paradox of slave mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass, The

College Literature, Fall 2003 by Lock, Helen

Even if we ascribe Delano's assumption here to quite conscious racial preconceptions about Babo, we find that they are mirrored elsewhere in the story by less conscious prejudices toward the Spanish captain Benito Cereno. Dana D. Nelson has noted that at the times when the story was both set and written for Americans "'Spanish' was an unstable marker, semiotically balancing between light/fellow Westerner and dark/Other" (1993,112), and she shows in detail how when Delano is feeling friendship and compassion toward Cereno he refers to him as "the pale invalid." For example, while when feeling suspicious "he is drawn to reflect on Benito Cereno's 'yellow hands' and 'dark' complexion and moral character" (112).The narrator notes at one point, for example, "There was a difference between the idea of Don Benito's darkly preordaining Captain Delano's fate and Captain Delano lightly arranging Don Benito's" (Melville 1961, 168).The same instability of signification also extends to the crew. As Nelson notes, "It is remarkable that, given the opposition established here between the 'white' sailors and the 'black' slaves, that Delano proceeds to identify the first 'white' sailor he observes with darkness" (1993,113). Her point is that "'white' and 'black' are perceptually interchangeable as racial markers in certain instances" (113), thus effacing the possibility of essential distinctions, and that Delano's preconceptions are based more fundamentally on class than on race. But even the distinctions of the perceived natural class hierarchy are unstable here, as shown by Delano's wavering feelings toward Benito as Benito himself wavers between "courtesy and ill-breeding" (Melville 1966, 162). One moment Delano perceives him as a "low-born adventurer, masquerading as an oceanic grandee" (162), and the next moment as "a true offshoot of a true hidalgo Cereno" (163)-all of which is again both true and false, since Benito is actually an oceanic grandee masquerading as an oceanic grandee. Yet while Delano can find nothing essential in Don Benito that denotes class, or indeed in the similarly masquerading Spanish sailors, some of whom are in fact officers, he has no difficulty in identifying a "royal spirit" (160) in the chained slave Atufal (who indeed comes of African royalty) and in the mulatto steward Francesco, who, Delano says, "has features more regular than King George's of England," calling him "the king of kind hearts and polite fellows" (190). But of course this assessment of innate nobility proceeds from Delano's assumption that in reality they occupy the other end of the social scale, if they can be said to be on the scale at all. (Elsewhere he compares other slaves, quite approvingly, to animals.)

Given the extent to which it becomes apparent that the very nature of a slave mutiny both destabilizes and inverts a presumed "natural" order, erasing difference and revealing connection and doubling, it is not surprising that when Charles Johnson addresses the issue of such a mutiny in Middle Passage (discussed further below) he makes characteristic use of the trope of intersubjectivity in order to highlight the interchangeability of roles and masks. Although Melville uses different techniques, he and Johnson nevertheless are making the same point: both illustrate how when the master/slave, ruler/ruled roles are inverted, each side reveals characteristics of the other, for better and worse, until, as at the end of Orwell's Animal Farm, there is no discernible distinction. Slaves whose lives have been regulated by violence perpetuate that violence when in command-the San Dominick slaves, for example, made irritable when becalmed and lacking water, kill the Spanish mate (but "they afterwards were sorry, the mate being the only remaining navigator on board" [Melville 1966, 213] except Benito Cereno), and they essentially enslave their former captors. These captors, meanwhile, learn rapidly both the survival technique of assuming the mask of docility and the crushing psychic effects of oppression, which Benito Cereno does not survive. That they come to identify themselves as captives/victims is made clear in Benito Cereno's deposition to the Lima Court, in which it is stressed that "from the beginning to the end of the revolt it was impossible for the deponent and his men to act otherwise than they did" (218).