the concrete realities of mutilation, torture, and violation. Jefferson's inability to deal with the issue of slavery leads directly to the apocalyptic terminology at the end of Query XVIII in Notes on the State of Virginia: 'Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become possible by supernatural interference!' The gospel of apocalypse, the blood, fire, and overturning of Poe's tales of terror, gain their force from Poe's problematic relation to notions of mastery and subordination. More important, he understood how the idealization of women in his society depended for its force on the dehumanization of blacks. When he writes Eureka at the end of his life, his version of 'the realm of Ends,' he demonstrates the 'convertibility' of matter and spirit, destroying the divisions that were at the heart of racialist discourse.
In the South's official mythology, the negro was forever nonAdamic: he/she had no task of naming and no gift of language. In -102- 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' Poe uses Dupin's acuteness in detection to reveal his own fantasy of barbarism. Poe had no doubt read that most severe of colonial historians, Edward Long, who in his History of Jamaica wrote: 'That the oran-outang and some races of black men are very nearly allied, is, I think, more than probable.' As Long admitted with Buffon: 'the oran-outang's brain is a senseless icon of the human;. . it is meer matter, unanimated with a thinking principle, in any, or at least in a very minute and imperfect degree. . an oran-outang. . is a human being. . but of an inferior species. . he has in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negroe race, than the latter bear to white men.'
The most difficult problem in knowing what manner of brute is the murderer in the Rue Morgue is the 'very strange voice,' the unrecognizable language of the criminal. Dupin explains: 'How strangely unusual must that voice have really been. . - in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognize nothing familiar! You will say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic — of an African.' Poe concludes the story by describing a scene of wrath and revenge that suddenly, whether intentionally or not, moves us from Paris to the South, from Madame L'Espanaye to the brute's master:
Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just discernible. The fury of the beast, who no doubt bore still in mind the dreaded whip, was suddenly converted into fear.
What Poe calls the 'catastrophe of the drama' in the supposedly 'humorous' story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1844), we should now recall: 'But I shall never forget the emotions of wonder and horror with which I gazed, when, leaping through these windows, and down among us pele-mele, fighting, stamping, scratching, and howling, there rushed a perfect army of what I took to be Chimpanzees, Ourang-Outangs, or big black baboons of the Cape of Good Hope.'
Poe's Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs (1849), one of his last tales, written some seven months before his -103- death, after the end of his engagement to Sarah Helen Whitman, while he fought illness and despair, remains Poe's most horrible tale of retribution. What Thomas O. Mabbott regards as merely 'a terrible exposition of the darkness of a human soul' is Poe's final revelation of the national sin of slavery. Did Poe know Hegel's analysis of convertibility? The master, dependent on the labor of the slave, would end by depending on the slave, and the terms of domination would be reversed. As Hegel wrote in his Phenomenology of Mind: 'Just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is.' In any case, Poe would have been familiar with Jefferson's description of the effect of slavery 'as a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism,' which turned the master into brute.
The eight masters of 'Hop-Frog' get turned into orang-outangs, tarred and flaxed (not feathered), by an enslaved dwarf 'from some barbarous province that no person ever heard of.' Then, chained in a circle, facing each other in a stupor of coincidence, they are burned to 'a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass.' The shocking blind spot of most critics to the practice of slavery as fundamental to the horrors of 'Hop-Frog' is exemplified by Mabbot's reflection in introducing the story in his Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: 'The manner of chaining apes described is not mentioned by any authorities consulted, and since it is integral to the plot, may well be invented on the basis of the captive wild men described by Froissart.' In the final incendiary climax of 'Hop-Frog' Poe gives 'the power of blackness' its obvious, though repressed cause. Poe recalls, in a bloodcurdling way, his own earlier preoccupation in the 'Paulding-Drayton Review' with what, in God's name, might 'have blackened the negro's skin and crisped his hair into wool.' But the tables have turned. The epidermic curse — the fatality of being black, or blackened — has been visited on the master race.
Writing his 1855 'Preface' to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman declared: 'Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.' By the 1850s the apparent division between fact and fiction was breaking down. The 'romance' of the -104- fugitive slave depended for its force on being a 'true history.' These 'verifiable' romances were janus-faced, pointing to both truth and fable. Hawthorne precedes The House of the Seven Gables (1851) with a discourse on 'Romance' that grants the writer the use of the 'Marvelous' in writing a tale that attempts 'to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.' And as Poe had argued against Hawthorne's heavy-handed use of allegory in his 1847 review of Twice-Told Tales, now Hawthorne emphasizes the importance of keeping any moral 'undercurrent' to the tale unobtrusive. Unsubtle didacticism can kill the effect proper to revealing 'the truth of the human heart.'
Whereas Hawthorne can choose to err on the side of fiction, no African American writer who had recovered his freedom only to work for the abolitionist cause could afford such flights of fancy. On the one hand, the conversion of brute to man depended on a language so extraordinary that it could make the horrible facts of slavery into romance. On the other hand, these titillating narratives had to be based on true experiences. Harriet A. Jacobs, writing her 'Preface' to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, begins: 'Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true.' And her editor, Lydia Maria Child, authenticated the document in the introduction to Jacobs's drama of what happens when romance — or more precisely, sexuality — is locked into race. She assures readers that she knows the writer and adds: 'I believe those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction.'
Toni Morrison writes in Beloved (1987): 'Definitions belong to the definers — not the defined.' The black fugitive turned hero or heroine found not only that there had to be limits to invention — imagination had to be accountable to a reality often invented by someone else — but also that these facts could then be embellished or made to serve the often demeaning romantic fantasies about the 'African character.' So, terms like romance and history (like liberty and bondage) underwent some strange but instructive metamorphoses. In the history of the United States, where a slave, a piece of property, could become an object of 'love,' linguistic distinctions were undone, humanitarian definitions derailed and dismantled. -105-
The oft-repeated 'power of blackness' thus could be argued to be absolutely necessary to the continued construction of whiteness. As Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks (1952, tr. 1967): 'The black soul is a white man's artifact.' Who holds the claims on the business of racial identity? Melville knew that the claims of color are nothing more than a sometime masquerade, depending on who wields power when. The Confidence-Man (1857) remains the most astonishing narrative of convertibility. But as early as Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville attempted to 'gospelize the world anew' by reveling in a wild blurring of opposites, what Poe had called 'Infernal Twoness.' Reviewers were quick to condemn Pierre when it appeared, recognizing how dangerous were the excesses of his language (not only his subject) to morals and to the very myths of purity and domestic love on which Americans of 'good taste and good sense' depended.
Like Poe in Eureka, Melville dealt with impossible inversions, unspeakable mergings. But Melville humanized or gave flesh to Poe's Newtonian mechanics and cosmic attractions. He
