Which Story is the Clearest Example of Metafiction

CHARLES JOHNSON’Southward REVOLUTIONARY OXHERDING TALE Jonathan Little Alverno College Consistent with his call for literary experimentation and diversity in Being and Race (1988), Charles Johnson’s metafictional Oxherding Tale (1982) opens up new areas for fiction dealing with black-white interracial romance. In casually endorsing interracial mixture, and in parodying sentimental and sensational precedents, Oxherding Tale signals the latest and nigh revolutionary stage of an evolving and important literary tradition. Early African-American fiction consistently showed that solidarist involvement should thwart any attempts at interracial romance. Understandably , for African-Americans writing before, during, and after the Ceremonious State of war, racial loyalty was perceived as a necessary bulwark and a weapon against an inhospitable and frequently racist white America. Novels such as Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), Frances E. W. Harper’south Iola Leroy; or, The Shadows Uplifted (1892), Walter White’southward Flight (1925), and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Comedy American Way (1933), clearly illustrate the psychological and physical dangers of crossing the color line for love, greater economic security, greater social status, or to avert bigotry. Those characters who try to cantankerous the colour line permanently for these or other reasons are either punished through quick demises or soon larn the error of their ways and, chastened, return to the unified black community.i The external warning in these novels is clear: the decision to laissez passer for white is dangerous and potentially cocky-destructive. This cautionary message is fifty-fifty more predominant in AfricanAmerican fiction of the mail-World War II period in which the story of interracial dear is used in an increasingly polemical and sensational fashion to emphasize the need for racial solidarity and rebellion against white hegemonic power. Not surprisingly, the post-Earth War 2 consciousness of African-American writers reflected the increasing frustration and rage with second-form citizenship. As Joel Williamson points out, “a century of hard striving since the 1850s had not reduced white racism, just information technology had, as we take seen, increasingly melded the Negro people together, non only in the genetic sense merely as well in the earth-shaking cultural sense. By the stop of World War II AfroAmericans were preset for matrimony, and they were poised to motion with ability.”two 142Jonathan Niggling I of the clearest examples of this revolutionary imperative can be found in John Oliver Killens’ ‘Sippi (1967), in which the AfricanAmerican hero uses his affair as a means of revenge against the white patriarchy, eventually realizing, nevertheless, that even this kind of matter is incompatible with the interests of the Movement. Chuck Othello [accent added] Channey tells his white lover that “marrying the white man’south daughter is not a part of the Black Power program,”three which is based on “Power—strength—violence” (p. 408). In the stop of the novel Channey mourns an assassinated Blackness leader who preached “Black union is the ship; all else is the open sea!” (p. 358). In ‘Sippi, Killens’ didacticism prevails throughout the novel to show the inappropriateness of interracial mixture in the interests of political and social activism, and he manipulates his blackness and white characters accordingly. This politicized racial polarization is also evident in William Gardner Smith’s Last ofthe Conquerors (1948) and Southward Street (1954) and Alice Walker’s Tiptop (1976), where characters must choose between interracial beloved or effective activism. In Walker’s Acme, for example, the tensions prove to be likewise much for the characters, equally demonstrated in a passage in which the white Lynn Rabinowitz lashes out at Truman Held, who has left her: Y’all only married me because you were too much of a coward to throw a flop at all the crackers who make you ill. You’re similar the rest of those nigger zombies. No life of your own unless it’s something against white folks. You tin can’t fifty-fifty enjoy a good fuck without hoping some cracker is somewhere grinding his teeth.4 In Walker, Killens, and Smith’due south works honey quickly disintegrates under the pressures of racial loyalties and the demands of activist leadership. More sensational even so in their depictions of interracial strife are Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and…