Behn & Friendships across Race Lines

Jeffrey, a mutual friend, and me

Jeffrey, a mutual friend, and me

Today, in honor of Martin Luther King, I want to talk about interracial friendship: how important it is that we make friends with people of other races and the reasons why those friendships are so often challenging.

The work I’m going to use to guide this discussion is Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, a remarkable 1687 account, partly autobiographical but mostly fictional, about the friendship between a white woman and an African slave. The friendship is fraught with contradictions and small betrayals, but it is no less vital for all that.

But first a word on the specific event that led me to write about this. Over winter break when I was down visiting my parents in southern Tennessee, I had the opportunity to have dinner with Jeffrey Patton, who was the first African American to attend my high school, Sewanee Military Academy, and who I mentioned in a previous post (I had wondered what had happened to him). He talked about how important a friendship with a white student had been to him during what was an extraordinarily difficult experience.

I wish he had been talking about me but I actually didn’t have much interaction with Jeffrey. I was a senior when he was a freshman (fall of 1968), and I was so wrapped up in my own unhappiness with the school (I got in trouble that year for putting out an underground newspaper) that I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to him. I was friendly but I never asked him how he was doing or helped him handle the hazing he was encountering—even though the hazing of freshmen had been one of the targets of my underground newspaper.

No, his friend was my brother Jonathan, also a freshman. Together they supported each other in the face of the bullying that was an integral part of SMA. As Jeffrey and I talked, I realized that he had been attacked by some of the same bullies that had made my life miserable throughout my childhood. But his situation was worse because he was black. In his case, they thought they had social license to behave the way they did.

As an aside here, I note that this is a problem with people making wild and hysterical claims in our public sphere, such as that Obama is a tyrant or that Americans may need to turn to armed resurrection. While grounded people realize the talk for what it is—so much hot air—others find that it affirms their crazy view of the world. An article by Mark Rudd in yesterday’s Washington Post talks about how he and other members of the Weather Underground were swept up in such talk in the early 1970’s when such talk was coming from the left.

Anyway, looking back at the hazing, Jeffrey says he doesn’t really blame the other students as much as he blames the school itself. SMA thought that integration could occur on its own and didn’t work to sensitize either students or faculty.  Jeffrey was forced to march an inordinate number of penalty tours and dropped out a few months later. He was in an impossible situation. But he is still grateful for his relationship with my brother.

And now for the impossible situation in Oroonoko. Aristotle writes in Nichomachean Ethics that, where there is a great power differential, there can be no friendship, and in a number of ways Aphra Behn’s book bears that out. A lot goes wrong in any number of the friendships in that book: between Aphra and the slave prince Oroonoko, between Oroonoko and the plantation overseer Trefry, between Oroonoko and the less privileged slaves.

However Aristotle, writing from a position of class privilege, fails to acknowledge that without such friendships in adverse situations, problematic though those friendship may be, we’d be even worse off. Beggars can’t be choosers and we must do the best we can.

The situation in Oroonoko is as follows. The narrator, who bears the same name as the author, is an upper class woman in a British colony on the north coast of South America (in British, later Dutch, Surinam). Behn develops a relationship with an enslaved African prince. Because he is an extraordinary man, he is given more freedoms than the other slaves. The two of them spend a lot of time talking and even go on hunting expeditions together. He tells her about life in Africa and she recounts stories about Europe.

Neither has as much power as he or she would like. As a woman, Behn is conscious of how she is operating in a man’s world. In fact, the real life Behn was probably middle class, not upper class, so there is a a power desire in the very way she has set up her character. Oroonoko, meanwhile, wants to return to Africa with his wife Imoinda/Clemene. The friendship feeds cherished illusions: Behn feels respected by a man (and by a prince at that) while Oroonoko is treated as something more than a slave.

Cracks appear in the relationship, however. For instance, note the subtle power and shame games that appear in the following convoluted passage. Oroonoko, who has been assured by both Behn and the plantation overseer Trefry that he will some day get his freedom, is beginning to think that he is being strung along. And in fact he is, although not entirely in a cynical and manipulative way. Behn would like to think that he will gain his freedom, but she is not being very realistic. Besides, it is not as big a deal for her as it is for him. The issue comes to a head when Oroonoko’s wife becomes pregnant and he suddenly realizes that his children will be born into slavery.

I find the passage indicative of the way that our own conversations about race become tangled. We may be the most-well meaning individuals in the world—I’m sure most of the readers of this blog are—but we live in a society that has power imbalances that we simply cannot step beyond. Whites, for instance, often do not see racism as prevalent in our society as blacks do, and those differing perspectives can lead to charged talks. And at least a charged talk is talk. Frequently whites and blacks alike feel they must hide what they really think.

Anyway, listen to Behn’s account of the following conversation and see how much of the subtle jockeying for power between these two “friends” you can pick up:

I had opportunity to take notice of him that he was not well pleased of late as he used to be, was more retired and thoughtful; and told him I took it ill he should suspect we would break our words with him and not permit both him and Clemene [his wife] to return to his own kingdom, which is not so long a way but when he was once on his voyage he would quickly arrive there.  He made me some answers that showed a doubt in him which made me ask him what advantage it would be to doubt. It would but give us a fear of him, and possibly compel us to treat him so as I should be very loath to behold; that is, it might occasion his confinement.  Perhaps this was not so luckily spoke of me, for I perceived he resented that word which I strove to soften again in vain.  However, he assure me that whatsoever resolutions he should take, he would act nothing upon the white people; and as for myself and those upon that plantation where he was, he would sooner forfeit his eternal liberty, and life itself, than lift his hand against his greatest enemy on that place. . . .

Before I parted that day with him, I got, with much ado, a promise from him to rest yet a little longer with patience, and wait the coming of the Lord Governor, who was every day expected ton our shore; he assure me he would, and this promise he desired me to know was given perfectly in complaisance to me, in whom he had an entire confidence.

After this, I neither thought it convenient to trust him much out of our view . . .

Here’s how I read the dynamics of their interchange. When Behn detects Oroonoko’s well-founded doubts that he will ever be freed, she tries to shame him for doubting her trustworthiness, saying that she “took it ill he should suspect we would break our words with him.” Behn has been playing on this trust for some time now, and the fact that Oroonoko has begun seeing through her prompts her to move to veiled threats. To doubt “us, ” she says (note how the “us” shifts her allegiance from her friendship with Oroonoko to the British) will be to frighten “us” and result in his imprisonment. She senses that if shaky promises will no longer keep him in line, then he must be threatened with power.

I can imagine that Behn means well here. I can imagine that she herself is not threatening Oroonoko with imprisonment but seeking to scare him so that he will not get in trouble. Maybe she is frightened for him. But she reveals her privileged position in the process, thereby exploding the illusion in which they have been colluding. Oroonoko can no longer deny the hard fist beneath colonialism’s velvet glove (velvet, that is, for him, not for the other slaves). He reveals his resentment and Behn, realizing her mistake, starts backtracking by striving to soften what she has just said. Oroonoko, meanwhile, does a little backtracking himself, offering the reassurance that he will not lay a hand on anyone in the colony. Perhaps he realizes that he has revealed too much about his dissatisfactions. Revealing oneself shouldn’t be a problem between friends, but power disparity is starting to corrode the friendship.

The conversation ends with an apparent return to their relationship as it has been heretofore. Behn assures him again that, once the lord governor arrives, he will be freed, and Oroonoko claims to have “entire confidence” in her and promises to be patient. But each of them is now on guard.

If she plays the shame card in the conversation, he does too. A friend, he essentially says when he uses the phrase “in whom he had an entire confidence,” would not deceive me. One can imagine him looking her straight in the eyes and emphasizing the words “entire confidence.”

She then shows herself unworthy of that confidence. Her next sentence is shocking for its sudden turnabout: no sooner have they reaffirmed their mutual trust than she admits to the reader that she cannot trust him. In her failure to accept Oroonoko’s word of honor, Behn unwittingly places herself in the same category as two of the most reprehensible characters in the book, figures that she scathingly attacks elsewhere: the slave ship captain and lieutenant governor Byam. Both she has exposed as inferior to Oroonoko for their inability to trust Oroonoko’s word and to keep their own.

If Behn were a true friend, she would tell Oroonoko the truth, not what she and he both desperately want to believe. An act of real friendship would be for her to say to him, “They are telling me to reassure you but, in fact, I think they’ll never set you free. ” Such truth telling, however, would involve turning her back on the people that provide her with her privileges. It would also threaten the most exciting friendship she has ever had, one that provides her with thrills and feeds her self-esteem. Telling the truth could even precipitate Oroonoko’s rebellion. It would certainly force her to abandon illusions that she clings to.

If you are tempted to come down hard on Behn here, imagine the situation reversed. When the slaves revolt, Behn and the other women flee the plantation, fearing for their lives despite Oroonoko’s earlier friendship promise never to hurt her. What if she relied on that promise and stayed and what if the other slaves captured her and wanted to hang her, as the Indians will later hang a Dutch woman and her family? Would Oroonoko, if pressured by his comrades to choose between them and Behn, choose Behn? Or would he let political expediency trump friendship, as it does for Behn? I can imagine legitimate arguments for each course of action, but the point here is that their good intentions are put under intolerable strain by the institution of slavery.

Thank goodness we aren’t under the same strains today. And yet power differentials still undermine friendships in our society, and not only those involving race. It’s true as well of class, gender, sexual preference, country (developing or developed nation). To make our tension-ridden society and tension-ridden world work, we must establish friendships in unpromising situations.

This was Martin Luther King’s goal. This is what Jeffrey wanted at SMA. This is what we should all be working towards.

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