Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips

Crossing the River, By Caryl Philips

Multiplicities of voices, multiplicities of perspectives:

Caryl Phillips' novel Crossing the River

Caryl Phillips' novel Crossing the River utilizes multiple perspectives to illustrate the horrors of American slavery. Rather than condemning the institution from a contemporary viewpoint, Phillips imagines himself within the minds and hearts of various figures that represent different aspects of the institution, such as slaveholders, slaves, and children of masters and slaves. A common theme that occurs and reoccurs in the novel is the question of understanding and misunderstanding. Slaves are continually 'mis-read' by masters, and even well-meaning whites fail to understand the perspective of people in bondage. The worldview of slavery dominates the minds and culture of whites and blacks to such a degree that not even African-Americans can accept themselves. Unlike novels detailing the plight of slaves in the south, Phillips' western setting acutely highlights the essential paradox of the concept of freedom as embodied in frontier ideology. The frontier was supposed to embody possibility and choice, but for slaves, going West meant even less of a chance to escape Eastward or to Canada.

The inability of slaves to articulate their unique perspective of the world is revealed in the story of Martha, a slave woman who attempts to escape to freedom. Martha, because of her age and fragile health, dies in her quest for freedom, although a woman does willingly give Martha shelter upon Martha's final night on earth. However, although Martha does not believe in God, the white woman buries her in a religious ceremony, illustrating the woman's inability to comprehend the degree to which slavery has eroded Martha's faith in the goodness of the world and humanity. Martha's voice is articulate, and Phillips allows her to raise her voice in prose, even while society has taken away her life and does not listen to her while she is alive or dead.

The prejudiced view of African-Americans and Africans held by whites is so all-encompassing at the beginning of the novel that even whites who feel that slavery is wrong seem powerless to resist its forces. James Hamilton, a slave-trader, hates the institution and cannot morally justify his profession in letters home to his 'dearest' wife. According to his Christian worldview, all men are equal, yet James is able to hold this belief system while systematically oppressing his fellow human beings. His 'log notes' catalogued in the novel are cool and clinical, and instruct his staff to dispose of the sickly slaves who are of no use to him, yet his letters to his wife do not even speak of the horrors he is perpetrating, as if he is numb or blind to the murders he is enabling. Hamilton does not seem to understand how to behave in a manner that is not exploitative because it has become a part of his life, his daily actions -- it is a vocation he despises, yet it is his vocation.

The plantation owner Edward Williams likewise is able to say he abhors slavery, yet profits by the institution because it is socially allowed. His wife Amelia Williams is silent upon the subject, like most white women, despite her husband's infidelities with slave women. Edward's his half-black son Nash seems infected by the concept of black inferiority like his father. Nash tries to convert the black Africans as a missionary, eventually sickening and dying before he can return to 'civilization.' The ideology of slavery is so pernicious that it corrupts whites and blacks alike with its worldview, and even when the moral truth is known, people seem powerless to resist its forces. Martha comes closest to resistance in her flight but is thwarted by her age and physical weakness.

After the institution of slavery has died, its terrible legacy lives on in the form of prejudice. Travis, a soldier during World War I, falls in love with the British woman Joyce, who has an abusive husband. But Joyce has to give up the baby she has with Travis, because she is forced to do so, as an unwed mother with a black child in a racist society. Just like slavery prevented Edward Williams from having normal, affectionate relations with his children, Joyce is also separated due to social and personal prejudice from her child Greer. Joyce may not discriminate against Travis because he is black. Yet because Joyce is living in a prejudiced society, like Edward Williams so many years before, she is separated from her own child and society treats him differently because of his color. For different reasons than the white slave-owners and traders of the earlier part of the novel, she is so troubled by this she cannot fully comprehend it, emotionally, and her narrative is presented in a randomized, fragmented fashion to illustrate this trauma.

The expanse of the frontier may be vast in scope, but as long as human beings are narrow-minded, the world will be narrow, Phillips suggests. Physical mobility does not bring freedom when people's minds, black and white, are bound by the chains of prejudice and ill will. None of the whites of the novel are explicitly racist in the conventional sense, but even while they strive for freedom from racial divides, they eventually bow to convention and social pressure and act in ways that are just as destructive to African-Americans as people who are outright racists. In some ways, their actions could be read as worse, as they involve actively cutting themselves off from their children, people to whom they have a bond of kinship.