The Destabilizing of Traditional Legal Artifacts in African American Literature

African American literature roots itself in documentation: slave narratives bear witness to the writer’s humanity. Likewise, African American citizenship finds its source in written constitutional omission and documented hypodescent: the three-fifths clause of Article I of the Constitution provides record of a black citizen’s marginal existence, while family records indicating the blood quantum of an individual serve to disqualify him from traditional property-holder rights. As a result, historical text artifacts traditionally serve to marginalize the African American’s personhood and individuality, binding him to words written against him in documents created neither by nor for him. In an attempt to reverse the fate inscribed by generative legal artifacts, some African American novelists use their narrators’ voices to reaffirm the marginalized individual, using references to law embedded in their work to undermine the reliability of traditional legal evidence rather than to simply root their narratives in painful history. Ship logs and testimonials, generated by unreliable narrators provide parallel faulty versions of the standard evidence of African American exploitation, suitably riddled and decentered by logical fallacies, playful anachronisms, and outright lying that have come to characterize a certain genre of African American literature.

Tituba of Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Rutherford Calhoun of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage provide different forms of evidence that these witty and self-aware narrators favor artifice over artifact in their use of legal documents and forms. From the literal evidence of a faulty deposition in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, to the curiously ahistorical ship log in Middle Passage, African American first-person narrators reclaim a legal “heritage the weft of whose genesis is [their] own disinheritance” (Williams 217). The “profoundly troubling paradox” articulated by Patricia Williams pinpoints the ability of narration to be formally indebted to such condemning historical artifacts while simultaneously rejecting and rewriting their marginalizing content through explicit and intentional artifice and inversion. In revising such artifacts, characters reject their status as objectified citizens or property on which white laws are enacted in favor of a system in which the narrator himself creates laws to enact on others, thus transferring his status from object to subject, from one made by text to one who makes text.

The most literal embedding of a historical artifact occurs in Maryse Condé’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, since the factual transcript of Tituba’s deposition occupies the very center of Tituba’s narrative. If the law were to be incorporated in a novel for its historical ramifications, certainly Maryse Condé’s fictionalized account, based in research and founded on the deposition of Tituba Indian herself, would provide evidence enough (199). However, displaced from the Essex County Courthouse to Condé’s novel, the deposition loses its positively historical appeal, contextualized, on the contrary, as a ruse––a product of Tituba’s bad acting (“I confess I wasn’t a good actress”) as well as John Indian and Hester Prynne’s extremist coaching (106).

That the Salem court accepted Tituba’s outlandish testimony, retaining both Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good and intensifying its search, proves the absurd judgment of the legal system Condé attempts to expose. Symbolically manifesting her doubt of the legal system through plot, Condé further emphasizes the factual inconsistencies of the trial by framing a deposition accepted as historical legal fact with an outlandish literary event—the playful and affectionate meeting of Tituba Indian, historical entity, and Hester Prynne, fictional character further fictionalized by an adopted feminist ideology. By framing Tituba’s deposition as a well planned “trick,” many lines of which come at the direct suggestion of an ultra-fictional entity, Condé inverts the legal status of the deposition from reliable evidence to undeniable fabrication (100).

Though the deposition provides the historical material from which the novel emerged, its foundational status does not confer on it semiotic primacy. On the contrary, the deposition, a generative document metaphorically reissued in literature, serves to destabilize, rather than canonize, the original while providing a more significant alternate story. First, Condé’s Tituba reveals the artifice behind the artifact by musing on her acting skills to the reader. Then, Tituba provides an alternate version of the story, reorienting her condemning yet paradoxically life-saving confession within her own narrative, which reveals it as a painful lie. Therewith, Condé shows her reader that the interpretation of Tituba’s legal artifacts relies on context, rather than any fair, systematic rule. While the court had nothing from the Tituba but her words in court and others’ accusations, Condé’s Tituba provides the reader with written evidence of her plotting with Hester, thus releasing her deposition to its necessarily perjurous meaning. Meanwhile, Condé ensures that the reader fathoms the centrality of legal corruption by in turn corrupting the novel, her own work of legal research, with irreverently ahistorical scenes. Thus, by incorporating Tituba’s deposition within the fabric of her first-person narrative, Condé proves the falsity of the historical document, while additionally using the winking, anachronistic playfulness central to her narrative to deride the kind of legality that would accept such documents as indisputable evidence in court.

If Tituba’s first-person narrative serves to fictionalize a specific legal document and system through both its confessions and plot twists, Charles Johnson’s presentation of a narrative ship’s log in Middle Passage serves to critique an entire genus of historical evidence through altering the purpose of a log book to subjectively qualify rather than objectively quantify the movement of bodies and goods. From the very start, Charles Johnson’s recreation of the middle passage artifact parallels Condé’s fabrication of Tituba’s autobiography in its creation of evidence in a mode that would typically incriminate its protagonist. The novel announces its intent to play at being a “Journal of a Voyage” on “the Republic” before the first page of narration. Writing aboard the Juno after his rescue in June 1830, Rutherford Calhoun, in effect, records his autobiography under the auspices of creating a body of evidence detailing the ship’s mutiny: “Exhibit A for any investigation into the loss of the Republic” (201). Rather than concerning himself solely with numbers, he equates the logbook with his very life, writing at the beginning of the final entry that, “[h]ere the log of the Republic––and my life––might have ended,” suggesting not that the logbook would have been lost at sea, but that the story told in the logbook would have ended with his own life (185). Johnson uses his self-interested narrator to imbue a mere object that traditionally objectified human life as enumerated cargo the subjectivity of a human life.

However appealing to the reader initially, in providing the him with a longhand narrative, Calhoun calls into question not only his reliability as a witness, but more broadly, the subjective nature of the logbook as a documentary form. Though Rutherford Calhoun’s log follows the structural conventions of the supposedly objective ship’s log—dating and numbering each entry––(just as Tituba’s deposition resembles its historical original) his “ship’s log” is not a log at all, but rather a narrative. Nor does he write his log during his voyage or on the ship named on the frontispiece of the book, as the conventions of objectivity would require, but rather he writes out of time, after the ship wrecks and the dates of voyage have passed. Thus, the dates of the logbook do not correspond to the supposedly objective events described, but to the subjective act of reminiscing as performed by the writer. Calhoun’s very act of writing a narrative––and an anachronistic and highly subjective one at that––in the previously unused logbook exposes the poor accountability provided by this purportedly objective document handled by only one person. To further emphasize the questionable nature of logbooks as documentation, Johnson gives to Rutherford Calhoun a mischievous narration, full of intellectual asides and lascivious anecdotes. Calhoun often sounds like a 1970’s theorist, throwing about terms like “displaced” and “decentered,” “Raw” and “Cooked” with the glancing pride of a graduate student eager to impress (142, 75). In addition to his narrator’s hyperbolically extensive reading in literary theory, Johnson also gives to Squibb the characteristic of a doubter of Darwin, claiming that the mysterious cargo “was the Missing Link between man and monkey,” thus setting his characters’ points of reference well beyond the two months in 1830 allotted for the logbook’s events (67). Just as Tituba’s alternate-literary-universe meeting with Hester Prynne makes a parody of the credibility of historical documents in Condé’s work, Rutherford’s anachronistic literary references show Johnson’s attempt to himself destabilize the textual artifacts of African slave trade, leaving behind an artifice so intentional as to forthrightly invert the accepted power dynamic of traditional document-makers.

In the rewriting historical documents as blatantly ahistorical first-person narratives, a genre of revisionist documentarians emerges from the works of Condé and Johnson, in which characters, visibly manipulated by their authors, claim the documents as their own, in an attempt to reclaim their documentation. Yet, in the ironic effort to reclaim a “disinherit[ing]” legal “heritage,” the authors sabotage their own narrators’ credibility in a sneer at the biased system which determines what is credible. While most African American literature remains rooted in legality (especially that of its protagonists), these authors present readers not with artifacts of legal historicity, but rather with anachronistic artifice. By rejecting the historical artifact to rewrite it as artifice, African American first-person narrators create questionable documents intended not to hold up in court, but rather to call into question the objectivity of all evidence, thus reframing each exhibit as an exercise in subjectivity. Since the courts historically refused to allow African American witnesses to testify Maryse Condé and Charles Johnson create first-person textual artifacts that could serve as physical evidence to be presented in court—subjective plays on those objectifying textual artifacts on which the court itself is based.