re Re: MDDM Washington

[Doug Millison]

Doug:
>> he doesn't put
>> himself at risk the way Dixon does when he frees those slaves.
>
 jbor:
>See 572.23-27. A much lesser "evil", a far greater risk.



Dixon's risk is worth, it seems to me, freeing the slaves so they don't
have to live exploited as the property of somebody else. Unless, of course,
you want to get into trying to measure the relative "evil" of the
relatively  few lives Dixon thus spares compared to the great many lives
that Washington could have helped to spare were he to have come out aganst
slavery as slavery's opponents encouraged him to do during his lifetime.


If you mean that Dixon takes a greater risk than Washington runs in this
scene on 572, where it's not at all clear that any repercussions will ensue
from Gershom's presence (if the  "invisible Youth" is Gershom), in order to
save fewer lives than Washington might do if he were to come out against
slavery, I would have to agree with that. Dixon is rather reckless in his
concern for these victims of slavery, even if he only manages to save a
few; as his character develops through the novel, Dixon does come to place
a high value on individual human life, if not on the value of humans as
property of other humans.


If you're talking about the risk to Washington's life here in this passage
at 572, it's difficult to see how Washington could run a greater risk than
Dixon, who puts his life on the line in order to free those slaves at p.
699, unless you want to argue that Washington's life is worth more or
something like that.  Dixon's encounter with the slave driver shows the
danger in standing up for the human rights of slaves in the southern
colonies, and by having him do it Pynchon throws Washington's hypocrisy --
talking liberty for whites, profiting from black slaves -- in sharp
contrast.


" [...] In 1796 George Washington received a letter from
Edward Rushton, a prominent English antislavery advocate.  [...] My
business is with George Washington of Mount Vernon in Virginia, a man who
not withstanding his hatred of oppression and his ardent love of liberty
holds at this moment hundreds of his fellow being in a state of abject
bondage--Yes: you who conquered under the banners of freedom--you who are
now the first magistrate of a free people are (strange to relate) a slave
holder. . . . [...]  Ages to come will read with Astonishment that the man
who was foremost to wrench the rights of America from the tyrannical grasp
of Britain was among the last to relinquish his own oppressive hold of poor
unoffending negroes. In the name of justice what can induce you thus to
tarnish your own well earned celebrity and to impair the fair features of
American liberty with so foul and indelibile a blot." [...]
http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/slavery/index.html


In putting the words in Washington's mouth -- "Not only presuming us their
Subjects, which is bad enough,-- but that we're merely another kind of
Nigger,-- well that's what I can't forgive" (572)-- Pynchon  seems to
underscore the very hypocrisy that Rushton calls out.


"Half the Company seem to believe this is a white Customer, impersonating
an African" (573) -- Pynchon takes us straight into the world of black-face
minstrel shows playing in theaters that would not admit black patrons
because of Jim Crow laws, which leads straight on to Sammy Davis Jr. and
his tenuous status as token member of the glitzy Rat Pack, and the strange
position of entertainers of color everywhere who must sing for their
supper, please privileged white patrons or go without.