Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter III - “Don Benito’s Harlequin Ensign:” The Slave Mutiny

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter III

“A Cultural Mongrel”

Transatlantic Mediations in Charles Johnson’s

Middle Passage

“Don Benito’s Harlequin Ensign:” The Slave Mutiny

In a Hegelian view, one achieves “personhood” only through a relationship with another person. In order to become self-conscious, one person has to reflect upon oneself. This reflection upon oneself is accomplished only if it is reflected back by “another self on a par with one’s self” (Inwood 1992, 246). Advocating the interchangeability of roles, Hegel affirms that in the dialectical relation between master and slave not only is the slave dependent on the master, but the master is also dependent on the slave. Like the slave, the master achieves a “dependent consciousness,” in which the recognition of his dominating role is conditioned by the existence of the subjected slave (Hegel 1967).

In Johnson’s Middle Passage, the episode of the slave mutiny offers a powerful instance of the author’s mediating vision on the interdependent roles of master and slave. Drawing on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Johnson’s text advocates that the master/slave conflict is perpetuated even if their positions are reversed so that they cannot escape their vicious circle of enslavement.²⁷ Fictionalizing the slave rebellions aboard the ship Amistad (1839) and aboard the ship Creole (1841), both Melville and Johnson make us reflect on “slavery as a chain reaction” (Giles 2002, 32). In their texts the episode of the slave mutiny functions as a memento on the interchangeability of the master/slave positions.²⁸ In both cases, the Africans take charge, murder most of the white crew, and transform the survivors into slaves kept alive only for their knowledge of navigation. Their ship turns out to be a teatrum mundi, a floating opera, a world turned upside down, where “mutineers, Africans, and able seamen could not be distinguished” (Middle Passage 106).

In Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” the English Captain Amasa Delano boards the Spanish ship San Dominick, where a successful slave mutiny has taken place. While the Spanish Captain, Don Benito Cereno, is forced by the Africans to pretend that he is still in charge, Delano is misled by their subterfuge and fails in “reading” the real significance of the events. Master of ambiguity and quid pro quo, Melville skillfully underlines the discrepancy between what Delano sees and what he knows. Even if Delano is able to detect something “incongruous” and “contradictory” in the present situation (51, 72), his preconceived ideas on the master/slave hierarchy prevent him from deciphering the subtext of this “tale of suffering” (42). He is consequently offered a version of the story fabricated by the apparently “unsophisticated Africans” and reluctantly told by the “gentlemanly” Spanish Captain (43). This reversal of roles points to the polarity in which the master/slave places are interchangeable. By simultaneously taking charge of the ship and fulfilling the task of Don Benito’s “faithful” servant, the African Babo stands for white man’s shadow, his double, his parodic reflection.

In a game of mimicry and mockery, Melville’s technique of reversing roles makes both Delano and the reader question their racial assumptions. The Africans appear in fact far more complex than they are initially thought to be. Via disguise, lying, and cajoling, they know how to manipulate the two white captains. Only in rare moments, Delano’s intuition helps him see beyond the deceptiveness of Don Benito’s “harlequin ensign” (81):²⁹

To Captain Delano’s imagination, now again not wholly at rest, there was something so hollow in the Spaniard’s manner, with apparently some reciprocal hollowness in the servant’s dusky comment of silence, that the idea flashed across him, that possibly master and man, for some unknown purpose, were acting out, both in word and deed, nay, to the very tremor of Don Benito’s limbs, some juggling play before him (81).

With the use of pastiche and parody, Johnson adopts events and characters from the Melvillean text and incorporates them in his reflexive, postmodern novel.³⁰ Unlike Melville, Johnson places his Janus-faced, polytropic narrator on a more flexible position. If Delano fails in deciphering Cereno’s cryptic tale, Rutherford is a Hermes figure, a great linguist who can easily gain knowledge of the others’ plans, and whose “middle” position makes him an accomplice of both parties. In fact, in Johnson’s text, two mutinies take place: the one of the white crew who intend to destabilize the captain’s tyrannical supremacy, and the one of the slaves who strive to regain their lost liberty. In this twofold conflict, Rutherford has the role of a double agent, if not, of a triple agent—the man whom the white crew, the white captain, and the Africans want to employ equally.³¹

As Johnson’s watchful narrator is placed in the privileged position of knowing the others’ intentions, he understands his own part in a greater masquerade in which the actors may easily change roles. The scene in which Rutherford secretly witnesses Meadows beating the dogs exposes that mimicry can become an effective weapon for gaining control. Posture, speech, and clothing are used in order to create the “devastating caricature” of the adversaries: Calhoun, Cringle, and other mates or Africans (104). Meadows’ manipulating technique expresses again the vulnerability of subjective boundaries, the possibility to easily exchange roles.

At an intertextual level, both Johnson and Melville offer ambivalent chronicles of the mutiny. Melville’s twice-told story has an official and an unofficial version. Cereno’s first account of the events to Delano offers the version imposed by the Africans, while his later report to the court reveals his own version—the complementary narrative that fills in the gaps of the previous tale. Even if these unreliable versions are told by a white man, they are actually prompted by a black character who is the instigator of events and the author of the story. One can hear Babo’s words in Benito’s mouth resonating in a disquieting, distorted way. Hence, the incredible, fabricated nature of this “fictitious story dictated to the deponent by Babo, and through the deponent imposed on Captain Delano” (105). Master of puppets, Babo has authorial control over his story, as well as over the life of Cereno, who is turned into a marionette, “one of those paper captains” (53). In spite of Cereno’s refusal to look at Babo during the trial, we are told that their destinies continue to be intermingled after their death: fixed on a pole in a plaza in Lima, Babo’s head, “that hive of subtlety,” gazes at St. Bartholomew church where Cereno is buried (113).

While alluding to Melville’s text, Johnson ironically reverses it. Toward the end of Middle Passage, Cringle undertakes a powerful conversion in which he no longer perceives the Africans as mysterious savages, but as “friends,” “shipmates,” “brave lads” and “lasses” (173). Just before offering himself to be killed and eaten by the others in a supreme act of altruism, he makes reference to Melville’s English captain: “‘tis scandalous how some writers such as Amasa Delano have slandered black rebels in their texts” (173). Invoking Melville’s character, Cringle’s exclamation questions the assumptions of his nineteenth century text, in which the Africans are inescapably forced into the role of the Other.

Through Rutherford’s middle position, the Allmuseri are no longer depersonalized slaves, but their culture, history, and language are sympathetically revealed. Unlike Cereno whose reluctance to look at Babo expresses the colonizer’s refusal to learn about the Other, Rutherford finds his African counterpart in Ngonyama, the one who calls him his “brother” and initiates him into the Allmuserian worldview. In the same way in which American history is not linear, Allmuserian history gains momentum from a series of departures, adventures, and returns that have led to cultural syncretism. Africa, India, America, and the Caribbean islands have left their imprint on their arts and language. Their unitary Weltanschauung is reflected by their written language, which is not designed for “doing analytic work, or deconstructing things into discrete parts” (77-78). Part of an exemplary tribe, the Allmuseri teleologically connect their destiny with their legends, and with their Christian-like manners. In this context, Rutherford’s manifest desire to appropriate their worldview and his identification with them prefigures his later ability to redefine himself in terms of the Other:

Compared to other African tribes, the Allmuseri were the most popular servants. They bought twice the price of Bantu or Kru. According to legend, Allmuseri elders took twig brooms with them everywhere, sweeping the ground so as not to inadvertently step on creatures too small to see. Eating no meat, they were easy to feed. Disliking property, they were simple to clothe. Able to heal themselves, they required no medication. They seldom fought. They could not steal. They fell sick, it was said, if they wronged anyone. As I live, they so shamed me I wanted their ageless culture to be my own (78).

NOTES

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