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The Practice of Citizenship. Derrick R. Spires
Читать онлайн.Название The Practice of Citizenship
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isbn 9780812295771
Автор произведения Derrick R. Spires
Издательство Ingram
Narrative registers neighborliness as a cultural practice in black citizens’ “real sensibility”: their quest to “be useful” and their “rendering services where extreme necessity called for it.”91 One case, mirroring familiar scenes of abandonment in Carey’s Account, features the actions of a poor black man set against two others. The comparison between the three upends expected roles and creates space for a more substantive critique and revision of not only how commentators like Carey applied civic republican logic but also of the civic republican logic itself:
A poor afflicted dying man, stood at his chamber window, praying and beseeching every one that passed by, to help him to a drink of water; a number of white people passed, and instead of being moved by the poor man’s distress, they hurried as fast as they could out of the sound of his cries until at length a gentleman, who seemed a foreigner came up, he could not pass by, but had not resolution enough to go into the house, he held eight dollars in his hand, and offered it to several as a reward for giving the poor man a drink of water, but was refused by every one.92
The first half of this story follows Carey’s narrative pattern: Carey also mentions the plight of “poor” persons “without a human being to hand them a drink of water,” “men of affluent fortune … abandoned to the care of a negro,” and those whose money could not “procure proper attendance.”93 In these instances, Carey’s two-tiered model falls apart. With expected neighbors failing and no one willing to risk infection for even a considerable fee of “five dollars,” the suffering die alone, die in the presence of a negro (which amounts to the same thing in Carey’s Account), or, as in the case of a servant girl, die in a cart as the guardians of the poor attempt to find a home willing to take them in.94 Where Carey’s illustrations typically end, however, Narrative offers “a poor black man” who “came up” and not only “supplied the poor object with water” but also “rendered him every service he could.”95 When the gentleman offers to pay the black man to help the dying man, the black man responds, “Master … I will supply the gentleman with water, but surely I will not take your money for it,” punctuating the insufficiency of money as a motivating factor.96
The black man’s story undoubtedly offers a direct rebuttal to Carey’s assertion of black inhumanity, particularly in his refusal of the gentleman’s money. Above these evidentiary moves, however, the anecdote provides a more general theory of citizenship missing in Carey’s Account: an immanent sense of civic responsibility uncoupled from social status or economic motivation. The man’s action demonstrates a “real sensibility” that compels him and other black citizens to move forward even as white neighbors hide or stand by because “the dread … was so general” as to make friends “afraid of each other.”97 Both groups show a kind of sensibility when confronted with a nearly overwhelming emotional tide—fear, horror, despair, pity, and so on—that suggests a breakdown in sympathy and fellow feeling, but black citizens’ sensibility becomes “real” through the “expressive language of conduct,” that is, when at sight of “others being so backward,” they refuse to let their senses control their actions.98 Narrative’s sensibility becomes “real” or concrete only as it produces measures to alleviate the need that initiated the sensory reaction. (Hence Jones and Allen’s position that their “services were the product of real sensibility.”99)
The white gentleman in Narrative’s vignette offers a useful point of contrast between this productive “real sensibility” manifested through the “expressive language of conduct” and what Markman Ellis usefully describes as the “specular economic voyeurism” of eighteenth-century cultures of sensibility. Despite the appearance of virtue in his attitude, the gentleman’s sensibility is no more effective than other citizens’ abandonment. He fulfills the expectation that a cosmopolitan gentleman be able to “relate to strangers, to share in the feelings of others, including social inferiors and even animals,” and might even occasion admiration.100 Yet, his concern for the dying man results in inertia: “he could not pass by, but had not resolution enough to go into the house.”101 “Observations on Sensibility, or Felling, as Opposed to Principle,” a 1791 article in Carey’s American Museum, explains the difference: “This [concern] is the work of an unprincipled man of feeling, whose nerves with peculiar irritability, can tremble every hour at the touch of joy or woe; whose finely-fibred heart would thrill perhaps with horror at the sufferings of—a fly.”102 The public display of sensibility, “Observations” continues, “supplies the want of religion … [,] appears more lovely than all the virtues,” and provides a benevolent analogue to the functional equivalency of self-interest.103 The gentleman feels for the stranger very publicly (he was standing on the streets) without a concomitant identification of the stranger as one who, more than an “inferior,” requires the gentleman to overcome his irresolution.
In contrast to the poor black man who moves to help the dying man, the gentleman tries to move capital instead, “[holding] eight dollars in his hand,” implicitly valuing the man’s needs or the value of his own good citizenship at eight dollars in the process.104 The gentleman is not without virtue. He does call attention to the dying man’s need, after all, and in some ways, concern for the dying man supplants class and racial boundaries: the “gentleman” foreigner asks a “poor black man” to help “a poor afflicted dying man.”105 Yet, his recourse to using capital as a proxy, to stand by until the market produced an agent, alienates him from a potential neighbor, resulting in the kind of complacence that created the economic crisis before the fever and a climate of exploitation during the fever. His attempt, like Carey’s Account, shifts attention away from his inability to help, calling attention instead to those for whom his fee is not a sufficient motivator. Perhaps the gentleman even sees himself as a helpless victim of both the dread the man’s wails cause and the manifest inhumanity of passersby.106 Juxtaposed against the poor black man, the gentleman’s inertia becomes less about the gentleman’s helplessness in an unwilling market than about the insufficiency of simple sensibility in general as a guide for civic action.
Narrative’s analysis of those like the “gentleman,” people of status and means looking to pay others for services, suggests that looking upward for models of good citizenship reveals an inadequacy that may be all the more dangerous because it is cloaked in performances of sensibility and class expectations rather than in an active “real sensibility.” Where the seemingly “natural” bonds between citizens (family, friends, servants, and neighbors) fail and the gentleman’s sensibility and finances prove ineffective (or, as in the previous discussion, counterproductive), the poor black man offers a third way, a neighborly ethics predicated neither on the claims of sociability or kinship nor on performances of sensibility and benevolence. Like the rank-and-file citizens, the man has no claim to respectability—Narrative describes him simply as “good natured”—like the gentleman, he cannot simply walk by. Absent any obvious tie to the dying man or social expectation of virtue, the poor black man nevertheless steps forward, his “real sensibility,” or piety in the FAS’s terms, providing the cosmopolitan link with the stranger even as the gentleman’s sensibility fails. This gentleman and passersby dramatize the “‘split subject’ of citizenship: the individual citizen understood as structured by this central division between private self and public persona.”107 Narrative’s account of neighborliness suggests this private-public binary is a deceptive one. More perniciously, it enables writers like Carey and the culture more broadly to assign moral credit or blame arbitrarily and strategically in the service of buttressing white