6.28: The Architecture of the Dungeon: Toni Morrison and the 13th Amendment

 

Advisory

A quick note before we begin. Today, through Toni Morrison’s lens, we are looking at the literary and historical architecture of Omelas. We’ll be examining systemic racism, the prison-industrial complex, and the violent extraction of black life in America. It may be for many reasons more strenuous work than we usually do. I urge you to follow my path here, but if the brief overview of this history and present-day crisis are difficult, I understand if you step away, postponing your engagement, but not setting it aside. 

And I mean this especially if you are a white listener. You might also be wondering why I, a white guy sitting in a comfortable studio in Michigan, am wading into the deeper political waters of race in America. But this answer is easy to understand: Our texts have led us here. And all along we’ve been talking about the intentional obliviousness of the people of Omelas. Because white silence built the basement. If we are going to dismantle this particular ‘Hideous Bargain,’ we must follow the lead of marginalized narratives. But we also must not rely on these narratives alone to do the work for the privileged. I am going to make mistakes today. I will likely expose my own blind spots. But avoiding the text to protect my own comfort is a privilege I am not willing to exercise. I invite your dialogue, your questions and challenges, and your corrections. Let’s get to work.

 

Turning the Camera Around

One of my favorite literary works to teach through nearly my entire career, from 1986 onwards, was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Still love it. Jeez, that guy could write, and before you ask, yes, I’ve also read his enormous but incomplete Three Days Before the Shooting, once published in a painfully reduced form as the novel Juneteenth. Amazing in both forms. 

But Invisible Man is the one I came to know fairly intimately, and I valued my ability to quote lengthy passages from memory, to connect the dots across its chapters; more, I was gratified to have the chance to teach it to quite diverse student populations, from those who saw themselves reflected in its pages to those who first resisted and then recognized their own roles in Ellison’s even larger existential Everyman themes. 

Ah, but then, in the early 2000s, as it became a fixture of my new AP classes, Toni Morrison was asked about it. And she said, “Invisible Man begs the question, invisible to whom? Not to me.” 

Damn. And she was right. Of course. I still love the novel and am a forever-fan of Ellison, and we’ll undoubtedly talk about him at length some time, because I can’t not, but Morrison nailed it: the novel is written to me, the white guy, the one who is guilty of the ironic failure to see. Of course, this is obvious when we pause to consider it for even a moment, but it speaks, too, maybe to Ellison’s desire to be validated by white publishers and white readers. Just as I had been doing. And it explains Morrison’s own decisions to write black-centered novels, the same way that we’ve seen with Nigerian or African writers and indigenous American authors: their literature is sovereign, not reliant upon my white reading or fandom.

Ellison’s own politics and work, his relationship with another idol of mine—philosopher Kenneth Burke—his participation in activism after the 1960s,and especially in his later years, was all more complicated than we have time for today. But Morrison’s summary remark “Invisible to whom?” a question with an obvious answer by the novel’s second page, made something clear which re-shaped my approach to him: Why does the white reader require their race talk from minority writers? And the answer, more and more as I considered it, was because we did not reflect on race in any way except as a binary to those who were not us. 

In other words, race only became important when considering what we called “other.” As a teacher, when I wanted to address themes of race, I “naturally” picked up a work by a minority writer. If I wanted to talk about other themes, I had white writers to choose from, of course. But then, it seemed that minority writers were always writing about race, weren’t they? And white writers rarely did. What the hell was going on?

Twenty-five-odd years later now and these questions may feel absurd to you. I get it. And though Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark had been out since 1992, I had not read it. I mean, we were still working hard to get any of her novels—Beloved, Sula, The Bluest Eye—approved for classroom use, and we’re still fighting that fight. I was teaching To Kill a Mockingbird because that’s what was the more approved curriculum, though lots of reasons to set it aside now, Gregory Peck notwithstanding. 

So no, I hadn’t read Playing in the Dark. Not then. 

If I had, I wouldn’t have been so marked by Morrison’s interview, needed as it was. Now Playing in the Dark’s three short essays sit on my short shelf at my desk, one of about a dozen books I keep within reach. I would have understood, maybe, that all along this white teacher had no concept of what whiteness really was except as it was constructed in a place of difference to the Other. It was otherwise a blank, an understood, a given. And, as Morrison writes, 

“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.”

Intro Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and today I explore how easy it’s been to hide that child in the closet.

 

Personae

And so we turn our gaze today from the narratives of the oppressed back to the architects of that experience. We’ve mentioned often enough now how the society of privilege rests upon, depends upon, the suffering of others. Le Guin has been there with us from the beginning. But today I want to take us on a tour of the white imagination and how it builds itself, both through literature and in the broader culture.

As literary nomads, those willing to explore new spaces for reading and meaning-making, we should expect from time to time (hopefully more often than less often) to be made uncomfortable. There is some escapist short-term pleasure in reading stories that soothe and assuage our anxieties, to be sure, but frankly, we should be highly suspicious of our habits if we were to live in such an echo-chamber of mollifying comforts overlong, whether in our reading or in our social media algorithms. Discomforts, frictions, are places to lean into, to investigate, to wrestle with, to allow into our psyches and do their work.

Now we have no evidence that Le Guin was specifically thinking about race when she wrote Omelas and posed its “turd in the punchbowl” affront to our safe spaces, but we do know she was thinking in part about political marginalization in terms of sexuality and gender issues, as so much of her other work makes clear. What’s more, and why we’re talking today about this, the architecture of this dependency, this reliance on the Suffering Child dilemma, is structurally identical to Morrison’s later work. 

Playing in the Dark, published in 1992, is three essays based upon Morrison’s lecture series from 1990, just at the time I was doing my grad work, so I just missed it when writing my thesis. And in brief, it is an investigation into the literary imagination of white American authors. Morrison argues that so much of what we call American literature and its core values—individualism, innocence, freedom—are actually responses to what she describes as a “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” 

I gotcha here. We’ve previously been a little skeptical of universal Western canonical ideas, and our American literary core, one that has largely carried values that build for us a conception of exceptionalism and the American Dream, is for Morrison actually heavily racialized. The white core of American values is, well, not so pure as many imagine.

But Morrison isn’t referring to any specific African historical or concrete person or culture here. By “Africanist,” she is describing a quote “brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire” invented by white writers. In other words, it is a psychological figment of white imagination, one that serves the needs of the Emperor, our American white history and Manifest Destiny, not anything represented in reality. 

But these terms: “brew, alarm, desire,” themselves all speak to a real complexity, and unsortability, of that consciousness. Something that has been cooking on the fires for some time, something that connotes an inexplicability and terror if we imagine its magic potency; and combining both alarm and desire, our psychological contradictions are revealed. We have produced a haunted taboo, the thing forbidden that we crave all the more. 

Now when I say it just that way it might seem absurd. I mean, why would our notions of American liberty and heroism rely upon, be responses to, this convoluted consciousness of black American identity? 

Let’s remember Le Guin:

They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

Le Guin makes clear in her story that the privileged people of Omelas are wealthy because of the child, but also that their identity and intellectual understanding, their mythology, depend upon it, as well. It is this suffering that makes possible quote “the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.”

Let me try to say it another way. It isn’t that the dungeon or punishment tells us who the victim is. It reveals instead the psychology, fears, and moral frailties of the society upstairs. Even Freud told us that we can understand a society by its taboos. 

And so we have Morrison. She tells us that 

Deep within the word ‘American’ is its association with race. American means white.

Whiteness is not a stand-alone entity. It emerges as a “collective” race only from not being black. We see this across American (and European) literature, of course. In the multitudes of books where only white characters figure—say, for instance, Wharton’s Ethan Frome or Chopin’s The Awakening, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye—in books like these, whiteness is virtually mute, unspoken completely because it is so much the status quo, the normalized order, the space so privileged that it need not reflect on itself.

Ah, but wait. The minority presence, “dark and abiding” remember, still hovers behind nearly all of these works. Hawthorne has witches and “the Black Man” in the dark wood, Chopin’s characters have a life of leisure dependent on black servants in the background, and we could easily ask about Holden Caulfield’s prep school life which is so soft that it need never ask a question about its own privilege, just as the Andrews newlyweds could so easily “erase” their own working class from the fields of labor. The absence almost cries out its hiding.

And in novels by white authors where blacks appear? Here is where Morrison explores quite a bit more. What is Huck Finn’s freedom really about with Jim there to act as suffering foil? And we may be familiar with Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of savage and language-less Africans in Heart of Darkness, but writers like Hemingway are little better, keeping such characters both nameless and menacing where they appear. Cather, Faulkner, Poe, Styron, Melville, O’Connor, and Bellow all fall under Morrison’s gaze. In every one, white characters are defined through their portrayal of, containment of, and exploration through black experience. The American values they articulate are found from these encounters. Dependent upon them.

Dependent upon them. I guess, what that means is exactly what Le Guin told us from the start: that the privileged position of Omelas, the white American literary canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More, is actually the one that is dependent. Gregory Peck is cool, but it’s too easy for us now to see the near-entirety of his Atticus Finch nobility built upon his savior actions around the black Tom Robinson and family. And if you’ve read the earlier novel written by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, your idealism around Atticus might . . . um, waver some. 

In writing her story, Le Guin said explicitly that it reflects “the dilemma of the American conscience.” This is a world of exceptionalism dependent upon the suffering and exploitation of those who are “not American,” who are in fact kept outside of privilege, even locked out.

And that’s the point. Locking away the Other says a great deal about the turning of that key. About who I choose to remain on the other side of the door. We spoke earlier about the termination policies for indigenous American tribes. The tribal voices speaking back are discomfiting, at the least, because they break our historical museum conception of the dead Indian of colonial times. Morrison goes further, saying that white American literature as we understand it cannot even exist without this Africanist presence. Building our white ideologies upon a backdrop of oppression, writers like Hemingway and Melville anxiously need to remind everyone that we know they hold the keys. 

 

Studies in Morrison

To show how Morrison goes about this, let’s look briefly at some of her techniques, her arguments, more precisely.

We might start with a novel by Willa Cather called Sapphira and the Slave Girl, where a fundamental misunderstanding of the oppressed destroys the book’s coherence. In the novel, a white mistress arranges for her nephew to rape her enslaved servant, Nancy, mostly because she is jealous of the slave, in fear of her husband’s attraction to her. In the story, Nancy’s mother knows this is going on, but doesn’t do anything about it. Basically, her loyalty to the mistress is forced to override her biological instincts to protect her own daughter. Morrison here describes the mother as therefore “natally dead,” denied even the right to be a woman who births a child. And while the novel overall attempts to argue against slavery, this singular objectification of Nancy’s mother as the static victim breaks reasonability. By failing to recognize the character’s humanity, Cather ends up offering black characters merely, Morrison writes, “solely for the ego-gratification of the slave mistress.”

What Morrison has to say about the more famous Huck Finn, however, should not surprise. And this is long before Percival Everett’s masterful novel, Jim. First, she shows that the slave Jim has an apparently “limitless store of love and compassion” for his white masters; and that he has to endure endless and foolish humiliations by Huck and Tom at the end of the novel. These failings are hardly new. I taught the novel twice before setting it aside, but our final project was to revise various scenes to offer Jim justice. But imagine what Twain has created here: a full functioning adult who passively accepts victimization by two children. The only way this works in the heads of white readers is to accept that Huck’s freedom, white freedom, is meaningless without completely disempowering Jim through enslavement.

In each case, I can hear objections: Wait, but these are only smaller parts of the novel. The larger work has so much more! But this objection is a fair observation, and is not at all Morrison’s point. Of course the novels have more to say; they have the freedom to say so. What happens here is fairly low key, working itself over and over with each book into the psyche of the white readership: This is the natural order of things, this is how it works. In discussing Hemingway, for instance, Morrison makes a simple and hugely effective point: “Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so.” Whiteness is universal, race-free, natural and expected. Only blackness must be narrated. And so without it, whiteness alone is “mute, meaningless.”

What Morrison is up to here is to move us away from worrying overmuch about what black people are called or what happens to them in American literature, and to instead look towards the authors and narrators who see them this way. From the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers. For decades, and in my own classroom for so many years, we would read this book and ask, “What does this say about African Americans?” Morrison wants us to ask, “What does the invention of this black character say about the psychology of the white author?”  As Morrison writes, “The subject of the dream is the dreamer.”

For Morrison, blackness haunts the texts of white American novels much like Erdrich’s ghosts haunt the US Senate. There is that “presence” she writes of, that ghost in the machine, the spirit inside the mechanism of the story, even in stories where black characters barely appear. Consider how important it is that Ahab’s whale is white. The more we assert white dominance, the more the specter or blackness abides.

It’s worth checking out one of Morrison’s short stories, “Recitatif,” about a black girl and a white girl, where she intentionally removes all racial descriptions and coding; the reader never knows which character is which. Oh, and how hard white readers work to try and figure it out! How important, vital, is it for them to know! And every hypothesis must, of course, reveal the prejudice the reader carries in, those learned from the rest of their studies of American fiction.

This is the trap of the binary, as well, isn’t it? We must distinguish between the white and the black, the protagonist and the other, the privileged and the punished. I said early on that the binary is always a limiting way of thinking, but we would do well to examine it as a relationship, not a mere opposition. And here, we can understand that relationship a little better: the white American requires the Other, the excluded, for a mythology of exceptionalism. Both are illusions, of course: the American is no more exceptional than the other is an objectified or static victim, but the mythology gets cemented. On both sides of it.

We are free because another is not. We are moral because another is wicked. Wealthy because another is impoverished. Citizens because another is foreign. Lawful because another is criminal. 

 

Legal Loopholes: 13th

Just as Morrison exposes how classic literature builds a mythology of whiteness, filmmaker Ava DuVernay exposes how this all plays out, how modern media has built a ‘mythology of black criminality.’ 

In 2016, Ava DuVernay wrote and produced the Netflix documentary 13th, where she argues fairly convincingly that slavery was never really abolished by the 13th amendment, not while it held a single loophole. Instead, after the Civil War we saw slavery evolve into other names for the same condition of indentured servitude. Blacks were arrested and imprisoned for labor work during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era, convicts were leased back to plantations and to factories and dangerous mining operations to build state revenue, and finally, today, we have an era of mass incarceration. 

Let’s recall this 1865 amendment first, the one that followed the Emancipation Proclamation and American Civil War. Section 1 states: 

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

The text of the 13th Amendment includes the abolishment of involuntary servitude, but then: “except as a punishment for crime.” In other words, anyone imprisoned, made a criminal, can still be a slave. Is this why, though the US has about 5% of the world’s population, it has 25% of the world’s prisoners? We’re number 5 or 6 of all countries in percentage of population in jail. 

Let’s remember what we said about Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman a couple of episodes ago, where the action of Termination was sold as “emancipation,” a covering over of the actual intention with a term with positive connotations. Interesting that we need a new euphemism for our behavior–almost as if we understand the foulness of it, its despicable immorality. By creating this constitutional loophole, we can replace the word “slave” with the word “criminal” and keep the practice of oppression and slavery going.  

And let’s make no mistake, money is key, especially as we have privatized our federal penal system. The companies build prisons which require prisoners to be profitable for their shareholders. Yes, you can (and maybe do) have stock in private prison companies. (I found myself recently lobbying my state government about where they were investing my pension funds.) And so these private prison companies and their supporting businesses—food vendors, clothiers, electronic groups, weapons and security manufacturers, legal organizations, construction companies—lobby for more extensive punishments. Because it is difficult to move legislation alone, the companies organize into networks like ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) to pool their resources and move laws. 13th shows several cases where the draft language written by ALEC has gone completely word-for-word into congressional bills. In other words, we imprison, we continue our indentured servitude, for profit-making. 

And we can use any number of political terms to convince mainstream Americans that this is for their own good: “War on Drugs,” “Zero Tolerance,” “Law and Order,” “Mandatory Minimums,” “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” “Truth in Sentencing,” “Protect Our Children,” “Clean Up Our Neighborhoods,” “Worst Violent Offenders,” or “Super-predators.”  The point of all of these phrases is not to reflect thoughtfully on statistics or best strategies for building communities. It’s to convince us that those who are punished deserve it. That our peace and safety and American Dream of prosperity depends upon that punishment. That we cannot be free and happy without that punishment. And sure, maybe we hear from time to time about the poor conditions of prisons, we look in upon the injustices and violence in these places, we know it’s there, but we convince ourselves that . . . it’s necessary. 

The people of Omelas receive a kind of abstracted happiness for their Suffering Innocent, themselves living a kind of narrator-propagandized bliss. Very recently, critic and activist Alec Karakatsanis gave us the term “copaganda” for all of the media’s work to tell stories of noble police officers working under hard challenges to keep the garbage off the streets. And while we don’t have time to pursue this term here, I offer it to demonstrate that there is a real conflict growing about the narratives we choose to adopt for ourselves.

And this is DuVernay’s point, as well. In one interview, she says that the film is designed to interrogate words in their quote “most naked form.” We consider terms like person and property, slave and freed person, labor force and prison worker, to see how they resonate with us as binaries. 

But DuVernay has a few rhetorical tools to offer that Toni Morrison never had. She has sound and image to work between her numerous interviews. We hear Public Enemy, Nas, and Usher behind and between the different scenes, bridges that work to unite the different historical eras discussed, a kind of musical loop or torus that underscores a repeated theme. And much like any ancient Greek chorus, says critic Sara Juarez, the lyrics build and build upon those themes, commenting as the Greek chorus would on the moral failings of the state while building its own strength and resilience. 

Nor are the documentary’s interviews those of a single political side. Yes, we have activists like Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander. But we also have strong conservative voices like Newt Gingrich and representatives from ALEC, all alike describing the unjust and race-targeted work of mass incarceration. They each take different angles on it, different justifications, different accusations, but none deny the work itself. 

Less loved but perhaps necessary to help viewer perspective and re-framing is the extensive testimony of cellphones, often showing the raw footage of unarmed black men killed. People like Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Philando Castile. We often remember these videos, but placing them in this context offers new insights into the social and political motivations for violence against blacks. The problem here may be what our indigenous and Nigerian writers warn about, though: that showing black men as victims unavoidably also creates a static image of victim, counter to DuVernay’s purpose.  Does showing the violence against the helpless act as a necessary witness to Adrienne Cavarero’s “Horrorism,” or does it risk commodifying the victim all over again? It’s hard to say and the answer isn’t either/or. But we, most of us, perhaps still in an era of escalating violence on camera, are shocked by this testimony enough that it fulfills its purpose. Put with everything else, that is its effect on me.

Hard to miss, too, is DuVernay flashing the word “criminal” in capital letters on the screen each and every time the word appears in any interview. A black and white version of the American flag has the white stripes filled with images of shackled prisoners. A horror builds here, much as it would in a Poe story of escalating dread: the number of incarcerated grow across the decades, quadrupling and then going higher still, with blacks and other minorities far over-represented in the numbers, five or six times whites. In 2025, ten years after 13th, blacks number around 13% of the total population but are just under 40% of prisoners. By the time they’re 35, nearly one in four black men will serve time in prison. 

And, like Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, then, we see time collapse, turning away from any notions of linear progress—the continued enslavement of minorities is not progress, after all—and that we keep repeating the same pattern over and over, our history of trauma reinscribed. In a dialectical montage near the end of the film, DuVernay uses audio footage from President Donald Trump at a 2016 political rally and juxtaposes it over archival film from the 1950s showing physical assaults upon black citizens by white supremacists. “In the good old days,” Trump tells us, “this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it again so easily.”  This is a confession, though, yes? That the Omelas basement is not a relic of the past, but an active, continuing architectural project of ours.

Whatever we might say of the film, it has impacted millions of viewers, a powerful call in our exploration of how we account for ourselves and our dependency on suffering. Historian Daryl Michael Scott claims that the film has spawned a new narrative trope, 13thism, where we see the Reconstruction Amendment not as a liberation from slavery, but as a new quote “legal foundation for the mass re-enslavement of African Americans.” Slavery never ended; it only evolved. So whatever else we say of DuVernay’s film, we must recognize that it is establishing a new paradigm, a new framework, for understanding American history and virtue.

DuVernay shows us that the Constitution itself has an Omelas basement written into it: the exception clause for punishment of a crime. This legal loophole creates a designated class of ‘un-people,’ a haunting Africanist presence.

 

Spare Parts

The Hideous Bargain has never been some philosophical thought experiment, and I know you and I understood this early on in our journey with Le Guin. But here, with Morrison and DuVernay, we can see plainly it is both a literary and a structural, legal, economic blueprint for the American nation-state.

I want us to understand—and I’m speaking mostly to my white listeners here—that part of that structural blindness has caused us to miss the active work and thinking of those we’ve delegated into our literary closets and prisons. The growth of Nigerian and African writers—and those across the Global South and those writing outside of or adapting the English language—the growing power of the indigenous American writers, and the fierce strength of black writers—these are narratives we too often miss, stories we do not hear, and ideas, then, we cannot consider. 

Our reading choices do this to us, if they are too limited. Our garden walls seal away those we do not care to witness; but they also seal us in with our own illusions. Increasingly, to our danger. 

Today we’ve seen a bit how the state, our Emperor culture, extracts both labor and identity from the marginalized to build its utopia illusion. And we’ve seen how our conception of the imprisoned is largely an act of our own psychological making, our own narrative choices. 

Is it possible, then, that we could make that psychological manufacture something more literal, still? If I choose to rely upon the unjustly imprisoned as part of my Hideous Bargain, why not just build them physically, design them, grow them? Next time, we’ll look at some recent works in what I have to describe as bio-political horror. We’ll dip once again into the Star Trek universe and also a powerful novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Get your free trials to stream Paramount ready. And then go read something.

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

Cather, Willa. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

DuVernay, Ava, director. 13th. Kandoo Films / Netflix, 2016. 

Juarez, Sara E. “The Power of the Documentary: Examining the Effectiveness of Ava DuVernay’s 13th.” Cinesthesia, vol. 8, iss. 1, 2018, Article 2. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cine/vol8/iss1/2. 

Lantigua-Williams, Juleyka. “Ava DuVernay on How ’13th’ Reframes American History.” The Atlantic, 6 Oct. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/10/ava-duvernay-13th-netflix/503075.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992. 

Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004, pp. 2395-2408. 

Scott, Daryl Michael. “The Social and Intellectual Origins of 13thism.” Fire!!!, vol. 5, no. 2, 2020, pp. 2-39. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/48573836.