Reviving A Dead World

IMAGINE a scholar of the future. He is writing at a time when today's people and classes have passed into history, along with the etiquettes and assumptions by which they lived. The scholar asks himself why people acted so irrationally at such obvious cost to themselves: why factory workers let foremen tell them what to do, why their sons went off to kill people with whom they might more profitably have allied themselves, why their daughters accepted theories of their own incapacity, how a ruling class professing to believe in freedom and equality reconciled itself to enforcing all these customs.

The scholar would want to answer questions like these. But his life would be molded in a different society and by a different set of relationships with other people. It would be nearly as difficult for this scholar to understand the ways we thought as for one of today's scholars to imagine himself a member of a slave society. Except that today's scholars carry an additional burden. Aware that their writing may be used to illuminate or obscure the situation of contemporary American blacks, many historians of slavery begin to tread warily at the edges of inter-racial relationships, whether they're considering slaves' resistance to planters or planters' benevolence to slaves.

Eugene Genovese succeeds in recreating the lost world of slaves and slaveholders in large part because he's thought about all this. As America's best-known Marxist historian, Genovese thinks of all history as a story of people in classes--classes whose relations are always historically unique because they're always changing. Because he believes his own society's ruling institutions and beliefs couldn't have existed before its ruling class did, and that neither the institutions nor the class need last forever, Genovese can treat people from a dead society as equals. He doesn't need to devote himself to demonstrating that slaves and masters both acted like human beings, or that slavery was an oppressive and unfair economic system. Instead he can examine the interplay between these two partial truths, and their synthesis in "the beauty and power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression."

AS BEFITS a dialection, Genovese is at his best in dealing with the interactions between contradictory truths or forces. Roll, Jordan, Roll centers around such a theme. It tells of how the struggle between black slaves and white masters, between the masters' claims to absolute power and the slaves' insistence on what was customary, forged a way of living, a practical and tough though constantly shifting set of compromises, what Genovese calls a pattern of reciprocal rights and obligations. You can approach the theme from the slaves' point of view or that of the masters by looking at economic systems that legitimized them. Genovese deals with all these things in turn, circling around his theme, reaching inward for stories about specific slaves and masters and outward for comparisons with other systems of class rule.

Genovese's discussion of the economics of slavery is illuminating. Because of his sensitivity to the transience of economic patterns, he's sometimes willing to question not just prevalent conclusions but prevalent assumptions. For example, he questions the significance of measuring the material incentives offered the slave. He suggests instead that people sometimes work as eagerly for collective satisfaction as for individual advantage, and that the most important incentive for shucking corn zealously far into the night was the community life that came with it.

But what makes Roll, Jordan, Roll important is its complex and deeply respectful account of the systems of ideas slaves and masters developed. In each case, Genovese stresses the contradiction within the system that made it meaningful and alive, the tension between its role as a bulwark of the world as it was and its promise of something better, if only in some other world.

In discussing the masters' ideology, Genovese relies heavily on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the author of the The Modern Prince who helped to found the Italian Communist party. Gramsci is just one of dozens of the unexpected writers cited in Roll, Jordan, Roll--the others range from Hegel, Brecht, T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell to historians of Italian slavery and traditional Japan. But Genovese devotes special attention to Gramsci, with his stress on the role played by a society's ruling ideas in ligitmizing--indeed, giving the appearance of inevitability to--its practice, not just among the ruling class but also among the ruled. If you start by understanding laws and ideas in this way, as an agency for humanizing what many people might otherwise find inhumane, it becomes easier to understand Genovese's moderately startling pages on the nobility of many of the planters' wives.

Genovese's treatment of the slaves' system of beliefs--a new breed of Christianity, fusing African and European religious traditions--is even more central to his book, studded as it is with quotations from the Bible and slave spirituals. Genovese argues that Christianity let the slaves maintain their dignity as people, and refuse the temptation to hate their individual masters instead of the class system that included good and bad masters alike.

Genovese says the Christianity--indeed, any belief the slaves could have evolved from the reality of their daily lives--was less suitable as a weapon for attack than for passive resistance. It let the slaves "act like men," even though "they could not grasp their collective strength as a people and and act like political men." It allowed for people like the old slave who answered a young white minister's "Primarily, we must postulate the existence of a deity," with a gentle, "Yes, Lord, dat's so. Bless de Lord." It allowed slaves to be compassionate even after a presumably all-consuming liberation, like the one who told of a visit to his old master:

I went to see him in his last days and I set by him and kept de files off while dere. I see the lines sorrow had plowed on dat old face, and I' membered he'd been a captain on hoss back indat war. It come into my 'membrance de song of Moses; de Lord had triumphed glorily and de hoss and his rider have been throwed into de sea.

Because Genovese writes about all the people he discusses as members of social classes that no longer exist, that stamped their humanity without destroying it, he's able to understand them as we might wish to be understood by the scholar of the future. He's able to understand them--as an older synthesis of partial truths has it--as people making their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing. And by remembering always the horse and his seemingly invincible rider, thrown into the sea and utterly destroyed, Genovese is able to remind us that not even those circumstances are immutable, that people have changed the world before and may yet do so again.