“And I saw What Divided Me from the World” :
The Enduring Legacy of American Slavery in the Work of
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Colson Whitehead

Fiona Mills, Ph.D.

Between the World and Me
and
The Underground Railroad

Between the World and Me -
National Book Award (2015)

The Underground Railroad -
National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize (2016)

“Fear of a Black President,”
“The Case for Reparations,” and
“My President was Black”
in The Atlantic.

The Intuitionist
John Henry Days
Sag Harbor

Aims/Goals/Questions

• An attempt to put these books in conversation with one another.
•View these texts as bookends – one nonfiction; one fiction.

How does Whitehead’s novel connect to Coates’ vision of American history?

Whitehead’s novel as a fictional accompaniment to Coates’ treatise on the state of race in contemporary America.

Both Coates and Whitehead tell the tale of American history with all of its injustices – from slavery to Indian removal to exploitation of immigrant labor.

Whitehead reimagines the historical forced sterilization of black women, eugenic theory and the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study
in his novel.

He re-inscribes these historical events in his fictional novel blurring the line between reality and imagination in a new way.

Whitehead working in the vein of other neo slave narratives
(Beloved by Toni Morrison, Middle Passage by Charles Johnson, Kindred by Octavia Butler, Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed, and others).
References to historical slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, etc.).
Reflects resurgent interest in slavery – Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd and Underground Airlines by Ben Winters).

Coates' Critique of the American “Dream”
for both blacks and whites.

“I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies” (Coates 11).

White FEAR
Black FEAR

White fear of retribution: “Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money. The shadow of the black hand that will return what has been given…whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood” (Whitehead 172).

The toll that all-consuming fear takes on black lives: “And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice” (Coates 28).
“Fear ruled everything around me …” (Coates 29).

Literal and figurative disconnect/distance between [the] worlds for African-Americans (and whites too?) – recurring motif for Coates.

“The break is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food” (Coates 138).

Whitehead's critique of the project of America – implicitly condemns American capitalism and the engine of cotton that undergirds its wealth:

“The engine huffed and groaned and kept running. The had merely switched the fuel that moved the pistons” (Whitehead 171).

Implicit falsehoods contained within our country’s founding documents
(the Declaration of Independence):

“The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others… She didn’t understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men” (Whitehead 117)

“The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land… Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood” (Whitehead 117).
“All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man” (Whitehead 182).

The paradox of America – a country steeped in freedom yet rooted in slavery: “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free” (Coates 70).

Fundamental question for Coates (and all black people): “In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live – specifically, how do I live free in this black body?” (Coates 12).

violence permeates black life

“You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land with great violence upon the body”
(Coates 10).

Fresh Air interview

Ending (or beginning) Thoughts

Whitehead's novel ends with Cora lighting out for Missouri
(connections to present-day Ferguson?)
and then California.

Whitehead’s text provides several different models of how to rethink the slave question.
All of these options are flawed.

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• Project of Negro Uplift in South Carolina
• Extermination of African-Americans in North Carolina
• Homesteading/all black towns in Indiana

Unsettled West is the only potential option for freedom for blacks?

Connection to end of Huck Finn when Huck and Jim alight to Indian territory in West – their relationship/vision of race is untenable in the East/Missouri.

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before. (Twain 388).

Whitehead speaks to the historic
intermingling of races in the U.S.
Claims that we are all a product of the history of slavery and racism whether black or white (or Native American or immigrant, as Whitehead suggests)

“In liberty or bondage, the African could not be separated from the American” (Whitehead 156).

“The word we. We are not one people but many different people… For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become… All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family” (Whitehead 286).

Ending of Whitehead’s novel – “Whether they had been born free or in chains, they inhabited that moment as one: the moment when you aim yourself at the north star and decide to run. Perhaps they were on the verge of some new order, on the verge of clasping reason to disorder, of putting all the lessons of their history to bear on the future” (Whitehead 287)

Coates issues a call to action for whites to reckon with the legacy of American racism – both its past and its present:

A call to reckon with
our country’s collective past

“Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious” (Coates 146).

“They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world” (Coates 143).

“I do not believe we can stop them. And I still urge you to struggle… But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all” (Coates 151).

The Significance of Struggle for the Black Community

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground... This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass

“Here’s one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can’t. Its scars will never fade… Everything you ever knew told you that freedom was a trick – yet here you are. Still we run, tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary… And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes – believes with all its heart – that is is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are” (Whitehead 285).

“[Whitehead] really conjures up the ghost of slavery and embodies it in a way that is deeply historically accurate. But the book also has these amazing leaps of imagination that help us think about slavery not just in the past, but in the present.” - Kevin Young

FRESH AIR INTERVIEW WITH COLSON WHITEHEAD

Charles Johnson's 2008 essay “The End of Black Narrative” - Johnson argues that the use of slavery as the only lens through which to view black experience has run its course.
He claims that it is time for new types of writing by black authors.
What is the relevance of telling the tale of slavery in 2017?

The Challenging Nature of Telling the Truth about America’s history

“But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it… Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hand when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach” (Whitehead 116).

Textual Endings - hope/lessness

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Cora as reconfiguration of Harriet Jacobs - fictional version of the real Jacobs? Jacobs's pseudonym - Linda Brent.
Both lived in an attic in North Carolina.

“But still, wherever we go, we’re still in America, which is an imperfect place. That’s the reality of things.” - Colson Whitehead, NY Times interview.

“...and I felt the old Fear”
- Ta-Nehisi Coates

DONALD TRUMP IS THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT
"The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy."

"America is literally unimaginable without plundered labour shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered."

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Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans

Charlottesville Protests

NFL Protests

Audience Responses

How do white readers interpret this text? (Audience responses; Student responses)

Gregg Popovich, San Antonio Spurs