In the spring of 1875, the poet Walt Whitman, then living in Camden, New Jersey, received an unusual piece of fan mail from the South. It was from John Newton Johnson, an Alabama cotton farmer and Confederate veteran. That alone would make it unusual, in the context of Whitman’s correspondence, which features comparatively few Southerners, despite the poet’s famous attempts to embrace the whole nation as its emblematic voice. But the letter was also written from the standpoint of an unusual persona; featured a difficult-to-decipher dialect; and contained some of the most virulently racist statements to be found in the many surviving letters received by “America’s bard.” To present it here offers a chance to explore an unusual performance of literacy—but also raises questions about how to approach the documentary record of a figure more often remembered for his vision of universal comradeship than his embrace of racist ideas.

            We are living in a renewed age of struggle over acts of commemoration. The monuments to South Korea’s comfort women; the lynching museum that opened in Montgomery, Alabama in April 2018; the pulling down of Confederate monuments across the South: all of these index a conflict over how the past will be articulated and used in the present. These contests about memory, about access to the historical record, and about a public presence and force, cross many kinds of boundaries. They justifiably get headlines. Japan withdraws its ambassador from South Korea and threatens to remove diplomatic personnel from California because of the comfort woman sculptures; there is a deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. But these conflicts are part of a wider set of disagreements, struggles, and conversations of long standing about how to represent the most divisive elements of the past. Monuments come and go, and come back, but the echoes of history they represent still circulate. So it is not just a question of presence or absence, hiddenness or exposure, but for those of us who study the history of culture, a question of how those echoes get passed on. Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play meditates eloquently on the question of such transmission. Set in an abstract space called the “Great Hole of History,” and depicting a series of interactive reenactments of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (played by a man, perhaps a Black man, who uncannily resembles the President), one of her play’s messages is emblematized in that hole/whole pun. Nothing in the past is ever really lost, but the problem with History, the play makes vivid, is that nothing in it is really complete, either. Echoes—of the fatal gunshot, of the whispered words of the dead—proliferate in Parks’s Great Hole of History. The play’s message is an echo, itself, of William Faulkner’s never past past—yet never quite a quotation of that monument.[i]

            This struggle, then, is taking place in many locations in our culture, from theatres to town squares to libraries, special collections, and courts of law. There are several rapidly developing sites of experimentation with new ways of linking past, present, and future through texts and artifacts. The United States’s enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 and a series of international agreements about protecting Indigenous traditional knowledge, for example, have encouraged the growing adoption of post-custodial approaches to cultural preservation, collaborations between institutions and Native communities that relocate to the latter interpretive power over collections. In the study of the African American past, Saidiya Hartman’s influential work asks hard questions about the way sentimentalized depictions of the violence of slavery, past and present, force a reckoning not only with the uncharitable aspects of the antislavery movement but with our own desires as historians to pull voices from the echoes of the Great Hole of History. “How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?” Hartman asks.[ii] How can you represent slavery’s violent past without perpetuating that violence, given the many modes by which History is passed on, the spectrum of means by which people attach to its representations? The most metaphorical version of literacy—cultural literacy—these days incites some of the fiercest feelings, for so much leans on what reading is in this context, and on who is writing.

           In the area of scholarly editing, the struggles are over both the lenses scholarly editions offer for viewing the past and the ways those editions constitute historical actions themselves. If an author—let us say, Willa Cather—expressly specified that she did not want her letters published under any circumstances, how then could the editors of the Willa Cather Archive have justified publishing them? Despite the careful historicization that characterizes the methods of the Cather Archive, such a justification has to be summoned transhistorically: in this case, by claiming that a better understanding of the writer in her moment will lead to better appreciation of her and her work in the future. Who is to adjudicate what the needs of the present are, sufficient to such a resurrection against the will of the deceased? Or take Alan Gribben’s controversial version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in which instances of racist terminology were replaced with less potentially offensive terms. Two editions, one more or less faithful, as it were, to the original and one modified, were published with the same press as part of that project. The debate over whether or not this was a good idea was not located only or principally in scholarly editing circles, but substantially in public conversations about the language we use in front of our children and in disagreements among education experts about secondary school classroom priorities.

            The struggle over the means of preservation of our racist past is not just about the content of a manuscript or statue, or just about who is represented and who is not. It is also about the ways in which people relate to the past and think about it as something that they can access, participate in, become echoes of. Editors are, consequently, implicated in this conflict in many dimensions, linking the detailed reconstitution of a historical moment to the high-visibility, identity-driven emotional attachments to relics today.

NOTES

[i] Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995).

[ii] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14; quot. 3.