Wright and Ironic History
The second paragraph of Wright’s “Foreword” to 12 Million Black Voices (1941) neatly exposes problems associated with joining “folk” and “history” to write a “folk history” which is illuminated by selected photographs. The book’s subtitle, A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, urges us to think about matters of class and genre classification more attentively than we might were the subtitle simply “A History of the Negro in the United States.” History, even oral history, is fairly commonplace; folk history is somewhat rare.
Just as W. E. B. DuBois chose to write about The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Wright made the choice to write about “folk” rather than “people.” No doubt, DuBois and Wright sought to evoke sympathetic responses from readers, and in Wright’s case readers/spectators. Yet, the grounds of sympathy depend less on common dictionary meanings of “folk” than on class-oriented connotations of “folk.” To some extent, the sympathy either writer could evoke was linked to what Jerome Bruner describes in Act of Meaning (1990) as folk psychology,” a system by which people organize their experiences in, knowledge about, and transactions with the social world” (35).
In 1903, DuBois used genteel prose to cast light on “sons of night who must plod darkly or in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone,” because from the vantage of turn-of-the-century white historiography it was difficult to grasp how “since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness” (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”). Attending to qualities of the “folk” in 1924, DuBois sought to “spread the splendid sordid truth that out of the most lowly and persecuted of men, Man made America” (“Prescript”). Seventeen years later, Wright used poetic prose and photographs to deal with “splendid sordid truth.” Given his intellectual class-orientation and identification with the Talented Tenth, DuBois’s historical writing about the “folk” came from an angle of privilege and exceptionalism. Wright, on the other hand, embraced a Marxist proletarian concept of “folk” in writing their history, which was subjectively his story.
Wright assumed “those few Negroes who have lifted themselves… above the lives of their fellow-blacks…are but fleeting exceptions to that vast, tragic school that swims below in the depths….It is not, however, to celebrate or exalt the plight of the humble folk who swim in the depths that I select the conditions of their lives as examples of normality, but rather to seize upon that which is qualitative and abiding in Negro experience….” (Twelve Million 5). Like DuBois, Wright had lifted himself, and according to the logic of his design, neither he nor DuBois belonged to the circle of what was abiding. His use of “we” and “our” throughout the text of the book calls attention to irony, the irony of writing from varying degrees of distance about the unfolding story of fellow-blacks.
As we read 12 Million Black Voices and DuBois’s books about black folk from the perspectives of the twenty-first century, we may be rewarded with a peculiar recognition: language chosen to create history is a remarkable instrument for simultaneous inclusion and exclusion.
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