ABSTRACT
Where Bharati Mukherjee creates an Indian ancestor for an American canonical heroine, or Octavia Butler sends a surrogate mother back to birth her foremother, John Washington, the hero of David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident goes one better: he claims that his ancestors are not actually dead. In one of several Melvillean digressions, John firmly rejects an economic approach to the trade in slaves. According to his apparently fantastic logic, historians may have argued that the trade was ‘something to do with economics, or with greed, or with lust’, with its effects seen in shifts in the worldwide balance of power, the development of the British Industrial Revolution, or the growth of the European cultural tradition, but all were wrong in one respect: their agreement that however long-lived its effects, the trade itself is at an end.1 To think otherwise involves
dealing with something so basic, so elemental, so fundamental that it can be faced only if one is forced to face it: death. For that is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide; death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands for the greater glory of God, King, and the Royal Africa Company, black people did not die (p. 208).
