Early American Literature

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison was truly royalty to me, and over the years, in my roles as a teacher, scholar and artist, I have treasured every opportunity to reflect on her. In 2005, I first introduced a seminar on her body of novels titled Toni Morrison's Novels on my former campus, the University of California, Davis. In recent times, I have reflected on the opportunities that I've had in my career to teach her work in a range of contexts. For example, in 2019, in the wake of her passing, I discussed my pedagogical process and experience in an op-ed in the Cornell Daily Sun, and as part of a teach-in honoring the fiftieth anniversary of The Bluest Eye, I discussed the novel in a teach-in at Cornell, her alma mater as a 1955 MA in English.¹ Similarly, in April 2022 I served as the invited speaker for the cohort of graduate instructors in Literature Humanities at Columbia University and modeled approaches and ideas for teaching Song of Solomon as they prepared to teach it to undergraduate students in their courses on campus as the selected literary work for the year within its core curriculum.²

I'm thankful to be part of this discussion of teaching strategies for A Mercy. Along with students from my Toni Morrison seminar at the Bread-loaf School of English, I first heard Morrison read from the novel, on the path to its publication, in 2008 at the Toni Morrison Society's Biennial Conference at the College of Charleston. I heard her read from the novel again at Cornell the next year. My method for teaching with Morrison has sometimes related her writings on the past to issues in the present as a way to reflect on her critical epistemology on race and nation, which points to the value in studying early American history.

In my African American Short Story course, a writing seminar for first-year students at Cornell that I've taught regularly since 2010, "The Lynching of Jube Benson" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the acclaimed Black poet who famously lamented the limitations of writing "a jingle in a broken tongue," has been among works we've read. The story focuses on Dr. Melville's [End Page 113] regretful memory of participating in the lynching of the Black man invoked in the title, who readers discover later in the story is innocent of attacking and killing a young white woman. A key expository passage reflects on the doctor's view of Blackness, which had fueled his suspicions and fateful choices:

I saw his black face glooming there in the half light, and I could only think of him as a monster. It's tradition. At first I was told that the black man would catch me, and when I got over that, they taught me that the devil was black, and when I had recovered from the sickness of that belief, here were Jube and his fellows with faces of menacing blackness. There was only one conclusion: This black man stood for all the powers of evil, the result of whose machinations had been gathering in my mind from childhood up. But this has nothing to do with what happened.

(Dunbar 6–7)

The irony was that it had everything to do with it.

In 2014, after the horrific death of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, I noticed that a substantial number of students in this course selected this story to write on for an assignment as one of the five papers that they were required to produce in the course. They would discuss this imagery related to Blackness from Dunbar's story, given the racial imagery that suffused the grand jury testimony of officer Darren Wilson, Brown's assailant, including the fears that it emphasizes related to the Black masculine body: "I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car anymore. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is...