This Is a Story To Pass On: How Toni Morrison Shaped My Writing of “Wake”

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In her essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Morrison asks— “where, I wonder… is the shadow of the presence from which the text has fled.” I wondered the same, and became obsessed with this question. As a Black American woman, and historian of Black Women, I am very aware of the shape of our absence in the historical canon. Historically we are at once both unseen, and made hypervisible through sensationalism and caricature. The actual lived experience of enslaved women, their subjectivity, their interiority, is passed on; Often, no one engages with it. In her acclaimed novel Beloved, Morrison does not simply pass these women by.

I am not a literature scholar, but I am aware of the historical obstacles in relying on existing recorded slave narratives. In my research for Wake, I have travelled down that weird echo chamber of attempting to confirm the stories in slave narratives collected by the Work Progress Administration during the Great Depression. In this process, historians have found that the stories that these formally enslaved people relayed changed drastically depending on whether the interviewer was white or Black. Literature scholars who have studied these slave narratives as a source found them to be highly curated, both by Abolitionists at the time and by subsequent historiographical imperatives. We know that no collection of evidence is completely objective. As Donna Haraway explains, all knowledge is situated (Situated Knowledges, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183). The existing narratives I had access to were specifically situated, with a racial dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. Because of this fraught collection process, I could not rely on these narratives to shed light on an honest interiority of the enslaved. I was forced to find another source, and turned towards literature for answers.

In my teaching of the history of slavery, I turned to the novel Beloved because it is an act of reclamation. Morrison engages with this question of the historical absence of enslaved women’s interior narratives by bringing to light the impossible choices that enslaved mothers were forced to make in a society that considered us property. Through this, she fights the flattening of their stories that have occurred through their sensationalization, and passes them on to new generations of readers. Morrison’s writing has both shaped my creative process in my graphic novel, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, and in my teaching as a historian of slavery in America, because I believe the existing historical sources are not enough to shed light on our subjectivity.

In creating the protagonist Sethe, Morrison reclaims the subjectivity of real-life woman Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped her captors with her children, and just before capture, managed to kill her daughter. Both contemporaneous press and modern scholarship sensationalized this event, calling Garner the “Modern Medea.” In fact, this is an actual book title: Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South, by Steven Weisenburger. This book is pitched as “THE LONG-FORGOTTEN, SHOCKING EVENTS BEHIND TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED.” I read it, so now you don’t have to. Margaret Garner’s story has nothing to do with the myth of Medea, but is instead the story of the heartbreak of Black enslaved women.

Sethe is the character Morrison creates to guide us through Garner’s story; Sethe kills her daughter to avoid her capture and return to slavery, and her daughter returns to her in ghostly form, as the young girl Beloved. Beloved herself is haunted by the Middle Passage. This process of haunting is beautifully described in Avery Gordon’s essay on Beloved, “not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there,” “A woman walked out of the water, thirsty and breathing hard, having travelled a long distance, looking for a face. Nobody counted on her walking out of the water, especially the ones who counted” (170). The ones who counted, and the ones who did the counting. We did not count, and to those in power, we still don’t. Because of this, I will not argue numerical semantics within Morrison’s dedication of her book Beloved to the “Sixty Million and more,” of us who were forced to travel the Middle Passage, and those of us that did not survive the Middle Passage. Quantitative historians estimate this number to be 12.9 million. The ones who “count.” Morrison creates an epistemology that can engage with this rupture in a way no quantitative method can even approach the violent rupture of the Trade. Neither the slaver bureaucrats, nor the best intentioned quantitative historians today, can begin to fathom. Numbers can’t contain the haunting.

Wake’s methodology engages with haunting directly. Black scholars of the slave trade are also haunted by The Trade. I know I am. Knowing this, how do we attend to the needs of this ghost?

First, we must greet the ghost. On the last page of Beloved, Toni Morrison says: “This is not a story to pass on.” I took this as a call to action while writing Wake. As in: This is NOT a story to pass on; Do not look away from this story. In order to answer that call, I had to confront the fact that many scholars often treat the Middle Passage like an ontological black box, a period in time and space in which there is nothing to see, and where the world became permanently anti-Black.

Historians and sociologists such as Orlando Patterson claim that through the Middle Passage and the institution of chattel slavery, we have become socially dead. Hortense Spillers claims that we were “ungendered” in the Middle Passage. I believe that we are decidedly, neither. Even before I uncovered how the Middle Passage was shaped by gender as a technology of power and how captive women wielded this technology of power to revolt, I knew those claims were incorrect. We were not ungendered, because chattel slavery is instantiated by racialized gender. In order to legally construct race-based chattel property, two genders of women were created. White women who give birth to the heirs of property, and Black women who give birth to property. This is how racialized gender works. To me, these are threads of Afro-Pessimism, a framework that explains how racism, colonialism, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade shape the structural conditions as well as the lived experiences of Black people. I am an Afrofuturist. In other words, I believe we will continue to exist in the future, and we can create a world in which we belong.

As an Afrofuturist historian, I felt Morrison’s call to not pass on this story. I didn’t shy away from the Black Box of the Middle Passage, but looked into it more deeply. I studied over 800 slave ships captain’s logs to recover the agency of captive women leading Slave Revolts. Through this study, I noticed a pattern in which captains would repeatedly claim to not understand how their captives got hold of weapons and started killing slavers. They claimed to have checked the man’s chains below deck night and day, though the captains kept women unlocked and on top of the deck. I realized we did not become passively ungendered. The erasure of enslaved women’s role in revolt was purposeful, and highly gendered. Revolt has a gendered body.

Beloved is about haunting, and so is Wake. Wake’s methodology engages with haunting directly. Beloved is about a ghost, who is herself haunted, and as Avery Gordon explains, haunting is a sociological phenomenon. Societies are haunted, if you want to understand a society you need to understand what’s haunting it.

Like Toni Morrison, I tried to take what was in the margin, to bring it to the center. Morrison refused the Black Box, and Wake excavated it to reveal a crucial part of our history of revolt that had been elided. This is what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work”, an ethical practice of imagining life otherwise in the face of catastrophe. This imperative is a central concept in Afrofuturism, and of the Akan concept of “Sankofa”; To “go back and fetch it”, or to move towards better ways of living, by retrieving our historical blueprint. I have come to see this work as a type of ancestral healing, through restoring the interiority of our people. We must attend the ghost, even if the ghost herself is haunted.

It was an intentional choice to create Wake in the medium of the graphic novel. Through this medium, it attempts to attend the ghost. To quote myself in the “conversations with the Author” section of Wake, “The use of text and images in a complex back-and-forth relationship allowed me to put the past right up against the present… It allowed me to make this story accessible while keeping its complexity. The sources on enslaved women are only fragments in the archive. The structure of the medium– panels with gutters (the blank space between panels) – is uniquely suited to recover and honor these stories and restore them to the historical record.” Daniel Stein, in Strange Fruit and Bitter Roots explains how I engage with the comics medium as a historical methodology; “The remediations of historical photographs in Wake mesh with a deeper understanding of the forms and functions of archives and our engagement with what they hold or exclude.” This is a process of superscription, of “superscribing images and narratives from the racist archive with new renditions that keep the old racism visible as a reminder of its entrenchment and longevity in U.S. culture but refuse to submit to its logic by providing critical counterimages and alternative narratives.” Wake uses methodologies of remediation in the archive to attend the ghost.

I have attempted in the writing and research of Wake, to give the ghost what it needs. To be “re-membered” from the dismemberment of the Middle Passage, and to create an opportunity for ancestral healing. Through my writing, I have tried to follow Morrison as she walks down the same circular path of time and history that connects us, our ancestors, the present, the future, and memory. In my present day, I have been exploring spiritual traditions that have brought to my mind the specific relationship that Black people have with water and its memory, and as Morrison said, “All water has a perfect memory.” When I think of the liveliness and resilience of the Black Diaspora, I think of the story of Yemoja, a riverine Orisha local to Yorubaland. She was transformed by the slave trade. She did not stay behind, or wait for her children on the other side of the Atlantic. Following those of us forced on this journey, the Middle Passage transformed her into the ocean itself. Creating repair from rupture.

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