Joshua Bennett - Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

The Negro is Americas metaphor.

Richard Wright, Blueprint for Negro Writing

The very first paragraph of Frederick Douglasss 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, presents us with a claim that leaps off the page as a problem for modern thought. One rooted in an altogether improper adjacency given the conventions and central aims of the slave narrative as a form, that is, to serve as black humanitys literary proof. Douglass writes, I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs. This moment of all-too-fraught proximity between the enslaved black person and the nonhuman animalpositioned here as twin captives, affixed by modernitys long arcdemands our attention. What Douglass names is a kinship forged in the midst of unthinkable violence, kinship born of mutual subjugation, yes, but also the shared experience of opacity mistaken for emptiness. Here, Douglass foregrounds animal perspective as a means to convey the impossibility of personal history for the enslaved. A slaves past cannot be recalled because there is no socially recognized, generally honored means by which to recall itno system to record ones emergence into the world, ones entry into the proper chronology, and cosmology, of the human.

Yet one could also argue that Douglass is gesturing toward a deep sense of commonality and even comradeship here. Though the horse is certainly a representative of what is lost, it is also an unlikely ally, one that shares the experience of existing both inside and outside the parameters of plantation time. The horse is a creature that likewise has no narrative of originno chronological orientation outside its relationship to the slavers clockand is thus also constantly moving between the realm of organism and machine, between occupying a space of self-determination and being configured as a living commodity. In this sense, horses are, for Douglass, a bridge par excellence between the human and nonhuman realms. They are saleable, living beings, not unlike Douglass and his kin, that are certainly used for labor, entertainment, and breeding but also possess an interiority that is, by the rule, denied.

Douglass forges this unexpected alliance to set up a line of argument that he follows intently throughout the text, a means of getting out of animality by going through it. Douglass understands, for example, that under the system of chattel slavery, there are structures in place for the care and sustenance of animals that simply do not exist for the enslaved. As a result, in many of the initial scenes involving horses in Douglasss narrative, there is a confluence of complex emotions: empathy and envy, pity, love, resentment and outright rage. Douglass is aware of this unwieldy network of feelings that bind livestock and the enslaved together, and he appears to wrestle at various points with the sadness that emerges from living in such fraught proximity: the contradictions implicit in being asked to care for a creature that is, on many occasions, granted more freedom, and more room to move, than oneself. During a speech delivered in 1873 in Nashville, Tennessee, entitled Agriculture and Black Progress, Douglass takes this point a bit further: Not only the slave, but the horse, the ox, and the mule shared the general feeling of indifference to rights naturally engendered by a state of slavery. The master blamed the overseer; the overseer the slave, and the slave the horses, oxen, and mules; and violence and brutality fell upon animals as a consequence. Douglass goes on to entreat his listeners at the timean audience composed primarily of recently emancipated black farmersto consider animals their co-laborers, friends, partners in the field, to resist the whims of a social order predicated on their confinement and instead embrace another, more radical form of sociality, one grounded in the desire for a world without cages or chains.

In this sense and others, Douglasss horse embodies the central concerns of this book. The argument of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man is that the overarching claims Douglass is making can be found throughout the African American literary tradition. That is, rather than triumphalist rhetoric that would eschew the nonhuman altogether, what we often find instead are authors who envision the Animal as a source of unfettered possibility, or, to call on the work of John Berger, the Animal as a promise. And what does the Animal promise, exactly? What do black authors create when they are willing to engage in a critical embrace of what has been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration, to leap into a vision of human personhood rooted not in the logics of private property or dominion but in wildness, flight, brotherhood and sisterhood beyond blood?

This book is composed of five chapters, each of which tracks a specific animal figurethe rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the sharkin the works of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers: Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden, respectively. I argue that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and black feeling, as well as to combat certain foundational claims within the Western philosophical tradition broadly construed. My goal throughout this work is to illumine the ways in which the black aesthetic tradition provides us with the tools needed to conceive of interspecies relationships anew and ultimately to abolish the forms of antiblack thought that have maintained the fissure between human and animal. For this too is what W. E. B. Du Bois might have us think of as the gift of black culture, the gift of blackness: the great chain of being come undone, life itself unfettered and moving in all directions, a window into the worlds that thrive at the underside of modernity. What does the Animal promise? Nothing short of another cosmos. A radically different set of relations is possible. As Douglass and others demonstrate, such an order is already here, already in the works, already waiting for us in the wild.