The Remains of the Slave Narrative in Marilyn Nelson’s Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem
p. 99-127
Résumé
Marilyn Nelson’s volume of poems, Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem (2004), was commissioned to commemorate Fortune, a Connecticut slave who died in 1798. His master, a doctor, dissected him in order to use his skeleton for anatomical study. Until scientists and historians identified the skeleton as Fortune’s, it was an anonymous exhibit in Connecticut’s Mattatuck museum. Much of what was discovered about the slave’s life is told through the book’s “paratexts”—the copious notes and images that accompany the poems. Through the paratexts, and through various motifs appearing in the poems, Nelson’s book evokes the slave narrative, but it appropriates elements of an outmoded form to say something new. Rejecting the suspense and linearity of the slave narratives, the poems imitate the form of the requiem mass. They also mock the empirical epistemology of the slave narratives, downplaying the slave’s material existence in order to endorse the spiritual life. Like Beloved, Nelson’s book moves beyond the slavery period to deal with the problem of surviving history’s traumas. This contemporary African American requiem can be seen as a kind of ritual exorcism designed to liberate readers from the horror of the past and put Fortune’s story to rest.
Texte intégral
1Published in 2004, Marilyn Nelson’s book of poems, Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem,1 has an intriguing history behind it. The work was commissioned by the Mattatuck Museum, in Waterbury, Connecticut, in response to the discovery that the previously anonymous skeleton donated to the museum in 1933 belonged to one of the last slaves to reside in Waterbury.2 The work of identifying the skeleton began in 1996. The team of anthropologists, archeologists and historians reached the conclusion that the bones were those of Fortune, a slave who died in Waterbury in 1798. Upon his death his owner, Dr. Preserved Porter, dissected the body and boiled the bones in order to preserve the skeleton for anatomical study. This rather gruesome reminder of Connecticut’s buried history of slavery caused division within the museum’s African American History Project committee and in the community at large. While some argued that the bones are valuable to research, others felt that Fortune’s remains should finally be allowed the dignity of a burial.3 It was at this point that the Mattatuck Museum contacted African American poet Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut’s poet laureate, with the request that she write a work “to commemorate Fortune’s life”.4 For Nelson, a poet particularly gifted at narrative forms,5 one of the ways in which to approach the assignment would have been to use the accumulated historical data to write a series of biographical poems imaginatively retrieving Fortune’s story. Instead, as the “Author’s Note” declares, Marilyn Nelson based her commemorative poem on the musical form of a “traditional funeral mass” (9). Nevertheless, I hope to show that both the book’s “paratexts”—the copious notes and images that accompany the text—and various narrative motifs appearing in the poems evoke the slave narrative6. Yet, despite these reminders of an earlier African American literary form, the book ultimately moves beyond the slave narrative in order to try to repair its inherent racial divisions.
2The notes and images accompanying Marilyn Nelson’s poems recall very strongly the heavy paratextual apparatus belonging to the books that Robert Stepto has labeled “primal” or “first phase” slave narratives:
3These documents—and voices—may not always be smoothly integrated with the former slave’s tale, but they are nevertheless parts of the narrative. Their primary function is, of course to authenticate the former slave’s account; in doing so, they are at least partly responsible for the narrative’s acceptance as historical evidence. However in literary terms, the documents collectively create something close to a dialogue—of forms as well as voices— which suggests that in its primal state or first phase, the slave narrative is an eclectic narrative form.7
4 Much of the paratextual material of Fortune’s Bones has a comparable authenticating function and produces a similarly eclectic form. For example, among the various images which recall that slavery existed in the North East throughout the eighteenth century are such items as a photograph of a bill of sale for Peter, a slave sold in Woodbury, Connecticut in 1762, reproduced on the title page (3), an ink silhouette of Flora, a “negro slave,” which was attached to another bill of sale (14),8 and an embroidered scene which represents, in the center, a white woman sitting at her desk writing while in the far right hand corner a black woman rocks a cradle (14).9 Such reminders are necessary due to the success of revisionist nineteenth century efforts to characterize the North as the place of emancipated white labor in contrast to the cruel and corrupt slavery system in the South.10 An additional function of the illustrations and explanatory notes is to convince readers that the skeleton from the Mattatuck museum was indeed Dr. Preserved Porter’s slave, Fortune. Pamela Espeland’s notes immediately present this as an indisputable fact: “Before Fortune was bones in a Connecticut museum, he was a husband, a father, a baptized Christian and a slave” (12). There follows, in equally simple, declarative sentences, a synopsis of the available facts about Fortune’s life and death. Indeed, the same kinds of facts about family ties and ownership are established in the prefatory letters to Henry Bibb’s Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849),11 the text that Stepto cites as typical of the “eclectic” or “frst phase narrative” (Stepto 1991: 4).
Fig. 1. — Front cover, Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem. Photograph of Fortune’s skeleton by Mattatuck Museum. Painting of Fortune by medical illustrator William Westwood. Jacket design by Helen Robinson. Reprinted by permission of Front Street and Boyds Mills Press.

5 The book’s split concern with Fortune’s death and his life is announced on the front cover: on the left is a photograph of the skeleton’s left side; on the right, the right side of Fortune’s body, from a painting by William Westwood. Though Westwood is a medical illustrator, he depicts Fortune’s body fully clothed, in late eighteenth century dress that evokes the portraits from the frontispieces of slave narratives. Like the freed slaves that are the authors of these books, Fortune is not in work dress, but in clothes that evoke a degree of affluence. He wears a soft white shirt with fine textured blue woolen hose and waistcoat, as well as matching blue leather shoes. We can compare Westwood’s painting (see figs. 1 and 2) and Frank Bender’s forensic sculpture, reproduced on page 23 of Fortune’s Bones (see fig. 3),12 to the half-portrait engraving of Henry Bibb from the first page of his narrative (fig. 4). The men’s elegant clothes suggest freedom and success. The significant difference is that where Bibb proudly holds a copy of a book in his hand, in Bender’s reconstruction, Fortune seems to be buttoning his shirt cuff, as if in the final stages of getting dressed. Bibb’s portrait shows him to be an author, while Fortune’s image suggests that his flesh truly clothed the Mattatuck museum skeleton. Though slightly different, the representations of Bibb and Fortune serve as authenticating evidence typical of the paratexts of slave narrative. Nonetheless, the artists’ imaginative reconstructions of Fortune seem to contradict the biographical details gathered by the historians, making him better dressed than his slave status would allow.
Fig. 2. — Overlay of the photograph of Fortune’s skeleton and Westwood’s painting (Fortune’s Bones 6). Reproduced by permission of Front Street and Boyds Mills Press.

Fig. 3. — The final stage of the facial reconstruction by the forensic sculptor Frank Bender, created for the Mattatuck Museum (Fortune’s Bones 26). Reproduced by permission of Front Street and Boyds Mills Press.

Fig. 4. — Portrait from the frontispiece of Henry Bibb’s Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: H. Bibb, 1849), reproduced with the permissio of the Joyner Library, East Carolina University.

6 The troubling sense of contradiction fostered by the paratextual material included in Fortune’s Bones begins with the cover, which suggests that the book will treat Fortune’s story both before and after his death. However, the normal order of before and after seems to have been reversed. As we read from left to right, the skeleton appears first and the man second, replicating not the order of existence, but the procedure of the forensic sculptor who reconstructed an image of Fortune from the evidence provided by his bone structure. Moreover, there is a mismatch between the two sides, which fail to fit together to create a complete body. This split announces the dual aim of the book: to evoke the biography of a slave and, at the same time, to treat a forensic mystery. On the one hand, the book’s layout evokes nineteenth century slave narratives, an association which is aided by the forensic artists’ imitation of their iconography. On the other hand, the numerous photographs of the bones from the Mattatuck Museum evoke both the imagery of medical science and the macabre iconography of Halloween or Gothic fiction.
7Perhaps unintentionally, the book’s split iconography recalls the division in the scientific and local community over what to do with Fortune’s remains. In agreeing to write the book, Marilyn Nelson faced the problem of addressing a readership torn between the desire to resuscitate the past and to put it to rest. Indeed, this is the dilemma America confronts in relation to slavery. This ambivalence is replicated in the book’s oxymoronic sub-title; the word “requiem” corresponds to the skeleton that clamors to be buried and the word “manumission,” to the well-dressed African American who demands recognition. At the same time, the subtitle suggests that poetic language, in its ability to hold opposites together, can respond positively and creatively to cultural and historical ambivalence.
8Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem can be compared to contemporary rewritings of the slave narrative such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Like Beloved, it moves beyond the slavery period to deal with the problem of surviving history’s traumas, though it finds an answer in the non-narrative form of a highly original requiem. The book shares the neo-slave narratives’ recourse to oral and musical traditions as well as the evocation of the ghostly presence of one of slavery’s victims. Although the poems eschew the biographical impulse, they recall slave narratives thematically, through the evocation of traditional African American topoi such as naming, flight, reflections on religion, the slave’s humanity, the slaveholder’s inhumanity, and the culminating celebration of freedom. The result of this hybridizing effort is a work whose stimulating contradictions prepare for a new kind of vision that moves beyond the original slave narrative.
9“Preface,” the first poem to appear in Fortune’s Bones, responds to the conventional openings of the slave narratives by asserting the impossibility of gaining exhaustive knowledge about Fortune’s life. The poem thus inverts an important argumentative strategy of the slave narratives, their validation of claims to truth. Since laws blocked slaves from learning to write, and the popular imagination also associated Blacks with illiteracy, the narratives habitually cite white “authorities” as evidence of their authenticity. Henry Bibb’s narrative thus begins with a Preface written by the Abolitionist minister, Lucius C. Matlack, which asserts the narrative’s “claims to truth”. In the texts that follow, a Committee of respectable white citizens presents the results of an empirical “investigation [which] has sifted and analysed every essential fact alleged, and demonstrated clearly that this thrilling and eloquent narrative, though stranger than fiction, is undoubtedly true” ( “Introduction” ii). By contrast, Nelson’s “Preface” moves from conviction to speculation to a frank avowal of ignorance. The facts it asserts in the opening lines are meager and deliberately disappointing in their blunt obviousness: “Fortune was born; he died. Between those truths/ stretched years of drudgery...” (13). Moreover, whatever knowledge the Preface asserts issues not from the pens of white authorities but from the bones themselves,13 which, miraculously, speak in blank verse: “they speak of cleared acres, miles of stone walls./ They say work broke his back: Before it healed, / They say, he suffered years of wrenching pain” (13). The Preface then moves into the realm of conjecture with a hypothesis about the slave’s anger at his situation: “A man unmanned, / he must sometimes have walked with balled-up fists” (13). Subsequently, the relative assurance of “must” shades off into doubt when the subject of religion is evoked: “and Fortune may or may not have believed” (13). Lastly, the speaker admits profound ignorance concerning Fortune’s character and emotions:
Was Fortune bitter? Was he good or bad?
Did he sometimes throw back his head and laugh?
His bones say only that he served and died,
that he was useful, even into death,
stripped of his name, his story, and his flesh. (13)
10These three unanswerable questions voice the desire to know more than historical or scientific methods can furnish. Fortune’s skeleton demonstrates the limits of factual knowledge, for it lacks the flesh and blood details that give narrative its force. Fortune thus becomes emblematic of all the unfreed slaves who “served and died” and whose stories have disappeared.
11A standard theme of the slave narrative is its reflection on the cruelty and depravity of slave owners. Asserting the inevitability of the institution’s degrading effects on whites made a strong argument for its abolition. In his chapter on “A Slaveholder’s Character,” Frederick Douglass condemns the “outrages deep, dark, and nameless” committed by a man that he concedes might have been humane in a different society.14 Nelson refuses to reproduce the conventional tirades against the slaveholders’ cruelty. Still, the “Preface”—the only poem to be spoken rather than sung according to the book’s list of “Contents”—shows the exploitative nature of slavery though its blunt statements about the drudgery and hopelessness of Fortune’s life. It also targets white hypocrisy in depicting how: “A white priest painted water on his head” (13). This description of the rite of initiation into the Christian community is derisively ironic. Baptizing someone without an acknowledgment of the recipient’s equality with other Christians is represented to be as ineffectual as painting without pigments. Eschewing the extravagant language of the slave narratives, the “Preface” employs understatement to protest chattel slavery, characterizing Dr. Preserved Porter’s unfeeling final exploitation of Fortune’s body for medical research as making it “useful, even into death...” (13). The truncated attempt to tell Fortune’s story ends with this protest against exploitation, and the spoken voice gives way to song as Nelson allows the slave narrative to mutate into an African American requiem mass.
12 The polyphonic requiem gives a more nuanced—though certainly not uncritical—portrayal of slavery, especially in allowing the voice of Dr. Preserved Porter to participate. As if to emphasize her rejection of narrative, Nelson inverts the chronological order of story or history in organizing the sequence of the poems. “Dinah’s Lament,” Fortune’s wife’s song about her very peculiar experience of widowhood precedes “On Abrigador Hill,” the poem that describes Porter’s dissection of the body. Thus the slave is given precedence over the master, and her experience of the consequences of the doctor’s act appears before the act itself.
13Assigned to the “contralto” voice of Dinah, Fortune’s wife, the first song of “The Manumission Requiem” follows the lead of the neo-slave narratives in employing the oral accent of an uneducated slave in order to bear witness to past humiliations. The poem shows the pitiless cruelty of chattel slavery obliquely through Dinah’s ironic description of her mistress’s squeamishness about the newly stripped skeleton:
Miss Lydia doesn’t clean the Doctor room.
She say she can’t go in that room: she scared.
She make me take the dust rag and the broom and clean around my husband, hanging there.
Since she seen Fortune head in that big pot
Miss Lydia say that room make her feel ill,
sick with the thought of boiling human broth.
I wonder how she think it make me feel? (15)
14Unlike the traditional slave narratives, “Dinah’s Lament” avoids echoing the Abolitionist discourse of condemnation, protest and analysis. Instead, the poem begins by repeating the white mistress’s protest against a chore which she judges too hard for her own sensitive nature, but suitable for a slave. In this way, Miss Lydia is made to express revolt against the exploitation she practices herself. In a clever use of ironic signifying,15 Dinah’s voice repeats her mistress’s denunciation of Dr. Porter’s act of “boiling human broth,” a practice that would place him among the “savages” stigmatized by the discourses of slavery and colonialism. “Dinah’s Lament” uses the veiled irony of the rhetorical question to protest the horrific task the slave has to perform. Indeed, Dinah’s feelings have to remain unspoken, not because she is inarticulate, but because she lacks an interlocutor who can hear her. The last line of her lament echoes a familiar spiritual: “nobody know my pain, but Fortune bones”.16 Touchingly, the only audience for her lament is the skeleton she is ordered to dust.
15Nelson’s most daring departure from the tradition of slave narrative is in attributing a complex, even sympathetic voice to the slave owner. “On Abrigador Hill,”17 the poem in which Dr. Preserved Porter’s voice describes “the dissection of/ the former body of my former slave” (17) strangely recalls the title of the jazz hit “Blueberry Hill”.18 Creating this ironic contrast between the text and the musical intertext is the first step in the process of weighting this moment with emotional complexity. The dissection could easily have been represented as an unfeelingly utilitarian exploitation of Fortune’s body; instead it becomes a moment of almost tender intimacy. What begins as a scientific exploration of the body ( “Herewith begins my dissection...”) transmutes into a profoundly moving encounter with the other and finishes by echoing a love song:
Note well how death softens the human skin,
making it almost transparent,
so that under my reverent knife—
the first cut takes my breath away,
it feels like cutting the whole world—
it falls open like bridal gossamer. (17)
16The dissection hovers ambivalently between an act of torture ( “the first cut”) and of love ( “takes my breath away”). It evokes both rape ( “it falls open”) and marriage ( “like bridal gossamer”). Dr. Porter appears as an intruder imitating an imperialist act of possession— “Standing on a new continent” (19)—and also as one who is himself penetrated and possessed— “beyond the boundaries of nakedness/ I am forever changed by what I see...” (19). Finally, Porter’s last statement in the poem— “I enter Fortune, and he enters me” (19)—rewrites the sentimental chiasmus at the end of “Blueberry Hill”19 to encapsulate the double significance of what the master does to his slave. Though it is certainly a final violation of the integrity of the slave’s body, the dissection seems to be partly redeemed by a scientific and humanitarian impulse that makes Porter receptive to what he can learn from Fortune’s body. Doctor Porter represents himself above all as a healer, for the first ten lines of the poem list the numerous medical acts performed in fifty years of practice. The refrain, repeated with variations after each ten line stanza, expresses the difficulty of performing those functions without any empirical knowledge of the human body: “And I’ve been humbled by ignorance/ humbled by ignorance”. This tone of respectful humility upsets the normal binary relations between master and slave, black and white. Fortune’s body becomes Porter’s teacher, giving a lesson both in anatomy, and in common humanity.20
17Other traditional motifs from the slave narratives appear in oblique and sometimes inverted ways. The topos of naming appears in a new transmutation. In the traditional slave narratives, masters named and renamed their slaves, exercising patriarchal control over their property. In freedom, the ex-slaves chose different names, either as protection or as a proclamation of their new identity. In the first stanza of “Kyrie of the Bones” the voice of Dr. Preserved Porter renames Fortune:
1800 [baritone I]
I called him Larry. It was easier
to face him with an imaginary name.
For Fortune was an image of myself:
my fortune known, my face bare bone. (21)
18 Espeland’s notes on the facing page explains the historical detail that inspired this stanza: “At some point—no one knows exactly when—‘Larry’ was written on the skull. Fortune’s name was forgotten for nearly a century” (20). The attribution of this act of renaming to Porter,21 who died in 1803, might initially appear as an accusation leveled against the slave owner. Nevertheless, although this is an instance of calling a man out of his name,22 the motives that Porter admits to reveal a mitigating sense of remorse toward the man he treats as an object. The words “to face him” acknowledge responsibility toward a fellow human being; indeed Fortune has become Porter’s double: “an image of myself: / my fortune known...”.
19References to flight, another conventional motif in slave narratives, appear in the opening and closing poems through a typically New England image of migrating geese. At first the image is conveyed in a negative statement:
Fortune’s legacy
was his inheritance: the hopeless hope
of a people valued for their labor, not
for their ability to watch and dream
as vees of geese define fall evening skies (13).
20The possibility of escape is not even envisioned here; instead Fortune simply anticipates passing on his condition to his children. Ironically, the only expectation he transmits is a “hopeless hope”. Yet the poetry soars, as the longing for flight is transmitted not only in the image, but also in the sounds of the words, through the assonance of the long front vowels in “dream,” “vees,” “geese” and “evening”. In the final poem, “Sanctus,” the image of flight returns again in the plea: “Be to us what south is to autumn geese” (29). As the choir implores: “Call us home, Lord, call us home./ Call us home, Lord, set us free” (29), their lines recall the spirituals that the slaves sang to encode messages about their plans for escape.23 Yet, the traditional direction for flight is reversed in the image of geese flying south. Indeed, the compass points, so vital for escaping slaves, are confused in the final poem, for “home” seems to be located in the North as well as the South, as the choir pleads: “Magnetic center of the universe, / make us iron filings” (29).
21In choosing the form of the requiem mass, Nelson rejects the narrative suspense and excitement that characterizes the slave narratives. Everything there is to know about Fortune is already told in the “Preface” and the paratexts. While the traditional slave narrative borrows from the picaresque novel, relating the protagonist’s adventures in traveling through American space,24 Fortune’s Bones shows Fortune journeying only in time, persisting through the centuries in “Kyrie of the Bones” and being displaced only from the Porter home to the Mattatuck museum in Waterbury. Clearly, Fortune’s sad but un-heroic life and ignominious death is not an apt subject for narrative. Instead, by hybridizing slave narrative motifs with the requiem mass Nelson produces a jazz-like improvisation on conventional themes. In this way, she reinvents and reappropriates an outmoded form so as to make it say something new.
22 Nelson’s most radical departure from the slave narrative tradition comes in the representation of Fortune’s voice. The whole purpose of the traditional slave narrative’s elaborate paratextual apparatus is to provide an authenticating context and a frame enabling the ex-slave “to write himself into the human community through the action of the first-person narration”.25 When Fortune’s voice finally appears in the book’s penultimate poem, “Not My Bones,” its first declaration seems to refute all the claims made in the paratexts: “I was not this body, / I was not these bones” (25). With these words, the book’s careful presentation of the forensic and historical evidence for Fortune’s identity seems to be denied. The poem thus seems to distance itself from the effort to attach a body, a name, and a history to the unburied skeleton. In keeping with the doubts and questions surrounding Fortune in the “Preface,” the penultimate poem confirms his absence, the irretrievability of his lived experience. Rather than filling in the gaps in the narrative of his life, Fortune’s voice keeps history’s secrets by denying the importance of his material existence.
23In its silences, the text prolongs the tendency W.E.B. Dubois finds in the productions surviving from slavery times to reveal little of “the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another..., so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences”. (W.E.B. Du Bois 1997: 736). Paul Gilroy calls this reticence, “the topos of unsayability”. In his view it explains the emergence of music as a preeminent form of Black expression: “[The topos] can be used to challenge the privileged conceptions of both language and writing as preeminent expressions of human consciousness. The power and significance of music within the black Atlantic have grown in inverse proportion to the limited expressive power of language”.26 Nelson’s choice of the sung Requiem as a response to Fortune’s story conforms to this theory in part. The poems take up African American musical idioms like spirituals, blues, and jazz to give an emotional response to history. Yet the emphasis on music in the book does not come at the expense of writing. The poems employ a wide range of poetic and verbal forms, marrying African American popular forms with all the literary resources of English.
24Eschewing narrative, Fortune’s voice finds a more liberating form of expression in the joyous song that breaks out of the mold of the traditional requiem mass.27 The apparent disclaimer of the title, “Not My Bones” becomes an attention-getting assertion that prepares for a new improvisation on conventional representations of freedom in the slave narratives. Nelson borrows from a non-Western religious tradition in this eclectic poem. In words inspired by the consolation of the Vietnamese Buddhist leader, Thich Nhat Hanh,28 Fortune’s voice proclaims that the essential part of him has survived slavery and death. The poem comes as a joyous assertion of life after a meditation on mortality. In contrast to the other poems, the idiosyncratically patterned stanzas of “Not my Bones” sound a syncopated, jazz-like note:
I was not this body,
I was not these bones.
This skeleton was just my
temporary home.
Elementary molecules converged for a breath, then danced on beyond my individual death.
And I am not my body,
I am not my body. (25)
25The first five of the poem’s six stanzas repeat this (abcbddaa) rhyme scheme, but the stress patterns are widely varied, giving a simultaneous impression of freedom and pattern. The fifth and sixth lines of the stanza could perhaps have been divided to create something approximating a ballad, with the last two lines of the stanza constituting a refrain, but instead, the chosen layout gives the impression of irregularity and improvisation. The longer lines create a change in tempo, since more words are compressed into the space of a breath. The poem’s polysyllabic words produce an effect of syncopation, and assonance and consonance heighten this effect, especially in the longer lines, where they tend to coincide with the stressed syllables: “EleMENtary MOLecules conVERGED for a BREATH, / then DANCED on beYOND my indiVIDual DEATH” (25). The jazz aesthetic is also expressed in the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of different tonal registers. Elegant phrasing like “the night sky’s/ mute geometry” contrasts with colloquial phrases like “your itty-bitty voice” (27). Original metaphors like “we are clouds in clothes” stand alongside lines from familiar songs.
26 At moments, the poem produces the effect of an improvised solo, particularly in the final stanza, where the rhyme scheme and the first-person statements change:
Well, I woke up this morning just so glad to be free,
glad to be free, glad to be free.
I woke up this morning in restful peace.
For I am not my body,
I am not my bones.
I am not my body,
glory hallelujah, not my bones.
I am not my bones. (27)
27Here the past tense of the poem’s opening line, “I was not this body,” switches to a triumphant present tense, as Fortune finally affirms his freedom and his existence in the paradoxical state of waking up “in restful peace” and being in non-being ( “I am not...”). There is a heavy insistence on repetition or reprise, as this stanza not only picks up the variations on Thich Nhat Hanh’s consolatory advice that recur in every stanza, but also includes well-known lines from the African American musical tradition. The insertion of “glory hallelujah” into the refrain sounds a gospel note. Besides recalling the culminating moment of the slave narrative, the line, “Well, I woke up this morning just so glad to be free,” reprises a line from a spiritual that was adapted during the civil rights movement to fit secular longings for release. “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus” became “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom”.29 In Nelson’s poem, this line mutates once again; the oxymoronic phrase— “I woke up this morning in restful peace”— creates a vernacular echo of the “requiescat in pace” of the traditional mass for the dead.
28Diverging as it does from the more sober mood of the other poems, Fortune’s jazz-like song seems to introduce disorder into the melodic composition of “The Manumission Requiem”. This disruptive moment befits the more hybrid, disjunctive African American aesthetic. As Nelson suggests in her prefatory note, the penultimate poem corresponds to the moment in “a traditional New Orleans brass band jazz funeral... [w] hen the music becomes jubilant. The mourners dance joyfully through the streets in what they call a ‘second-line parade.’ And crowds of people, passers-by, strangers, come out and join them. What was a dirge for the dead becomes a celebration of life”.30 Indeed, in spite of its apparent repudiation of the body, images of dance and movement are recurrent in the poem. Scripted as a song for “baritone II with choir” (7), the poem celebrates a community of spirits that breaks the boundaries of time and place. The poem associates I, you and we in a shared refusal of the importance of the body that paradoxically becomes a celebration. Like witnesses at a jazz funeral, readers are invited to participate in a joyous ceremony connecting the living with the dead man and denying the finality of death.
29Though the final poem, “Sanctus,” returns to a more solemn tone and rhythm, it prolongs the call for identification in adopting exclusively the first person plural. While the slave narratives celebrate the singularity of the slave narrator, whose adventures transform him into a distinctive hero, Nelson’s concluding poem insists, “Each and every one of us is Fortune” (29). Echoing powerful phrases from the African American tradition, the final line, “Call us home, Lord, set us free,” invites contemporary readers to participate in a new ceremony aimed at moving beyond distress and division. The poem reaches for a truth beyond history, finding a remedy for the past in the idea of a universal god: “Holy of Holies, thy creating name/ be raised above all barriers” (29). “Sanctus” moves beyond race as well as time, envisioning a reconciliation of differences beyond death. The poem looks to a time when individuality will cease to matter, and all will be united in a common “Eternal source” (29). The “us” of the final poem brings together all the singers of the mass, black and white, as well as readers of all races, in a vision of peace that moves beyond racial conflict, and more concretely, beyond the suffering bodies of slavery’s history.
30We have seen how Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem evokes the slave narrative form in order to move beyond it. The poems cite motifs from the original slave narratives but use them in new ways. While the book’s paratexts serve to validate Fortune’s identity, thus imitating the original slave narratives, the poems seem to counter their argument, downplaying the importance of his material existence in order to endorse the spiritual life. The poems mock the empirical epistemology of the slave narratives, calling into question their tendency to depict history in terms of binary oppositions, and drawing attention to their commonplaces. In evoking the original slave narratives in order to break with them, the book participates in the new genre of the neo-slave narrative. Though most of the neo-slave narratives are novels, they often problematize the narrative mode, drawing instead on the poetic and musical forms that are fundamental to Nelson’s treatment of Fortune’s story. Like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the poems of Fortune’s Bones move into the post-slavery period. The paradoxical necessity and impossibility of the aim to retrieve lost stories from the African American past gives rise to dispersed or ghostly voicings of slavery. These rewritings of the slave narrative summon slavery’s unburied ghosts, but confront the problem of their absence or their unrepresentability. In so doing they awaken a sense of loss, beginning the work of mourning.
31Finally, though, Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem is not so much a neo-slave narrative as a new ritual created to respond to one of the many tales of horror from the history of North American slavery.31 Borrowing the form of the Catholic requiem, it illustrates the African American genius for improvising on Western forms, which reaches its highest expression of creativity in jazz. The aim of The Manumission Requiem is not to tell a story but to offer an emotional response to what has happened. The mass begins with a blues lament, moves on to the joyous dance of “Not My Bones” to end in the exaltation of the “Sanctus”. The poems partake in a peculiarly African American aesthetic described in Nelson’s words as: “setting grief side by side with joy” (9). This oxymoronic emotional charge can be found in spirituals, gospel, the blues, and jazz. W.E.B. Dubois heard it and expressed it eloquently in a description that could very well apply to Nelson’s poems:
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. (W.E.B. Du Bois 1997: 738)
32Ultimately, all the work of reconstituting Fortune’s body that is detailed in the paratexts of Fortune’s bones: The Manumission Requiem is made to seem irrelevant. The Requiem finishes by evoking an “eternal” time in which material details and individual differences dissolve and “I” and “you” become “we”. The conflicts of history only impede this resolution. Tellingly, the book is dedicated not to the victims of slavery, but to more recent victims: “to everyone in the world who died on 9/11—the victims of the terrorist attacks, but also the victims of starvation, of illness, of poverty, of war, of old age, of neglect: Everyone” (9). The Requiem’s final poem offers a promise of hope for bodies still tortured by political and economic divisions. The liberation called for in the poem’s last line is predicted when contradictions and conflicts dissolve in spiritual unity. It thus embraces the hope that Dubois expresses at the end of his book and affirms the truth of song, not narrative. Finally, the religious message of “Sanctus” is less important than its place in a ritual exorcism—a Manumission Requiem—that liberates readers from the horror of the past and puts Fortune’s story to rest.
Bibliographie
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Works Cited
Davis, Charles T. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Slave’s Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Documenting the American South: docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html
10.1093/actrade/9780198835325.001.0001 :Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. New Revised Edition. Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892.
10.12987/9780300213720 :Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. (1903. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997): 613-740.
Flake, Marcella Monk. “Sing Two Stanzas and Rebel in the Morning: The Role of Black Religious Music in the Struggle for Freedom” Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute website. www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1997/5/97.05.07.x.html
Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford, 1988.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
10.2307/2925648 :Hedin, Raymond. “The American Slave Narrative: The Justification of the Picaro”. American Literature, 53 (1982): 630-645.
Mattatuck Historical Society. Fortune’s Story website. 2004.
www.fortunestory.org
10.7591/9781501702938 :Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England 1780-1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Nelson, Marilyn. The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
10.1080/02690055.2022.2000108 :Nelson, Marilyn. Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem. Notes and annotations by Pamela Espeland. Asheville, North Carolina: Front Street, 2004.
Nelson, Marilyn. The Freedom Business: Connecticut Landscapes Through the Eyes of Venture Smith. Old Lyme: Lyme Historical Society, 2006.
National Public Radio Archive. “Hidden Museum Treasures: Fortune’s Bones”. All Things Considered, September 16, 2003.
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1433035
Stepto, Robert B. Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979; 2nd edition 1991.
Walker, Wyatt Tee. Somebody’s Calling My Name. Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1979.
Notes de bas de page
1 Nelson, Marilyn, Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem, notes and annotations by Pamela Espeland (Asheville, North Carolina: Front Street, 2004). Subsequent references to the text will be noted parenthetically. Permission to quote from the poems contained in this book has kindly been granted courtesy of Boyds Mills Press, Inc., of Honesdale, Pennsylvania.
2 Espeland’s notes to the text state that by 1790 there were 12 slaves residing in Waterbury. “Five were members of Fortune’s family, all owned by Dr. Preserved Porter” (Nelson 2004: 8).
3 See the Afterword to Fortune’s Bones, written by the Museum’s Executive Director, Marie Galbraith (31). See also the National Public Radio’s internet archive of the programme All Things Considered, September 16, 2003: “Hidden Museum Treasures: Fortune’s Bones” www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1433035
4 These are the words on the book’s jacket notes.
5 Marilyn Nelson’s recent books include an African American revisiting of the Canterbury Tales published in The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), as well as a series of poems relating the story of Venture Smith entitled The Freedom Business: Connecticut Landscapes Through the Eyes of Venture Smith (Old Lyme: Lyme Historical Society, 2006). When I wrote to the author explaining that I intended to study Fortune’s Bones as a neo-slave narrative, she very generously sent me a copy of the Venture Smith cycle, suggesting that it might be more pertinent. However, what interests me in Fortune’s Bones is its simultaneous evocation of slave narrative conventions and its refusal of the biographical form.
6 In her correspondence with the present writer (February 7, 2007), Marilyn Nelson describes the book as “a four-way collaboration: I wrote the poem, then the publisher, Stephen Roxburgh, imagined it into a book (the poem alone could not be a book), and asked my friend Pamela to write the historical section (she and Stephen worked closely together on this part), and Helen Robinson, the book designer, put that together with photographs, maps, etc.”
7 Stepto, Robert B., Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2nd edition 1991): 3-4.
8 The caption next to the silhouette identifies the bill of sale as that of Dinah, Fortune’s wife, who was sold to a Stratford man in 1796.
9 The caption under the image identifies it as an “eighteenth-century silk embroidery by Prudence Punderson,” from the collection of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.
10 See Melish, Joanne Pope, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England 1780-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998): especially 222-223.
11 The narrative is available in its entirety, along with numerous other slave narratives, on the University of North Carolina’s very impressive website, Documenting the American South: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html
12 Three stages of Bender’s reconstruction work are reproduced in Fortune’s Bones (26). Figure 3 shows the final stage.
13 Here the poem departs significantly from Espeland’s explanatory notes, which attribute this knowledge to scientists’ findings (18).
14 Douglass, Frederick, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. New Revised Edition (Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892): 50.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dougl92/menu.html
15 My use of the term “signify” refers to the many studies that discuss this African American linguistic and literary practice of subverting the master’s discourse through various rhetorical means. See notably Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford, 1988).
16 This line recalls the spiritual: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen”. It was one of the ten “sorrow songs” quoted by W.E.B. Dubois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997): 734. The substitution of “but Fortune’s bones” for “Nobody knows but Jesus” is an example of the poem’s signifying.
17 Abrigador Hill was the site outside Waterbury boundaries where the doctor had to perform his forbidden act. (The “Fortune’s Story” website mentions that dissection was illegal in the United States before 1834.) See Fortune’s Story, www.fortunestory.org/.
18 Recorded in 1956 by both Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino.
19 “Tho’ we’re apart, you’re part of me still...”.
20 The fact that master and slave share human characteristics is one of the themes of the traditional slave narratives.
21 Baritone I sings both Dr. Porter ’s part in “On Abrigador Hill” and this stanza of “Kyrie of the Bones”.
22 I use the African American expression here for calling someone something other than his name, often in order to insult him.
23 See Walker, Wyatt Tee, Somebody’s Calling My Name (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1979).
24 See Hedin, Raymond, “The American Slave Narrative: The Justification of the Picaro,” American Literature, 53 (1982): 630-645.
25 Davis, Charles T. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Introduction: The Language of Slavery,” The Slave’s Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985): xiii.
26 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993): 74.
27 See “Author ’s Note” where Nelson explains: “My requiem has some but not all of the elements of a traditional funeral mass: the Introit (I call it a Preface), the Kyrie (the prayer of Kyrie eleison, Greek for ‘Lord, have mercy’), and the Sanctus, a hymn of praise...‘Not My Bones’... is not part of the traditional funeral mass” (9).
28 The author’s note explains that this spiritual guide advised that “the most helpful thing” to tell the dying is “Don’t worry. The body that is dying here is not you” (9).
29 See Marcella Monk Flake’s discussion of spirituals on the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute website. “Sing Two Stanzas and Rebel in the Morning: The Role of Black Religious Music in the Struggle for Freedom,”
www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1997/5/97.05.07.x.html
30 “Author’s Note,” (9).
31 In this it recalls the improvised exorcism that rescues Sethe at the end of Beloved. See Morrison, Toni, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987): 257-262.
Auteur
Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail
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