Vol. 11 No. 5 (May 2001) pp. 239-242.

WHISPERED CONSOLATIONS: LAW AND NARRATIVE IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFE by Jon-Christian Suggs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 401 pp. Cloth $67.50. ISBN: 0-472-10651-1.

Reviewed by Martha Merrill Umphrey, Department of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought, Amherst College.

Those of us who attend to the relation between law and politically subjugated groups often find ourselves tracing the shadows of an absent presence. The dilemma we face is, of course, that the very laws and legal processes doing the subjugating constitute the main body of our historical evidence. If we are interested, in particular, in exploring the kinds of legal consciousness produced in the dynamic between law and legal subject, then the dilemma is even starker. How can we produce any meaningful insights into legal consciousness when American law has historically disabled the members of some groups--women, people of color, new immigrants--from even speaking before a court, or voting for a legislator, or sitting on a jury? Where should we begin to look for the stories members of those groups might tell about the regimes of power that conspire to silence them?

Jon-Christian Suggs' provocative response to this predicament as African-Americans have faced it is to turn to a history of literary texts whose central preoccupation is the relation between law and the articulation of identity. Suggs--a professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York--has produced an important and creative study of a distinctively African-American legal consciousness that should be of real interest to scholars and teachers of legal and constitutional history as well as to those more directly interested in the field of law and literature, particularly in relation to the politics of identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States.

Suggs' lyrical title, WHISPERED CONSOLATIONS, comes from the 1894 writings of a woman named Mrs. N. F. Mossell, who lends the book its opening epigram. "As a rule," she writes, "a race writes its history in its laws and in its records. Not so the Afro-American: he could make no law; deprived of the opportunity to write, he could leave no written word; he could only protest against the injustice of his oppressors in his heart, in his song, and in his whispered consolations to the suffering and dying." As Suggs suggests in his theoretical introduction, those whispered consolations may be found and recovered in the writings of African American intellectuals and artists, and they constitute a significant body of work both constituted by and commenting upon (or "signifying," a term Suggs borrows from the writings of literary critic Henry Louis Gates' book THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY 1988) the heavy pressure law has exerted in the lives of African Americans from the era of the Civil War through World War Two and into the present.

The literary works of African Americans, Suggs argues, were profoundly

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bound up with the legal predicaments they faced as non-citizens, and then new citizens, of the United States. Indeed as Suggs' sees it, "The law's ability to shape-its historical force as the sole yet ever elusive determinant of African American social identity-presets the narrative base for all African American fiction" (p. 9). Suggs carefully documents the centrality of law in the articulation of identity in texts ranging from slave narratives of the pre-Civil War era and political tracts of late nineteenth-century activists through some of the most important writings emerging out of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the great novels of the mid- to late-twentieth century (e.g., Richard Wright's NATIVE SON, Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN, Toni Morrison's BELOVED). Some of the lesser known works bristle with historical and political insight, and after Suggs' convincing readings the more well-known texts ought to be included as core works in law and literature classes, and as rich examples in legal history and theory classes of law's power and workings in everyday life.

Suggs argues that these writings, taken together, constitute a "counternarrative" to the totalizing and intentionally dispossessing stories told about African-Americans by whites in statutes, cases, and the justificatory rhetoric of politics. The fabric of Suggs' argument is complex and sometimes mercurial, and best understood as conceived in essentially two parts that together map the historical trajectory of the relation between African-American literature and American law. The first part, following a general introduction, consists of three chapters devoted to what Suggs describes as an era of "post-property" narratives, written largely by an emerging African-American bourgeoisie in the years between Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. In that era, Suggs argues, whites imagined themselves as Romantic selves, "authentic" (spontaneous and responsive) and "ironic" (capable of self-knowledge and reflection, rather than existing in a state of untutored innocence). Yet, whites used law--the laws of slavery, of course, but also of Jim Crow and of the many quasi-legal social customs of the post-Reconstruction era--to deny to African Americans the capacity to act as Romantic subjects and full, self-possessing persons. African Americans wrote literary texts that struggled with these legal measures, which, Suggs suggests, were intended to suppress and delegitimate not just the people themselves, but their very desire for subjecthood-that is, for a sense of humanity and a place as citizens in a post-slavery democracy.

If whites in the post-Reconstruction era continued to insist on a thin, pre-Civil War conception of the humanity of African Americans, African Americans responded by imagining themselves as supremely authentic and ironic subjects: respectable in their domesticity, genteel in their manners, and heroically disciplined in the face of a confounding world of self-serving, sometimes vicious whites. The conventions of this post-property narrative shifted, argues Suggs in the book's second half, as African Americans escaped the repressive South for the urban landscape of the North in the early twentieth century. Around the turn of the century, African American writers began to develop what Suggs calls "post-authenticity" narratives that challenged romantic notions of identity and moved away from the relatively genteel dramas of the late nineteenth century and toward direct confrontation with the ways in which law criminalized the everyday lives and desires of African Americans. Many of these "post-authenticity" texts confront the

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horrors of lynching and the strictures of racial segregation with realist narrative techniques, exploring the problematics and possibilities of African American desire as they were expressed outside the law, and outside the boundaries of bourgeois respectability. In them "black" characters pass as "white." They play the trickster. They travel and act in ways that reveal the law as always already unjust (like Wright's Bigger Thomas) or abjure the world that has refused to recognize them (like Ellison's Invisible Man).

Though he does not use the term, the literary texts Suggs analyzes offer a fascinating window into the legal consciousness of African Americans, and his history offers an insightful and sometimes surprising gloss on a the usual-white-narrative of race relations as it emerges from traditional legal texts. Take, for example, the idea of "social equality." Anyone who has read PLESSY v. FERGUSON understands that idea to be a specter haunting the imagination of whites, who managed with a magical logic to separate the concept of "legal equality" from its (to them) horrifying and impossible counterpart "social equality" in order to justify Jim Crow laws. However, Suggs suggests that the rhetoric of social equality was relatively absent from the writings African Americans, who were at the time much more preoccupied with the everyday traumas and spectacular tragedies associated with forced encounters with whites. Their subject was the cruelty of whites, and their desire was to transcend-or at least avoid-it, not emulate it.

Suggs does not always carry through as far as he might with these kinds of tantalizing insights. (He could, for example, have expanded this very interesting analysis with a reading of the remarkable battle royal scene early in Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN [1947] when the novel's narrator recounts the theater of cruelty that forces a slip of his tongue as he accidentally substitutes "social equality" for "social responsibility" while giving his valedictory speech, bloodied and almost naked, before a gathering of white men.) In general, a tighter definitional and organizational structure would have filled out his theoretical claims more fully. His analysis would also profit from a clearer and more detailed sense of the ways whites conceived of the Romantic hero, not because the book needs to become yet another consideration of white authors, but because Suggs' vagueness here leaves undeveloped his claims about the "signifying" nature of African-American writing. To what extent were the motivations and self-imaginings of African- American heroes distinct from the heroics of characters in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, or Owen Wister? What, more precisely, is the imagined relation between the legal subject and the romantic hero as between white and African-American authors?

Similarly, I found Suggs' conception of law somewhat too impressionistic to sustain any strong historical claims about the relationship between legal and fictional narratives concerning African- American subjectivity. The analysis Suggs offers from some of the cases he cites, for example, would benefit from the same kind of careful, engaged close readings he gives to literary texts. Also, the book moves perhaps too seamlessly between pre- and post-Civil War legal regimes, among different kinds and strata of legal and quasi-legal regulation and prohibition, and between South and North in the early 20th century, to develop a textured sense of the connections between particular continuities and shifts in law and in African-American literature.

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Nonetheless, Suggs argues convincingly that one can trace a history of African-American legal consciousness through a history of imaginative texts- texts written both about and over the law, commenting upon and judging in fiction what could not be judged and reformed on its own terrain. Fittingly, Suggs concludes his survey of "classical" African-American literature with an epilogue that assimilates the scholarship of Derrick Bell and Patricia Williams to this history of literary signifying on the law. The work of these two legal scholars exemplifies the ways in which, as Suggs argues, "narratives of law and African American life are inextricably bound up in one another" (p. 323) even as the tension between the legal and literary renderings of African-American subjectivity reveals a fault line of epistemological depth, not yet fully reconciled in the politics of the post- Brown era.

REFERENCES:

Henry Louis Gates. 1988. THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY: A THEORY OF AFRO-AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ralph Ellison. 1947. THE INVISIBLE MAN. New York: Random House.