takes Bell and Rushdy’s arguments further by positing that the genre's nomenclature is insufficient: Bell’s “neoslave narrative” and Rushdy’s “Neo-slave narrative” are too specific. Keizer expands the genre through her phrase “contemporary narratives of slavery,” stating, “The influence of U.S. . . . slavery upon contemporary black literature is much greater than Bell and Rushdy acknowledge” (3). While Keizer does not name a specific work as the inception of “contemporary narratives of slavery,” she recognizes Bell’s claim of Jubilee as the founding work; she also claims that “contemporary narratives of slavery” begin with the postmodern literary era. Keizer recognizes that Black authors’s contemporary views of slavery are most definitely informed by “traditional slave” narratives; however, contemporary Black authors have “moved so far beyond the traditional narrative that their works are not bound by that frame of reference” (3). Contemporary Black authors' work on the “production of counterhistories to destabilize the official history imposed by colonial and neocolonial powers” (4). In other words, Keizer sees contemporary Black authors as writers that have accepted the responsibility to synthesize the known (white) American history with the unknown, often willfully ignored, Black American history while also (as Rushdy points as the primary purpose of Stevens 14 neo-enslaved narratives) reclaiming the history of the Black community. Keizer’s theory is supported by Toni Morrison’s statement that the Black community has “memories within” that, in modernity, require both recollection and imagination (Morrison 302). Because of the synthesizing and reclaiming work contemporary Black authors choose to undertake, Keizer claims Black authors facilitate the “transformation of the contemporary narrative of slavery into a body of literature focused on the formation of black subjectivity” (7). With a focus on subjectivity, Keizer contends that Black authors are participating in an effort to “re-inhabit those [enslaved] people” in order to “represent . . . the process of self-creation under extremely oppressive conditions” (11). Through these representations of slavery, Keizer sees the benefit of reading established theories of subjectivity into neo-enslaved narratives. While she recognizes that literary works should not be reduced exclusively to theoretical framing, she believes that fiction is an appropriate “site of theorizing because . . . writers (and other artists) [act] as weather vanes of the cultures they inhabit—they tell us which way (and how hard) the social and cultural winds are blowing” (15). Writers are first on the scene of cultural issues; theorists show up later with criticism and critiques of writers’ interpretations of cultural situations. However, according to Keizer, with the multifaceted aspects authors of “contemporary narratives of slavery shoulder, the vital aspect is “nothing less than that of representing a new black subject” (15). The literary representation of the new Black subject in neo-enslaved narratives is important in uncovering who is enslaved in both the past and present. African American literature, specifically neo-enslaved narratives, is an ever-evolving genre because of America’s ever-evolving society and culture. The works of Bell, Rushdy, and Keizer have demonstrated this evolution. Bell lays a solid foundation by coining and initially defining the genre, Rushdy adds to and refines the definition of the genre, and Keizer points the genre to the current issues of the individual and cultural identity of the Black community as they grapple with reclaiming their unique American history. However, Bell and Rushdy neglect the importance of the narrative from the predecessor to the Black Arts Movement—the Harlem Stevens 15 Renaissance. Their respective definitions of the neo-enslaved narrative genre are too specific because of the requirement of authors to write from specific character points of view and include specific traditional “slave” narrative tropes. This narrowing does not allow for slavery’s ever-evolving material legacies. However, Keizer’s focus on the literary representations of enslaved people and their importance on individual identity is an important aspect of the neo-enslaved narrative but is quite broad. This broadening can be too ambiguous for readers to form a sympathetic response to the story. Broadening the neo-enslaved genre too much can also lead to assumptions that all Black literature will include the subject of slavery, which is reductive to Black authors's crafts. Deciphering the Discourse: Analysis of Major Works Traditional slavery narratives gave readers, specifically white readers, a glimpse into life as an enslaved person; Black authors, particularly in the early twentieth century, continued this narrative practice in their neo-enslaved narratives, albeit through stories that take place after the institution of chattel slavery was dismantled and slavery’s material legacies began taking hold in American society. I located this moment in time as the Harlem Renaissance; many in the Black community migrated away from the violent oppression—strict Jim Crow laws and lynchings—in the Southern states and journeyed to Northern states seeking refuge. It was in the wake of the Great Migration that the Harlem Renaissance was born. Alain Locke said of Harlem Renaissance authors, “all classes of a people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage” (47). What Locke’s zeal for “New Negro” authors connotes is the artful mastery of the Black authors’ struggle with Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness; being hyper-aware of the social tension one’s skin color causes is an instance Stevens 16 of slavery’s material legacy. Black people were not allowed to be themselves in public; instead, they consciously represented themselves in a light that reassured the white public. As an author and a poet, Langston Hughes focused on themes concerning double consciousness, such as “the trap of respectability” (Flournoy). The concept of respectability was one that Hughes targeted in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which he shares his observations of Black artists caught in between two worlds: “‘O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes. ‘Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites” (3). Representing respectable, good, stereotypical enslaved people is an angle that many writers of traditional “slave” narratives took to ease the minds of their white readers. However, this liminal space of Blackness attempting to camouflage in a white space was a trap, according to Hughes. The white social standard—the standard of respectability—Hughes saw the Black community trying to achieve was insurmountable. He was a firm believer in Black people rejecting the mountain of white respectability and, instead, owning and championing their race and its unique type of respectability: We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (4) While the call to action toward individual and community-wide acceptance in Hughes’s manifesto was strong, the struggle with double consciousness was stronger. Regardless of being physically freed from slavery, the white beliefs of superiority and racial stereotypes that held over from the slavery era kept the Black community from rising up the social mountain. Stevens 17 Hughes displays the Black struggle with double consciousness in his debut novel Not Without Laughter. Hughes writes a Black bildungsroman, giving readers a front-row seat to the everyday life and upbringing of Sandy Rogers and a unique perspective of growing up Black at the moment in history when children of enslaved people were trying to find their way as alleged free citizens. Jim Crow laws, at the very least, undermined any progress made during Reconstruction, and the Great Migration of millions of Black people made for an atmosphere of social upheaval. Through Sandy’s young but watchful eyes, readers see the ripples in the cultural pond caused by the rock of slavery. At a young age, Sandy understands the difficulties he will face as he experiences racism daily. The poor white boys in Sandy’s neighborhood call him derogatory names every chance they get, which does not seem to bother Sandy, but when the racism against him is put on display, Sandy feels it deeply. During school, Sandy and his other Black classmates are forced to sit in the back of the classroom while the white children are assigned seats by their last names. The Black children did not have to wonder why they were sat in the back of the classroom: “My name is Sadie Butler and she’s put me behind the Z cause I’m a nigger. . . . the teacher’s putting the colored children in the back of the room made him feel like crying” (Hughes 95). In this instance, readers see slavery’s material legacies at work. During antebellum slavery, it was illegal to educate enslaved people in order to keep the enslaved under control. Sandy and his fellow Black classmates’ ability to learn is affected by sitting them in the back of the room to be forgotten. The neglect Sandy’s teacher inflicts upon him illustrates one of slavery’s material legacies and the neo-enslavement of Sandy’s mind—a mind that has been cultivated to understand double consciousness from a young age. All Sandy wants is to earn an education like his formerly enslaved grandmother Aunt Hager begs him to do, but he is kept from it by no fault of his own. As Sandy grows into a young man, he struggles to break the bonds slavery’s material legacy of poor education brings. He struggles to uphold his grandmother’s dream for him to Stevens 18 move beyond the social limitations by which she and Sandy’s other family members have been restrained. In a moment of reflection, Sandy ponders on his Blackness: Yet to get a good job you had to be smart—and white, too. That was the trouble, you had to be white! . . . It was not nearly so difficult for white boys. They could work at anything. . . . But a colored boy. . . . No wonder Buster was going to pass for white when he left Stanton. . . . Being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs. They don’t want us up there with them even when we’re . . . smart like Dr. Du Bois. (Hughes 198-9) In this moment, Sandy is struggling to find his individual identity in a white society that discounts smart, respectable Black men like Du Bois. Sandy is conflicted between fulfilling his grandmother’s wish for him and the reality of his social situation. While Black people may have been freed from chattel slavery, slavery’s material legacies keep them contemporarily enslaved. Sandy is enslaved by the historical and generational poverty and trauma first inflicted on Aunt Hager by her enslavers; the policy of non-education for enslaved Black people is Sandy’s inheritance that he must fight against. Having the characters of Hughes’s novel explain slavery’s material legacies through Sandy’s young point of view creates a space for readers to find real-world instances of similar situations and form a deeper sense of empathy for real-world people in these situations. Similar to Hughes’s novel, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God explores the difficulty of self-discovery for and independence of Black women through the perspective of Janie Crawford. It has been speculated that Hurston wrote this novel about the economic disparities during the Harlem Renaissance; while many middle-class Black people in Harlem and other northern cities that experienced a population boom due to the Great Migration were flourishing, the poor Black community still struggled. There was a desire by the middle-class Black community to shrug off the image of the poor Black Southern; as such, many writers turned away from their heritage of enslavement. Zora Neale Hurston felt differently; she Stevens 19 used realistic vernacular dialogue in her works, despite the resistance from her critics, as a way to uphold the value of the poor Black community and their enslaved ancestors. As an anthropologist, Hurston worked tirelessly to uncover Black culture in the United States and Haiti. Her use of the realistic vernacular of the Southern Black community was one way she achieved this goal. Hurston’s character Janie represents the Southern Black community that Hurston worked to make visible. Like Sandy, Janie is searching for her identity as a freed Black person. The identity discovery for Black female characters depicts the grappling of “immense complexities of racial identity, gender definition, and the awakening of their sexual being” while struggling against cultural repression (LeSeur 101). Janie is raised by her grandmother Nanny; her mother is not in Janie’s life. Janie rejects the social convention of finding security and status in marriage to find herself. Janie wants love and romance and wants “to struggle with life” (Hurston 11). After witnessing Janie allow a boy to kiss her, Nanny shatters Janie’s dream of love by telling her that she arranged a marriage for Janie. Nanny sees Janie’s naivety and fears Janie will eventually be sexually abused by white men, just as her mother was. Janie marries Logan Killicks regardless of her lack of feelings for the much older man. Nanny tells Janie that love is not important: "‘Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection.” Nanny does not want to see Janie “be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow” as she was (Hurston 15-16). Janie does as she is told and marries Logan Killicks, a Black man in good standing with Janie’s town. Janie is embittered toward her grandmother for this forced marriage: “The familiar people and things had failed . . . She knew now that marriage didn’t make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (Hurston 25). As a Black woman, the reality of her struggles was just beginning. Historically, Black women have struggled against dehumanization and commodification along with their Black male counterparts; however, black women additionally experienced the dehumanizing actions of Black men. Like many white men, many Black men saw Black women Stevens 20 as objects for their use. This ongoing subjugation is slavery’s material legacy that Janie must grapple with throughout the novel. Nanny wanted to protect Janie from the subjugation of white men, but she did not anticipate the subjugation Janie would experience at the hands of black men. Paradoxically, it is through the men that Janie seeks her identity, an identity defined by the mythical iteration of love and a comparatively mythical sense of equality. The novel can be divided into three sections, one section for each man Janie marries. First is Janie’s arranged marriage to Logan Killicks, who sees Janie as a work ox. Janie is willing to do work but does not get the sense of equality she desires. Logan accuses Janie of not taking “a bit of interest in dis place” (Hurston 31). He slings this accusation as Janie is making breakfast. Janie retorts, “You don’t need mah help out dere, Logan. Youse in yo’ place and Ah’m in mine.” Logan’s response to Janie’s persistence exemplifies his subjugation of her: “You ain’t got no particular place. It’s wherever Ah need yuh. Git uh move on yuh, and dat quick” (Hurston 31). One can imagine this controlling sentiment was one enslaved people heard from their enslavers, intimating that oppression is learned and bequeathed as Logan speaks to Janie as a white man would speak to a Black enslaved woman. Readers can also see in this moment how Zora Neale Hurston is relying on the “memories within” or the memories of others that shaped whom she became (Hurston qtd. in Morrison 302) to bring readers this scene of oppression. Logan’s treatment of Janie causes her to reject the stable protection Nanny wished for her as Janie runs away with Joe (Jody) Stark, who becomes her second husband. Jody has big plans to join the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, which he heard about while working for white people. Jody wins Janie over with his surprise that any man would use Janie as a work ox: “A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo’self and eat p’taters dat other folks plat just special for you. . . . if you think Ah aims to tole you off and make a dog outa you, youse wrong. Ah wants to make a wife outa you” (Hurston 29). Janie and Jody are on the next train out of town. Stevens 21 In Eatonville, it is not long before Jody begins to subjugate Janie. Jody becomes mayor and opens a general store. Janie, in turn, becomes Jody’s trophy wife; she is dressed in the finest clothes to ensure “nobody else’s wife to rank with her” (Hurston 41). While Janie enjoys the pampering, she begins to understand that Jody is not interested in keeping her as an equal. She is an object, a tool, to increase Jody’s standing in the town; Jody has money, land, and the prettiest woman in town. Placing Janie on a pedestal isolates her from other women in the town who only see her as something to envy. Jody also makes Janie tie her beautiful hair up in a kerchief because of the looks of desire the men of the town give her. Janie’s isolation deepens as Jody makes it clear to the town that he speaks for Janie. At Jody’s mayoral inauguration, the townsfolk want to hear “uh few words uh encouragement from Mrs. Mayor Starks,” but fearing Janie would eclipse his popularity, Jody quickly steps in to silence Janie: “mah wife don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home” (Hurston 43). Janie aches for equality, but she is being kept as a token of Jody’s success, not allowed to speak unless he allows it and expected to follow every demand Jody barks out. Just as with Logan, Janie reaches a point where she can no longer allow Jody’s subjugation. Janie, emotionally exhausted from coping with the material legacy of Jody’s controlling ways, robs “him of his illusion of irresistible maleness,” verbally emasculating him in front of the store patrons “[casting] down his empty armor before men and they had laughed, and would keep laughing” (Hurston 79). In this self-defense, Janie creates an unbridgeable rift between husband and wife. Jody moves out of their bedroom and shuns her until his dying day. Janie gets the last word, scolding Jody on his deathbed, “Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowed out tuh make room for yours in me” (Hurston 86). After Jody’s death, Janie symbolically frees her hair from the kerchief, but it would not be long before Janie’s dream of love and equality is shattered again. Stevens 22 Janie’s third husband, Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods, is the proverbial knight on a white horse for whom Janie has been waiting. Tea Cake loves her and treats her as his equal. They do everything together: hunting, fishing, dancing, and driving (Hurston 110), much to the town's surprise. Janie does not care how scandalized the town is about her new relationship with Tea Cake, as he makes her happy in a way her previous husbands did not: “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine” (Hurston 114). Through Tea Cake and the willingness to abandon her grandmother’s way of life, Janie finds wholeness. To keep this sense of identity, Janie follows Tea Cake to the Florida Everglades to harvest the crops that white people grow. Tea Cake and Janie make a life on the muck, a life Janie allows to find contentment. Her chains of slavery’s material legacy through subjection seem to break for a time. Janie’s idyllic life is shattered when the Everglades get slammed with a hurricane of unimaginable destruction, based on the five-day-long hurricane she survived while in the Bahamas in September of 1929 and the 1928 Lake Okeechobee Hurricane that killed 4,028, the majority being migrant workers (Mullany 126). Nature is the ultimate subjugator. In this fictionalized hurricane, Tea Cake gets bitten by a dog that is later found to be rabid. As Tea Cake’s infection worsens, he becomes more paranoid and violent. Janie is forced to shoot Tea Cake to protect herself, killing him. Janie shoots her happiness and her sense of identity, being forced to enslave herself again. She returns to Eatonville to pine after the loss of Tea Cake and, therefore, her loss of equality and identity. Through Janie’s journey of finding her identity through equality and love, Hurston portrays how the ongoing subjugation of Black women is a form of slavery’s material legacy. As writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes and Hurston, with many other prolific Black authors, laid a solid foundation on which the authors of the Civil Rights movement built. Ralph Ellison is one of these authors. In the later years of the Harlem Renaissance, Ellison conducted interviews with the Black community there. His time in Harlem shaped who he was Stevens 23 as a writer (Vitale). In his only published novel, Invisible Man, Ellison condenses the experience of Black history into one nameless narrator as he experiences the racial conflicts affecting the Northern states in the late 1930s. Invisible Man was met with mixed reviews; this novel earned Ellison the 1953 National Book Award, yet many people did not understand the surrealist tone of the novel. This surrealism is precisely what Ellison had in mind. In his National Book Award acceptance speech, Ellison acknowledged the experimental nature of the novel: it has moments of surrealness and moments of reality (Popova). This back-and-forth dissonance reminded many critics of jazz music with its improvised notes that, sometimes, felt surreal and wrong. In Invisible Man, the narrator has to cope with the surrealness of being a Black man in early twentieth-century America. The struggle of navigating the surreal aspects of American society is the narrator’s form of slavery’s material legacies. Many Black American novels highlight the difficulty of finding one’s identity in a social system that operates on elite white supremacy. However, Ellison’s protagonist has come to terms with the harsh reality of his identity: “I am an invisible man. . . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (Ellison 3). He explains his process of reaching this identity of invisibility: It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man. (Ellison 15) The narrator understands that, since the end of Reconstruction, white people have chosen not to see Black people’s humanity, thereby making them invisible. He also understands why Black people are invisible in American society: “Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement” (Ellison 14). The ruling white elite of society would have to admit wrongdoing towards millions of enslaved Africans and, by doing so, give up centuries of sociopolitical control. The narrator is not enslaved to mythical ideals of equality. The material legacy that the narrator inherits lies not in the identity of invisibility but in the paralyzing and confusing struggle of navigating the absurdity of a society that dehumanizes him Stevens 24 at every turn, all the while grasping at an optimistic future. The narrator aims to shake off the intergenerational trauma of slavery that his grandparents lived through. Try as he might, the narrator falls into what his grandfather calls the danger and treachery of meekness (Ellison 16-17), meaning Black people personified the mythical docile enslave person in traditional “slave” narratives without being considered persons by white society. The narrator explains that “[he] was more afraid to act any other way because [white people] didn’t like that at all” (Ellison 17) when he reflects on why he did not take his grandfather’s advice to give up the docile stereotype. Nevertheless, the narrator feels he is betraying his grandfather when he is meek. The narrator takes the danger of meekness to another realm when, at his high school graduation, he gives a speech that extols the attributes of humility and meekness, that these attributes were “the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress” (Ellison 17). This type of rhetoric shows that the values put forth by Booker T. Washington were still highly esteemed by some of the Black community. The narrator’s speech earned him an invitation to give the speech again but this time in front of the town’s elite white men. When the narrator arrives at the ballroom of the town’s fanciest hotel, he learns that he has to participate in the battle royal before he gives his speech. Through the battle royal, Ellison highlights American society's surrealness in the early twentieth century. As the battle royale starts, a nude, blonde woman dances around the boxing ring. As she dances, the group of all-Black boys are stunned with confusion at not only the sight of a naked white woman but at the connotation of what merely looking at a white woman could mean for them; at the height of Jim Crow, young Black men were lynched for much less. The presence of this woman incites the white elite to base animalistic behaviors such as drooling, grabbing at the woman, and eventually chasing her: “It was mad. Chairs went crashing, drinks were spilt, as they ran laughing and howling after her” (Ellison 20). The sight and actions of the town’s leaders have the narrator confused and taken aback. These men in power have seemingly lost control Stevens 25 when presented with an exotic dancer. The narrator is uncomfortable in this situation and ready to leave the hotel, but he and the other Black young men are forced to stay and fight. The battle royal was in no way similar to popular boxing matches of the time. The young men were blindfolded and sent flailing into the fight. The group begins fighting for what seems like no purpose except for the entertainment of the white men. Eventually, the fight was stopped, the portable boxing ring removed, and a rug littered with coins brought in to replace the ring. Running on adrenaline from the fight, the young men, as instructed, dive onto the rug for the coins. As the young men grab the coins, they are shocked by the electrified rug (Ellison 26-27). The white men laughed as the Black young men contorted with every touch of a coin and continued laughing as the young men desperately tried to collect as many coins as possible. The M.C. of the event finally ended the torture and gave each boy five dollars, which was the only money the fighters would get: the coins they fiercely scrambled for were mere “brass pocket tokens advertising a certain make of automobile” (Ellison 32). After the absurd madness of the battle royal, the narrator is finally allowed to give his speech. As he begins, the men in the room ignore him, still laughing over the battle royal, talking over him, and berating him when he says emotionally loaded words such as “social responsibility.” Despite the heckling and disrespect, at the end of his speech, he is applauded and given a leather briefcase and a scholarship “to the state college for Negroes” (Ellison 32). The narrator is overwhelmed with joy to the point that he forgets that these white men violently exploited him for their entertainment. The narrator also does not seem to realize, or maybe he does but does not care, that the gifts the group of white men give him are inconsequential to them; white society, due to beliefs held over from slavery, do not validate Black spaces of learning. However, with the narrator perpetuating the doctrine of meekness to the Black community, the elite white leaders want to “encourage him in the right direction . . . [to] help shape the destiny of [his] people” (Ellison 32). The elite whites of the town are pleased to keep one more Black man submissive to the white agenda. The joy the narrator feels in this moment Stevens 26 is illusory because the emotion is based on the minuscule success in white society. The battle royal is a turning point for the narrator and his sense of identity. The scholarship he receives puts the narrator on a path of more confusion and racial violence, with the briefcase serving as a collection box for his history. The battle royale is a scene full of absurdity. Many of Ellison’s readers wondered if such a scene was based on facts—it was. The following image was found in Ellison’s personal files. It is a 1946 article in The Amsterdam News about Black blindfolded boxers that, at the end of the brawl, must pick up coins with their mouths. Enough of Ellison’s readers speculated on this absurd scene that Ellison had to explain his motive for including it in his novel: “‘The facts themselves are of no moment,’ he writes. ‘The aim is a realism dilated to deal with the almost surreal state of our everyday American life …For all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd’” (Bradley). Ellison’s reference to the end of the novel (the hole the narrator falls into) serves as evidence that the narrator is stalked by slavery’s material legacy of the absurdity of his invisibility. Stevens 27 For the remainder of Invisible Man, the narrator stumbles into absurd situations. He gets dismissed from his school for an encounter he had no control over and winds up in Harlem during race riots (based on the actual race riots of 1943). Throughout his life, the narrator is enslaved by the nonsensical and racist situations he finds himself in, and, because of his invisibility, he becomes a victim to slavery’s ongoing material legacies (e.g., the systemic racism in American society) and being the docile character in white society’s story. On the other hand, Black people struggle to cope with slavery’s material legacies regardless of whether or not they are perceived by white society as docile or aggressive. James Baldwin portrays the racial struggle of an assertive Black man, Fonny, in his novel If Beale Street Could Talk. On the surface, Baldwin’s novel is about young Black love, but a dangerous current of racial injustice runs parallel to the love story. The novel highlights the hypocrisy of the ratified clause in the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime” (National Geographic). If Beale Street Could Talk also critiques the racial profiling that feeds the U.S. prison system. Because activists such as George Jackson liken prisons to antebellum slavery and If Beale Street Could Talk highlights the injustice of prisons towards Black men, we can see slavery’s material legacy of racial profiling through Fonny. First, it is important to understand how racial profiling feeds the prison system and how we can see this as one of slavery’s material legacies. Scholars such as Angela Davis explain that the emancipation of enslaved people in 1863 left an economic vacuum in the South. With cotton commodities in high global demand and no one to pick cotton, the economy of the South struggled. With slavery now illegal, the justice system found ways to capitalize on and criminalize innocent Black men by exploiting the ratification clause in the Thirteenth Amendment. Over time, with further help from legislation such as Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s, and the “War on Drugs” campaign in the 1970s, the targeting, and incarceration of poor, Black males compounded exponentially. The justice system, particularly the prison system, has Stevens 28 become the new plantation, with Black men becoming enslaved once again; prisoners are often treated as subhuman by guards and other prisoners, hold no voting rights, and earn little to no income while incarcerated. James Baldwin explained these racist forms of legislation and the justice system as they functioned in the 1970s through his character Fonny. Baldwin concentrates on slavery’s material legacy of racialized incarceration. From the beginning of the novel, Fonny is falsely imprisoned on rape charges. He has been taken away from his family and his pregnant fiancée, Tish. Tish is the narrator and explains to readers that society had it out for Black boys like Fonny because society–the white majority–does not expect Black people to amount to anything but criminals. Tish tells readers that Fonny is a talented sculptor, but the vocational school he attended taught the students how to make “shitty, really useless things” that rich people will not buy: “they say the kids are dumb and so they’re teaching them to work with their hands” (Baldwin 36). Tish believed that Fonny’s vocational school was not interested in their students’ educational growth, that “they are really teaching them to be slaves” (36). Fonny refuses to be part of the reproduction of labor power that white society demands. Fonny saw the people around him caving to this power. He refused: “He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re supposed to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger” (36-37). Fonny understands the power dynamic of his Harlem neighborhood and wants to break the cycle of racism. Fonny soon learns that breaking the cycle is nearly impossible when he fights off a white man sexually harassing Tish at a local farmer’s market. Fonny does not see the gaze of the local police officer who runs to intervene in the fight. Tish understands that the police officer is willing to end the fight by shooting Fonny, so she holds Fonny back: “I was sure that the cop intended to kill Fonny; but he could not kill Fonny if I could keep my body between Fonny and this cop” (Baldwin 137). The police officer, Bell, does not believe Tish’s story of the white man harassing her; the antebellum and Jim Crow era society taught and propagated the racist lie Stevens 29 that Black people were criminals waiting to be caught–why would Bell take Tish at her word? Bell questions Fonny about the situation, disrespectfully calling Fonny a “boy.” It is in this tense moment that Tish defies Bell, replying, “‘He’s not a boy, Officer.’ Now, he looked at me, really looked at me for the first time, and, therefore, for the first time, he really looked at Fonny” (Baldwin 138). Tish’s defiant retort embarrasses and infuriates Bell. Bell is about to punish Fonny by taking him to jail when Bell’s authority is again called into question by the farmer’s market proprietor, an Italian woman, who stands up to Bell’s bullying, again embarrassing Bell in front of white passersby. Bell backs down, but before he leaves, he promises Fonny that he will keep his eye on Fonny. Later that same night, Bell keeps his word as Fonny notices “a patrol car parked across the street from our house” (Baldwin 144), re-establishing Bell’s authority. Fonny is well aware that Bell will find a way to cross paths with him again in order to teach Fonny that “criminals” will not undermine white authoritative powers. Fonny explains to Tish: White men don’t like it at all when a white lady tells them . . . the black cat was right, and you can kiss my ass . . . because that’s what she told him. In front of a whole lot of people. And he couldn’t do shit. And he ain’t about to forget it. (Baldwin 143) Bell finds his way to get revenge when Victoria Rogers reports a Black man has raped her. Bell sees that Fonny’s picture is the only Black man in the photo lineup, so naturally, Victoria accuses Fonny of the crime. Bell also claims he witnessed Fonny running from the scene. Lastly, Bell has intimidated Fonny’s friend and only alibi to change his story and sent Victoria Rogers to Puerto Rico, where she cannot be reinterviewed (Baldwin 94-95). Bell is not alone in this scheme. Fonny’s lawyer, Mr. Hayward, claims, “Officer Bell . . . is a racist and a liar . . . the D.A. in charge of this case . . . is worse” (94). Through Fonny, Baldwin helps readers to see how “Black men come to be expendable in the eyes of the law and how easily state officials can cripple Black men who challenge their perceived racial superiority” (Alexander 52). This form of slavery’s material legacy comes in the incarceration of Black men. Stevens 30 Epilogue: Synthesizing Insights and Charting New Horizons Slavery, America’s greatest shame, is both unknowable and “unspeakable” (Goyal 7). In other words, authors of the modern and contemporary literary era can write—in a powerful way—about the subject of slavery and the enslaved people’s experience. However, the many generations that have passed have taken away the living proof, the people with firsthand experiences. Now, we are left with their stories to help us continue reconciling with the nation’s shame: this is the importance of traditional “slave” narratives and their modern iterations, what Bell and Rushdy call “neo-slave narratives.” I argued that, while traditional “slave” narratives are important to the history of America and lay a solid foundation for “neo-slave narratives” to build on, my concept of neo-enslaved narratives shows a move beyond the plot of antebellum slavery and expand to include literature that highlights the struggles of Black characters with the modern and contemporary social issues that are slavery’s material legacies. For example, New York Times journalist and social justice activist Nikole Hannah-Jones explained that George Floyd was not murdered; he was lynched. She reframed Floyd’s death as slavery’s material legacy of lynching to demonstrate the social injustices of a society that allows a police officer to kill a man safely in custody with multiple witnesses and not hesitate to consider the potential recourse. Reframing Floyd’s murder as a lynching brings a gravitas to the situation that, hopefully, makes people stop and realize that slavery has not been vanquished; it has become more surreptitious, hiding in plain sight but knowable to society. Allowing stories that grapple with slavery’s material legacies as neo-enslaved narratives bridge the knowable and unknowable aspects of slavery; the knowable aspects are the scenes from the everyday lives of Black people that intersect with slavery’s material legacies. This expansion of the neo-enslaved genre creates a space from which readers recognize the past through the actions of now, with the hope that readers will empathize with the protagonists and find moments of solidarity. While neo-enslaved narratives are not intentionally didactic, readers Stevens 31 can begin to see how deeply slavery affects the Black community decades (even centuries) after Emancipation. The instances of slavery’s material legacies discussed in my research exemplify Michelle Alexander’s statement on remedying the social justice issues that plague America: “if your strategy for racial injustice involves waiting for whites to be fair; history suggests it will be a long wait” (257). Black authors use literature to make visible slavery’s material legacies as a form of speaking out against the ongoing inequality and white supremacy. Just as many Black authors found inspiration from the traditional “slave” narratives of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, so too do modern and contemporary Black authors build on the genre and continue the plight against slavery and its material legacies. However, more research needs to be done. As I continue researching neo-enslaved narratives, I want to research further into slavery’s material legacies and how theoretical areas such as affect theory and cultural theory intersect with neo-enslaved narratives. I will also look at more Black literature from the twentieth century into the twenty-first century to locate how slavery’s material legacies have evolved and how the Black community continues to struggle in an inequitable society. This research represents the beginning of a life-long pursuit of personal decolonization. It brings to light my own subconscious racism as I discover the truths about slavery that the Black community has been expressing for decades. Stevens 32 Works Cited Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press, 2011. Alexander, Patrick Elliot. From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel. Temple University Press, 2018. Baldwin, James. If Beale Street Could Talk. Vintage International, 2006. Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bradley, Adam. “Surreal Encounters in Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man'.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 June 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/t-magazine/ralph-ellison-invisible-man.html. Condon, Frankie. I Hope I Join the Band : Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiraciset Rhetoric. Utah State University Press, 2012. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.hal.weber.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=434731 &site=ehost-live. Digital reproduction of “Trial of Young Glovers” newspaper clipping as found in Ralph Ellison’s personal files. “Surreal Encounters in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man,’ by Adam Bradley, 3 Jun. 2021. nytimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/t-magazine/ralph-ellison-invisible-man.html Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage International, 1995. Stevens 33 Flournoy, Angela. “How Langston Hughes Brought His Radical Vision to the Novel.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Jan. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/books/review/angela-flournoy-langston-hughes-not -without-laughter.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CNot%20Without%20Laughter%E2%80%9D %20crystallizes%20some,life%2C%20the%20beauty%20of%20black. Goyal, Yogita. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York University Press, 2019. Hannah-Jones, Nikole and Doug Fabrizio. “An Evening with Nikole Hannah-Jones.” Weber State University Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities' Browning Presents! 31, Mar. 2023, Val. A Browning Center, Austad Theater, Ogden, UT. Public Discussion. Hughes, Langston. “THE NEGRO ARTIST AND THE RACIAL MOUNTAIN.” The Langston Hughes Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1–4. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26432664. Hughes, Langston, and Angela Flournoy. Not Without Laughter. Penguin Books, 2018. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 75th Anniversary ed., Harper Perennial, 2006. Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation In the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Cornell University Press, 2004. LeSeur, Geta. Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman. University of Missouri Press, 1995. Locke, Alain. Voices of the Harlem Renaissance or The New Negro: An Interpretation. Konecky & Konecky, 2019. Stevens 34 Martinez, Aja Y. "A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory: Stock Story Versus Counterstory Dialogues Concerning Alejandra's" Fit" in the Academy." Composition Studies 2014: 33–55. Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson et al., The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990, pp. 299–305. Mullaney, William. “Her Eyes Were Watching Katrina: Unnatural Deaths in a Natural Disaster.” Obsidian, vol. 9, no. 1, 2008, pp. 124–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44489279. National Geographic Society. “The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution.” National Geographic Society, 20 May 2022, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/13th-amendment-united-states-constit ution Newman, Judie. “Slave Narratives and Neo-Slave Narratives.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, edited by Sharon Monteith, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 26–38. “North American Slave Narratives.” Slave Narratives: Chronological List of Autobiographies, Documenting the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/chronautobio.html. Popova, Maria. “Ralph Ellison on Literature as a Voice Against Injustice, a Chariot of Hope, and a Lens On the Human Experience.” The Marginalian, 1 Mar. 2017, https://www.themarginalian.org/index.php/2012/03/07/ralph-ellison-national-book-awardacceptance-speech/. Stevens 35 Powell, Malea D. "Down By the River, or How Susan La Flesche Picotte Can Teach Us About Alliance as a Practice of Survivance." College English 2004: 38–60. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies In the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Oxford University Press, 1999. Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses: The American Novel Since Gone With the Wind. Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Vitale, Tom. “Ralph Ellison: No Longer the 'Invisible Man' 100 Years After His Birth.” NPR, NPR, 30 May 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/30/317056807/ralph-ellison-no-longer-t he-invisible-man-100-years-after-his-birth.