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Related Topics wright. Stepping Down and Lessons Learned. Each step he took made the old house creak as though the earth beneath the foundations were soggy. He wondered how long the logs which supported the house could stand against the water. But what really worried him were the steps; they might wash away at any moment, and then they would be trapped. He had spent all that morning trying to make them secure with frayed rope, but he did not have much faith.
Although he considers killing them, their house suddenly tilts, the axe in his hand does not fall over their heads, and he ends up rescuing them. Once the boat safely reaches the hill, they tell the authorities that Mann is a murderer. As he flees down the riverside, he is shot to death. But thousands of them remained. Years later, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that New Orleans was no exception to the principle that liberal societies make some people more vulnerable to natural disaster than others through no fault of their own.
Mencken assumes that, even in the face of a disaster impacting millions of Americans, every individual has equal capability to escape and that flood victims consequently have only themselves to blame and deserve no public sympathy. As if people who, in some cases, had never left the city limits should magically know to leave the city and have the resources to do it.
As if those with the most precarious relation to citizenship would not be taking a greater risk by leaving their homes than by staying put. Even if we agree with these hypotheses, the recalcitrant fact remains that the infrastructure of the Delta and Gulf Coast could no more accommodate a mass evacuation in than it could in By foregrounding these suppositions and examining their narrative expression, I want to add new critical force to what might otherwise be shrugged off as political correctness.
Wright offers a narrative of escape while challenging our assumptions about the collective routes and risks of departure. Such a narrative begins only when the home is abandoned. But Wright refuses to dispatch Brother Mann to face peril alone. His free indirect discourse weaves back and forth between first- and third-person points of view, making the reader his unwilling companion on a journey—a journey common enough to people like the Manns but not one the reader could otherwise experience.
Other critics have focused on this technique in order to argue for a stable sense of African American identity at a time when full citizenship seemed achievable for those willing to make a contribution. Notably, Gates finds that this communal discourse narrates the collective surviving of a hurricane. Transindividuality is precisely what prioritizing the relation of individual to state under liberalism suppresses, condemns, and exploits. Transindividuality, as I conceive it, will not provide a bridge from collective resistance to individual suc- cess.
Quite the contrary, transindividuality provides the foundation of an alterna- tive political model poised for ongoing collective transformation. It is with this in mind that Wright uses free indirect discourse to redirect the novel from its traditional subject matter, the liberal individual, to those barred from the protections and rights that ensure reproduction of the dominant ethos. In each case, he is speaking of a collective vulnerability that is never reduced to his own individual plight.
Wright does not begin with a triumphant hero but with an ambivalent, fearful, feverish, and, most of all, guilty man. While the Manns sit trapped in their home, Brother Mann admits guilt for not leaving as soon as the government provided boats for this purpose.
Such judg- ment would protect the liberal equation of the individual with the state from the charge of racial bias. But when he has Brother Mann admit that he stayed in order to get a head start on other sharecroppers by planting seed in the floodwaters, Wright displaces personal recrimination with another form of guilt that challenges the assumption that we are a nation of individuals.
This information begs the question, why would sharecroppers learn to plant during a flood if it were in their rational self-interest to leave? Sharecropping, as Saidiya Hartman has argued, is a moral econ- omy based on multigenerational guilt, which made departure unacceptable to the sharecroppers themselves even in life-or-death circumstances.
Hartman points out that sharecropping was the economic aspect of a political, legislative, and cul- tural program intent on perverting the positive effects of emancipation on African Americans. Confederates claimed they sacrificed to achieve emancipation for the freepersons who now owed the South repayment for such a gracious gift No harvest, however successful, would pay off the debt.
In that process, the sharecropper, often illiterate and lacking access to paperwork or legal recourse, would have to accept a new level of debt created from thin air by the second planter. Sheriffs, acting as muscle for the planters, threatened debtors with the chain gang or worse if they tried to escape across state lines Daniels 3—6.
As Du Bois has explained, allowing economic exploitation for one population does not protect other populations from the same. It brings all people closer to that extreme suffering. I believe that neoliberalism has adopted the same tactics that targeted black rural peasants and transformed them into a world sys- tem.
Whereas Marx described the violent dissolution of an agrarian economy in Europe, Wright exposes the violent perpetuation of an agrarian economy in the United States. There it was again.
He had heard that the white folks were threatening to conscript all Negroes they could lay their hands on to pile sand- and cement-bags on the levee. And they were talking about bringing in soldiers, too.
They were afraid of stores being looted. Tha shooting might mean anything. But likely as not its just some po black man gon. This generic expe- rience of fear materializes when Bob, a close relative of the Mann family, seeks a boat for Brother Mann, Lulu, Peewee, and Grannie. The money from that sale, coupled with the cash Brother Mann gave Bob, is not enough to purchase a boat. Caught in a double bind in which labor the mule depreciates as the cost of the necessities of life the boat is inflated, Brother Mann must resort to the use of a stolen boat.
Although he knows that the Manns will drown without a boat, Bob nevertheless warns Brother Mann against the journey: Mann, Ahm mighty scared yull git in trouble takin the boat thu town. Ah stole tha boat from the Pos Office. Its ol man Heartfiels, n yuh know how he hates niggers. N lissen, theres trouble a-startin in town, too. They drivin em like slaves. They wuz a-waiting fer the soljers when Ah lef, n yuh know whut tha means. One deems physical violence unavoidable, necessary, even a privilege exercised by the few with impunity on behalf of political order.
But the second option sees violence as the only way out of the cycle of physical violence. There is no predetermined route through town to the Red Cross relief camp, and if there were one, he could not hold to it in the rush- ing waves, pouring rain, floating debris, unmoored houses, and other elements of a rapidly shifting topography.
Both fail to con- sider that Wright might be using the occasion of the storm to challenge the options that have put Brother Mann and his family in a bind where they must stay and die or flee and suffer the fate of criminals. But I would also insist along with Robinson that Wright uses Lulu to complicate the double bind that condemns Brother Mann to two impossible alternatives by transforming our understanding of it.
Instead of confronting us with a choice between two impossible options, the Lulu plot forces us to see those options as two different concepts of possibility. How can active possibilities take shape in a reactive environment? In doing so, he urges us not to think in terms of 8 Deleuze explains his distinction between active and reactive forces in chapter 2 of his classic work, Nietzsche and Philosophy 39— He urges us instead to think in terms of flows that actively respond to con- tingencies.
But perhaps for this reason, these contingencies force Brother Mann to break out of habitual thought patterns and continually think anew. There are telling moments when he fails to do so.
Nev- ertheless, the uncharted boat ride enables Wright to identify a kernel of creative and critical thinking within this population that might someday prove capable of imagining and enacting alternatives to the structures oppressing them. Instead, for Wright, darkness contains nonhierarchized forms of differen- tiation and the potential to choose between positive and negative forms of labor.
But when Mann stops trying to force experience into familiar patterns and lets the environment speak to him, he finds he can under- stand it: He could feel the tugging and trembling of the current vibrating through his body as his heart gave soft, steady throbs.
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