In a blog earlier this semester (for Sept. 22), I wrote of how Bigger, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son, pursues the “sense of wholeness” (Wright 240) he has been deprived as an African American male in 1930s Chicago, and of how Whitman’s enjoinder to “claim your own at any hazard” (from “Leaves of Grass (part 4),” 1867 edition of Leaves) assumes a white position of privilege from which Bigger’s “wholeness” might be claimed.  However, I still assumed that Whitman, with his driving postwar impulse to see his halved nation cohere, was really hoping for, as I put it, “a highly nationalized, comparatively race-leveling ‘collective identity’ that empowers and protects all Americans non-dichotomously (that is, without distinguishing South/North, white/black, etc.).”

            Morris suggests that these two threads, white privilege and the forging of an American identity, might not be separate or at all “contradictory.”  They could, in fact, point to the same goal.  “The Great Army of the Sick” refers to Whitman’s explicit, publicly asserted distaste for African Americans, as revealed in an excerpt Morris reprints from an 1858 Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorial.  “‘Who believes that Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America?” Whitman asks.  “Or wishes it to happen?  Nature has set an impassable seal against it.  Besides, is not America for the Whites?  And is it not better so?” (Morris 80).  When we think of Whitman calling for a consolidated national identity, we must consider how his abstractly limitless sense of “American” inclusion aims at eradicating one dichotomy, North/South, while permitting another, black/white, to proceed unchecked.  

Morris pointedly reminds us of these priorities, stating that Whitman “despised equally the abolitionists and the proslavery hotheads of the South whom he blamed—not without cause—for the fracture of the Union” (81).  That antipathy for abolitionism, as Morris suggests, closely corresponds to Whitman’s insistence that African Americans were inferior beings, that “I should not like to see a n****r in the saddle—it seems unnatural” (80).  Not in the saddle, and certainly not down his open road.  He reveals this outlook rather plainly in “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” from “Drum-Taps,” describing a “dusky woman” as “so ancient hardly human.”  That conception of the woman’s inhumanity couples appropriately with the speaker’s inability to understand her, his wondering “What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? / Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green? / Are the things so strange of marvelous you see or have seen?” (451-52).  The exotic, multicolored “turban” and the woman’s strangely animal tendency to “wag [her] head” combine to impress on us Whitman’s feeling that this woman, named simply “Ethiopia” in the title, was certainly not eligible for membership in his vast America.

Elsewhere in “Drum-Taps,” Whitman calls out to that America in terms that reveal how he conceives of the entire nation racially.  For example, “Race of Veterans”:

Race of veterans—race of victors!

Race of the soil, ready for conflict—race of the conquering march!

(No more credulity’s race, abiding-temper’d race,)

Race henceforth owning no law but the law of itself,

Race of passion and the storm.  (452)

Just as in the “Leaves of Grass (part 4)” passage I held up alongside Wright, Whitman’s speaker here assumes that his listeners enjoy the privilege of self-possession, that they are a “race henceforth owning no law but the law of itself.”  However, when examined in light of Whitman’s external assertion that “Whites and Blacks” can and should never truly “amalgamate” in America, this apostrophe does not seem to address a figurative “race” made up of all the variegated inhabitants of America, but a more literal “race” made up of those whites who participated as a people in the Civil War’s slaughter.  (Anyone’s guess what he made of the thousands of African Americans enlisted in and fighting for both armies.) 

The fact that Whitman’s speaker here calls out specifically to Union veterans, and not to the nation at large, does not limit his “race of victors” to that category, since his wide-scale enjoinders to a listening America begin similarly by invoking the country’s soldiers.  In “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” the speaker asserts that “Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious / …If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one.”  These “Sons” consist of Missourians, Carolinians, Floridians, etc., all “comrades” whose bond yields “The continuance of Equality” (449).  As a group, they begin in the same frame of reference, the “victorious” war, as the “race of veterans—race of victors.”  But by expanding that outlook to include all the states of the Union, and to characterize the men’s relationship as a stronghold of Equality, Whitman represents the entire national “race” within that group of war veterans.

            Would he have conceived of that nation as anything other than a white one?  His discussion in “Over the Carnage” of the process by which each state will join together in a single dominion of “Equality” clangs with obvious dissonance against his belief that “Nature has set an impassable seal against… Whites and Blacks… amalgamat[ing] in America.”  In this particular racial context, his hope that the country can come together as a single people means precisely that—and nothing more.

a parade moves through the streets of Fredericksburg, where George Washington walked and his mother Mary lived, where George Washington Whitman would have marched uphill (determined? afraid? moving between the staggering Union survivors in retreat?) and come back down (marching? dragging? on a stretcher?–exhausted, defeated, wounded, through the blood of thousands dead in a day);

my family and others march behind an election banner for our neighbor, the Commonwealth Attorney for the city: La Bravia Jenkins, an African American woman;

the cluster of African American friends, family, and supporters for La Bravia are the only people of color I see in the parade, which is a collection of children on decorated bikes, babies in strollers and wagons, the cow from Chik-fil-a, one clown;

my son walks in the parade wearing a paper George Washington mask and a tricorn hat, above his red-and-white Obama 2008 t-shirt, calling “Happy Independence Day!” to the people on the sidewalks;

I mull over the fact that the parade is called The Heritage Parade;

at the dunking booth for the Fredericksburg street festival, my son waits nearly an hour for the editor of the local paper to get in so he can pitch the balls and dunk him in chilly water for the conservative viewpoints he spouts from the editorial page;

at Montpelier, the home of James Madison, Architect of the Constitution, which sits about 50 minutes south of Fredericksburg and was used for a winter encampment of Confederate soldiers in 1863 when Whitman was two hours north in DC, we read about Madison’s death in the words of his literate “man-servant,” who reports that just before he died, Madison told his niece it was “nothing but a change of mind”;

in the basement of the home, the cellars, storage rooms to which Dolley Madison kept the keys, and indoor kitchens, which are not on the guided tour, we see the first names of 120 slaves written in cursive letters on transparent plastic informational signs throughout the rooms, their ghostly naming floating behind facts and dates;

we read that one of Madison’s slaves accompanied him to Philadelphia, where he listened to Madison, a man always well prepared for his debates, defend freedom and basic rights for all human beings and then challenged his master about slavery; Madison admired his thinking and could not deny his point, so he wrote to his father that the slave would not be fit for plantation life again and might incite unrest among the other slaves; after the Congress he was sold in Pennsylvania, a state where he might earn his freedom after seven years of servitude;

we find that one of Madison’s oldest and longest serving slaves was named Moses; my partner says, “Ironic”;

we cross wet grass barefoot to see some headstones partially hidden by trees, and find they are for race horses because the Montpelier estate houses a stable for retired thoroughbred racers, which was established by the enormously wealthy DuPont family that purchased the house and land several years after Dolley’s death in poverty;

the slave cemetary we walk to has no headstones at all, just indentations in the earth where the soil has given way to rotting coffins– about five visible though there must be 100; the sign shows a photo of the indentations filled with snow, which increases their visibility;

we see that Dolley Madison lived long enough to be photographed, her likeness hanging next to her husband’s oil painting in a small gallery;

a fraction of a letter handwritten by Madison is also on display, having been found by historic preservationists in a mouse nest inside the walls of Montpelier in the last ten years and later authenticated by experts.

History/heritage/legacy/preservation/tradition.  Race.  Economy.  Politics.  War.  Literacy/language.  My Whitman Catalogue for Independence Day.

The threads, at a minimum:  freedom and limitation/slavery/imprisonment, inspiration, poverty,  inventive language and necessary communications, race, hope and despair, the American Dream, future of the nation, the city, war/violence. . .

This will have me thinking for a long time.

Whitman House in center