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Volume 24, Number 3 (1999) reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review "CHILDREN AND SLAVES IN THE WEST": IMAGINING FRATERNITY AMONG OUTLAWS IN THE SECRET INTEGRATION JOE BOULTER* Pynchon is shown to intervene in every aspect of this debate. Like the Civil Rights movement, he focuses on the experience of children and the ideal of integration, whilst containing blacks in fiction, just as Civil Rights legislation eventually contained them in law. At the same time, he makes us aware of the limited relevance of children's experience, and of integration itself, to the socioeconomic disadvantages of African Americans, and of the limitations of fiction as a vehicle for social change. The Article explores the ambivalent attitude to integration both in Pynchon's story, and in the stories which it follows and critiques, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1964, William Brink and Louis Harris wrote, "[a]lways before they have been able to find some way to contain the Negro--by giving him his own school or confining him to a ghetto so that he didn't get too close. But the day of accommodation is fast disappearing."1 They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that in cases like Brown v. Board of Education,2 and through legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the problems of African Americans were translated into problems of equal rights. By treating black socio-economic disadvantages as a particular kind of legal issue, white institutions effectively continued to contain the Negro, providing responses which were not solutions. It is this process of translation and containment which is repeated, and critiqued in Thomas Pynchon's 1964 short story The Secret Integration.3 At the meeting marking the end of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Reverend Robert Graetz spoke of putting away childish things.4 This idea was especially relevant to the Civil Rights movement, which was above all about equality of opportunity. African Americans were demanding the rights and means to participate as adults in American society, and to get out of the socio- economic position which they had continued to occupy since slavery, which was a position of dependence. It is perhaps indicative of the kind of Civil Rights African Americans were going to get that they did not put away childish things. The image of children persists in the Civil Rights era, and it persists specifically in the rhetoric used by Martin Luther King to try to win white sympathy, an attempt which itself indicates that blacks were depending on whites to release them from their dependence. King's use of children as a rhetorical device, both in letters and in life, was most effective at Birmingham. In his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, King used children as examples of innocents to whom racial discrimination had to be explained.5 Then, from May 2 to May 7, 1963, he encouraged children to demonstrate.6 King's letter was published in several national periodicals, reprinted, and mostly favorably quoted. The demonstrations were also important in gaining widespread publicity for the movement. In the case of the demonstrations, the publicity and the sympathy for blacks was not the result of black actions but of white police brutality. At Albany, the Kennedy administration had not acted against Albany's clear violations of federal law because there had been no confrontations, and at Birmingham King was determined to provoke them.7 By sending out children against the police, King prompted whites to think that they perhaps ought to take better care of blacks: he was not so much challenging the white myth of black dependence as exploiting it. Because King's rhetoric relied on existing white attitudes, it could hardly hope to change them. As much as the use of black children's innocence provoked white sympathy for the Civil Rights movement, the threat of black adults' violence provoked white fear should the movement fail. King led the march on Washington, but the black leader who was on television more than any other in 1963 was Malcolm X.8 It was the threat of violence more than anything else which prompted Kennedy to introduce a Civil Rights Bill.9 The Civil Rights movement did not put away childish things. In its search for white support, it used children as a part of a rhetorical strategy which relied on, rather than upset, the white image of blacks as dependent on white society. In the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, King was also using children in another way. He was exploiting the idea that children have an innate sense of equality, and learn racial discrimination from their parents. Newsweek's 1963 survey of attitudes towards race found that respondents generally believed that color does not matter to children.10 This idea is also central to Mary Ellen Goodman's Race Awareness in Young Children,11 which was first published in 1952 and which went into a second edition in 1964. In her study, Goodman stressed that she was not simply recapitulating the popular myth that children are color-blind. She said that "Americans like to believe in the 'purity' of childhood," but that it is wrong to believe that children pay no attention to race.12 However, while she established that children were aware of racial difference, and that children as young as four were aware of racial discrimination, she distinguished between the two, arguing that difference is a matter of perceiving facts, and discrimination is a matter of learning values.13 She says that at four years old "[the process of learning how other people place Negroes and whites on various scales of value is well under way," even while she tells us how early discrimination is learned, she indicates that it is learned.14 For Goodman, "[t]he standardized American ideas and feelings about race are 'transmitted' from one generation of Americans to the next,"15 but they are transmitted through culture rather than through the genes. In his everyday example of having to explain racism to children, King exploits both the popular conception of children's color-blindness, and the social science evidence that discrimination is learned. In both Goodman's book and King's example, the implication is that if children could be placed in an environment that was integrated, they would not learn discrimination. It is this implication, applied especially to the case of black children learning to discriminate against themselves, that helps to explain Justice Warren's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. This opinion was informed specifically by contemporary social science evidence that segregation leads to feelings of inferiority in black children.16 Because it does so, Warren argued, segregation in itself, even on the basis of separate but equal facilities, deprives the minority group of equal educational opportunities.17 The Warren Court used social science evidence to support its decision because it understood Civil Rights as the right to equality.18 Thinking of Civil Rights in this way prompted the Court in Brown to try to find a way of showing that segregation led to inequality in education, and consequently distorted the issue it was faced with in such a way that the ruling did not solve the problem, because the Court did not address the right issue. Nevertheless, the law continued to translate social problems into equal rights issues. The 1964 Civil Rights Act made it unlawful to discriminate against any individual because of their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,19 and today anti-discrimination has displaced or supplemented "other ways of conceptualizing ... many social problems."20 To translate the social problems of African Americans into legal issues of equal rights is to misunderstand them. Segregation, for example, is wrong, but it is not wrong because it necessarily means inequality. In Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Brown's opinion was that segregation does not "necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other," and that it does not impinge on the "absolute equality of the two races before the law."21 However unsatisfactory the effects of the decision in Plessy, Justice Brown's refusal to see a necessary link between segregation and inequality is supported by the fact that attempts to make that link, such as Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy, and Justice Warren's opinion in Brown, indicate that the link is contingent rather than necessary. Justice Harlan's opinion is that the "real meaning" of segregation is that "colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens."22 No doubt Justice Harlan is right in the context of a continuity between slavery and segregation, a context which George Kateb says is strong in Justice Harlan's dissent and should be felt even in Justice Warren's opinion.23 Justice Harlan would also be right in the context of the coaches allotted to blacks being of inferior quality to those allotted to whites, which no doubt they were. In neither case, is Justice Harlan's dissent a dissent from Justice Brown's opinion that the link between segregation and inequality is not necessary. Both cases introduce contingency. Similarly, the Warren opinion introduces contingency by indicating that in the light of social science evidence, segregation produces inequality. Justice Warren was criticized for contextualizing in this way.24 Segregation is not unequal in principle, though it has been in practice, and any attempt to show that segregation is unequal must ultimately appeal to context. In other words, the demonstration will be not that segregation is unequal, but that it has the potential to be unequal. This is so with Kateb's re-examination of Plessy and of Brown. Kateb maintains that "separation is inherently unequal," since it results in humiliation for the racial minority; therefore, in being humiliated they are being denied equal protection under the law.25 What Kateb fails to do is to show that segregation is always humiliating. Suppose segregation involved giving the best of everything to members of a segregated minority. Would that humiliate them? Clearly it would not. Of course, this is not what happened in the case of segregation in the United States, but as soon as you start to argue on the grounds of what happened, you are arguing on the basis of practice rather than principle. The argument that segregation did in a particular case lead to humiliation is not an argument in support of the inherent inequality of segregation. Kateb tries to show this inherent inequality by means of a thought experiment in which he asks if a white person would feel humiliated if they were put in a black person's position under segregation. He answers yes, but his thought experiment is an appeal to context, as is obvious from the fact that Justice Brown used the same tactic to defend the separate but equal policy on the grounds that, in his opinion, a white person would not feel humiliated in such a position. From Kateb's point of view, segregation is humiliating, and from Justice Brown's point of view it is not. Kateb tries to discredit Brown by saying that he is working from the racist assumption that while blacks can be made to feel inferior, whites never can.26 This may be true, but the basic aim of Justice Brown's argument is to deny Kateb's claim on the grounds that segregation does not necessarily involve inequality. Therefore, whites could not feel inferior if they were segregated. It is obvious that Justice Brown's point of view is based on ignoring the real facts of segregation, but given that the argument is about the inherent inequality of segregation, he is right to ignore those real facts. The fact that it is hard to argue that segregation is inherently unequal indicates that the translation of social problems into equal rights issues can fail to address the social problems adequately. In the case of Civil Rights, this translation did occur, it failed, and the results of the failure are obvious. One collection of King's writings is called I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World.27 The problem is that the Civil Rights movement did not change the world, it only changed the law. Today whites and African Americans increasingly inhabit two separate worlds.28 Equal rights laws have not and will not solve this problem: this is illustrated by the fact that whereas in Brown, equality before the law was a principle of reform, now, the Right seeks to uphold it as a means of maintaining the status quo.29 It is the failure of the law to solve the social problems of African Americans which has prompted lawyers to recognize that the law, because it translates such problems into its own terms, may not be able to solve them.30 Stephen Halpern argues that there are some issues which cannot be translated into the existing terms of the law, however they are interpreted.31 He sees Brown and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act not as parts of the black struggle for greater economic and political power, but parts in which those objectives became lost in the translation of the struggle into law. For Halpern, the only way to equalize educational opportunities is to give disproportionate resources to children of low socio-economic origins, a solution which is once again outside the limits of the law.32 The inappropriateness of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a response to African American social problems was apparent before it was passed. Newsweek's 1963 survey indicated that the issues blacks were most concerned about were economic. The most important area of discrimination for blacks was employment, followed not so closely by education and housing. In education, what blacks wanted was not integration, but access to better facilities.33 The emphasis on economic equality is also seen in the priorities of the marchers in Washington, D.C. in August 1963. The marchers wore buttons which depicted a white and a black hand clasped above the words "Jobs & Freedom."34 That the legal equality implied by the picture would not lead to the economic equality implied by the words had become apparent by the end of the decade, when it was argued that given a situation of Institutional Racism in America, the problems of African Americans could not be solved by equal rights laws.35 The law itself was seen as a white institution operating to the disadvantage of blacks. Similarly, educational problems could not be solved by integration, because integration would continue to leave the education of blacks under white control.36 Instead of equal rights, the solutions proposed were "multicultural curricula, more low-income housing, selective purchasing, consumer education, and--most importantly--black self- determination."37 What became clear was something which was implicit in the Civil Rights movement all along, and which was implicit in King's use of children in his rhetoric: translating black issues into issues of equal rights was maintaining the black position of dependency, and allowing the containment of black power in white institutions, most notably the law. The inappropriateness of the equality solution is not something which was only recognized in retrospect. It was apparent to Malcolm X in the year it was fought for, and it was apparent to Pynchon in the year it was achieved. Malcolm X opposed integration, and instead argued in favour of black controlled schools.38 Pynchon's position in The Secret Integration39 is more ambivalent. On the one hand, his story participates in the translation of the problems of African Americans into issues of equal rights, and it participates to the extent that it too focuses its arguments on the experience of children. On the other hand, Pynchon's story makes, as part of its theme, the awareness of the limited relevance of integration, the experience of children to those problems, and its own respective limitations. By containing his Negroes in fiction, rather than law, and exploring that containment, Pynchon is following Mark Twain. African Americans in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer40 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn41 are represented in relatively positive ways, but this representation is still a process of containment. Aunt Polly's slave Jim skips into Tom Sawyer singing "Buffalo Gals,"42 but in doing so he slots into a white construction of blackness, since "Buffalo Gals" is a minstrel song. Pynchon also follows Twain in using the experience of children as the focus of his exploration of integration. In Tom Sawyer, "White, mulatto, and negro boys and girls"43 gather round the town pump, "waiting their turns, resting, trading playthings, quarrelling, fighting, skylarking."44 The pump is a place of integration where children interact on equal terms regardless of race. More specifically, though Jim is Aunt Polly's slave, he is on equal terms with Tom in the children's economy. Tom must buy Jim's help by whitewashing with a marble and a look at his sore toe.45 This association on equal terms contrasts with the adult attitude to blacks in Twain, which Huck adopts when inventing a story of a steamship explosion for Aunt Sally. She says "[g]ood gracious! anybody hurt?" and he replies "No'm. Killed a nigger."46 As the quotation from the preface to Tom Sawyer in my title indicates, 47 children and slaves are associated in Twain, and they are associated because they are outside adult society. In Huckleberry Finn, the "king" admits "children and niggers free" to his temperance revival.48 All the children in Tom Sawyer aspire to outlaw status, "they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States for ever."49 But, it is Huck who is the real outlaw, "he was idle, and lawless, and vulgar, and bad," and all the children "delighted in his forbidden society."50 It is this outlaw status that makes him the fitting companion for Jim in the later novel. Here, Huck steals, tells lies, and breaks the law by helping a runaway slave and traveling with him as an equal. The integration that Jim experiences with his association with children is of limited use to him. First of all, it is an association that implies that black men and white children are social equals. Jim and Huck engage in dialogue--they discuss the virtues of King Solomon, and the creation of the stars51--but the equality implicit in this dialogue is demeaning to the black man. Similarly, in Twain's preface to Tom Sawyer, what "children and slaves in the West" share are a range of "odd superstitions."52 While they are associated in their outlaw status, and in their beliefs, that outlaw status and those beliefs are things white children will grow out of. Twain also said he wrote the book to remind adults of what they "once were."53 The association between blacks and children, while it offers equality for blacks, qualifies that equality. First, it is equality with children, the implication being that only children are naive enough to share the odd superstitions of naive blacks. Second, it is equality in the eyes of children, who have odd superstitions which they will grow out of, odd superstitions which could include the equality of blacks. Jim is further demeaned at the end of the novel, when dialogue is replaced by dependence. In order to escape from Aunt Sally's hut, he has to play a role in Tom's escape game. Jim accurately describes his position as a subject forced as an object into Tom's game accurately when he tells Tom, who has instructed him to tame rats, spiders and snakes by playing his jews-harp, "[b]lest if I kin see de pint. But I'll do it ef I got to."54 The point for Tom is that the escape must be carried out according to the code of adventure fiction.55 As with the Civil Rights movement, what the black man wants is being lost sight of as it is translated into white discursive structures. Tom translates the escape into a game, and Jim into an object, because he knows Jim has already been legally freed.56 Tom, despite his outlaw pretensions, is actually law-abiding to the extent that he breaks his vow to Huck to testify against Injun Joe in the courtroom.57 This law-abiding nature persists in Huckleberry Finn. When Tom devises a mark for his robber band, he says that anyone who uses the mark who is not a member of the band must be sued.58 He turns "nigger stealer" in play, not in fact. This is the most significant indication of the limited use of Jim's integration with children. It turns out that it is not Jim's association with Huck, or his participation in Tom's game, which gave him his freedom. He is free because a white woman decided he would be free, and white law guarantees his freedom. His position of dependence on the law has not really changed. In 1964 Brink and Harris described segregation and discrimination as a second slavery in which blacks are "chained."59 This comparison, along with Pynchon's references to Twain, encourages us to see the integration of blacks and children in The Secret Integration as a further exploration of the theme of Huckleberry Finn. Pynchon's favorite surname, used for Dr. Slothrop and his son Hogan, might well originate in Huckleberry Finn, where Mary Jane suggests she could go to stay at "Mr. Lothrop's."60 Some of the odd superstitions of children and slaves included in Tom Sawyer surface in a discussion between Tom and Huck of how to cure warts, and Pynchon alludes to this discussion when Dr. Slothrop tries to cure Tim's wart by suggestion therapy. Like Twain, Pynchon presents children as outside the jurisdiction of adults. So the story begins with Tim wondering how he is going to get out past his racist mother, just as Tom Sawyer begins with Tom trying to escape his slave- owning aunt.61 The association of children with outsiders is epitomized by the fact that Hogan Slothrop is welcome at Alcoholics Anonymous but thrown out of the Parent-Teachers' Association (PTA).62 As outsiders, the children are also hostile to adult society. Etienne Cherdlu's practical jokes are targeted toward "institutions" such as school and the PTA. His antisocial behavior is to be interpreted as a form of critique of society, just as Silberman says that antisocial behavior of blacks is a critique.63 Grover Snodd refuses to accept adult systems of representation as true, and instead looks for their motivation for representing things in the way they do. As a result, he prevents Dr. Slothrop's suggestion therapy for working on Tim's wart by explaining it to him. More importantly, he does not accept the representations of blacks in the children's books he reads, and instead decides that these representations are designed to teach him racist attitudes. As a group, the children integrate themselves while befriending Carl Barrington, the new black kid on the block.64 While the children integrate themselves, the adults engage in a hate campaign to drive Carl's parents from the neighborhood.65 In addressing the issue of blockbusting, Pynchon crosses the line that whites typically draw on integration: they would not want a Negro living next door.66 In Newsweek's 1963 survey, whites said they saw blacks as unclean and unhealthy, and expressed fear of personal contact with them.67 The Mingeborough adults have exactly these attitudes. Tim's mother calls Carl's parents "dirty" niggers, and tells them to "get out of this town," and Pynchon comments, "[i]t was hard to see what their parents were all so scared of."68 Where the Barringtons are persecuted, their son Carl is integrated. But just as in Twain, Jim's integration has a limited effect on his real situation, so Carl's integration can have a limited effect on his parents problems in Mingeborough. This is because Carl is not real. Tim starts the story wondering how he is going to get out past his mother, and he gets out past his mother by wondering. In other words, the children's integration can only take place outside the jurisdiction of adults if it takes place in their imagination. Carl is the "as if" of the children's lives, he is the metaphor for the things which their parents will not let them have access to.69 Tim wants access to further experience when he asks his dad when the family is getting a color television, and his dad prevents this access when he says that black and white is good enough. The metaphor of color for experience is then developed so that Carl, as "colored," is more deeply involved with all color than anyone else. As "a compensation for whatever it was about the light that was missing,"70 he represents the experience Tim does not have. Because he is constructed as that which is absent from adult discourse, the "phrases, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from," Carl is just as much the product of adult discourse as if he were constructed as being present in adult discourse. He is, in Baudrillard's terms, not really "other," but simply "different."71 He is not an independent subject outside discourse, he is the dependent object of discourse. He is particularly dependent on the children being children, rather than adults, for his existence. Once the children start to grow up, they will begin not to talk about Carl, and he will cease to exist. This is what happens at the end of the story. The adults' racism reaches its height when they spread garbage over the Barringtons' lawn, and Carl quickly begins to fade away. A page later he has vanished into the rain. The abandonment of Carl occurs as the children take a step towards adulthood. Pynchon concludes the story by saying that their "dreams [...] could never again be entirely safe."72 Carl is integrated, but since he is constructed by children from the supplements to adult discourse, he is integrated with the children as an object rather than a subject, as a dependent rather than an equal. He is "entirely theirs, their friend and robot," who they can "banish from their sight,"73 once their fiction of integration is disrupted by the adult reality of discrimination. Pynchon makes the limitations of the fictional integration more obvious by juxtaposing the children's successful relationship with Carl with their unsuccessful relationships with the real black characters in the story. They try to clear up the garbage their parents have strewn over Carl's lawn, but his real "parents" are not interested in integration. They tell the children "[w]e do not need your help [....] We do not need any of you on our side."74 They are like the blacks who Charles Silberman describes resisting "welfare colonialism," who say, "we refuse to be planned for as though we were children."75 Mr. McAfee telephones Alcoholics Anonymous, and since Hogan is a member the children sit up all night trying to help him overcome his craving for whiskey. As a result, he is suspected of child abuse, arrested for vagrancy, and, it is implied, becomes a victim of police brutality.76 There is a brutal realism about the children's experience of real integration, which we would expect if it is intended to emphasize the limitations of fictional integration, but this juxtaposition is not sustained in the story. Carl is the children's construction, so we would expect him to conform to white stereotypes about blacks, and he does. Tim imagines that Carl will be a basketball star and Tim will be his coach.77 Carl McAfee is the real inspiration for the children's imaginary Carl (he also inherits the gesture of snapping his fingers to remember a name).78 We expect him not to conform to white stereotypes about blacks, but he does. He is a bass player.79 For Charlie Mingus, "the word jazz means nigger, discrimination, second-class citizenship, the whole back-of-the-bus bit."80 Mr. McAfee is also an alcoholic who is arrested for vagrancy, and who cries when Hogan runs off with his whiskey, "the way a little kid cries."81 His integration with children can be seen as pointing to a childlike quality in himself, just like Jim's integration. Stereotyping, in the portrayal of Mr. McAfee, demonstrates that Pynchon's exploration of the limitations of the children's fictional integration can be read as a commentary on the limitations of all translations of black problems into white discourse, including especially, the translation made by Pynchon in The Secret Integration. Mr. McAfee, just as much as Carl, is "different" rather than "other." The implication is that African Americans are inevitably misrepresented in fiction, just as their problems are inevitably misrepresented in law. The Secret Integration participates in and draws attention to the process of translating, and containing black issues in white discourse, and it is this same process which makes Civil Rights law ineffective. Because it recognizes its own participation in the process, it also helps us answer the question of why the process occurs. The two answers to this question can be described as "the structuralist answer," and "the realist answer." The first says that we inevitably construct reality in a certain way which reinforces the position of the dominant interests in society; the second says that we simply tended to misconstrue reality in ways which reinforces the position of the dominant interests in society. In practice, there has been no difference in the end result for Civil Rights, but in principle the second answer is more hopeful since it allows us to recognize when we have been misrepresenting people or issues. By "the structuralist answer," I mean one based on the idea, common in twentieth-century humanities and social sciences, that we do not experience reality independently of conventional categorizations, such as those provided by what followers of Foucault like to call "juridical structures."82 This idea that juridical structures construct reality, and us, is also found in accounts of Civil Rights legislation.83 It is also used by Civil Rights commentators like Silberman as the basis for the odd conclusion that because lower class families do not talk very much to their children, lower class children have a limited perception of the world around them, such that they "do not know what things are."84 By "the realist answer," I mean one that believes that the object of any legal or fictional representation is available for inspection outside such representations. According to this answer, the authors of the Brown decision and of the 1964 Civil Rights Act could in principle have recognized that their account of racial discrimination and its solutions translated the problem into inappropriate discourse, where it could not be solved effectively, though the authors did not recognize this in practice. The "realist" position is the preferable one. The "structuralist" position is becoming increasingly untenable as a result of cognitive science discovering forms of non-conventional categorization.85 In Silberman's terms, even if people do not know what things are called, they can still know what they are. The structuralist position is also unable to account for why we might want to change juridical structures. If there were not a real state of affairs separate from its construction in law, we would not be able to see that laws have changed and reality has stayed the same (as in the case of the position of African Americans). Finally, it is clear that the inappropriateness of Civil Rights law to social reality could have been recognized, for the simple reason that it was recognized, by, for example, Malcolm X. It is clear that the authors of the law could have recognized that they were containing the Negro, because Pynchon, as the author of The Secret Integration, recognized that he was. |
