Africanisms in American Lit

University Press of Kentucky
Chapter Title: Introduction. Tropical Trees: Towards a Hippikat Poetics
Book Title: Reading Africa into American Literature

Book Subtitle: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales
Book Author(s): Keith Cartwright
Published by: University Press of Kentucky. (2002)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jbc3.3
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Introduction
Tropical Trees: Towards a Hippikat Poetics
Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am that Tree planted by the River,
which will not be moved.
Maya Angelou, "On the Pulse of Morning," read at the
inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton, 1993
If I am child of the foundation tree,

the origin of all things,
I am child of the dead child.
All things awaken, under the tree,

to be finished; even the dead
gnarl up to the tree for breath.
Jay Wright, The Double Invention ofKomo
I
A strong body of scholarship from Melville Herskovits (1940) to Gwendolyn
Midlo Hall (1992) has shown that enslaved Africans were among the pri-
mary shapers of emergent American cultures. But as Eric Sundquist argues
in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), "it
remains difficult for many readers to overcome their fundamental concep-
tion of 'American' literature as solely Anglo-European in inspiration and
authorship, to which may then be added an appropriate number of valuable
'ethnic' or 'minority' texts, those that closely correspond to familiar or se-
mantic paradigms" (7).1 Even contemporary multiculturalism often works
to keep the unhyphenated American, understood as white and Anglo, still
fixed at the unreconstructed center. What I hope to trace here is something
of the historical routes and semiotic systems by which Africa may by recog-
2 Reading Africa into American Literature
nized as a foundational source of the American mainstream. The African

presence runs deep, as does the Anglo-American response to the call (real
and imagined) of that presence. When we remind ourselves, for example,
that Thomas Jefferson's first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a
black servant, we can be certain that the presence of Africans and their
American-born children played a significant role in shaping the emergent
Virginian/American identity of the man who would give compelling voice
to our nation's yearnings for freedom.2
By reading Africa into American literature, I hope to render greater
visibility to some previously invisible or misread African American cultural
currents that have long shaped American language and consciousness. Along
with Albert Murray, I recognize America's black presence as its "Omni-Ameri-
can" presence. The very first Americans were those who were most fully
forced to navigate the chaos of New World changes: the Africans of many
nations who responded to situations imposed upon them by European set-
tlers to become a New World people. The collective memory and reinven-
tions of Afro-Creole cultures serve par excellence as channels for navigating
the tragedies and transitions of our shared national and hemispheric ex-
perience. As Paul Gilroy argues in The Black Atlantic (1993), it is no real
irony that Afro-Atlantic music "produced out of the racialized slavery that
made modern civilisation possible, now dominate[s] its popular cultures"
(80). A strong African presence was indeed one of the factors that most
clearly differentiated America from Europe, and transatlantic slavery was
a major force in shaping a New World central to any understanding of
modernism.
My reading of America's Africanity follows critical pathways bush-
whacked and charted by Joel Chandler Harris, W.E.B. Du Bois, William
Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. And while
following the signposts and going into the territory of scholarly works like
Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, and Henry Louis
Gates's Figures in Black (1987), my study departs from these groundbreaking
predecessors in looking to one specific region of Africa (Senegambia) for
African models—and to the American South's core Creole regions (Louisi-
ana and the Sea Islands) for the clearest crossroads whereby one identifiable
group of African nations entered American life. Gates's The Signifying Mon-
key (1988) provides valuable precedent in its modeling of the Yoruba Ifa
corpus as a possible source and analogue of the signifying traditions opera-
tive within African American vernacular culture. But Gates's powerful
comparativist reading is grounded in poststructuralist readings of the Afri-
can American tradition's self-conscious intertextuality, through which he
lays claim to equivalent modes of discourse from the Yoruba Ifa corpus. My
aims and methods benefit immeasurably from his Eshu/Derrida-inspired
Introduction 3
refigurations but operate a bit differently. I am interested in calling readers

to reconsider the age-old paradigms through which the roots of American
literature and identity are seen to be solidly British, while African sources—
when recognized at all—find location in what is perceived to be the "ideo-
logical," ever-separate and ghettoized domain of black studies. I would move
us to recognize that the study of all American literature demands deep, his-
torically conscious reassembly.
Perhaps because I am a Southerner whose true education began with
the eye-opening experience of spending some of the formative years of my
young adulthood in Senegal (where having one's inner eyes open makes
one—in Wolof—the "hippikat" familiar to American musical/countercultural
longings), I find texts like the Mandinka Sunjata epic or the Senegalese
animal fables of Birago Diop to be a bit less "otherly" than the Beowulf epic
or the plays of Samuel Beckett.3 Having been forced to develop a new set of
eyes in Senegal to see through some of the limiting assumptions and moral
pathologies of my Southern upbringing and undergraduate education, I began
to develop the means to trace routes by which an African presence has been
an active and ever-repressed agency at the foundation of American culture.
This study is the result of my effort to read traces, re-creations, and shadows
of Africa into American texts that have always been fully inhabited by Afri-
cans—both real and imagined. So with the Senegambian region as my Afri-
can reference point and the American South as primary crossroads of study,
I will examine three Africa-informed currents in American literature: 1)
epic-like narratives of African ancestry by Americans of African descent; 2)
folk-infused, fabulous narratives by white Americans revealing Afro-Creole
cultural descent; and 3) Africanist, gothic-historicist narratives by Ameri-
cans responding to the literacy and scriptural religion of Senegambian Mus-
lims, revealing what Toni Morrison has called "the racial disingenuousness
and moral frailty" at the heart of the American design (Playing in the Dark 6).
Like Toni Morrison, I will be charting a "critical geography" in order
to arrive at a more accurate map of American literary and psychic history.
Though I will be speaking of "Africa" and "America" rather broadly, I think
it best to focus upon specific landscapes in order to achieve sufficient reli-
ability and detail. My familiarity with the Senegambian region of West Af-
rica provides this study's African focal point or benchmark. Several years of
teaching at Coastal Georgia Community College reinforced my desire to
look closely at the Georgia/Carolina Gullah coast and at Louisiana (areas
with Creole languages) so that I might examine the Senegambian crossroads
into American culture at the strongest ports of entry—New Orleans, Charles-
ton, and Savannah. But if we are to make the most sense of the stories told
in Senegambian-Creole contact zones, it would be useful to supplement
geographic-historical focus with generic focus.
Having been called by Eileen Julien's African Novels and the Question oj
Orality to consider the way generic tendencies work as "tools of social vi-
sion," I see in the patterns of genre, "the underlying assumptions of a work,
its struggle to reconcile new historical situations with what we might call—
following Fredric Jameson's lead—'ideology of form'" (46). African Ameri-
can narratives of epic impulse tend to treat Africa (particularly the old Islamic
empires of Greater Senegambia) in one almost enshrined set of ways, as the
epic engenders and reassembles a community's sense of identity and differ-
ence. The folktale or fable tends to be more transgressive and ethically am-
biguous, and I am particularly interested in the master class's use of "fabulous"
black cultural forms and language as emblems of Southernas identity a a
masked means of "rebel" freedom from "white" forces of social/psychic con-
straint.4 And finally, scripture itself—writing—has been seen in both Mus-
lim Senegambia and in America as the sign of reason; and the very fact that
enslaved Senegambians could produce Arabic scripture provoked shocks of
recognition that fueled some of the nation's most explosive writing in modes
of deferral, repression, and compulsive explication that we have come to
recognize as American/Southern gothic.5 Attention to Africa-impacted genres
should provide a means of understanding the enduring power of the stories
we tell at the geographic and literary crossroads of Africa and Europe in
America. Part of what we will find here is a particular set of American re-
sponses to what Toni Morrison calls "a dark, abiding, signing Africanist
presence" (Playing in the Dark 5). And it is this presence, "this unsettled
and unsettling population," that—contemporaneous with the extermina-
tion and forced relocations of America's indigenous peoples—provided "the
very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent
entity" (6).
In treating the pervasive "Africanisms" shaping American texts, we
must recognize that we are dealing with at least two different but histori-
cally blended forces. We are looking at a landscape infused with the cultural
presence of Africans and their descendants. Simultaneously, however, we
are looking at a landscape shaped by racial ideologies that have worked to
deny African humanity and in doing so have denied the full humanity of
America and the narratives that represent and divine our paths.
For one understanding of Africanism we may turn to Melville
Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), in which he traced adapta-
tions and transformations of African cultural practice in America. Herskovits's
recognition of African cultural agency in North America inspired important
projects such as the Georgia Writers' Project's Drums and Shadows (1940)
and Lorenzo Dow Turner's Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949), as well
as the work of Peter Wood (1974), Charles Joyner (1984), Gwendolyn Midlo
Hall (1992), and Michael Gomez (1998), to name just a few of the histori-
Introduction 5
ans, linguists, and folklorists who have been the truest trailblazers of my
own path of study. Herskovits had a good understanding of the interlocking
self-perpetuation of power and knowledge, as revealed in the opening chap-
ter of The Myth of the Negro Past, entitled "The Significance of Africanisms":
"The myth of the Negro past is one of the principal supports of race preju-
dice in this country. Unrecognized in its efficacy, it rationalizes discrimina-
tion in everyday contact between Negroes and whites, influences the shaping
of policy where Negroes are concerned, and affects the trends of research
whose theoretical approach, methods, and systems of thought presented to
students are in harmony with it. . . . its acceptance is so little subject to
question that contradictions are not likely to be scrutinized too closely" (1).
The orthodox myth was that enslaved Africans "presented a cultural tabula
rasa on which to receive this New World experience" (14). Through com-
parative study of "Africanisms" (African cultural "survivals," "syncretizations,"
and "acculturations"), Herskovits sought to demonstrate the falsity of the
myth and to lay the framework for our eventual understanding of the fact
"that the civilizations of Africa, like those of Europe, have contributed to
American culture as we know it today" (30). For Herskovits, awareness of
America's African heritage would work to deconstruct the white racial myth
of the American past and move us all to an understanding of our nation's
foundational multiculturalism.
Another, quite different understanding of Africanism arises from Chris-
topher Miller's Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985), a work
that owes much to Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). In Blank Darkness,
Miller differentiates Europe's invention of Africanist discourse from its cen-
turies-old construction of an Orientalist discourse producing an Orient that
although inferior to Europe possesses identifiable cultures, its own religion
(Islam), scriptural texts, and history (15). Africanist discourse, on the other
hand, constructs an Africa that is a "nullity," a "blank slate" void of culture,
history, and religion; it is "an otherness that appears to have no 'actual iden-
tity'" (23). European fixation upon the dark blank slate of Africanist nullity
creates a dreamlike (and often nightmarish) discourse of wish fulfillment as
Africa becomes whatever the subject desires or fears. As a result, Africa
tends to be presented in "dual, polarized evaluations" and "has been made
to bear a double burden of monstrousness and nobility" (5).
This European discourse evoked Africanist monstrosity and nobility
in one set of ways when addressing a distant, exotic Africa separated from
home (France or England) by thousands of miles of sea. But things changed
utterly in the New World. As home became some American town or planta-
tion, some colony or nascent nation, Africanist wish fulfillment laden with
desires and fears was suddenly addressing a familiar, even intimate "other,"
even as the context and grounds for this forced familiarity were so utterly
perverse. Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992) rings true in asserting
that "a real or fabricated Africanist presence," an "American Africanism,"
provided American writers with "a way of talking about and a way of polic-
ing matters of class, sexual license, and repression.... a way of contemplat-
ing chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the
problems and blessings of freedom" (7). But in America the line between "a
real or fabricated Africanist presence" may be incredibly elusive since the
primitivist/antebellum representations of Africans that enabled plantation
slavery became so entrenched in America's racialized configurations of power
and knowledge, so hauntingly real, that to speak of discursive inventions of
Africans is to speak of a strange double agency: 1) Africans shaping new
American identities and culture (variously but also centrally for all Ameri-
cans) within the context (and against the grain) of a thoroughly racist soci-
ety; and 2) an ideologically dominant "master" discourse, inventing ideas
and economies of Africans and their descendants in such a way as to shape
and warp us all. I join Morrison in defining America's "Africanist" discourse
as the "denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come
to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and
misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people" (6—7).
But we must be wary of easy separation between the ideologies (Althusser's
"imaginary relations to the real") of America's Africanist discourse and the
reality of what Morrison calls the "varieties and complexities of African
people and their descendants who have inhabited this country" (6). Since
in some of the most engaging American works Africanist ideology is often
intertwined with real Africanisms, and since real Africanisms are forced to
navigate America's Africanist ideologies, what we are essentially called to
do is to develop a complex set of bifocals. My real goal in establishing
Senegambian benchmarks for a rereading of American literature does not
lie in proposing an alternative Afrocentrism (which is too often a mirror
image of Eurocentrism and thus a reaction almost wholly predicated by the
boundaries of Eurocentric racial discourse). Ultimately, my project would
work towards opening our eyes and ears to a crossroads from which we may
perceive some of the unsettling double agencies and something of the paral-
lax effect of a contrapuntal, often polyrhythmic consciousness that is our
true New World heritage.6
II
The Senegambian/Old Mali region of the Sahel—an area stretching from the
Senegal River in the north to the Casamance River and Futa Jallon moun-
tains in the south, and from the Atlantic coast eastward to the middle Niger
Valley—will serve as my study's African focal point. The region's Muslim,
Introduction 7
often monumental cultures and texts rose from a succession of famed em-
pires, offering an attractive cultural patrimony that has served as one of the
easiest, most obvious refutations of the racist notion of African cultural/
historical nullity. But I do not intend to argue that the cultures and texts of
the Senegambian region (and the old empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhay) are
inherently more valuable than others, nor will I argue that Senegambia has
always been the single most important source of African contributions to
American culture. Rather, I focus here on Old Mali and the Senegambian
region because of the difficulty of generalizing about a continent as vast and
diverse as Africa, and because the Senegambian region is the part of Africa I
know best.
Boubacar Barry has outlined the historical/cultural contours of what
he calls "the Greater Senegambia" (extending well beyond the contempo-
rary borders of Senegal and the Gambia) as he has argued for the region's
"profound cultural cohesiveness" (Senegambia 3). Barry goes on to note
that the Senegambian region's cultural and geographic diversity should not
be underestimated, but he emphasizes how much is indeed shared among
its dominant Mande, Fulfulde, and Wolof speakers. Thomas Hale has out-
lined shared narrative patterns among the descendants of the Ghana, Mali,
and Songhay empires of the Sahel (Griot, Scribe, Novelist 167). And Stephen
Belcher argues that "the effects of the succession of states, trade, Islam, and
colonialism in the region have made the Sahel from Senegal to the republic
of Niger a region of related and interpenetrating traditions" ("Of Birds" 55).
Important to any study of Africa in America is the fact that American
planters valued Africans according to ethnicity and region of embarkation,
and placed particular value upon the Senegambian region as a desirable
source. We must acknowledge that the very term "Senegambia" is an inven-
tion of European slave traders who viewed the ports between the Senegal
and Gambia Rivers as prime sources of highly marketable Wolof, Fulbe, and
Mande captives. And we must also acknowledge the complexities and his-
torical complications in speaking of Senegambian ethnic and linguistic
groups. Spread even further than the far-flung boundaries of their Old Mali
empire, "Mande peoples may be defined either linguistically, as a group of
peoples speaking closely related languages or historically, as a group of
peoples defined by belief in a common origin, generally centered on the
towering figure of Sunjata" ( J o n n s o n et al 8). Mande-speaking peoples in-
clude Maninka, Mandinka, Bamana (known by their neighbors and in the
historical literature as Bambara), Dyula, and Sierra Leonian groups such as
the Kuranko and Mende. Fulbe (singular Puulo) peoples, speaking dialects
of Fulfulde/Pulaar, are even more widespread in West Africa and are known
throughout the region as Peul, Fula, Fulani, or Tukolor, and were identified
in the slave trade as Fula, Pholey, or Poulard. Wolof populations (also re-
ferred to as Jolof) have been more centered in Senegal proper. If the lan-
guage for identifying West African ethnicities and language groups is often
elusive, we might keep in mind that the people most interested in "pinning
down" such categorizations were usually the slave traders and colonial ad-
ministrators whose business it was to turn a profit on subdividing the region's
population. So, following Boubacar Barry and tracing the murderous routes
of the transatlantic slave trade, I will use the term "Senegambian" in its
largest sense to speak primarily of Wolof, Fulbe, and Mande peoples from
an area once controlled by the Mali empire, peoples who when shipped into
slavery most often left from ports in Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone.
And 1 will read "Senegambian" bodies of epic, folk narrative, and scripture
to develop lenses through which we may read American texts.
As a Peace Corps fisheries agent assigned to counsel Wolof rice farm-
ers on an ill-advised aquaculture program, I spent countless hours with
members of the Guidakhar rice cooperative beneath the village pench, the
palaver tree that provided a shaded location for public discourse. Through-
out the region, such trees have long been perceived as primal, spirit-inhab-
ited locations. Barry notes in Le Royaume du Waalo that Louis Chambonneau
visited the Wolof Kingdom of Waalo in 1675 and reported that each family
was represented by a totemic animal and that several sacred trees received
offerings (69-70). And Mande/Bamana creation myths collected by Germaine
Dieterlen describe how Pemba, a deity incarnate in a tree, descended to
earth and enabled creation (10-29). Even with the spread of Islam, trees
such as the ones Maninka bards call "origin of origins" continue to serve as
dialogic sites of mediation in the region (Johnson 207-8).
No single performance piece could provide a richer discourse upon
origins or a more widespread cultural encyclopedia than the region's best-
known epic, the Sunjata. And at the base of the Sunjata, animating its ac-
tion, lies a powerful psychic concept: the agency of nyama. The Sunjata epic
finds emplotment and voice through Mande articulations of nyama, "energy
of action," described by Patrick McNaughton as "the energy that animates
the universe . . . prerequisite to all action . . . emitted as a by-product of
every act," a "natural and mystical . . . source of moral reciprocity" (15).
While nyama could be described as being a divine current, it may also be
linked to pollution, to catastrophic destruction resulting from disembodied
forces unleashed through acts of hubris, even through the killing of plants
and animals necessary to daily sustenance. If we think of the enormous
charges of nyama released by transatlantic slavery and centuries of violent
racial oppression, then we might understand the need for a "nyama-han-
dling" griot (Mande jali or jeli, Wolof gewel, Fulbe gawlo or mabo) who—
like Faulkner or Morrison—understands that the past is never truly past,
that old actions hold a wild power and "rememory" of their own.
Introduction 9
Most Senegambian cultures recognize a special class of artists who are

born with the means to handle these wild energies of transition.7 Among
Mande speakers, this endogamous caste of professionals, nyamakala, is com-
posed of all who craft nyama in leather, wood, metal, music, and language.
The endogamous caste status of nyamakalaw allows them to inherit the
biological and social means or nya "to perform particular acts and, more
importantly, to be protected from the consequences of those acts" (Bird and
Kendall 16). Thus, nyamakalaw are "holders of the nyama" (Keita 113);
they are the ones who handle wild forces and fetch them for the community.
The nyamakalaw (and notably the griots) provide the socially ambigu-
ous channels by which innovation and conformity to tradition are navi-
gated. So fraught with tension is this mediating artistic role, that Wolof
griots have traditionally been buried inside large hollow baobab trees at the
margins of the bush rather than in the cemetery (Hale, Griots 193-96). The
baobab's emblematic linkage to the griot's authoritative witnessing comes
across in Waly Mbaye's transmission of "The Baobabs Nderexeen and
Werugeen," which speaks of the importance of two particular baobabs as
fonts of royal election and authority in the old Wolof kingdom of Baol.
Mbaye addresses the "electing" baobab Nderexeen by name, aware that king-
doms have come and gone beneath a baobab that endures: "Nderexeen, the
one / The king knows he's chosen by. / That's where he's taken. / Maali Kumba
Njaay/Was taken to Nderexeen" (Kesteloot and Mbodj 193). Mbaye tells of
how the king was bathed and covered with protective amulets before being
buried "up to the shoulders" at the base of Nderexeen, where the nobles
and griots would dance a "crowning" ring dance around him. The griot
then narrates the procession's movement to another baobab, Werugeen, where
all strata of Wolof society gather for the newly chosen king's ritual boasts by
the baobab of authoritative power:
I'm the best of us!

I'm the best of my mother's offspring!
I'm the best of my father's offspring!
I'm the best of my maternal uncle's offspring!
So only I can hear the title "King"! (195)
Asserting that he is the strongest product of collective roots, the new king
engages an almost hubristic energy of action—since it is normally the griot
who sings the noble's praises. But his language of individuation and collec-
tive identity rises from traditional structures of family life.
Ideas of mothering and fathering developed from polygamous mar-
riage engender much of Mande ideology around a fertile tension between
jadenya or "father-child-ness" (Fulbe jandirabe), rivalry between a father's
children from different wives, and badenya or "mother-child-ness" (Fulbe

bandirabe), the affection between full siblings of the same mother. Fadenya-
oriented behavior tends toward innovation and individualistic social trans-
gression, while badenya-oriented behavior tends toward conformity, social
cohesion, and group-affiliated action. This engendering of ways to assimi-
late foreign or wild material for the benefit of the community (by way of
fadenya/badenya and professional groups like the nyamakalaw) leads to an
orientation toward tradition that values dialogic openness and improvisa-
tion without undue fears of losing identity. When, for example, the Fulbe
griot Bani Gisse (between interludes on his hoddu, ancestral to the banjo)
recounts the orthodox Muslim holy warrior al-hajj Umar Taal's visit to a
spirit-inhabited tree to secure a supernatural army for his jihad (Kane and
Robinson 125), he mediates between localized ancestral repertoires and the
power of universalist scriptural Islam. This West African "polyrhythmic sen-
sibility" navigated the chaos of transatlantic slavery and came to be central
to contrapuntal Afro-New World "soul" cultures, religions, and music.8
Polyrhythm and complementarity are so fundamental to West African
worldview that we may speak of the soul itself as being a polyrhythmic
unity. Traditionally, the individual soul in the Mande-speaking world (as in
Yoruba spiritual systems and in Cuban santeria, Haitian vodou/voodoo, Afro-
Creole Christianity, and more recently, Freudian psychology) consists of
several constituent parts: the elemental life force (ni), its shadow or double
(ja), and a force of essential character or personality (tere, which may be
shared with animals and is not reincarnated but dispersed as nyama after
death). It is this pluralistic, polyrhythmic sensibility noted by Chernoff (155-
60) and alluded to by Du Bois as "the singular spiritual heritage of the na-
tion" (178), a psychic "twoness," a veiled gift of "second sight" (3) that
offers America our most profound understanding of e pluribus unum.
Ill
Despite pervasive appropriations and commodifications (and most often in the
very face of them), African American soul music has transmitted sustaining
energies of action uniquely charged for navigating New World/modern/post-
modern uprootings and re-routings. We see something of this when Langston
Hughes enters the cabaret of "Jazzonia" and finds figuration for the deep em-
bodiment of African American spirituality in the Africa-based trope of the tree:
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.
Introduction 11
Oh, singing tree!

Oh, shining rivers of the soul! (226)
Hughes's linkage of the vernacular singing tree with "shining rivers" of soul
embodied in dance embraces the erotics of a music that is now moving the
world. This expansive (non-Puritan) sense of the erotic has been best de-
scribed by Audre Lorde in an essay entitled "The Erotic as Power": "The
erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the
power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.
This sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual,
forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understand-
ing much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their
difference" (56). Lorde goes on to speak of the erotic as "a resource within
each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual place, firmly rooted in
the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling" (53). Charged with
its own powerful nyama, the erotic works as a bridge to what Michelle Cliff
calls "intimacy informed with identity" (368), a sharing of powerful mother-
child-ness bonds that may be used in an abstract sense to call people "to
suspend their differences and find solidarity in a common mother," a "Mother
Mande" or "Mother Africa" (Diawara 159). In America as well, the deepest
sharing of the joys of vernacular traditions often becomes feminized as a
kind of "mother wit." An occult(ed) realm of birthing and language acqui-
sition, song and culinary art, finds location in a female/spiritual zone close
to what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic: "the rhythms, intonations, and
echolalias of the mother-infant symbiosis—intense, pre-Oedipal, predating
the father" (157). I am interested in exploring patterns in Senegambian and
African American expressive traditions whereby certain realms of vernacu-
lar identity have been feminized and "guarded" against a scriptural patri-
mony that often aims at destroying them. The literary and legal language of
English, working through deft hierarchies like patrimony/matrimony has
worked against articulation of the soul semiotics of Afro-Creole mother-
child-ness and has created anxieties of patrimony for writers who would
emplot claims to an African heritage.
Responding to similar anxieties, Henry Louis Gates has written in The
Signifying Monkey that "[b]ecause of the experience of diaspora, the frag-
ments that contain the traces of a coherent system of order must be reas-
sembled" (xxiv). Gates goes on to demonstrate, however, that the process of
African American cultural reassembly is as old as America and has never
lost coherence. From the moment of arrival in the New World, Africans and
their descendants faced the daunting task of mediating between various
African, European, and emergent American vernacular traditions. Indeed,
it requires the kind of comparatist perspective that Gates advocates, mind-
ful of "complex double formal antecedents, the Western and the black"
(xxiv), for us to see how enslaved descendants of Africans appropriated
Hebrew myths (familiar to Muslims) around an old pench of knowledge:
Of this tree you must not eat,

Dese bones gwine rise ergain.
If you do you'll have to skeet,
Dese bones gwine rise ergain.
Sarpent wound aroun' the stump,

Dese bones gwine rise ergain,
At Miss Eve his eye he wunk,
Dese bones gwine rise ergain. (Newman White 84)
This tree of knowledge is more fully erotic (in both the conventional sense
and Lorde's extended sense, linking freedom of body and soul) than the Anglo-
Christian tree that more often marks the guilt of original sin and the fall from
grace. The tree of the spirituals is Christian, but its composite soul has grown
from West African palaver trees of mediation and cultural reassembly.
Mande epic euphemisms for one's true lover—"sharer of secrets,"
"sharer of hopes" (Camara 107)—get to the core sustenance of soul identity
and community. A secret-sharing sense of mother-child-ness enabled slaves
to sing of a tree of life that could as easily mark heavenly shores north of the
Ohio as it could heaven's side of the Jordan:
I have a right to the tree of life,

And how I long to be there!
With them that fought my Jesus' fight,
And how I long to be there!
If you get there before I do,

O, how I long to be there!
Look out for me, I'm coming too,
O, how I long to be there! (Barton 83)
Whether sharing plans to escape, as in spirituals such as "Steal Away," or

whether sharing the open secret of black Christianity's singular adherence
to Christ-consciousness, the spirituals are imbued with an energy of action,
a mother-child-ness and mother wit aptly described as "soul."9
America's most steadily repeated trope of African mother-child-ness
finds panegyric expression in Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Ode to Ethiopia," in
which Dunbar invokes "MOTHER RACE," and sings of how African seed, though
Introduction 13
crushed by slavery, managed to "spread its leaves so fresh and young— / Its
blossoms now are growing" (15). Dunbar's praise-song concludes in bardic
style:
Go on and up! Our souls and eyes

Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's glory. (15)
Though masked in standard English, worn poetic diction, and nineteenth-cen-

tury racial ideology, West African energies of action branch from a familiar trope.
And if Dunbar's "lyres" seem to be producing a sound unfamiliar to Senegambian
griots, we might look again and see a mask; elsewhere he is more clear in shar-
ing the secret: "We strum our banjo-strings and call them lyres" (117).
True to form, Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925) features
the singing tree as Harlem's repeated trope of renaissance. Within its pages,
Langston Hughes links the singing tree of "Jazzonia" to Egypt and Eden,
while Jean Toomer's "Georgia Dusk" evokes "folk songs from soul sounds,"
and "Song of the Son" claims inheritance from "A song-lit race of slaves"
through "An everlasting song, a singing tree, / Caroling softly souls of sla-
very" (137). Countee Cullen's "In Memory of Colonel Charles Young" turns
its praise-song to an old pench: "No lie is strong enough to kill / The roots
that work below; / From your rich dust and slaughtered will / A tree with
tongues will grow" (133). And finally, Jamaica-born Claude McKay contrib-
utes a sonnet that rings with nyama-filled boasts:
Like a strong tree that reaches down deep, deep,

For sunken water, fluid underground,
Where the great-ringed unsightly blind worms creep,
And queer things of the nether world abound.
So I would live in rich imperial growth,

Touching the surface and the depth of things,
Instinctively responsive unto both,
Tasting the seeds of being, fearing no stings,
Sensing the subtle spell of changing forms,
Like a strong tree against a thousand storms. (134)
Throughout the Americas, black modernists responded to The New Negro

with a revalorization of African ancestry. In the poetry of Nicolas Guillen
and Aime Cesaire we can see the arboreal tropes and hear the contrapuntal
sound of a reenergized "counter-culture of modernity" (Gilroy I).10
From attentiveness to the Sunjata epic, we can trace specific energies
of action that informed black vernacular culture in America, patterns that
found reassembly in epic-like narratives of ancestry by writers such as W.E.B.
Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alex Haley, and
Toni Morrison. Vernacular "mother wit" (nourished by a number of Afro-
Creole repertoires—a whole "soul semiotics") drew sustenance from many
sources, including bonds of mother-child-ness between Senegambia and
America, while Islam and accompanying narratives of glorious black em-
pire worked to render the Senegambian patrimony ideologically attractive
in the face of forces that would present Africa as a cultural nullity.
Chapter 1 will look to the Sunjata epic as a cultural catalogue and to the
griots' multigeneric epic forms (mixing narrative, panegyric, and song modes)
in order to chart something of the vast matrix of West African energies of
action that informed black folk culture and gave sustenance to Du Bois's ar-
ticulation of double consciousness, the veil of second sight, and the idea of
"soul beauty" in The Souls oj Black Folk. Through close comparative reading,
we can find enough of a Senegambian impact upon African American vernacu-
lar culture to insist that the Senegambian region should be regarded as one of
several sources of Du Bois's psychic reassemblies in The Souls of Black Folk.
Chapter 2 examines patterns by which three novelists—Toomer,
Hurston, and Ellison—articulate something of an Africa-informed "soul"
heritage from occulted sources of song, folktale, and spirituality. As Toomer,
Hurston, and Ellison capture a nodal moment of black cultural transforma-
tion from Afro-Southern sources of authority to the freer ground of north-
ern urban migration, their fiction often feminizes the Southern vernacular
tradition and reveals a sometimes anxious search for black patrimony. From
tireless efforts at antiphonal patterns engaging the nyama of Afro-Southern
semiotics, Toomer's Cane (1923) seeks to "become the face of the South . . .
my lips being the lips of its soul" (81). Zora Neale Hurston offered High
John de Conquer as the hoodoo root figure of a semiotic system that is "the
source and soul of our laughter and song," come from Africa "walking on
the waves of sound" (542-43). And although Ellison's Invisible Man (1947)
works to undermine concepts of rooted identity, his novel remains so im-
mersed in Afro-Southern systems of expression that a much hybridized
Senegambian nyama emerges in scenes that locate shared soul identity in Brer
Rabbit, Carolina yams, and the entire jazz-inflected system of "mother wit."
Chapter 3 will address attractions and problems of epic quests for
Senegambian Muslim patrimony. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex
Haley's Roots, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon respond to the loss of
African patronyms and the dislocations of black families with narratives
Introduction 15
that seek griotlike marriage of soul semiotics and epic-heroic African Mus-
lim patrimony. The Autobiography of Malcolm X voices the clearest call for
an Afrocentric Islam as a means of black nationalist salvation, but the work's
undervaluation of certain aspects of the Afro-Creole soul heritage shares
something of the Western Devil's discourse. Alex Haley's Roots offered the
Mande/Muslim Kinte patronym as a foundational epic replacement for the
Nation of Islam's variable "X" in a work of unparalleled popular success, a
much attacked text that single-handedly re-introduced America to the griot
profession. Finally, I want to pay close attention to how Toni Morrison
handles and revises the project of epic renaming and narration of transcen-
dent heroic flight in Song oj Solomon, which lays claim to yet another
Senegambian Muslim forefather.
IV
Although the Deep South's subtropical landscape, substantial black popula-
tions, and colonial immigrations of people and institutions from the West
Indies (to Carolina from Barbados, to Louisiana from Haiti, and to Florida
from Cuba) ensured its position as a Creole matrix, too few Americans have
recognized the vigor of the Afro-Creole foundational presence. Joseph
Murphy has called our country "a Creole country. . . . [t]he denial of our
Africanity is the great myth that Herskovits succeeds in exposing" (115).
Likewise, W.E.B. DuBois called black music "the singular spiritual heritage
of the nation" (178), andJ.E. McTeer, who served as sheriff in Beaufort, South
Carolina, for thirty-nine years while working for fifty years as a root doctor
and white colleague of the famous Dr. Buzzard, observed how "over the years
of our country's growth, the white American has become a 'hybrid'" (96).
We must pay more attention to the ways in which the word "creole"
may represent us all. By "creole" I refer to a multiplicity of New World
forces and identities, a new crossroads of being, and an awareness of (and
often a resistance to) becoming something new. "Creole," with its ever-present
association with race, tends to refer to an Africa-informed New World pres-
ence. The first New World writer of distinction, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,
gave early mention of this most American of words in La Florida (1605):
"The Negroes designate all persons criollos who have been born in the Indies
of either pure Spanish or pure Negro parents, thus indicating that they are
natives of the Indies. . . . Likewise, the Spaniards have already introduced
the word criollo into their language, attaching to it the same significance"
(106). George W. Cable wrote in The Creoles of Louisiana (1884) that criollo
is "a corrupt word made by the negroes, said to be a contraction of criadillo,
diminutive of criado—one educated, instructed, or bred up, pp. of criar, lit.
to create, also to nurse, instruct" (41). While "creole," in its earlier sense
came to signify New World peoples, cultures, products, and identities (any-
one or anything born/produced in the Americas), and carried traces of the
racial and vernacular "corruption" alleged by Cable, the word has also been
applied by linguists to name the Afro-Atlantic languages born of New World
contact situations, languages spoken primarily (though never exclusively)
by the descendants of enslaved Africans. My understanding of creolization,
informed by linguistic models, is supplemented by the broader vision of the
Caribbean poet/historian Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, who has defined it
as "a cultural action—material, psychological, and spiritual—based upon
the stimulus/response of individuals within the society of their environ-
ment and—as white/black, culturally discrete groups—to each other" (296).
Extending linguistic models into the realm of culture, we may speak of
creolization in folktales, religion, cooking, music, and worldview. In the
United States, core geographic centers of creolization may be located in
areas of long-standing creole language use (the Carolina/Georgia coast as
well as the area popularly synonymous with "Creole" culture—with a capi-
tal "C"—South Louisiana). Energies of action that created Afro-Creole lan-
guages and cultures in these core areas may also be traced throughout the
plantation economy, and—following routes of urban migration—through-
out America's cities, and across the world.
In summary, by "creole" I am referring to New World identities and
cultures deeply impacted by Africans, as well as the languages born of New
World contact situations. I follow the lead of the Martinican writer, Edouard
Glissant, who in writing of Faulkner speaks of creolization as "the unstop-
pable conjunction despite misery, oppression, and lynching, the conjunc-
tion that opens up torrents of unpredictable results. . . . the unpredictability
that terrifies those who refuse the very idea, if not the temptation, to mix,
flow together, and share" (30). Anxieties of creolization are distinctly regis-
tered in Anglo-America's foundational colony of Virginia, which was the
native soil of Thomas Jefferson, the site of the varied hauntings of Edgar
Allan Poe and Nat Turner, and the source of the antebellum banjo sound of
Joel Walker Sweeney, '"the Elvis Presley of his time'" (Rosenberg 12).
But when we look farther south, to South Carolina, which according
to an eighteenth-century traveler's comment, looked "more like a negro coun-
try than like a country settled by white people" (Wood 132), we find white
anxieties and repression of creolization to be intensified. In an early issue of
the South Carolina Gazette, a poet who signed himself "The Cameleon Lover"
(1732) feared for the white minority's moral/racial survival, arguing that
whites who took black lovers would "imbibe the Blackness of their Charmer's
Skin," while a responding poet soon countered with "Cameleon's Defense"
in verse sympathetic to "the dark beauties of the Sable Race" (234-35). The
development of varying degrees of chameleon or gumbo consciousness was
Introduction 17
certain in the colony, given its substantial black majority and the fact that
Carolina, according to Philip Curtin, offered "the closest mainland approxi-
mation to the West Indian plantation pattern" (Atlantic Slave Trade 145).
Although the rice belt of South Carolina and Georgia was a strong
center of African cultural dissemination, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall writes that
"the most significant source of Africanization of the entire culture of the
United States" is Franco-Creole Louisiana (157). We find this Creole pres-
ence evoked in Dominique Rouquette's "La jeune fille des bois" (1857),
which links Louisiana's landscape to "une brune, ami, comme ces jeunes
filles / Que dore de ses feux le soleil des Antilles" (a dark girl, friend, like
those young girls / that bake in the heat of the Antillean sun), and begs
more of "ses longs cheveux d'ebene (her long ebony hair) and more of "ces
chants ... dans la foret Creole" [her songs ... in the Creole forest (4598-99)].
In a landscape in which the majority language was a Creole language, it should
come as no surprise that the Creole forest, Afro-Creole song, and a repressed/
projected/romanticized/often pornographic eroticism emerges from white
Creole texts. This Creole forest was a new landscape inhabited by an African
majority that in some way inhabited almost every thought of the French,
Spanish, British, and American-born residents who claimed title to it all.
As we have seen with South Carolina's "Cameleon Lover," America's
Creole forest often aroused white anxieties. William Gilmore Simms's "The
Edge of the Swamp" (1853) laments the Carolina low country's lack of re-
semblance to the English landscape:
Here are no gardens such as he desires,

No innocent flowers of beauty, no delights
Of sweetness free from taint. The genial growth
He loves, finds here no harbor. Fetid shrubs,
That scent the gloomy atmosphere, offend
His pure patrician fancies. On the trees,
That look like felon spectres, he beholds
No blossoming beauties . . . (491)
Increasingly, however, America's emergent vernacular tradition took shape

from grounding in Afro-Creole soil, as can be seen in the banjo playing of
early minstrels, the animal tales of Joel Chandler Harris, and the fresh voice
of Huck Finn. In the 1920s, in the midst of the jazz-modemist-primitivist
vogue, the Charleston Poetry Society nurtured some of white America's most
forthrightly creolist writers, including DuBose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, and
Beatrice Ravenel. Heyward's Porgy (1925) provided the basis for his collabo-
ration with George and Ira Gershwin in the making of "Porgy and Bess."
And Peterkin, the first Southern novelist to win a Pulitzer Prize, launched
her career with work grounded in Gullah traditions of tree-talking (a tradi-

tion shared with Senegambian spiritual seekers): "Me an' dis ol' tree / Sets
heah togedder. /1 wonder ef e know me / Lak I know him" (242). Beatrice
Ravenel, the most powerful poet among the members of the Charleston
Poetry Society, is now almost forgotten, but she managed to combine the
group's local colorist interest in the Carolina low country with a keen intel-
lect informed by a modernist jazz-era aesthetic. Her Arrow of Lightning (1925)
affirms Creole difference from European sources in the title poem's address
to a mockingbird: "Oh, what have you to do / With English wood-rides, /
Trees pampered like horses in a stall?" (31) When Ravenel was in her six-
ties, she wrote an astonishingly strong body of work in Haiti, arguing (in
"Judge Achille Fontain") that "Folk-ways are final, supreme, holding the
only authority; / Crystallized they are Law" (89). This "crystallization," fur-
thermore, is revealed to be nothing more than political and social power, as
she stresses in having her Haitian judge state that with freedom from Ameri-
can Marines, the old Creole ways "would be ours once more. / O Legba! O
Dumballo! O Voodoo Pantheon! / Our folk-ways then would be Law. / They
would be right" (89). What many Southern writers began to sense was that
old differences of valuation between high canonical culture and black folk
culture had been rooted not in any intrinsic correctness or value but in
ideology: in the workings of economic and political power.
This study's second section of chapters (4-6) proposes that by reading
texts from Gullah and Louisiana Creole repertoires through the lens of
Senegambian folktales, we may begin to trace processes of Africa-informed
creolization at work elsewhere in the South and in the country as a whole.
Calling attention to the fact that African cultural currents were strong enough
to cross the color line, I will focus upon white writers' representations of
Afro-Creole fables and language in order to address questions about how
Afro-Creole cultural forms have answered the peculiar needs of whites.
Chapter 4 will turn to Senegambian folk narratives to show that the
Afro-Creole repertoires of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana some-
times preserve Senegambian tales almost wholly intact and regularly trans-
mit Mande/Wolof/Fulbe plot structures, motifs, performance techniques,
language features, and names. We will examine how enslaved Senegambians
came to be in position to impart so much of their culture through all strata
of plantation life. Animal fables, moralistic tales, and shape-shifting hunt-
ers' narratives worked upon their listeners as a civilizing force capable of
harsh criticism of the hubristic savageries of the plantation system, and
worked simultaneously to encourage the kind of openness to wild forces of
innovation that has made American vernacular culture truly powerful.
Chapter 5 highlights the means by which Joel Chandler Harris might
arguably be called one of our most African American authors, as we look at
Introduction 19
how his immersion in Afro-Creole semiotic systems enabled his fidelity to

the plots and performance techniques of Senegambian fables. By examining
the different political and psychic needs that Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit
answered for Harris and for America as a whole, we may begin to note Harris's
major contribution to the development of a folk vernacular voice, noting
too that Harris's Africanist voice and knowledge tended to be used to sup-
port white Southern governance of black subjects.
In Chapter 6 we will chart double forces in Harris's work (a realistic
Creole-vernacular voice and a perniciously sentimental arcadian mask) that
inform routes taken by other white writers-—particularly in representations
of the enculturating force of the black "mammy" or "maum" in the fiction
of Susan Petigru King, Alfred Mercier, Julia Peterkin, and Faulkner. In re-
traversing the charged space of racialized weaning from what King called
her "maumer tongue," these writers often entered a personally liberating,
fabulous, masked zone in order to move through repression toward other-
wise unaskable questions of soul erotics and pornography, legitimacy and
illegitimacy, morality and immorality, freedom and control. While their ef-
forts to find vision in Afro-Creole "spiritual soil" are fraught with all sorts of
violence, these texts create more openings than closures, and they prefigure
current pop-culture movements toward an African American-inflected voice
in a nation still struggling toward the kinds of intimacies informed with
identity that would mark full acceptance of our creolization.
V
If, as I will argue, there is an Afro-Creole nyama (an "energy of action" with
identifiable Senegambian roots) at work in the shaping of American cul-
tures, there has also been a counterforce working to close the pathways of
Afro-Creole energy of action; this counterforce is also an agent of creolization.
Following the aforementioned lead of Miller and Morrison, we may refer to
this counter-Creole (yet still creolizing) agency as Africanist discourse. By
regarding African culture as a nullity, Africanist discourse in America churned
up the most unsettling and relentless national obsessions, as Ralph Ellison
has pointed out, "For out of the counterfeiting of the black American's iden-
tity there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind as to the authen-
ticity of his own image of himself (Shadow and Act 68). While Harlem
Renaissance writers were reclaiming African heritage through the singing
tree, Nashville's celebrated Fugitive poets were beginning to recognize that
a foundation tree rooted in white Anglo-American identity was doomed by
its dependence on unmixed purities.11 Developing a pruned high-formal
style, John Crowe Ransom sought enracination in the virgin space of En-
glish foundations—"A green bough from Virginia's aged tree" that might
stay "the world of outer dark"—but found only doom there: "this was the
old tree's late branch wrenched away, / Grieving the sapless limbs, the shorn
and shaken" (38). Following the shocks of World War I and the rising resis-
tance of colonized peoples throughout the world, white modernists had
good reason to question the roots of the Western image, as we see most
famously in Eliot's "The Waste Land": "What are the roots that clutch, what
branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?" and found "only / A heap of
broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the
cricket no relief (29-30). Forces of creolization led Eliot to mimic and
resist jazz voices singing "OOOO that Shakespeherian Rag" amidst "a heap
of broken images," a "dead tree" choked by multiplicity.12 But Eliot was far
from alone among American artists in drawing upon this polyphonic rag-
time sound even as he felt threatened by "something oddly amorphous and
denaturing . . . the distorting shape of the Other" (Glissant, Faulkner 31).
In the hands of American writers, Africanist disorientation (and dia-
logic intervention with it) takes many modes and masks. So again entering
the frontier territory charted by Ellison and Morrison, I will examine
America's most powerful mode of Africanist writing—the "gothic." It is no
accident that the Southern literary tradition and the "gothic" inhabit a shared
crossroads. The gothic novel, with its obsessions with history, haunted edi-
fices and bloodlines, shadowy curses, moral and supernatural blackness,
and romance gone awry, provides a framework for labyrinthine excavation
of the repressed knowledge at the base of our national edifice. As Eric
Sundquist writes, "The essence of the gothic is the eruption from below of
rebellious or unconscious forces and the consequent violation of bound-
aries, whether racial, sexual, or abstractly moral" ("Faulkner, Race, and
Forms of American Fiction" 18). Even the Fugitive poet Allen Tate, who
yearned to connect with the Confederate dead, could not avoid gothic
"knowledge / Carried to the heart" (21), a knowledge that is clearer in a
later poem, "The Swimmers," which recalls a childhood memory of stand-
ing in creekbank shadows and discovering a lynched "nigger" on a "giant
sycamore," embodying unspeakable sin: "Alone in the public clearing / This
private thing was owned by all the town, / Though never claimed by us
within my hearing" (135).
Gothic tends to work most powerfully as a medium not when it is
sharing the open secret of white guilt or hypocrisy, but when it gives energy
of action to insurrectionist shades. Operating at such a juncture, the New
Negro poet Angelina Grimke presented "Tenebris" (1927):
There is a tree, by day,

That, at night
Has a shadow,
Introduction 21
A hand huge and black.

All through the dark,
Against the white man's house,
In the little wind,
The black hand plucks and plucks
At the bricks.
The bricks are the color of blood and very small.
Is it a black hand,
Or is it a shadow? (945)
By showing how America took shape from sources other than European
roots, as well as from racial "othering" of peoples deemed enslaveable, I
seek to help, as Jay Wright does in his Mande-informed The Double Inven-
tion ofKomo, "a spirit uneasy in its double knowledge" (39) lay claim to its
"complex body" (43). This study's concluding section of chapters (7-9)
will trace the explosive gothicism and passages through which American
writers have repressed, outrageously recapitulated, boomeranged, and re-
membered the nation's denial of African (and indeed its own) humanity.
By focusing upon the Arabic scriptural tradition of Senegambian Mus-
lims, Chapter 7 argues that literate Senegambian slaves presented a unique
challenge to the "providential" ideology of racial slavery. Arabic texts pro-
duced by enslaved black "gentlemen" registered shocks of recognition (and
elaborate dodges) in white responses to African literacy/humanity. Particu-
larly charged Africanist disorientations take place when "masters" confront
literate Muslim slaves and thereafter find it increasingly difficult to defend
racial assumptions and even more difficult to minimize dangers of insurrec-
tion and damnation. Plantation romances such as William A. Caruthers's
The Kentuckian in New York (1834) face mounting pressures in repressing
the violent "dark side of things."
Chapter 8 calls attention to the fact that Senegambian insurrectionists
provided some of nineteenth-century America's most haunting shadows of
Africans in texts that violently explode white America's imaginary relations
to its real conditions of existence. Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855), in spite
of its obvious "Ravenesque" foreshadowing, anticipates that the reader's
complicity with racist ideologies will allow Senegalese Babo (and author) to
plot a spectacular revolt in a narrative that reenacts energies of action for
which American literature has had no adequate language. George W Cable's
The Grandissimes (1880) also uses an exceptional Senegalese rebel around
which to build an attack on the foundations of American racial ideologies
and thereby reveal "the double damage of all oppression," but the very
exceptionalism attached to Senegalese in the narrative entraps Cable's ef-
forts to move most meaningfully through the violence he reemplots.
After establishing that some of America's most haunting shadows of

Africans were cast by the glare of whiteness in recognition of Senegambian
Muslim humanity, I will move to examine ways in which three twentieth-
century novelists sound the racialized depths of the American romance gone
awry. In the labyrinthine prose of Faulkner, we may find a truly New World
medium of foundational designs and events that continue to channel present
actions since "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished" (Absalom
261). Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison help us to read African and Africanist
energies of action into a body of literature already channeled by their thick
enmeshment. In engagement with the eye-opening poetics of our strongest
crossroads writers, my tracing of the most historically visible African strand
of the American heritage (the Senegambian presence) seeks to sharpen the
focus of our ever-emergent hippikat vision.

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University Press of Kentucky

Chapter Title: Introduction. Tropical Trees: Towards a Hippikat Poetics

Book Title: Reading Africa into American Literature

Here, root yourselves beside me.

If I am child of the foundation tree,

All things awaken, under the tree,

nized as a foundational source of the American mainstream. The African

refigurations but operate a bit differently. I am interested in calling readers

Most Senegambian cultures recognize a special class of artists who are

I'm the best of us!

children from different wives, and badenya or "mother-child-ness" (Fulbe

Oh, singing tree!

Of this tree you must not eat,

Sarpent wound aroun' the stump,

I have a right to the tree of life,

If you get there before I do,

Whether sharing plans to escape, as in spirituals such as "Steal Away," or

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes

Though masked in standard English, worn poetic diction, and nineteenth-cen-

Like a strong tree that reaches down deep, deep,

So I would live in rich imperial growth,

Throughout the Americas, black modernists responded to The New Negro

Here are no gardens such as he desires,

Increasingly, however, America's emergent vernacular tradition took shape

her career with work grounded in Gullah traditions of tree-talking (a tradi-

how his immersion in Afro-Creole semiotic systems enabled his fidelity to

There is a tree, by day,

A hand huge and black.

After establishing that some of America's most haunting shadows of

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