F L O R E N C E
K I N G
Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.
A CARDINAL rule of writing is never interrupt yourself to explain something. If you must bring up an obscure topic, drop informative hints about it as you go along so that you don't end up with the entire explanation all in one place. This keeps you from skidding to a stop and sounding teacherish. Otherwise it's better to omit the obscure topic altogether, or as mothers might put it: If you can't say it interestingly, don't say it at all.The American way of history turns this rule into a crapshoot, as I discovered recently when I reviewed a biography of John Quincy Adams. A full explanation of what happened would make me sound teacherish, so I'll just quote the note I faxed to the editor:
``Re: JQA and Amistad.
``I wrote this review before the publicity about the movie hit TV. I didn't want to go off on a tangent about what was then a little-known slave mutiny, so I decided to leave it out, but now it's all over the tube. If there's still time, stick in a sentence about it so they won't think I live in the Gobi Desert.''I would love nothing better than to live in the Gobi Desert provided the Mongolians stayed snubbed. I can see my yurt now, and myself curled up in a yak skin, reading my new seven-volume, unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I haven't even started it yet, but reading every word of Gibbon is my life's ambition because I love history, but as usual I'm in the wrong country.
Americans hate history. ``You're history!'' screamed the girl as she threw her engagement ring in her fiance's face. ``That's ancient history!'' snarled the ad director to the un-hip copywriter. An exception to our aversion might be ``social history,'' the offshoot discipline concerned with everyday life. It's useful during nostalgia trips when we yearn for the decade du jour, usually the Fifties, or during periodic offbeat fetishes like the recent Jane Austen revival, when we develop an intense curiosity about dead customs, usually female virtue. Otherwise we would rather keep on thinking about tomorrow and consign history to the dust bin of history.
But we can't. It is a fact universally unacknowledged that there won't be any tomorrow unless we think constantly about history in terms of its new definition: material for commemorative minutes for Black History Month.
Our age of bigger and better apologies is unsuited to the traditional methodology of history. The meticulous sifting and weighing practiced by Gibbon is much too slow for people in the throes of multicultural panic, so we take our history like those freshmen who are so desperate for acceptance by a frat that they drink a whole quart of whisky all at once and then drop dead.
Our discovery of the voyage of the Amistad is typical. In the sea lanes of the American publicity machine you can sail from total ignorance to total saturation in about two weeks. Every slavery movie is launched full speed ahead and proceeds so steady on course that the promotion for one movie is interchangeable with any other.
First we get the interviews with the forthcoming movie's producer or director, who explains how he stumbled upon an obscure historical incident that he had never heard of but which immediately began to obsess him. ``I felt wrung out and, yes, haunted.'' Soon we will all know the feeling well.
Next come the interviews with the cast, who look studiously grim -- or if white, studiously wracked -- as they describe how they felt during the filming. ``It left me depressed and, yes, angry'' . . . ``I felt numb and, yes, sick.'' After the last of the clips has been shown, we hear from the white psychologist from Berkeley who was invited on the show to analyze how depictions of whippings and massacres affect race relations. ``Total honesty leads to mutual trust and, yes, oneness.''
Thanks to all the film clips and spot ads, the Amistad was soon ubiquitous and, yes, a household name. Once the movie finally opened we had to endure the ``dialogue,'' America's two-ish name for a cast of thousands all sounding off at once on op-ed pages, Sunday shows, and hastily called forums. Meanwhile, in Akron, Bill Clinton was dialoguing with Abigail Thernstrom about Colin Powell, our own Scipio Africanus, adding a little touch of Gibbon in the night.
THE crisis in slave-movie dialogues comes when whites think they have made amends, only to learn that blacks are offended and, yes, angry. Take the dialogue between Time's Richard Schickel and the Washington Post's Courtland Milloy. In Schickel's rave review of Amistad, he wrote that showing the slave leader Cinqué with ``the wild rolling eye of what might be a desperate and panicked animal'' captured the dehumanization of slavery.
An infuriated Milloy countered that Spielberg used the same crazed-eye shot for the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, and suggested that he equates black men with bloodthirsty dinosaurs. Furthermore, ``There are really no bad white people in the movie,'' which ``is essentially about how two white guys . . . come to the rescue of some Africans bound for slavery,'' making Amistad merely ``a tribute to the American justice system.''
Then, suddenly, America changed boats. Amistad was sunk, as it were, by Titanic, the whitest event in history, and there's going to be hell to pay. The Washington Post has already shored up against the gathering tempest with a Style feature of remarkable desperation, ``The Toast of the Titanic: Oral Tradition Carries On Legend of Lone African American,'' about a mythical black stoker named Shine (the Post writer interrupts herself to apologize for the name) whose fictitious shipboard heroics were recounted in raplike toasts drunk in Harlem in 1912.
Crowding out a black slave ship with a white luxury liner is bad enough, but naught will atone for the scene in which Kate Winslet climbs on the Titanic's prow and poses as the timeless symbol of the Great White Goddess: a ship's figurehead. Aprés moi le dialogue.
