Silencing the Dead: Washington Irving’s Use of the Supernatural in the Context of Slavery and Genocide

• Published in: The Arizona quarterly 2013-06, Vol.69 (2), p.1-24
• Main Author: Blazan, Sladja
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; American literature; British history; Dutch language; Families & family life; Felicity; Ghosts; Historians; Irving, Washington (1783-1859); Library collections; Literary history; Person; Plot (Narrative); Postcolonialism
• ISSN: 0004-1610; 1558-9595; 1558-9595
• DOI: 10.1353/arq.2013.0010

Abraham Lincoln The Oracle(s) of the Family: African American Ghost Story Tellers and Dutch American Historians In Washington Irving’s First Book-Length Publication, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), the narrator attempts to describe “a typical domestic situation” in post-revolutionary United States. A scene of “a happy regulated family” of Dutch origin is introduced: the father smoking a pipe, the mother knitting stockings, and the young folks . . . crowd[ing] around the hearth, listening with breathless attention to some old crone of a negro, who was the oracle of the family,-and who, perched like a raven in a corner of the chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon, a string of incredible stories about New England witches-grisly ghosts-horses without heads-and hairbreadth scapes and bloody encounters among the Indians. (History 479)1 In this scene an old woman marked as African American is mediating “incredible stories” about witches, ghosts and Indians, while the mother knitting stockings, the warmth of a fireplace, and the intimacy conveyed by a first person narrator are intertwined in an effort to produce what is offered as a “typical” image of harmony and felicity in the United States shortly after the country’s acquisition of independence. To an Anglo-Saxon audience in 1809, the character of a (former) slave must have appeared highly suitable for this task, as the imagined distance in experience, habits, and culture in comparison to a “typical” Euro-American family...