Home, Homelessness, and the Master’s House

Abstract Chapter 8, “Home, Homelessness, and the Master’s House: African American Literature” highlights two discursive tropes that frame the Black house-and-home imaginary: first, “the Master’s house,” a trans-temporal conceit linking slavery times to the epistemic structure of racism still to be dismantled today; and second, a home/homelessness problematic originating in the dispossessions of the slave trade and still observable in contemporary fiction. Among the African American scholars and writers whose work is discussed in the chapter’s opening sections are Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, and Langston Hughes. The chapter then investigates Southern plantation houses as represented in Black slavery fiction. Pride of place is given to a little-known Charles Chesnutt parable about a formerly enslaved man who dreams of building a big, white plantation house of his own. The chapter goes on to explore treatments of plantation mansions in the burgeoning body of African American slavery fictions published from the 1960s to the present (by Margaret Walker, Alex Haley, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, and Colson Whitehead). In this rich, collective re-envisioning of ancestry, novelists position enslaved figures between a tragic, unstable “Quarters” and a despised “Big House” that is not simply the home of a perverse, merciless oppressor, but an anti-home, the very emblem of Black American dispossession. Butler’s Kindred, a raw, vivid dramatization of life in the transhistorical “master’s house,” offers to this study’s meditations on great house libraries an inquiry into the potential tyranny and freedom embedded in the master’s bookshelves.