Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa by Kenneth Kalu & Toyin Falola

Author:Kenneth Kalu & Toyin Falola
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319964966
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Oxherding Tale

Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale23 is a neo-slave narrative set in the antebellum South, on Jonathan Polkinghorne’s plantation called Cripplegate, and details the adventures of Andrew Hawkins, born of a white mother (Jonathan’s wife) and a black father, George Hawkins, (Jonathan’s butler). After a night of heavy drinking both slave master and his butler become too drunk to face their respective wives and decide to swap marital beds; the result is Andrew. At 20, Andrew, who falls in love with another slave at Cripplegate, Minty, requests to be manumitted, so he could work and purchase his and Minty’s freedom. Jonathan, who has hitherto hired a private tutor for Andrew’s formal education in philosophy and other classics, instead, sends him to Flo Hartfield’s plantation , Leviathan, to work and earn money for his freedom. While at Leviathan where he becomes Flo’s sex toy, and is later sentenced to the mines where slaves are worked to death, Andrew decides to run away with the aid of another slave, a coffin-maker, named Reb. Andrew passes for white, and later marries Peggy, a white woman, but he lives most of his life in fear of being “discovered” by the renowned slave catcher , Horace Bannon. Before Andrew is sent to Flo Hartfield’s plantation , his father, George Hawkins, warns him against passing: “You could pass…if you wanted to, but if you did it’d be like turnin’ your back on me and everythin’ I believes in.”24 Andrew would later defy his father, as he passes for white, because as Reb tells him, “if you got no power you have to think like people who do so you kin make y’self over into what they want.”25 Interestingly enough, the Vet (yes, the Vet) who examines Andrew at Leviathan observes that his heart, since his arrival, “had developed an extra sound: a sort of whisper, or moan on the diastolic downbeat,” and that his heart “would never rest again, ‘unless [he] stops being a Negro.’”26 Andrew finds the Vet’s recommendation ridiculous but wonders if his “life would indeed be easier if he abandoned what appears to be a no-win struggle for happiness in th e Black World…that had always been, and might ever be a slaughterhouse—a style of being characterized by stasis, denial, humiliation, thinghood… a relative being.”27 Andrew, in fact, stops being a Negro, as he passes for white, and is “pleased that [his] passage into the White World went unmarked,” because the Negro, according to Reb, “is the finest student of the White World, the one pupil in the classroom who watches himself watching the others, absorbing the habits and body language of his teachers, his fellow students.”28 However, in spite of his success in the white world, his racial past, so to speak, catches up with him when he sees Minty (the woman he had promised to marry once he is financially secure to buy their freedom) being sold on the auction block. He is moved to attend to her physical wounds, resulting from abuse and neglect, in order to free himself, and to effectively leave slavery behind .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.