Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

100 страница из 129

But Washington’s educational and social theories, I want to suggest, were even more subversive than Hale or Dixon ever imagined, particularly as seen in his frequent emphasis on hands, handcrafts, and making. While this subversiveness is not always immediately obvious, its disruptive power is almost always there lurking, visible once one begins to look for it. Take, for example, one of Washington’s most infamous comments, from his speech at the Atlanta Exposition (which is printed in its entirety in Up From Slavery): “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (221-222). At first glance, this comment seems entirely straightforward: blacks and whites can work together to improve economic conditions in the South, while remaining entirely separate socially. White leaders from across the nation rallied behind Washington’s declaration. But if we return to Hale’s comment about the white South’s construction of whiteness and its fear of hybridity, Washington’s image of a single hand with black and white fingers invokes precisely that hybridity, raising a number of questions that unsettle the foundations of white southern separatism. This is David Leverenz’s point, when he observes that Washington’s image of the hand “subliminally subverts” the social separatism that it seems to stabilize, since any attempt to visualize the hand—how is the hand both black and white?—suggests racial amalgamation. “Is the hand striped, like a zebra?” Leverenz asks, offering ways to visualize it. “Blended, like a mulatto? Which fingers are black, and which are white? How many of each are there? What happens at the base of the black finger or fingers, when the black moves into the palm?” (165). Adding to the disruptive potential of Washington’s image of the hand is the foreboding challenge that he immediately after delivers to southern whites: “Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward” (222). How comforting can all this be to white supremacists? And what happens when those hands are made into fists?