Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:55:51.361Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Troubled Black Humanity in The Souls of Black Folk

from PART THREE - CASE STUDIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Donald Pizer
Affiliation:
Tulane University, Louisiana
Get access

Summary

'Once I thought my grandfather incapable of thoughts about humanity, but I was wrong. Why should an old slave use such a phrase as, “This and this or this has made me more human,” as I did in my arena speech? Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity - that was left to his “free” offspring. He accepted his humanity.' (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man) These ruminations by the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are paradoxical. Chattel slavery in the United States was a system calculated to impress on black and white alike the inferiority and brutishness of black people, and yet in the memory of Ellison's narrator, his enslaved grandfather could emerge as more human than a young, intelligent black man of the twentieth century. Certainly it is true that the horrors of slavery were not felt uniformly and unceasingly by the enslaved, and that black resistance to the physical and psychological dimensions of bondage was endemic. In the words of Lawrence Levine, “Slave music, slave religion, slave folk beliefs - the entire sacred world of the black slaves - created the necessary space between the slaves and their owners and were the means of preventing legal slavery from becoming spiritual slavery” (80). But however effectively blacks managed to nurture their sense of humanity while in bondage, it seems curious that these same people and their descendants would experience that humanity more tenuously under freedom than they had under slavery.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×