Epilogue

Abstract

Black servitude in retrospective fiction has much to reveal about American history, culture and values. Robert Penn Warren, E. L. Doctorow, Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison confront political, social and economic situations of the past through the representation of black servitude in their tales that engage historical context. Mark Carnes writes in Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other) that the “fossilized facts of the historical record are reanimated with imaginative meaning and aesthetic truth. Novel history, like alchemy, is an inaccessible science and elusive art, but to readers who seek understanding of themselves and the world, its riches are real.”² Each of the authors in this book is such an alchemist, imbuing the past with imaginative meaning, which also reveals a distinctive world view. They do not read or misread history, they imagine history and the historical moment in particular ways for specific reasons.

We think and write about history because it has formed us, influences the choices we imagine available to us.

—Marge Piercy

Outside the whale is the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history. Outside the whale there is a genuine need for political fiction, for books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world. Outside the whale we see that we are all irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and politics; we see that it can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep.

—Salman Rushdie

Although we think the past is gone and the future is not yet here, if we look deeply, we see that reality is more than that. The past exists in the guise of the present, because the present is made from the past. In this teaching, if we establish ourselves firmly in the present and touch the present moment deeply, we also touch the past and have the power to repair it.

—Thich Nhat Hanh¹