(PART ONE) |
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In Slavery (1959) Stanley M. Elkins discusses the American stereotype of “Sambo” which arose during the period of slavery. In discussing this stereotype-which he said never emerged in other countries where blacks lived--Elkins focuses on the unique nature of the American slave system. Elkins’ primary concern is with the impact which the American slave system had on the personality of the typical slave. According to Elkins, what were the main characteristics of the American slave system? How did this social system influence the personality of the typical slave, and why? According to Southern slave owners, Sambo was the typical plantation slave. Sambo was docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing; his behavior was full of infantile silliness and his talk was inflated with childish exaggeration. His relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment: it was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being. Although the merest hint of Sambo’s “manhood” would fill the Southern slave-owner with scorn, the child, “in his place,” was both exasperating and lovable. In Slavery Elkins argues that most American slaves were in fact like Sambo. The question is, why? Elkins dismisses all racial explanations, pointing out that Sambo personalities never existed in Africa. Since Sambo never existed in Africa, what happened to transform the heroic African into the submissive slave? For one thing, the process of enslavement subjected the African to a series of traumas that tended to cut him off from his culture and destroy his African sense of identity. First, there was the physical torment of the long march to the sea from the point of capture: tied together by their necks, the slaves walked barefoot for weeks through the steaming jungles; those who didn't make it were abandoned to die a slow death by starvation. (The British abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton wrote of having seen hundreds of skeletons lining one of the caravan routes.) Arriving at a coastal trading port, the slaves were subject to the further trauma of being exhibited naked to the European slave traders. The slaves who were bought were branded like cattle and, like cattle, herded on shipboard-those considered unfit or undesirable are abandoned to starve to death. Then began the greatest trauma of all: the dread “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic, a trip so brutal that only an age which has been exposed to the existence of Nazi gas ovens could believe it really happened. It is estimated that approximately one third of the Africans taken prisoner died on the way to the coast and at the embarkation station--and that another third died during the Middle Passage and the “seasoning” that followed. Most slaves were landed first in the West Indies, where they were broken into their new roles as slaves; only afterward were they shipped to the United States. Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps went through a similar series of shocks. The first was the shock of “procurement:” Gestapo policy was to make arrests at night, to heighten the element of shock, terror, and unreality. A day or two later came the second shock: transportation to the camp, which involved a planned series of brutalities inflicted by guards making repeated rounds through the train; prisoners transported in cattle cars were sealed in, under conditions much like those of the middle passage. When they arrived at the camp, there were sham ceremonies designed to reassure the prisoners--so that the next round of terrors would have even greater impact. Those not marked for early extermination would go through “registration” (descriptions of this process reveal that it was like the inspection of the slaves in the 18th century). In the concentration camp, registration ended with perhaps the most devastating weapon of all: being marked with a number--which symbolized the prisoner’s loss of his name, hence of his identity. “Because he had become a number,#148; one psychologist has written, “the prisoner belonged to a huge army of the nameless who peopled the concentration camp.” Without question, the African slave’s loss of his own name--slaves were given new names by the traders or their new masters--was even more devastating, because in pre-literate society a man’s name is considered an essential part of his personality. Surely it is significant that the Black Muslims insist on discarding their “slave names” and taking new names instead. The Nazi concentration camps of this century offer proof enough of the ease with which the human personality can be shaped and reshaped. Stanley M. Elkins has pointed out the parallels between the way the Nazi concentration camps changed the personalities of the prisoners who survived and the way in which slavery in the American South changed the personalities of blacks brought from Africa and shaped the identity of the blacks born here. There are risks in any such analogy, of course. But the only mass experience that Western people have had within recorded history comparable in any way with slavery was undergone in the Nazi concentrations camps. The concentration camp was not only a distorted slave system--it was also a distorted patriarchy. The product of the concentration camp was, consequently, surprisingly like most 19th century descriptions of the slave: “The black in his true nature is always a boy, let him be ever so old. He is dependent upon the white race; dependent for guidance and direction even to the obtaining of his most indispensable necessities. Apart from this protection he has the helplessness of a child....” The most striking characteristic of the concentration camp inmate’s behavior was its childlike quality. Many prisoners--among them mature, independent, highly educated adults--were changed into fawning, servile, dependent children.. Childish behavior took a variety of forms; the prisoners’ sexual impotence brought about a disappearance of sexuality in their talk; instead, excretory functions occupied them endlessly. They lost many of the customary inhibitions as to soiling their beds and persons. Their humor was filled with silliness and they often giggled like children. Dishonesty was normal--prisoners became chronic and pathological liars; like adolescents, they would fight each other bitterly one moment and become close friends in the next. Dishonesty, egotistic actions, theft-all were commonplace in the camps. But the most improbable outcome of the concentration camp life was that inmates came finally to identify with their captors. They identified with their S.S. guards and accepted the Nazi values. Thus they came to imitate the Gestapo in dress (sewing their uniforms to look more like those of the S.S.), in mannerisms, and often outdid the S.S. in their cruelty toward fellow prisoners; they also accepted the guards’ intense German nationalism and anti-Semitism (even some Jewish prisoners became anti-Semitic). The acceptance of the Nazi values constituted the final stage of “adjustment"” for the prisoners. They came to view one another through the Gestapo’s eyes, to judge one another by the Gestapo’s standards. To all those men--who were reduced to complete and childish dependence on their masters--the S.S. guards had actually become father symbols, for the prisoners were every bit as dependent upon the S.S. guards as infants are upon their parents: the prisoners were kept in a state of chronic hunger, and the guard could, at his pleasure, give or withhold food; the prisoner had to ask permission for every single thing--even to go the latrine--and permission would not always be granted. The prisoner, in short, was reminded hour after hour that the S.S. guard had power of life or death over him. In a social system as tightly closed as the plantation or the concentration camp, the slave’s position of absolute dependency virtually forces him to see the authority figure as somehow really “good.” Indeed, all the evil in the slave’s life may come from this man--but then, so also must everything of any value. Here is the seat of the only “good” the slave knows, and to maintain his psychological balance he must persuade himself that the good is in some way dominant. A threat to this illusion is thus in a real sense a threat to his very existence. It is a common experience among social workers dealing with neglected and maltreated children to have a small child desperately insist on his love for a cruel and brutal parent and beg that he be allowed to remain with that parent. The most dramatic feature of this situation is the cruelty which it involves; but the mechanism which inspires the child’s “devotion” is not the cruelty of the parent but rather the abnormal dependency of the child. For his psychological security, the individual had to picture his master in some way as the “good father,” even when--as in the concentration camps--it made no sense at all. If the concentration camp could produce in two or three years the results that it did, one wonders how much more pervasive must have been the results on large plantations. For the black child, in particular, the plantation offered no satisfactory father-image other than the master. The “real” father was virtually without authority over his child, since discipline, parental responsibility, and control of rewards and punishments all rested in other hands. The slave father could not even protect the mother of his children except for appealing directly to the master. Indeed, the mother’s own role was far larger for the slave child than that of the father. She controlled those few activities (household care, preparation of food, and rearing of children) that were left to the slave family. For that matter, the very “etiquette” of plantation life removed even the labels of fatherhood from the black male, who was addressed as #147;boy” until, when his vigorous years were past, he was allowed to assume the title of #147;uncle.” From the master’s viewpoint, slaves had been defined in American law as property, and the master’s power over his property must be absolute. But then this property was still human property. These slaves might never be quite as human as he was, but there was still certain standards that could be laid down for their behavior: obedience, loyalty, humility, docility, cheerfulness, and so on. Hard work would of course be demanded, but a final element in the master’s situation would undoubtedly qualify that expectation. Absolute power for him meant absolute dependency for the slave--the dependency not of the developing child, but of the perpetual child. For the master, the role most aptly fitting such a relationship would naturally be that of a father. As a father he could be either harsh or kind, as he chose, but as a wise father he could have a sense of the limits of his situation. He must be ready to cope with all the qualities of the child, exasperating as well as ingratiating. He might have to expect in this child--besides loyalty, docility, humility, cheerfulness, and (under supervision) hard work such qualities as irresponsibility, playfulness, silliness, laziness, and (quite possibly) tendencies to lying and stealing. Should the entire prediction (which is Elkins’ argument) prove accurate, the result would be something resembling “Sambo.” Of all the roles in American life, that of Sambo was by far the most pervasive for the American slave. The punishment for breaking out was instant. But the rewards--the sweet applause for performing it with sincerity and feeling--were also present. And the audiences appear to have been for the most part well pleased. Love, even for playing Sambo, was surely no inconsequential reward. But what was the basic requirement? The black was to be a child forever. Not only was he a child; he was a happy child. Few Southern writers failed to describe with obvious fondness the bubbling gaiety of a plantation holiday or a perpetual good humor that seemed to mark the black character , the good humor of an everlasting childhood. The role, of course, must have been rather harder for the earlier generations of slaves to learn. “Accommodation,#148; according to John Dollard, “involves the renunciation of protest or aggression against undesirable conditions of life and the organization of the character so that protest does not appear, but acceptance does. It may come to pass in the end that the unwelcome force (the master) is idealized-that one identifies with it and takes it into the personality. It sometimes happens that what is at first resented and feared is finally loved.” |