An Escaped Slave and a Good Person

One of the joys of encountering John Keene's work is reading his many interviews. Out of respect for his interviewers and readers, time and again Keene finds ways to expand questions that risk closure. His answers ask, what more can we know together? Keene assumes that he and his readers can surprise each other, a lesson surely learned in part from his students at Rutgers University-Newark, the most diverse campus in the nation for 25 years running. To our credit, he imagines readers feeling our way into the open spaces of his stories. Consider an interview conducted by Front Porch Journal about Keene's 2015 collection of stories and novellas, Counternarratives. The interviewers ask, "Do you see Google as a necessary companion to your collection? Who is your ideal reader, and does it matter if they don't exist?" Keene responds, "Given that one of the key themes of the book is knowledge and how we acquire it, my ideal reader is someone who is willing to proceed in a state of not-knowing, or not fully knowing, just as she might read any challenging work that operates on multiple, not fully graspable levels, yet provides numerous opportunities for engagement and pleasure. Having a dictionary or search engine nearby is optional."1 The theme is knowledge, but the imagined relationship is one of trust. Though the path may be dark, I hear Keene saying to us, I have written it with you in mind and I believe that you can make your way. I darken and wind the path in preparation for you. 

The interview format allows Keene to say outright that he keeps his reader in mind, but this is no less clear in his fiction, where the path is thoughtfully obscured and corkscrewed. Where craft meets care, the ground for a reading relationship forms. Indeed Counternarratives, as much as any book I've read as an adult, has impressed upon me the feeling of being in expectant relation to an author's text. I feel written toward, if not precisely led, and I respond from that relative and changing place. I read and write for a living, and I have been drawn to thinking with and writing back to Keene for these reasons. Toward, from, with, to. These are prepositions, relationship words. In what follows, I want to explore what it means for a reader to be in relation, to feel imagined by and responsive to an author and his text. Though this relationship can feel personal, I think it is better to say that Keene's counternarratives give readers ways to imagine themselves in altered historical relationships to characters, each other, the text itself, and received knowledge, and this has important implications for our understanding of reading in the present.

The third story in Counternarratives, titled "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," transports the reader into a vacillating historical orbit. We are not jettisoned into the deep space of "Mannahatta," the collection's opening story, set circa 1613, about the first known non-native inhabitant of Lenape tribal land that is now called by most Manhattan, and the United States. Nor have we landed on the unfamiliar moon of the second story, "On Brazil, or Dénouement: The Londônias-Figueiras," with its 450-year time span, its diacritical hieroglyphs, and its hyphenated names that signal both familial connection and disconnection (think: beheadings). Rather, "An Outtake" gravitates toward a more familiar historical moment, at least for readers of English educated in the U.S.: the years immediately preceding the American Revolution. Relative to that time and place, readers explore their relationship to known rather than unknown history. Yet Keene draws the readerly orbit around the well-rehearsed historical scene of the nation's founding as a wacky ellipse rather than a predictable circle, modulating our distance from the 1770s. He does this by situating us within the unstable, shifting relation to the history of U.S. slavery. 

"Naturally, New Mary ran away...." So begins a rather ordinary sentence from the fourth page of "An Outtake."2 Keene has already identified the setting as a colonial estate in Roxbury, Massachusetts. We know there is a master, Isaac Wantone, who owns enslaved people. We know "New Mary" was a free Gambian before her capture and sale and that she rejects her new status. We know she was purchased to replace a deceased slave, Mary. The new name reminds us of something we know beyond the text: that chattel slaves, considered legal property, were replaceable and renameable. With these small bits of textual information and historical fact in mind, nothing could make more sense than the words, "Naturally, New Mary ran away," and this is because it seems natural from the distance of today that a slave would run away from her unnatural condition of enslavement. In other words, naturally, the reader wants New Mary to escape. "Naturally" effortlessly elides the distance between New Mary's and the reader's understanding of the human will to freedom. It pulls us across time with the force of something akin to Natural Law, a deeply contested notion in the eighteenth century. And though pro-slavery as well as anti-slavery arguments appealed to Natural Law, or the law of nature known by man through reason, it would seem that New Mary's view of her humanity won out — that view being our own, after all, and appearing from today's vantage not so much ahead of its time as beyond the question of time.

Yet "naturally" slides quickly by in this sentence, which continues, "Naturally, New Mary ran away, to Brookline, where she was captured by the local constabulary, and returned bound to the Wantones."3 Of course New Mary ran away. But also, of course she was captured and returned by the law, "the local constabulary." Though we know, and New Mary knew, that her bondage in the New World was unnatural (and here we could qualify our knowledge as moral or ethical, beyond reasoning or eminently rationale,) it was nevertheless the law of the land in each of the 13 original colonies, including Massachusetts, home to Brookline. In another sense, then, it is as natural that New Mary was (re)captured as it was that she ran away, for man-made laws do their own naturalizing work. Almost naturally, we do not want people afoul of the law running around loose. More to the point, this naturally prompts us to consider how we do not want property to go stealing itself, as here it has done. Unnaturally enslaved though New Mary may be, Massachusetts law tells us we must have order, now just as then. Though seemingly outdated, conflicting Law/law-based negotiations of the natural are far from unthinkable today. Indeed, present-day readers may want New Mary to be both free and within the law. Or to declare it more simply, we may want New Mary to be both an escaped slave and a good person.

New Mary is a minor figure in "An Outtake." By the end of the paragraph, she has disappeared, escaped again after having spent seven years caring for Mary's (and perhaps Wantone's) child, named Zion by his master. Zion in turn becomes the test case for our yo-yo-ing allegiances to competing kinds of laws and duties. Like New Mary does — and like hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the U.S. did — Zion runs, to the reader's approval. Following Zion's longer and more convoluted narrative of escape in the environs of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, the reader confronts the often-overlooked fact of slavery in the North, including in the very cradle of American liberty. By presenting the various officers of the law as bumbling keystone cops who find but lose the self-stolen Zion, and in presenting Zion's numerous owners as hesitant to mete out the most severe punishments due to mercantilism, religion, and perhaps a dawning sense of competing duties to the Law/law, Keene invites the reader to confront the national narrative of slavery as a system of regional differences, legal inconsistencies, and uneven cultural conventions. I want to suggest that in this wobble exposed by the counternarrative of Northern slavery, the colonial and present-day logics of freedom and order get tangled up. What I mean is that "An Outtake" confuses contemporary readers' clear-cut relationships to slavery by invoking our various and troubled commitments to lawfulness. In that confusion, we may want and even expect Zion, the embodied enactment of human freedom in the counternarrative, to be a good person, a person who abides by the law. We may at the same time also believe some rather different things: that the need for fugitivity exempts him from such expectations or lawful limits altogether.

How, narratologically, does Keene help the reader test our will to freedom against our will to lawfulness or, indeed, lawlessness? He has us follow Zion around in order to imagine, without knowing many details of Zion's inner life, the circumstances of a person who escapes from slavery. On the run, Zion steals food and goods and horses, all reasonable infractions for a fugitive from human bondage to commit, we agree. A man of adventure, Zion explores the seafaring life. That's the prized, individualistic stuff of good and recognizable stories, made all the more heroic given Zion's unfree beginnings. But Zion returns to the land of his bondage, apparently not wholly intent on staying escaped. He misses his people and places, and the country is his as much as anyone's from his point of view. As though to demonstrate his belonging, Zion sings loudly and makes music as he hides in the woods, drawing attention to himself. These are songs of freedom, and we are compelled by the romantic warbler's refusal to suppress his gifts and his vision. But we question the good sense of our increasingly uncompromising fugitive. Does Zion want to be free or not? He takes further liberties. He does crimes, as my students at the College of Staten Island say, the phrase pitch-perfect in the ambiguity of its action. He drunkenly flirts with one white woman and likely rapes a second. The reader faces the law. Perhaps this escaped slave, who is evidently not a good person, deserves capture, the shackles of a valid imprisonment, and even the ultimate punishment for the worst of his violence. In the end, Zion escapes once more and a replacement black man is hanged in his place, in full view of white and black people from Zion's past who know the sacrificed man is not Zion yet who remain silent. Beyond the great moral questions raised by the infanticide at the heart of Beloved,what kinds of order and orderliness does a contemporary reader require of a fugitive from slavery and the witnesses to his bondage and/or fugitivity?

Keene's neo-slave narrative throws us into looping historical orbit where anachronism is an active two-way relation between the past and the present, not merely an interpretive error made by looking backward and seeing ourselves. "An Outtake" produces anachronisms not only because in wanting Zion to be an escaped slave and a good person (or, again, an unjudgable one) we read our own values and visions into the past (e.g., of course we are anti-slavery and of course we are anti-rape). Rather, the anachronisms arise because we are forced to re-read those very values and visions in the present, which changes our relationship, for instance, to the contradictory ideas that play out in the media and the academy alike that slavery has ended or that slavery is unending. Surely we need not use slavery as a metaphor for unfreedom in the present when we have so deeply naturalized our current legal system of racialized incarceration. Yet, naturally, we analogize to slavery in seeking freedom still denied, and naturally we analogize to slavery in order to express the enduring and even timeless pain of that seeking. Further, surely we need not seek order by wishing Zion were a good person, not only because the law confounds this wish by punishing innocence and guilt alike (remember, another man was hanged for the crime of which Zion was accused) but also because we risk naturalizing harm — rather than repair — in the resulting disorder.

Keene first published "An Outtake on the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" in Agni in 1999,4 the end of the decade that began with Rodney King, Clarence Thomas, and the Gulf War, and that re-engineered the great incarceration of the 1980s, putting 651,000 more people in Federal and State prisons (Prison Policy Initiative) and hundreds of thousands more in local jails. In 2023, the U.S. military still occupies the Middle East, Clarence Thomas is the de facto leader of the Supreme Court, and Rodney King has been dead for a decade, having drowned on June 17, 2012. More than two decades after "An Outtake's" publication, the story functions in Counternarratives even more effectively than it did when it marked the close of the first American century without legalized chattel slavery. By "functions" I mean that it compels a reckoning with the present by casting the reader in new relation to the past through counternarrative. Readers can fill in the timeline of our near-past; more than ample opportunity exists to reread our relations to what we call the history of slavery, whether through the lens of continued astronomical imprisonment, police murder of black and brown people, competing theories of fugitivity, or our own empowerment and responsibilities as onlookers with cell phone cameras. The republication, or re-invitation, of "An Outtake" in Counternarratives in 2015 reshapes the reader's historical relation to these markers of the present moment, this already long new millennium. The collection even defines, for this reader, what it means to be reading in the present.

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Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies, College of Staten Island & the CUNY Graduate Center, and he is the Executive Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. He has published Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke University Press, 2020), James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2014), and has co-edited Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education: Challenging Institutional Structures, Queer Sharing in the Marketized University, and Imagining Queer Methods.

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