Speaking of Race and
Words, Signs and Self
in the Works of Henry Louis Gates, Jr
By S. Bailey Shurbutt
A Double Voice
If the "double voice" is the key, according to Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., to understanding African American literature, it is, without
doubt, central to the originality and unparalleled success of Gates' own
scholarship and writing. Both a literary critic and a journalist, a
scholar and a cultural commentator, Gates has that extraordinary ability to
speak about the African American experience both from inside and outside his
culture. His "double voice" is not so
much in the literary sense of what he refers to as "signifyin(g)" but rather in
his singular and uncanny ability to walk gracefully in both the white and the black
worlds. A few extraordinary individuals—for
example, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton—possess this
ability to move seamlessly among the two cultures, to possess such a universal
point of view that they transcend their racial selves, surpassing, in the
process, the great racial divide that still stands formidable in contemporary
American life.
This ability of Gates is something akin to what
Victorians referred to as "disinterestedness," which is to say "possessing an objective rather than an uninterested point of view"—for Gates is
profoundly interested in the racial divide.
Explaining his theory of criticism in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the 'Racial' Self, he notes
that to create his system of reading African American texts he had "to step
outside [his] culture, to defamiliarize the concept by translating it into a
new mode of discourse, before [he] could see its potential in critical theory"
(236). All of Gates' writing has, in one
way or another, been aimed at diminishing the color line, as well as
rediscovering lost African American writers and providing a point of reference
and system of tropes and symbols to explain and explicate African American
texts, veiled as they often are in the language of indirection and
subtext. Thus Gates' writing is aimed
both at lifting that veil and at assaulting literary and popular cultural myths
that separate and marginalize African Americans and that feed the racial
divide.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a native of
Among Gates' influential books are Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the
"Racial" Self (1987), The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (American Book Award
winner 1989), Loose Canons: Notes on the
Culture Wars (1992), Colored People:
A Memoir (1994), Truth or
Consequences: Putting Limits on Limits (1994), The Future of the Race (1996), and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997). Gates' anthology editions include The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature (1996) and The
Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (1991). Gates graduated suma cum laude from
Growing Up "Colored" in
Gates has said about his hometown
The story of Gates' coming of age in the mountains
of Appalachia and the close-knit African American community of Piedmont is
detailed in his award-winning memoir Colored
People, a book that serves as a remarkable chronicle for a remarkable
period of American history—the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, a time
of transition from an officially segregated to an integrated America. Colored
People provides a unique perspective from many other social histories and
memoirs of this period. Joyce Carol
Oates has written that the book is an "eloquent document to set beside the
grittier contemporary testimonies . . .
in essence a work of filial gratitude, paying homage to such virtues as
courage, loyalty, integrity, kindness" (qtd. in "Henry Louis Gates, Jr."
3).
In Colored
People, Gates explores the interplay between past and present, utilizing
Most important, Colored
People is a book about "naming"—how we name and rename, vision and revision
ourselves, in this case from "colored" to "Negro" to "black," with all the
associative social and cultural responses that accompany such appellations (Colored People 201). Gates tells a wonderful story in "What's in a
Name," an essay in the Loose Canons
collection, about going to the Cut-Rate Drug Store with his father as a boy and
being perplexed when Mr. Wilson, Irish as many whites in the town were, walked
by and responded to Gates' father's hello with "Hello, George." Skip looked up at his dad and said with some
perplexity, "Your name isn't George."
Henry Louis Sr. quietly told his son after a "long silence": "He calls all colored people George." Gates notes, "I never again looked Mr. Wilson
in the eye" (132).
In any bildungsroman
or "coming of age" story, the juxtaposition between time present and past
becomes singularly important. For Gates,
time lies at the heart of his story. He
begins Colored People in time
present, with a vignette about his daughter Liza, whose privileged life makes
it difficult to understand or to empathize with the struggles of her
grandparents. Gates writes: "No, my
children will never know
In an interview with Brian Lamb, Gates makes it
clear that he wrote Colored People as
a tribute to his parents, as he says "a portrait of my mother, but in my
father's voice" (7). Gates' parents represent
the diversity within the African American community and the emerging Black
middle class that he has written so eloquently about. His mother's family, the Colemans, who lived
in
Whenever one of my uncles would speak to a white
person, his head would bow, his eyes would widen, and the smile he would force
on his lips said: I won't hurt you, boss, an' I'm your faithful friend. . . .
he assumed the same position with his head and his body when he was telling a
lie. (150-151)
This mask or "veil" is one of the dominant images that Gates explores in
both his criticism and memoir writing. In
The African American Century: How Black
Americans Have Shaped Our Country, Gates explains the "veil" as the
"curtain separating black and white life" (5).
In his introduction of America
Behind the Color Lines, Gates illustrates the idea by observing: "It has
long struck me as curious that African Americans often speak differently—more
colorfully and openly—when talking with each other behind closed doors, as it
were, than they do in interracial settings; more spontaneous, say, in
barbershops and beauty parlors, in church socials and their living rooms . . .
. [They] conducted their lives in
Unlike her brothers, however, Pauline Coleman was
both suspicious and fearless of white people.
Her experiences with cleaning the houses of white folks and with the
meanness and condescension of whites had engendered downright hatred. Gates writes of an incident when his mother
was watching a CBS documentary about black Muslims called The Hate that Hate Produced, and as Mike Wallace spoke about the
fierceness of Malcolm X, Skip noted a "certain radiance" slowly spreading
across his mother's "soft brown face, as she listened to Malcolm X naming the
white man the Devil. 'Amen,' she said,
quietly at first" (34). The child was
astounded by the change he perceived in his mother's face: "It was like
watching the Wicked Witch of the West emerge out of the transforming features
of Dorothy. The revelation was both
terrifying and thrilling" (34). Yet
Pauline Coleman Gates had found within herself a reservoir of dignity that made
her a leader in the community, among both blacks and whites. It was she who was elected the first black
president of the PTA, it was she who stood eloquently before black and white
parents and read the PTA minutes with perfect diction that sounded to her son
like poetry, and it was she who functioned in the black community of Piedmont,
in some sense, as the traditional "elocutionist," someone, as Gates describes
in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black
Man, who inspired Black lives,
delivered "uplifting homilies," and recited the "race poetry" (xxiv). It was also Pauline who accepted and defended
her son's various rebellious acts and social activism, who insisted that both
sons aim for the highest goals they could comfortably achieve and then work
hard to accomplish them. Gates recalled
one of his white teachers reprimanding him once when he referred to his mother
simply as "she." "Your mother is a lady, a real lady. What is wrong with you?" the teacher scolded
(93).
The Gates' family, from the
One of the fascinating things about Gates' memoir is
his candid discussion of the importance of skin color and hair texture in the
African American community, in the days before integration. In the insular, segregated black community,
folks are evaluated according to the degree of their hair's "nappiness" and the
lightness of their skin tone. Gates
writes casually of the African American assessment of the Methodist preacher,
Reverend Monroe, whom he describes as "a nice guy, medium-brown-skinned, with a
not-bad grade of hair" (116). Likewise,
the favorite TV shows of the African American community would not be today
considered "politically correct." Leave It to Beaver and Amos and Andy were community
favorites. While Beaver's world
fulfilled economic dreams of African Americans, Amos and Andy gave them familiar faces. Gates writes: "Beaver's street was where we wanted
to live, Beaver's house where we wanted to eat and sleep, Beaver's father's
firm where we'd have liked Daddy to work.
These shows for us were about property, the property that white people
could own and that we couldn't" (21).
Gates notes as well that Amos and
Andy was viewed differently by African Americans from the negative
stereotyping and racial caricature with which it is labeled with today. He writes: "I don't care what people say
today. For the colored people, the day
they took Amos and Andy off the air
was one of the saddest days in Piedmont, about as sad as the day of the last [segregated]
mill pic-a-nic. . . . What was special to us about Amos and Andy was that their world was all colored, just like ours"
(22). What further was special, in a similar
respect to the slave folk tales epitomized in the "politically incorrect"
series of Uncle Remus stories, was the political subversion and trickster
aspects of some of the Amos and Andy characters
and situations. Just as Joel Chandler
Harris, who recorded the tales, could little comprehend the political subtext
and subversive scope of the slave stories, the white people involved in the
production of the Amos and Andy
episodes and the white audience that watched the series with superior self-satisfaction
were blithely unaware of what the episodes often said to African American
audiences.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the "colored"
part of Piedmont was the closeness of the African American community or
"village," as Gates sometimes refers to it, a community that represented both positive
(support and sense of belonging) and negative (gossip and judgmental attitudes)
traits. For African American families,
the barbershop, the kitchen, the Church, and the schoolhouse were the heart of
the community. Each environment brought
a different sense of cohesiveness and belonging. The barbershop and beauty parlor were places
that signified coming of age, particularly in sexual terms. Gates recalled his own youthful "initiation" in
the barbershop, the stories of affairs and titillating gossip. "Not getting a sugar bowl haircut" he writes,
however, "was even more important than graduating from Ebony and Jet to Penthouse and Playboy" (175).
On the other hand, the kitchen was the center of
African American home life, the heart of the home because it was the woman's
domain and she was the center of family life and utterly essential to her children. The kitchen, which sometimes served as a
make-shift beauty parlor, and the food imagined and created there were thoroughly
African. Gates writes: "If there ever
was one part of our African past that resisted assimilation, it was the
kitchen. No matter how hot the iron, no
matter how powerful the chemical, . . . neither God nor woman nor Sammy Davis,
Jr., could straighten the kitchen. The
kitchen was permanent, irredeemable, invincible kink. Unassimilably African" (42). The Church, on the other hand, was central to
the socialization of African Americans, as well as historically important in
the struggle for civil rights. Children
in Gates' youth were brought up in the church and were expected to abide by the
values and ideals espoused there, though like every other aspect of "colored"
life, there was diversity and variety within that institution. For example, Skip Gates started out in the
more conservative, evangelical church of his grandmother and moved to the more
staid Methodist church of his father's family.
However, when his mother died, he longed for the more emotional,
evangelical send-off that he recalled from his earlier church days.
Education for the generation of Henry Louis Gates'
parents was everything—the irrefutable panacea, the ticket to affluence and
success. Both of their sons were primed
for absorbing the opportunities that education provided. Because integration came to
Ours is a . . . world profoundly fissured by
nationality, ethnicity, race, class and gender.
And the only way to transcend those divisions—to forge, for once, a
civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities—is through
education that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture. Beyond the hype and the high-flown rhetoric
is a pretty homely truth: There is no tolerance without respect—and no respect
without knowledge. (Loose Canons xv)
The process of "moving away" from
The journey to "Elsewhere," changed Skip Gates' life
in a number of ways. He had thought, as
most young blacks venturing off to those elite white institutions of higher
learning, that he would study science and become a doctor, that he would assume
the position among his people as what W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as the
"Talented Tenth." He studied instead literature
and became another sort of "physician." Early
on, he understood, first intuitively and then intellectually, that language and
literature shape reality, that the power of the word is prominent and tangible
in the myths and images it creates, the stereotypes it engenders, and the
"realities" it manifests. The
eighteenth-century "enlightened" philosophers, who figured into Gates' Ph.D.
dissertation, posited that the dearth of "literary and artistic traditions"
among African peoples denoted a lesser stage of "civilized" accomplishment,
thus providing the rationale for slavery.
However, as "dearth" might be interpreted as "different" or, more
likely, as being "omitted from" the accepted European patriarchal canon, so too
might our assessments of African American writing require some re-thinking. Gates would go on to provide in his scholarship
the "revisioning" of those dated, uninformed, and shallow judgments about black
art and literature, and to rediscover lost or ignored works that reveal the
soul and mind of African America. In
this respect, his journey to Elsewhere, has been perhaps more fruitful for his
people and for the American racial and intellectual landscape than being
another sort of doctor.
Moving On to "Elsewhere," A Scholar Is Born: Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey
Skip Gates' brave new world began with the singular
experience for an African American youth in the early 1970s of attending
Gates' first major discovery in 1983 was the Harriet
Wilson novel Our Nig, at that time
given the distinction as the first novel published in this country by a black
person (1859). Gates has gone on to
exhume and reclaim other forgotten works, including those gleaned from black
periodical literature and a handwritten manuscript that is likely the first
novel written by a slave: The
Bondswoman's Narrative, by Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped
from
The second extraordinary accomplishment of Gates is
his attempt to provide a critical framework for evaluating, defining, and
explicating works by African American writers.
Both Figures in Black: Words,
Signs, and the "Racial" Self and The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism provide
the scaffolding for this lofty task, with the second volume considered a
continuation of the framework of critical ideas laid out in the first. As Gates researched and taught works by
African American writers, as he read those nascent literary theoreticians and black
writers who came before him (and who stepped lightly through the minefields of
reading and comprehending black writers), he became convinced that it is
through the process of "signification" (in the case of African American
literature, a theory of reading that arises from "within the black cultural
matrix") that understanding black writers, as he says in Figures in Black, must begin (235).
Just as nineteenth-century women's texts must be read through
indirection and subtext (or what Emily Dickinson suggests as telling "all truth
but tell[ing] it slant"), African American texts, particularly nineteenth and
twentieth-century texts, are "double-voiced," speaking both to the reader and
to other African American texts. Gates
writes in The Signifying Monkey: "The
black tradition is double-voiced. The trope of the Talking Book, of
double-voiced texts that talk to other texts, is [a] unifying metaphor . . .
. [and] Signifyin(g) is the figure of
the double voiced" (xxv). Utilizing the linguistic strategies and habits
that require reading literary works through the African American culture allows
Gates to offers a tool for a deeper level of understanding African American
texts. The key to signifyin(g) thus lies
directly within the Black vernacular and in images that come from African myth
and art. "The challenge of the critic of comparative black literature," Gates notes in Figures in Black, "is to allow contemporary theoretical
developments to inform his or her readings of discrete black texts but also to
generate his or her own theories from the black idiom itself" (58).
Gates explains in Figures in Black
his literary "theory of interpretation" by noting that it comes not only from
"the black cultural matrix" but that it is a theory of "formal revisionism [rewriting
and/or revisioning a text to create a system of tropes that casts new meaning
and myth]." He goes on to assert that
such a theory "is tropological" and "turns on repetition of formal structures
and their differences" (235). Literary
discourse and critical interpretation of African American texts, as Gates
writes in The Signifying Monkey, rely
on modes of interpretation that "accord with the vernacular tradition," and a
close and accurate textual reading thus requires an understanding of "the manner
in which [African American] language is used" (xxvii). Gates explains: "Black texts Signify upon
other black texts in the tradition by engaging in . . . formal critiques of
language use, of rhetorical strategy.
Literary Signification, then, is similar to parody and pastiche"(xxvii). Parody is reinforced by allusion and word
play, both enhanced by amplification and
augmentation through the African American vernacular to garner a new or
expanded meaning.
The
trope or metaphor that Gates employs as a frame for his critical theory comes
directly from Yoruba (African, Caribbean, and Black South American) and African
American cultural myth, from those trickster characters long part of the
African story telling traditions and, in this case, associated with language
and text: specifically Esu (the
figure linked with interpretation and the double voice) and the Signifying Money (the figure which
serves as the metaphor for revisioning and deconstructing language). Characteristically, Esu hobbles on unequal
legs, one made for walking in the magical world of the gods while the other
stumbles awkwardly in the human realm.
While Esu is more technique or style than substance, he is nonetheless
key to the revelations of content. Most
important, Esu is depicted in Yoruba tradition with two mouths, indicating his
"double voice," while the Signifying Monkey, an African American trope, is a
metaphor for textual revision and the interplay between texts. Together, as Gates notes in The Signifying Monkey, Esu and the
Signifying Monkey serve as "two tricksters [that] articulate the black
tradition's theory of its literature" (xxi).
Esu's
double voice and the language of Signifyin(g), as Gates notes in The Signifying Monkey, are the "unifying
metaphors, indigenous to the tradition," used to discern "patterns of revision
from text to text and for modes of figuration at work within the [African
American] text" (239). Within that
scheme, Gates finds that there are variations on the double-voiced text and
textual relationships, specifically four: the "Tropological Revision" as
typified in the various versions of slave narratives with their attempts to "tell
their own stories"; the "Speakerly Text," a double voiced hybrid text such as
Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God,
whose narrator speaks in standard English and whose characters speak in African
American dialect; the "Talking Text," where black texts talk or speak to other
black texts; and the "Revision of the Speakerly Text," where black texts revise
other black texts, such as Walker's loving revision of Hurston in The Color Purple, a book that utilizes
an epistolary style to allow Celie's vernacular voice to function most often as
narrator. Gates sums up the intertextual
relationship between Their Eyes Were
Watching God and The Color Purple
(the Revision of the Speakerly text): "In The
Color Purple . . .
Such
narratives, in one way or another, "Signify" upon other black texts, and to
comprehend any one text, the reader must be aware of the rich intertextual
tradition with which these texts are associated. In The
Signifying Monkey, Gates renders a number of close readings, utilizing his
theory of synifyin(g), in order to illustrate these intertextual relationships,
specifically of Zora Neale Hurston, Ismael Reed, and Alice Walker. It is clear to the literary scholar, that
this mode of comprehending African American texts is a variation of Eliot's
principle that most great literature dialogues directly and indirectly with texts
that have gone before. For example,
Wordsworth's revisioning eighteenth-century poetry is a type of signifying, as
is
Both
women's and African American's writing must thus utilize irony, the mask, and
indirection in order to revision themselves, and it is essential that they
recapture those prevailing cultural images and reconstitute them into tropes
and images essential for their survival. Thus works of Austen, for example, signify
upon Radcliffe, Burney, and Edgeworth; Mary Shelley attempts to revision the
misogynistic intent of Milton, while Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot signify
upon those masculine texts that limit the possibilities of both men and women. Nineteenth-century women writers and African
American writers are attempting thus to write their own versions of lives, to tell
their own stories, or as Carolyn Heilbrun characterizes the phenomenon, "to
write oneself"—and in so doing they are able to seize the language, its
metaphoric intent, and thus their own destinies. What is distinctive about Gates' critical
theory is that he provides the tropological framework for readers to comprehend
the revisions in African American texts, a framework, as noted, that is rooted
in African culture and vernacular. Gates
concludes The Signifying Monkey by
asserting that "Esu's double voice and the language of Signifyin(g) [are the]
unifying metaphors, indigenous to the tradition, both for patterns of revision
from text to text and for modes of figuration at work within the text" (239).
In
Loose Canons, Notes on the Culture Wars,
Gates writes about the debt that African American scholarship and African
American programs owe to feminist criticism.
He posits: "Scholars of women's studies have accepted the work and lives
of black women as their subject matter in a manner unprecedented in the
American academy. Perhaps only the
Anglo-American abolitionist movement was as cosmopolitan as the women's
movement has been in its concern for the literature of blacks" ("Tell Me, Sir,
. . . What Is 'Black' Literature?" 92).
Gates credits particularly writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker,
and Gloria Naylor for engendering this interest among feminist literary
scholars, and Morrison he applauds for using her position as a senior editor
for Random House to encourage the proliferation and sales of books by black
women, which has begun to "reverse the trends that by 1975 had jeopardized the
survival of black studies" (92-93).
Feminist critics have therefore played no small part in "loosen the
canon."
Loose Canons and Other Cultural
Considerations
Gates
writes in Loose Canons that the
"literary canon is, in no very grand sense, the commonplace book of our shared
culture, in which we have written down the texts and titles that we want to
remember, that had some special meaning for us" ("The Master's Pieces" 21). The crucial necessity for all to see a
reflection of themselves in the works that are read and taught in the academy
is at the heart of "loosening" the canon.
"Self-identification," he writes, "proves a condition for agency, for social
change. And to benefit from such
collective agency, we need to construct ourselves, just as the nation was
constructed, just as the class was, just as all the furniture in the social
universe was" (37). One of the ways that
African American males, in particular, will "construct themselves," Gates
writes, is to recognize the heritage of the mother. Gates reflects on the words of African
American critic Hortense Spillers in "The Master's Pieces": "It is the heritage
of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his
own personhood—the power of 'yes' to the 'female' within" (qtd. in Loose Cannons 40). At first, Gates thinks it a "curious
figure—men, black men, gaining their voices through the black mother" (40), but
then he recalls his own mother's providing him literally with a voice, a story
that he recounts in Colored People. As a precocious four-year-old he was called
on to "deliver my Piece" one Sunday at Easter in the local
For
me, I realized as Hortense Spillers spoke, much of my scholarly and critical
work has been an attempt to learn how to speak in the strong, compelling cadences
of my mother's voice. To reform core curricula, to account for the comparable
eloquence of the African, the Asian, and the Middle Eastern traditions, is to
begin to prepare our students for their roles as citizens of the world culture,
educated through a truly human notion of 'the humanities,' rather than—as
Bennett and Bloom would have it—as guardians at the last frontier outpost of
white male Western culture, the Keepers of the Master's Pieces. And for us as scholar-critics, learning to
seek in the voice of the black female is perhaps the ultimate challenge of
producing a discourse of the critical Other.
(42)
In
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,
a collection of essays that explores the meaning of what it is to be a black male
in the Twentieth Century, Gates applies a variation of his literary theory of
"signifyin(g)" in order to comment upon the great divide between the races—what
he calls "counternarrative," a type of popular, collective signifyin(g) in a
sociological sense. In the collection of
profiles in the book, Gates selects thirteen representative black men from a
variety of areas of life in order to explore the concept of masculinity—signifying,
one might add, upon Wallace Stevens' poem "
Gates
refers to a study by folklorists Patricia A. Turner whose 1993 work shed light
on the concept rumor in the African American community. Turner's explication of rumor suggests the
principle of "counternarrative": ". . . these stories encode regnant anxieties,
that . . . take root under particular conditions and play particular social
roles." Gates explains that the
"currency of rumor flourishes where 'official' news has proved untrustworthy" (
Gates
has written that "the single most pervasive and consistent assumption of all
black writing since the eighteenth century has been that there exists an
unassailable, integral, black self, as compelling and as whole in Africa as in
the New World, within slavery as without slavery. What is more, this self was knowable,
retrievable, recuperable, if only enough attention to detail were displayed" (Figures in Black 115). He has spent his
professional life attempting to reveal that "black self." Gates has also guarded the right of all to
speak equally forceful about the realities they perceive. Sometimes he has been criticized for his
openness and honesty regarding free speech and the right of everyone to express
his cultural reality. In 1990, Gates
defended the rap group Two Live Crew
when they were arrested in
The society we have made simply won't survive without
the values of tolerance. And cultural
tolerance comes to nothing without cultural understanding. In short, the challenge facing
Works
Cited
Cole, Bruce. "2002
http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/gates/interview.html.
Books,
2004.
__________________. Colored
People, A Memoir. NY: Vintage Books,
1995.
__________________. Figures
in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self. NY:
__________________. Loose
Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars.
NY:
__________________. The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism. NY:
_________________. Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Black
Shaped Our Country. NY: Simon
& Schuster, 2000.
__________________ and Cornel West. The
Future of the Race. NY: Vintage
Books, 1997.
Liberties. NY:
"Henry Louis Gates, Jr." Annie
Merner Pfeiffer
http://www.wvwc.edu/lib/wv_authors/aughors/a_gates.htm.
Lamb, Brian.
Booknotes Interview.
http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1220.