On March 14, 1862, Federal forces captured the inlet port city of New Bern, North Carolina, which they would hold through the rest of the Civil War. Slaves soon gathered behind Union lines; local white landholders fled; and a chaplain in one of the Massachusetts regiments occupying the city, a man named Horace James, undertook to organize the “contraband,” as the dislocated slaves were then called (as we saw in the foregoing chapter). He arranged for them to settle along the Trent River on plots of abandoned land. To honor their benefactor, the now-freed slaves named their settlement James City. The freedmen prospered and, according to James, by 1865 most of them had laid up considerable property, in the form of livestock, carts, and the like, and a number had succeeded as merchants. And there they lived for twenty-eight years until, in 1893, Governor Elias Carr dispatched a regiment of the First North Carolina Militia to evict the men and women of James City. Title to the land had long been in dispute in the courts—that is, until a decision was made, in 1891, to transfer the land to its antebellum owners so as to make enforceable certain deeds possessed by the white family who had, at the end of a long series of exchanges, most recently purchased the “bad paper”—as the merchants of debt now call it—from them (or rather, from their successors). In 1893, when the eviction orders were put into effect, the black men of James City had no choice but to sign three-year leases to work the land they had owned, or so they believed, for thirty years (quite as if they'd been victims of sub-prime mortgages and predatory lenders). They had nowhere to turn. They had had a taste of an America made real, but soon enough the “swarthy specter” of slavery took “its accustomed seat” at the nation's post-Reconstruction feast (Souls 366). America was again what Du Bois said it had always been: an “armed camp for [the intimidation of] black folks,” and for the abuse of their labor (Souls 436).

Words and Weapons

It all began with a fi re: the one Richard Wright himself set when he was four years old. He had wondered, he tells us at the start of his autobiography, Black Boy (American Hunger), “just how the long fluff y white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of straws and held it under them” (5). They looked splendid; it is a wonder no one was killed. As it turned out, the little boy Wright still was at the time came closer to death than anyone, and not from the fi re itself, but from the beating his mother gave him in the aft ermath. “I was lashed so hard and long that I lost consciousness,” he recalls. For years he was “chastened,” as he puts it, when he remembered that his mother “had come close to killing” him (8–9).

At about that time, his father abandoned the family, and Wright, the oldest child, underwent an ordeal of initiation. When some local Memphis boys beat him and stole the money his mother sent with him to market, she simply gave him more money, a heavy stick, and then locked him out of the house: “I am going to teach you this night to stand up and fight for yourself,” she said. And so he went back out, paralyzed with fear: “I was alone upon the dark, hostile streets and gangs were after me. I had the choice of being beaten at home or away from home.” When the gang set upon him, he “let the stick fl y, feeling it crack against a boy's skull,” lashing out again and again. His fury horrified the boys. “They had never seen such frenzy” (18–19). There were many more beatings, but now they only came from Wright's guardians: his mother, his grandmother, his grandfather.

There were mystifying events, too, as when the young boy awoke once to a commotion in the next room: his aunt's lover had stolen money from a woman—Wright never learned exactly who—knocked her unconscious and set her house ablaze.

We can learn something about the naive artist,” Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, “through the analogy of dream. We can imagine the dreamer as he calls out to himself, still caught in the illusion of his dream and without disturbing it, ‘This is a dream, and I want to go on dreaming,’ and we can infer, on the one hand, that he takes deep delight in the contemplation of his dream, and, on the other, that he must have forgotten the day, with its horrible importunity, so to enjoy his dream” (32). Its Dionysian ecstasies notwithstanding, Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) belongs to the tradition of Apollonian art that Nietzsche conceives of here: an art of willful illusion sustained against the encroachments (as Nietzsche later puts it) of “a whole world of torment” (33). Kerouac's is the work of forgetting (as is Stephen Crane's, in its differing ways). But what intrigues me are precisely the residues of memory, the shaft s of daylight, that trouble this dreamer's sleep.

I am interested in whether or not On the Road finally believes, and in what sense it believes, in the mythology of America on which it depends— whether or not, by Kerouac's lights, the America he gives us forthrightly remains an imaginary realm. At times Kerouac seems directly to question the faith his narrator Sal Paradise has in all Dean Moriarty comes to represent: a peculiarly intense and charismatic masculinity, a vital relation to the body, cultural and spiritual authenticity, the promise of America itself. On the Road achieves, it may be, a certain distance from its own enabling myths, quite as if it were holding them up for scrutiny even as it plays them out. This has the effect of putting us and the novel itself in a strangely abstract relation to its ideological basis, which is why the problem of faith is crucial. On the Road constantly tests the limits of its own creed, but refuses, oft en poignantly, to abandon it. Kerouac's road novel outruns its own horizon and at the same time always fails to achieve escape velocity.

The Civil War Begins Again

In 1872, Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, was elected to his second term as President of the United States. That year marked the height of the Radical Reconstruction of the South. The Republican Party controlled state legislatures and statehouses in many of what, for a few years back in the early 1860s, had called itself the Confederate States of America. Black voters were registered in the South in numbers never to be seen again until the 1960s. African Americans there held public office at nearly all levels of government, from City Hall to the Senate of the United States. Here, W. E. B. Du Bois would later maintain in Black Reconstruction (1935), were the first steps toward a radical labor-democracy ever taken in the New World, or, for that matter, anyplace in the world where white folk and people of color lived together. In 1870 in South Carolina, for example, blacks were elected to the statewide posts of lieutenant governor and attorney general; and of 155 seats in the legislature, 96 would now be filled by former slaves, or by men who shared their complexion. Reactionaries, together with the academic historians who lent their views a mantle of respectability, later attributed this to corruption in the Republican “carpetbag” regime of governor Daniel H. Chamberlain, as if there simply could be no other explanation. But sixty-percent of the South Carolina population was African American in 1872 (the majority was larger still in the lowland counties); the Democratic Party had never been any friend of the slave; the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution had enfranchised African American men; and they voted—to fund public schools and redistribute land (among other things hated by the planter class). This was a time and a place when the logic of the following exchange—made during the investigation of Ku Klux Klan terrorism ordered by President Grant—made a certain kind of sense: “Question. Is he a white man? Answer. No, sir. His father is a senator.”

This book proceeds from two premises. The first I phrase with a nod to Marianne Moore: America is an imaginary place with real people living in it. Such splendid ideals, and yet so oft en such sordid realities. My second premise is that slavery and its legacies explain why America should remain so imaginary a place. Both premises assume that slavery and, after it fell, white supremacy generally, were—and to a marked degree remain— essential to American capitalism, which requires, insofar as it can be secured, cheap, unorganized labor. I concur with David Roediger's suggestion in Class, Race and Marxism (2017) that “the production of racial … differences is itself part of the logic of capital” (7). I take as granted W. E. B. Du Bois's observation in Black Reconstruction (1935): “It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South which overthrew Reconstruction [1876–90] was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation. The wage of the Negro worker, despite the war amendments, was to be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste, and every method of discrimination. This program had to be carried out in open defiance of the clear letter of the law”(670)—and therefore entailed an imposture that kept our national promise illusory. Or to put the matter in the cooler phrasing of social psychologists Michael W. Kraus, Julian M. Rucker, and Jennifer A. Richeson in their 2017 study: “Race-based economic inequality is both a defining and persistent feature of the United States that is at odds with national narratives regarding progress toward racial equality…. Americans, on average, systematically overestimate the extent to which society has progressed toward racial economic equality, driven largely by overestimates of current racial equality….[Our] findings suggest a profound misperception of and misplaced optimism regarding contemporary societal racial economic equality—a misperception that is likely to have important consequences for public policy” (my emphases). Most Americans, in a word, do not know the nation they inhabit.

Crane, the Civil War, and the 1890s

Ireprise at the head of this chapter a phrase quoted not very many pages back: I aim here to trace the happy-go-lucky moods of Stephen Crane's fiction to the national distemper so well diagnosed, as we have just seen, by Du Bois. The two authors are of an age, after all, and Crane's remarkable novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) alerts us—as does The Souls of Black Folk—to what Du Bois calls the rapid passing away, in the 1890s, of the “ideals” for which the American Civil War had been waged, by the best of Radical Republicans anyway (Souls 392). He means, simply, the ideals of widening democracy and of emancipation: in short, the new birth of freedom of which Lincoln spoke in 1863, and for which men like Robert Gould Shaw, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and a host of other “Radicals” (and thousands of black soldiers) believed themselves to be fighting and dying. Du Bois and Crane register this passing away of war “ideals” in utterly different keys. The one is angry, elegiac, disturbed, indignant. The other is cool, irreverent, detached, whimsical, ironic. Du Bois would impress upon us the heroism of the men who fought, or who thought of themselves as fighting, for the better angels of our nature (in such books as Black Reconstruction [1935]). Crane satirizes heroism and courage, quarantines them in quotation marks. He seems highly skeptical that such things actually motivate men. The war, as we know it in his pages, has nothing to do with principles. Alfred Kazin gets Crane about right in On Native Grounds (1995): “The surest thing one can say about Crane is that he did not care which way the world went. No one was ever less the reforming mind” (68). And the surest thing one can say about Du Bois is that he did and was.

In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin suggests that “the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind” (Essays 342). The idea is that “intercultural” oppression and “intrapsychic” repression are complementary disorders. In “The White Negro,” Mailer, like his friend Baldwin, sets about to dismantle these twin structures of racist and psychic repressions—white over black, conscious over unconscious. He does so in a dual maneuver: he asserts the primacy of the historically or morally subordinate terms and then abolishes subordination altogether. And “The White Negro” helps us see how the racial politics of On the Road are perhaps more progressive than at first they seem. “The nihilism of Hip,” Mailer says, “proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself “ (Advertisements 319). The revolution Mailer describes would take aim against all prohibitions having to do with sex and race. And his remarks suggest that the blackface tradition of the “white negro” is by no means without insubordinate implications. Mailer's essay brings to a fiercer, much more troubling pitch the argument with white Christianity that Stevens has in “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (which remains the utterance of an aesthete and insurance man, not a rebel). What follows The Revolution is total affirmation of Life, to use Mailer's Lawrentian term for it: “disaffected flagellants,” smacking their muzzy bellies in parade.

Mailer believed (maybe only provocatively) that a sexual revolution would reverse the savage turn the West took in the first five decades of the twentieth century. For him, psychic repression, racist repression, and military-industrial rapacity were three aspects of the same pathology: they all added up to The Bomb.

Cotton Thread Is the Union

Emerson had, in 1844, much warrant for his sour observation that ‘Cotton thread holds the union together. Patriotism is for holidays & summer evenings with music and rockets,’ he says, ‘but cotton thread is the union’ (Journals 356). This is, of course, an observation about slavery. The black slave was the instrument white men used to make the cotton thread that bound the union to their interests. Love of money, not of country, lay at the bottom of it. Music, rockets, holidays, and summer evenings: there is patriotism, and there is the power to which patriotism gives cover. Frederick Douglass had that power in mind when, in Rochester, New York, he took the stage one bunting-bedecked July evening in 1852, eight years after Emerson set down his remark about cotton: ‘What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?’ he asked an audience of white abolitionists. ‘A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.’