MDDM Washington, Gershom, subverting racist history

[Doug Millison]

jbor :
>Nowhere in _M&D_ is GW depicted as "attempting to define the total reality"
>of Gersh - quite the opposite in fact, in terms of the absolute liberty to
>be and do and say whatever he wants that Gersh is afforded by GW - and the
>"jive" version of the slave-master relationship they create together is a
>*shared* joke between them rather than dissimulation against George on
>Gersh's part, and it's performed at the expense of stereotypes which
>sanctimonious Philadelphians (and someone like Walker, too, I'd add) have
>concocted and propagated.

Gershom and Washington, in M&D as in history,  live in a society that is,
in Walker's terms,  "attempting to define the total reality" of enslaved
Africans. That is the point of bringing in a perspective like Walker's (and
she is certainly no more "biased" than you are) to read alongside M&D.

Washington, in M&D and in history, owns slaves, profits from their labor.
There is a historical record of Washington gradually coming to realize that
it wasn't right to keep slaves --  not because he thought them equal to
whites, but rather because he felt it was their due because of the way so
many had fought, and died, in the revolution.   That didn't stop the
historical Washington, however, from contributing several of the "enslaved
Africans " (I like Walker's term better than "slaves", for the reasons she
gives) he owned to the back-breaking labor of the Great Dismal Swamp Land
Company as late as the 1790s-- a historical fact, despite your callous
joking about that miserable project in your posts yesterday.  Washington
owned enslaved Africans and profited from them until  he died.  There is no
record that any of them volunteered for the job.

During the period of his life that we see in M&D, P's Washington is clearly
part of the slave-owning society that Walker and other scholars describe --
as you observe, P shows a vast system, such as we know from history, that
enslaves and exploits Africans and African Americans.

Neither in the Colonial American context, nor in the broader context of
M&D, which blends past and future anachronistically almost on every page,
can you support the argument that Washington grants Gershom " liberty  for
the simple reason that Gershom remains Washington's property.  Every
privilege that Gershom enjoys is at Washington's whim, he can withdraw what
he grants; we know that the historical Washington advertised for the return
of escaped slaves, he certainly didn't give them any sort of "absolute
liberty", and I believe that Pynchon expects that we will know, or find
out, what sort of man the historical Washington was. Even if we don't go
outside M&D for that information, what P shows Washington doing does not
require that we assume he believes Gershom to be his equal or that
Washington grants him "liberty" -- quite the opposite.Washington's behavior
towards Gershom can be explained the same way we explain how other masters
permitted their enslaved Africans and African Americans certain intimacies
-- Pynchon shows us a Washington who likes to smoke pot and drink punch,
while his slave serves drinks and entertains and the wife bakes sweets to
soothe his munchies.  (Other masters liked to have sex with theirs, and
thus create more enslaved African Americans to sell or work the farms.)

(In this P's Washington  is very like certain 1960s' rebels, the men that
is, who expected their women to bake cookies while the men sat around and
talked and plotted revolutionary politics, all the while, many of them
enjoying riches and privileges as whites in a profoundly racist society --
among other factors,  a reaction against that sort of thing helped propel
the feminist movement of the '60s; Pynchon seems very aware of this history
in his Slow Learner intro, and I think he puts it to work in his brief
characterization of Martha. )

 Pynchon's Washington does appear to follow the historical record that
depicts a Washington who took relatively good physical care of his property
-- but  historians do not appear to believe that, as Franklin and Hamilton
did, Washington thought Africans and African Americans to be the
intellectual or social equals of whites.   Pynchon gives us no reason to
think that his Washington considers Gershom an equal, either.

This is the historical picture against which Pynchon carefully crafts this
scene at Mt. Vernon,   focusing  on a slave whose work and actions recall
the very familiar,  limited range of work opportunities that whites have
permitted  African-Americans in the US:  Pynchon gives Washington a slave
who  serves drinks, cooks, steps 'n' fetches things, and entertains with
jokes, well within the frame of opportunity that has limited African
Americans in the US even to the present day, with exceptions of course, but
you don't have to try hard to  find   and hear contemporary African
American voices who speak of this limitation, the obstacles that work them
out of many fields of endeavor. At the same time, Pynchon shows a
Washington who adopts African-American speech patterns and slang, who
enjoys "soul" food -- P seems to take into account the kind of argument
that Walker makes:  even in their bondage, because of their presence, their
numbers, African cultural contributions form an important strata in the
bedrock of 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.
Therefore, this largest human migration also constituted the world's first
_massive brain and transfer of technology_ from Africa to the Americas,
which established the 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 in Colonial America. Clearly, Washington is
learning from
Gershom, and Gershom is fighting back the only ways that he can, too, as he
remains enslaved  in M&D, in legal bondage to Washington.


What I like about the perspective that a scholar like Walker brings to this
discussion, is that it helps to understand Washington and Gershom in M&D
without forcing the preposterous notion that Washington simultaneously
holds enslaved Africans as property  *and* grants them liberty --
ridiculous because Washington legally owns Gershom, a fact that Pynchon's
Washington acknowledges in calling him a "tithable" and in identifying
himself as Gershom's master.  By insisting that M&D shows Washington
granting "absolute liberty" to a human being he owns as property, you force
an interpretation that veers far from what the novel shows, and depend on a
hairsplitting definition of liberty that the novel does not provide or
endorse. I don't think you can fit Pynchon inside that particular political
box, without throwing away most of what Pynchon has to say about slavery in
Colonial America and stripping away the many layers of nuance and irony,
that Pynchon builds into this novel.

Flame-free,
Doug





http://rpuchalsky.home.att.net/libfaq.html
Do the Libertarians really believe that slavery should be legal?
Some do, you bet! Many Libertarians of the anarcho-capitalist variety
believe that you can't really own something unless you can sell it.
Therefore, since you own yourself you can sell yourself. They have no
problems with selling yourself into slavery as long as it is "voluntary"
(i.e. as long as you are starving and see no other way to get food, for
instance.) Some Libs will indignantly claim that they don't believe in
slavery. Usenet threads on the subject generally reveal that at least 1/3
of Libertarians
support slavery and think that it should be legal for one human being to
own another.