MDDM Washington, Gershom, Great Dismal Swamp

[Doug Millison]

As you dodge and weave and throw in red herrings, your posts continue to
ignore the substance of what I wrote earlier:


The really poignant aspect of this discussion is that in your insistence to
read
Gershom the slave  as enjoying "absolute liberty" while he remains legally
a slave and as subject to Washington's whim as any of Washington's other
slaves (your simpleminded denials notwithstanding),  you appear to ignore the
radical work that Pynchon does in these scenes.


In this scene at Mt. Vernon, Pynchon focuses on a slave whose work and
actions recall a very familiar,  limited range of work opportunities that
have always been accorded to African-Americans in the US.  Pynchon gives
Washington a slave who  serves drinks, cooks, steps 'n' fetches things, and
entertains with jokes.   We know from the historical record that most, if
not all of Washington's slaves,
led far different lives -- some of them slaved away in that swamp for
years of back-breaking labor, for example -- and I believe that Pynchon
expects us to know that,
or to learn it when we turn from M&D to the historical record.


At the same time, Pynchon shows a Washington who adopts African-American
speech patterns and slang, who enjoys "soul" food:  Pynchon might be seen
to bring into play a whole realm of contemporary historical discourse, that
focuses on recognizing the contributions that Africans made to American
culture.


"... Africans who came to the Americas constituterd not merely a "labor
force," which in the context of slavery in the Americas connotes physical,
not intellectual labor. The transatlantic slave trade also involved the
very deliberate selection of Africans on the basis of their specific
knowledge and skills that were needed for the development of the Americas.
Therefor, this largest human migration also constituted the world's first
_massive brain and transfer of technology_ from Africa to the Americas,m
which establishedt he basis for contemporary power relations in the
Atlantic world." (_African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation
of the Americas_, Sheila S. Walker, ed., 2001)


Pynchon shows this sort of transfer -- you alluded to something like this
in an earlier post in this thread -- happening, as it did historically,
within the context of slavery. Clearly, Washington is learning from
Gershom, and Gershom is learning, too.  But Gershom remains a slave in M&D.
And as Walker and her colleagues show in the book I just quoted (and there
is a large, rich body of work in the same vein), the contributions of
African slaves has been minimized if not outright ignored in the way white
America has written history.


Pynchon's portrait of Gershom restores some balance.  But, his portrait of
Washington reminds us that the cruel institution of slavery stayed intact
even as the Founding Fathers were plotting revolution to win their own
liberty. Washington is the master and he knows it (his wife knows it, too,
as Washington appears to expect her service as a matter of course, the way
he does Gershom's;, lucky for Gershom that Washington is one of the slave
holders who treated his property with care.


I find it odd that you're so concerned to rehabilitate Washington, and by
extension the rest of the Founding Fathers I assume, by insisting that M&D
shows him granting "absolute liberty" to his slave -- an interpretation
that veers far from what the novel shows, and depends on a hairsplitting
sort of definition of liberty that the novel does not provide or endorse.
In trying to force Pynchon's text into this particular political box, you
strip away multiple layers of nuance, and irony,  you ignore the many
elements in the novel that create an accurate picture of slavery as the
inhumane institution that we know it to be, and that so many of
Washington's contemporaries knew it to be.