Black Enigma

...Sections on blacks and communism acknowledge communist contributions to the civil rights and anti-peonage movements and properly pose the question of black-red interaction not in terms of how blacks were "duped" but in terms of why communist efforts in black communities yielded such modest results...

...Long Memory's problems lie less in its organization than in its lack of a sustained focus on themes tying chapters together...

...Perhaps, at this juncture in Afro-American studies, that is appropriate...

...Because it sometimes results in a lack of clarity about the nature of the changes involved, because it is so innovative, and because it fits' poorly into chronologically-organized college courses, this structuring of the book is bound to earn criticism from academic reviewers...

...They do not yet even approximate the level of sophistication found in the free-wheeling digressions of DuBois, Woodson, or St...

...How, in the words of the preface of Long Memory, are we to account for the "power emanating from weakness, patience and hope in the face of overwhelming odds...

...of floggings, castrations, mutilations, imprisonments, and executions and argue that bondsmen were content...

...In Long Memory: The Black Experience in America, Mary Frances Berry, a professor of history and law at Howard University, and John W. Blassingame, a Yale historian, have written an engrossing history of Afro-American life, but one in which learning and historiographic technique far excel design...

...DuBois's in his classic The Gift of Black Folk (1922), the approach cannot be without virtue...

...It may be that we will have to entertain the possibility that many enslaved Afro-Americans felt, and not without reason, a profound superiority to their masters, before we can speak to the issue as lucidly as the older generation did...

...Praise, especially for the undertaking of writing a history which extends to the present, and criticism, especially for the thin treatment of black women's history, could be multiplied...

...However, since the format almost exactly parallels W.E.B...

...David R. Roediger (David R. Roediger is Mellon assistant professor of history at Northwestern University...

...Nonetheless there is much to recommend in Long Memory...

...The argument that "the African memory .. . permeated American folklore, speech, music, literature, cooking, and religion," is buttressed with an impressive array of evidence from songs, tales, rituals, naming practices, and, especially, proverbs...

...Long Memory ends abruptly, without any conclusion...

...We are ready to pose such questions but not to answer them...

...This failure, I suggest, reflects less on the scholarship of Berry and Blassingame than on the difficulty of synthesizing the new historical literature on black America...

...The coexistence of exploitation, of white brutality and black humanity, seemed not a problem but a given, a reality to be set forth against the myths of moonlight and magnolias...

...Many major historical questions, including the origins of slavery and the impact of slavery on the drafting of the U.S...

...No general history can neglect a sustained discussion of the spirituals, the Harlem Renaissance, and the great slave rebellions...

...A closing chapter on black nationalism establishes the continuity of a richly varied nationalist and pan-Africanist tradition...

...But it is perhaps more important to consider why the many flashes of brilliance do not make Long Memory shine throughout and whether the time for a sweeping reinterpretation of black history is near...

...Long Memory also provides full and fair coverage of two controversial subjects consistently ignored or ill-treated by historians...

...The size of the slave trade over time, an object of heated controversy, is vaguely estimated at "10 to 50 million...

...But they are much more than that...

...Even on subjects fully treated, conclusions are too often hedged...

...Individual chapters bring considerable insight to a range of topics, but the lack of unifying themes and of continuity produces a whole which is less than the sum of its parts...

...Whatever the causes, Long Memory does not quite stand as either a general history or as an interpretive essay...

...Such an approach differs greatly from recent general histories of black America...

...Berry and Blas-singame do defend certain interpretations convincingly...

...Despite the wealth of good work in Afro-American history, we may still be far from developing a new synthesis...

...But Fogel and Engerman explicitly deny that beatings occurred with "monotonous" regularity...

...Clair Drake, addressing Ralph Ellison's point: how black America has become "more than the sum of its brutalization...

...Our tentative insights, particularly those bearing on the importance of the African heritage, of culture, and the family, are offered far too self-consciously...

...The steady insistence that knowledge of the slave experience must undergird the study of any aspect of black life cuts sharply against a good deal of writing which so anxiously lets bygones be bygones that it forgets the years before 1865...

...But as the old stereotypes have partially receded, new and huge questions about the precise interactions of oppression, resistance, and cultural values have arisen...

...The older and remarkably sound general histories by DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, and John Hope Franklin are sometimes derided as "contributionist"—as works too preoccupied with the listing of achievements by black Americans...

...Striking out simultaneously at the three stereotypes—-black inferiority, black docility, and slavemaster paternalism— which dominated the historical literature, lonely voices like DuBois and Woodson told of accomplishment and assertiveness under oppression...

...It is easier to retreat to a discussion that emphasizes either oppression or creativity, but not both...

...Three pages later, they favorably cite the assertion of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in Time on the Cross that planters were significantly constrained from brutality by the profit motive...

...Constitution, are sidestepped...

...Finding the most salient themes in Afro-American history "obscured by the mass of detail in narrative histories," Berry and Blassingame organize Long Memory by topic, not chronology...

...Their eleven chapters cover the African heritage, slavery, the antebellum life of free blacks, family and religion, sex, politics, economics, protest, crime, education, armed service, and nationalism...

...Passages on the rise of Jim Crow segregation laws breathe both erudition and fire...

...Nor is the book sure enough of its arguments to constitute an interpretive synthesis...

...The authors forthrightly declare that "no rational person could read the monotonous notations in plantation records...

...Nationalist figures are allowed to speak for themselves in a way that corrects what Blassingame and Berry call the "very bad press" black nationalism has received from most American scholarship...