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Elaine Showalter and Christopher Benfey

the breakfast table
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from: Christopher Benfey

Miscegenation Nation

Posted Wednesday, July 7, 1999, at 12:22 PM ET

Dear Elaine,

I had expected the Japanese tales of sleep paralysis to have sexual themes as well, but unless "vague gibberish spoken in one's ear" is a bad translation of "whispered sweet nothings," the symptoms and experiences reported in the Times don't sound very sexy. Nor do the victims seem to be primarily female: "Men and women seem to suffer it at equal rates." I was interested in this detail: "In old Japan, it sometimes seems to have been interpreted as a giant devil whose foot came down on the sleeper's chest." My current research concerns American participation in myths and narratives of "old Japan," a concept that dates from the Meiji Restoration, when many Americans and Japanese feared that "old Japan" was disappearing as Japan Westernized and modernized. No one did more to preserve the tales of old Japan--including tales of giant devils attacking sleepers at night--than Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn, who had covered crimes and weird events in Cincinnati and New Orleans, arrived in Japan in 1890 and applied his Poe-derived skills to Japanese material. So this peculiar link between Japanese sleep fantasies and Western fantasies may be closer than one might think.

I was interested in the famous 1966 alien abduction story of Barney and Betty Hill, which you discuss in Hystories, citing the Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon's suggestion that the Hills' story might have derived (in your paraphrase of Simon) from "the repressed tensions of maintaining an interracial marriage." Today's New York Times has an interesting interracial story buried on Page A12: "Descendants of Slave's Son Contend That His Father Was George Washington." Family oral history suggests that Washington may have fathered a son with Venus, "a young slave who lived on the estate of his half brother." The Times story, written by Nicholas Wade, has the usual convinced descendants and cautiously skeptical historians familiar from the early phase of the Jefferson-Hemings debate. The pathologist who successfully linked Hemings to Jefferson through DNA samples has already been approached about Venus and George, but there seems some doubt as to whether enough of Washington's hair survives to complete the test.

Wade notes that this story adds "a new strand to the emerging links between the black and white sides of slave-owning families." Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to such strands, since I contributed one myself, when I discovered that Edgar Degas had African-American cousins in New Orleans. His great uncle had a longstanding relationship with a free woman of color named Constance Vivant, and among their six children was the brilliant inventor and chemical engineer Norbert Rillieux.

My optimistic guess is that our fascination with such stories derives from our deep-seated conviction that blacks and whites in this country are too interrelated ever to be separated. And this truth is what drives white supremacists crazy, like the Indiana killer Benjamin Smith, who killed two people and injured 12 over the 4th of July weekend (still front page news in today's Times) and your bigoted organ donor in England.

Best,
Chris

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Christopher Benfey

Miscegenation Nation

Posted Wednesday, July 7, 1999, at 12:22 PM ET
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Elaine Showalter, chair of the English department at Princeton University, is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, including Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (click hereto buy the book). Christopher Benfey is a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and the author of Degas in New Orleans (click hereto buy the book). He covered art for Slate for two years.
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