Slave on the Block

“Slave on the Block” highlights the tension between the political ideals of white liberals and the reality of their day-to-day interactions with Black people. During the 1920s, white people were eager to explore Harlem and to consume the music, dance, and art that Black people created in giving birth to the Harlem Renaissance. However, those interactions didn’t always translate to greater social and political equality for Black Americans.

Still, wealthy white people like the Carraways were avid consumers of Black music, art, and culture. For them, Black culture afforded an experience of life they considered free from the inhibitions of a stale Western culture that had lost moral authority with the coming of World War I and the insights of people like Sigmund Freud. Freud and others highlighted the degree to which people were not the rational creatures that the 16th- and 17th-century thinkers of the Enlightenment had painted them to be. Instead, people were irrational and motivated by drives like sex.

The Carraway couple, like many liberal-minded people of this period, see Black people as more in touch with their primitive natures. Creating art influenced by African and Black American culture, slumming through Black quarters like Harlem, and engaging socially with Black people are their efforts to approximate the freedom that they associate with being more primitive. Anne and Michael see Black spirituals, Southern work songs, and the bodies and time of their Black servants as material to take in and transform into sophisticated art.

Such an attitude toward Black people and culture ignores some crucial elements of Black culture during the period—namely, that the migrants who came North and to cities all over the US were more interested in their futures than a slave past. As Luther’s evolution shows, the cosmopolitan culture in the city transformed such migrants. Like Mattie and Luther, Harlemites and Black people throughout the US were no longer content to have their place in life and their identities determined for the convenience and pleasure of white people. Luther and Mattie have their own lives, emotions, and conflicts—signs of an interior life that drives who they are but that the Carraways find inconvenient.

Anne and Michael do not hold the explicitly racist beliefs of the elder Mrs. Carraway, who uses racial slurs and fully expects Luther to abide by the code of racial deference that dominated in the Jim Crow South and much of the US. Nevertheless, the Carraways objectify the bodies and cultures of the Black people who enter their orbit. They embrace low expectations of Luther because that’s all they believe Black people are capable of. Their blindness to their own privilege—and their insistence that Mattie and Luther subordinate their own personalities and needs for the pleasure of their white employers—constitute a form of the paternalistic racism that poisoned the efforts of even the most well-intentioned white people to engage on terms of equality with Black people during this historical period.