Raising Voices, Lifting Shadows: Competing Voice-Paradigms in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by James Christmann

As I have begun to suggest, the tension between these future-visions--and the voices that embody them--erupts most powerfully in the novel's double climaxes. The verbal performances of the church meeting model an inclusive, heteroglossic world in which both dialect and black "standard" speech occupy discrete spaces and yet interact and intersect in community-building exchanges. The conversazione's exclusively "standard" speeches of self-improvement and progress offer, in contrast, a monoglossic conception of bourgeois ascendance. In these climactic moments and in the "voice careers" of individual characters, Harper creates competing voice-paradigms that become models for, or become integrated into, competing textual strategies and narrative arcs. The tension and interplay between these paradigms--which I label call-and-response and the voice-narrative of progress--are thus revealing not only of Harper's understanding of black class and black progress, but also of her conception of the nature of black art. In other words, the voice-paradigms she creates represent conflicting social models and suggest differing aesthetic models. A salient question is raised by these paradigms: Is there a place for the African-American folk ethos in twentieth-century black culture? [4]

Call-and-Response: A Vernacular Model for Black Nation-Building

The Africa-rooted practice of call-and-response, integral to the traditional black verbal arts of song, storytelling, and sermonizing, features ritualized and improvisatory contributions from both speakers and listeners. Or rather it makes clear-cut distinctions between speaker and listener less tenable, since call-and-response forms are community acts. Lawrence Levine's discussion of spirituals usefully glosses both the qualities and the effects of call-and-response:

The overriding antiphonal structure of the spirituals--the call and response pattern which Negroes brought with them from Africa and which was reinforced in America by the practice of lining out hymns--placed the individual in continual dialogue with his community, allowing him at one and the same time to preserve his voice and to blend it with those of his fellows. (33) [5]

What Harper recognized in constructing the verbal world of Iola Leroy is that this folk practice of call-and-response represents a dynamic that can allow both dialect and uninflected black voices to engage in communal and community-building acts while retaining their distinctiveness--in Levine's terms, "preserv[ing] his [or hen own voice." In Iola Leroy, call-and-response mediates between--or, in the Bakhtinian lexicon, dialogizes--African-American speech and class realms, suggesting that the folk ethos and the black subaltern, while distinct, can coexist as vital elements of the African-American community.

The church meeting climax of Chapter XX is Harper's most extensive portrait of call-and-response practice and the moment when her own call-and-response rhetorical/narrative strategy becomes clear. Iola and Robert, the educated mulatto heroes of the novel who have discovered that they are uncle and niece, have traveled to their pre-war "homes" in search of mothers and grandmothers. At the church meeting that they attend with fellow ex-slaves John and Aunt Linda, Iola and Robert sing a hymn. While this performance is not represented, the pair likely sing in their usual uninflected voices. [6] Immediately a "dear old mother" rises from her seat and tells--in dialect--of being sold away from her family during slavery." 'I had a little boy, an' when my mistus sole me she kep' him,'" she recounts. "'Many 's the time I hab stole out at night an' seen dat chile an' sleep'd wid him in my arms tell mos' day.' " This oral testimony following Iola's and Robert's singing certainly suggests the antiphonal structure of cal l-and-response. What follows is more than suggestive. Moans and calls of "'Amen,'" "'Glory,'" and "'Dat's so!'" continually interrupt, or rather respond to, the speech of the older woman (180). And as she concludes her tale, Robert, whose attention had been riveted by her "voice and manner," rises and eloquently tells of his separation from his "'own dear mother, who used to steal out at night to see me, fold me in her arms, and then steal back again to her work'" (181-82). "Again," Harper writes, "there was a chorus of moans" (181). Amid this communal cacophony, mother, son, and granddaughter quickly reunite, and Lola and Robert catch "the infection of the general happiness and rejoiced with them that rejoiced. There were songs of rejoicing and shouts of praise. The undertone of sadness which had so often mingled with their songs gave place to strains of exultation" (182). As Harriet, the dialect speaking grand/mother, joins with her "standard"-speaking offspring, their voices intersect in a general, joyful noise.