"As If I Had Entered a Paradise": Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Border Literary History

I then made up my mind that salt and potatoes in Canada, were better than pound-cake and chickens in a state of suspense and anxiety in the United States.--Reverend Alexander Hemsley, Fugitive slave from St. Catherine's, Upper Canada They thought that I might yet get to Canada, and be free, and suggested a plan by which I might accomplish it; and one way was, to learn to read and write, so that I might write my self a ticket, to go just where I pleased, when I was taken out of the prison; and they taught me secretly all that they could while in the prison.--Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures (1849) One Shall Pass: Reconfiguring Conceptions of Passing and the Color Line This is not a story to (275). Thus concludes Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, a statement that proves to be something of a double ecriture, an utterance with a shadow, or we might justifiably say, a ghost. It suggests the ineffability of the slave's experience and the innate difficulties of assessing the psychic toll on the subject by means of a straightforward, referential language. The imperatives of pausing, reflecting, and grappling with the manacles of traumatic memory remain constant preoccupations. At the core of the sentence lies the issue of narrative representation (story/histoire/history) and its attendant, ambiguous verb of reception, on. To foreshadows the transmission of these events to a latent audience, one who may alternatively pass on (that is, ignore, forget, repudiate, or distort) such a vital historical and literary inheritance. By logical sequence, what should be passed on to posterity instead passes away; it is a ritual of memory foreclosed, an offering refused, and a duty shunned. The recurrence of the ghost, an archetypal figure of incompletion, implies that a self-perpetuating covenant between the living and the dead has been left in limbo. Thus, to signifies movement at the same time that it signifies stasis, and gestures to a leave-taking that refuses, with a perverse but apocalyptic momentum, ever to arrive completely. What relevance does this contradictory episteme of passing--passing on, passing by, passing through, passing over, passing away--have in a discussion of the interplay between African American and African Canadian literary histories? Perhaps at the most intuitive level, passing evokes a sense of inertia, unsettledness, and expectation. One of the most obvious denotations of pass is as a verb that gauges a subject's ability to adopt and function under the guise of another racial, class, gender, or sexual identity. (1) The first category, racial passing, plays a foundational role within the African American canon, given its emergence and frequency in such pivotal works as Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (published in 1857, one of the earliest products of the novelistic tradition alongside William Wells Brown's Clotel, Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave, and Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig), Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (an effort that combines a template of chivalric romance with the tragic mulatta motif), James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (a landmark installment from the transitional era that Chesnutt coined Post-bellum--Pre-Harlem [Brodhead 1]), and Nella Larsen's Passing (a novel lately revitalized by strategic interventions into the cruces of sexualized race and racialized sexuality). (2) As these texts, among others, demonstrate, choosing to required more than just mimetic or mechanical maneuvering and clever equivocation. A state of ontological suspension, passing demanded the subject's immersion in an environment of precarious self-censorship, continuous surveillance, and highly asymmetrical relations of power. One instance of carelessness could easily cause the already insecure base of racial and class identification to buckle and collapse. …

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