18 April 2013

from Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Discussing To Have and Have Not:

In part one, at a crucial moment during the fishing expedition, which has disappointed both the captain and his customer, the boat moves into promising waters. Harry is coaching Johnson; the black man is at the wheel. Earlier Harry assured us that the black man does nothing aside from cutting bait but read and sleep. But Hemingway realizes that Harry cannot be in two critical places at the same time, instructing the incompetent Johnson and guiding the vessel. It is important to remember that there is another person aboard, an alcoholic named Eddy, who is too unreliable to be given the responsibility of steering but who is given manhood and speech and a physical description. Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so. Now, with Harry taking care of his customer and Eddy in a pleasant stupor, there is only the black man to tend the wheel.

When the sign heralding the promising waters arrives—the sighting of flying fish beyond the prow of the boat—the crewman facing forward ought to be the first to see them. In fact he is. The problem is how to acknowledge that first sighting and continue the muzzling of this "nigger" who, so far, has not said one word. The solution is a strangely awkward, oddly constructed sentence: "The nigger was still taking her out and I looked and saw he had seen a patch of flying fish burst out ahead." "Saw he had seen" is improbable in syntax, sense, and tense but, like other choices available to Hemingway, it is risked to avoid a speaking black. The problem this writer gives himself, then, is to say how one sees that someone has already seen.

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