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Author's Statement

Readers have asked how and why a white author came to create a novel with a black hero. Certainly I do not believe that I speak for people of color, who can speak for themselves and create their own heroes. Yet I would agree with Albert Murray, who, in The Omni-Americans, asserted that "slavery and oppression may well have made black people more human…while it has made white people less human." Say, then, that I write from a desire to become more fully human. To me, "whiteness" is less a skin color than a habit of privilege that is maintained through denial of others' suffering. What dies in me when I so deny?

I grew up in the midwest, in an upper-middle-class subdivision where a surprising number of houses had white pillars in front, like southern plantation houses. Some had black iron jockeys on the lawn -- fake horse-hitching posts. The homeowners were the children of immigrants and Okies, risen from the working classes, yet a potent marker of success in that subdivision was a nineteenth-century slave-owner's house with a black iron servant, ring through his hand, on the lawn -- testifying in his muteness to those left out of the triumphalist history taught in school. And we pale children in the houses? We were asleep. If the dark iron man was under a spell, so were we.

By writing an "I" who is a slave savant, a man of magic and of science who escapes and transcends orthodoxies, I am able to move beyond the brittle, thin triumphalist American narrative. I am able to inhabit an enlarging and challenging perspective. It is a little like the youthful actor from Anytown who is assigned the role of Oedipus. How can he, whose experience of life is school, hanging out, and flipping burgers, play a king? He may look within himself for memories of experience resonant with Kingness, experience of leadership, perhaps. Or he may create a series of grand physical gestures appropriate for kings, and learn to fill the role in the space thus created. Pierre Baptiste is, I hope, a grandly human character. You can read him as an African-diaspora genius, like Quassi Graman, who discovered quinine, or like Equiano, who wrote The Interesting Life. Or you can read Pierre Baptiste's life as a journey toward a more magnanimous sense of possibility, a journey into a new New World.

Reader Correspondence

Dear Ms. Eakins:

How much of Pierre's views are reflective of the author's attitudes, beliefs, and subscriptions?

While Pierre's recognition of the animal kingdom's contributions seems, at his point in history, commendable, his communion (of sorts) with the sea creature that 'impregnates' and robs him of speech seems to suggest that he panders to the popular racial stereotype of blacks as animals. Is this a correct assessment?

Dear E. Maynard:

To answer your question in cursory fashion, No, your assessment is not correct. But let's back up and take this a step at a time. If a wasp lays its eggs in a caterpillar's body, does that make the caterpillar any less a caterpillar? Pierre's "communion of sorts with the sea creature" is not a pregnancy in the sexual sense, though it does open the realm of female experience to Pierre. In biological terms, Pierre's impregnation is an infestation, a parasitic appropriation of his person. Yes, Pierre is himself a parent, but he is a very lonely man, after all, a lonely man sustained by the hallucinatory aspects of his powerful pantheistic, animistic, syncretistic religion.

That Pierre's offspring rob him of speech... ah! Children do, they do eat up their parents' lives, and particularly their female parents'. In this novel, "Nature" is an aggressive, invasive "masculine" presence in Pierre's body, even though it has wooed Pierre in a seductive and feminine guise.

Nature in some aspects is a rapist and a parasite, then. Much like Pamphile, though Nature has many redeeming characteristics, while Pamphile is almost unrelievedly vile. Yet, though Pierre murders Pamphile in the name of their shared humanity, he respects Pamphile's corpse. He will not appropriate it, will not eat the eyes. Pierre insists on the transcendent value of the human, despite the mystical sense of oneness with Creation that suffuses his vision and his science.

The theme of the parasite emerges again and again in the course of the marvelous adventures Pierre recounts: the needle creatures Pierre observes through the louvers, the meemie worms, the institution of slavery itself. The novel does not offer a political solution, along the lines of "crush the parasites," or "overturn the parasites." (Pierre is worried that in the post-revolutionary order, some men will continue to live at the expense of others.) Rather, Pierre creates a universe in which symbiosis and altruism transform hierarchy, dominance, and parasitism. He civilizes, educates, and tames the world of Nature, releasing its formidable powers in a benevolent manner, to increase the stock of goodness, beauty, and knowledge in the world. Pierre wishes to return to San Michel in order to give back to his fellow sufferers in the world of former slaves all that he has discovered and created.

Pierre is a natural philosopher, a scientist who comes to believe that men are not separated from beasts by any impassable chasm. Nonetheless he is a very human hero, in the most ancient sense of the word, the great-hearted and great-souled man who is separated from lesser beings by his sheer stature, his ability to transcend his misfortunes. Pierre has been robbed of speech, but not of language and its power to transform experience! That this quintessential hero, this philosopher-scientist-poet, should have been a slave, counted on his master's books as a chattel beast -- this is a terrible irony, as slavery itself was.

Dear Ms. Eakins:

I was wondering about the mythology that Pierre learned from the older slaves on the plantation. Are those stories part of an African tradition that you learned about in your research, or are they the product of your own imagination, or perhaps an elaboration by you on the traditional tales?

Dear Ms. Weber:

This question speaks to the very nature of the genre of fiction -- particularly fiction that purports to take place in a past which we cannot directly experience. To report the results of research is to write nonfiction or docu-fiction. Yet the imagination, unmoored to quiddity, can spin fantasy so arcane that readers will hesitate to shoulder the anthropological burden of reading it.

Like the novel's European traditions, the African traditions of The Marvelous Adventures are less reported than imagined or reinvented. I drew on no single body of tradition but rather on traditions from the breadth and length of what is after all a very large continent. Virtually all of the peoples and traditions about whom Pierre speaks -- such as the Oro -- are imaginary. However, the ways of the Perg, for instance, resemble in many respects those of the Peul, an actual people. I tried to create a sense of the African continent's geographic diversity and a sense of the general patterns of trade, as I understood them. I tried to convey some sense of the syncretism that generated New World religions like Santeria and Vodoun, although I stayed away from known deities like Erzulie and Ogun.

The folkloric stories that Pierre recounts are mostly based on actual tales, but all the stories are greatly changed. For instance, the story about the children in the cave with two doors is a real-enough African story, but it is set in an imaginary culture with an imaginary kinship structure. Certain details of hunting come from an anthropologist's description of life among the forest people that some outsiders call Pygmies. Ue-ue berries are a made-up fruit, and so on.

I have been asked why I do not simply write historical novels, true to documents and known facts. If I don't make history strange for myself, if I don't make it mysterious, then I'm approaching it with a distance and confidence that people living in it could not have had. So I make it strange for myself in order to put myself in the position of a person who was living in the past with the same sense of trying to figure things out that you or I would have now. Thus, I sort things out along with my characters. I don't want the burden of trying to tell stories that have to be true to facts that I can never know well enough, however much research I do.

For a related forum, see "Grist for the Mill / The Artist and Moral Responsibility," an e-mail dialog among four artists and writers: Patricia Eakins, Dee Shapiro, Moshe Benarroch, and Zane Ivy in the e (energy) section of salonDAarte, edited by Georgia Gibbs, posted 15 December 1999.