With Names, No Coincidence: Colson Whitehead's Postracial Puritan Allegory

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African American Review, Volume 47, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall 2014,pp. 285-300 (Article)

P bl h d b J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/afa.2014.0046

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Christopher Leise

With Names, No Coincidence: Colson Whitehead’s

Postracial Puritan Allegory

So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion, but what’s important—why the Pilgrimscame here. —Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation” (1989)

Apex�Hides�the�Hurt is, in a very broad sense, about rebranding Winthrop. At thediegetic level, Colson Whitehead’s 2006 novel is about—as in, it concerns—

a nondescript Midwestern town gripped by an identity crisis. Winthrop’s legislatorscannot decide whether it needs a new name, and if so, what that name should be.The town’s three councilmembers hire a consultant, the suggestively unnamed char-acter to whom the legislators actively lobby for their own causes.1 Floundering scionAlbie Winthrop wants the Winthrop family legacy unaltered since their barbed-wirefactory laid the town’s early economic base. Tech-sector CEO Lucky Aberdeenadvocates “New Prospera,” championing its upbeat tone. Lucky’s company hasrecently replaced Winthrop Barbed Wire as the town’s most potent economic force,and he wants to attract Internet-age employees to his company’s somewhat remotesetting. Finally, mayor Regina Goode seeks to restore the name initially given byWinthrop’s first Goode: Abraham Goode was a progenitor of her family line andan optimistic coleader of the freed slaves who established the settlement as“Freedom.” In a pragmatic move, however, Abe Goode conceded pride of title toSterling Winthrop when a promised new factory brought jobs and key infrastructureto Goode’s nascent freedman community.

It so happens that the “nomenclature consultant” is an elite black intellectualwhose investigation into Winthrop’s history yields the discovery that Goode’s darklyrealistic counterpart and cofounder of Freedom, William Field, presented a fourthalternative with no one to champion its cause: “Struggle.” The consultant alone isgiven the power to rename the town. In his seminal explication of Signifyin(g) inAfrican American literature, Henry Louis Gates explains that “to name [a] tradition isto rename each of its antecedents, no matter how pale they might seem. To rename isto revise, and to revise is to Signify” (xxiii). Apex’s conceit permits just this: to renameand thus revise what the Winthrop legacy connotes in America’s contemporarycontext. Within the novel, this takes the form of recovering a lost voice from history.Such recoveries are often figured in historical fiction as the correction of injustices,an effort to give voice to persons forgotten by history. At the formal level, the tonesof this recovered voice inflect commonplace terms with otherwise latent meanings.After listening to the Dark, Apex’s narrator Signifies on the legacy of the Puritanlawyer John Winthrop in a manner contrary to recent political appropriations of hisimage. Rather than citing Winthrop as the progenitor of the “Protestant Ethic,”Whitehead argues that America’s economic Elect are simply Lucky.

Although it does not explicitly name John Winthrop, Apex makes a number ofarcane jokes that repeatedly evoke colonial Massachusetts. One that appeals mosthumorously to Puritan literary history comes as the urbane protagonist begins toprocess the unfamiliar, largely white, middle-America town. A number of New�Yorker-style cartoons hang framed in the hotel bar,

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but the punch lines were over his head. Portly Englishmen with round, curved bellieshuddled in taverns and drawing rooms referring to minor scandals of their day. He didn’tknow what they were talking about: I HAD A MINOR WIGGLESWORTH. What the helldid that mean? (14)

Given too few clues as to the content of the cartoon, readers also cannot determinewhat it means. We can, however, recognize that Michael Wigglesworth was the mostprominent colonial American poet of his day, and that his The�Day�of�Doom (1662)commanded New England readers’ attention well into the nineteenth century;at present, his work on Judgment Day (and the damning to hell it purportedly meansfor so many) is widely anthologized. For the consultant, then, the Wigglesworthname does only half the work of a sign: it gives form to an evidently prominent,knowable Signified, although the history that makes “Wigglesworth” meaningfulhas been lost in the novel’s time.

Whitehead continues using terms of early New England’s theocratic discoursethroughout Apex. None on its own is powerfully suggestive, but taken together therepeated use of such terms as “compacts” (38), “pilgrims” (43, 142), and a room-mate named “Milton” (80), all call out to literary and historical components ofAnglo-America’s Puritan past. The playful references to Puritan history do not stopthere. Our hero is a graduate of his nation’s elite college, “Quincy”—which mirrorsYale University, given its description as the “third-oldest university in the country,founded on a Puritan ethic” (69). Yale was established in New Haven as a responseto what Puritans saw as the decline of Harvard’s commitment to New England’sdevout Calvinism.2

At the figurative level, then, Apex is also about (as in “at work on”) reassessingthe legacy of America’s most famous Winthrop, the man renowned for making thephrase “a city upon a hill” a mainstay of contemporary American political self-representation. The novel’s primary plot line—deciding how to talk about the legacyof a foundational public figure—recapitulates a higher-stakes project long afoot inAmerican politics. During and subsequent to Reagan’s presidency, the Winthropmoniker has been steadily whitewashed to mean something essentially differentfrom what it did in its colonial New World context. In deliberating the status ofWinthrop’s name, Whitehead’s novel invites its readers to build connections toWinthrop that the consultant himself cannot, effectively calling for a reconstructionof the memory of American Puritanism. Understanding Winthrop in his ownterms (and context) underscores the fact that policies undertaken in the guise ofbuilding the modern “city upon a hill” have led to an increasingly divided classstructure, like that which Winthrop blatantly promoted.

Contemporary American discourse has deactivated certain of John Winthrop’sassociations and substituted for them with more appealing connections. Specifically,the term “Winthrop,” after the Reagan presidency, has been programmed to triggerAmerican ideals such as “freedom” and the promise that wealth is the reward of hardwork, while strategically suppressing the historical Winthrop’s faith in the need forclass hierarchies to promote a healthy body politic. Apex�challenges this contemporaryredefinition: it invokes other colonial-era figures and concepts that undermine claimsto exceptionalism, but that are nevertheless more consistent with historical factsand more accurately identify the colonial origins of economic conditions faced bymany hardworking people in twenty-first-century America. Using diction laden withpuns and multiple meanings, Whitehead reintroduces a fuller range of significancethat lurks behind these idealized terms of America’s beginnings.

Teasing out the tension between Goode and Field into the twenty-first century,Whitehead’s novel explodes the notion of a singular “black America” or “AfricanAmerican community,” revealing that ostensible gains in executive opportunities fornonwhite Americans can serve as a distraction from the reality of increasing economicdisparity in the United States, particularly for nonwhites, and largely attributable to

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post-Reagan-era economic policies. Apex does not, overall, pretend to right anyhistorical wrongs; it simply tries out another name—Struggle, not Freedom—for what is and has been at the heart of the American project from the outset for fartoo many people. Sometimes, it contends, the reward of hard work is more hardwork.

Whitehead, Postracial Style, and Puritan History

In light of his scathing, sardonic 2009 New�York�Times op-ed entitled “The Yearof Living Postracially,” it might seem strange to consider Colson Whitehead a

“postracial” writer. Yet Ramón Saldívar sees Whitehead as one in a growing bodyof “postracial” American writers, whose works move beyond postmodern historio-graphic metafiction in blending fiction with history. Postracial fiction, he explains,“is not a heightened realism [nor] an affirmation of the historical realm over fic-tional act” (580). Neither does it simply return us to mislaid facts from the historicalregister, as one might expect, given that Apex’s consultant takes on a rather carefulinvestigation of Winthrop’s origins. Rather, “to read the [postracial] novel in refer-ence to the Real requires that we extend the narrative’s fracturing of form into asymbolic allegory of social and racial relations” (Saldívar 582). Saldívar later demon-strates that postracial writing performs a mimesis of fantasy—not to be confusedwith postmodernism’s obsession with the representation of representation, thesepostracial writers make public the private functions of fantasy to “paradoxically . . .serve as the real basis for understanding the conditions under which a postraceworld might be conceivable as a real possibility within the imaginary of fiction” (595).

Apex imagines the fantasy of a black person rebranding America’s Puritan pastto the same effect as the political Elect.3 Reagan and many of his followers haverecast John Winthrop as the American Spirit’s originary font; they define colonialNew England as America’s origin, which posits Winthrop’s Massachusetts as thesource from which the modern U. S. issues. To modify the cultural memory of this(or any) perceived originary period is thus to change the idea of America itself.Whitehead’s reinvesting the Winthrop brand with a fuller range of meanings contra-dicts the larger move in American politics to narrow John Winthrop’s legacy to afew controlled connotations.

Apex’s consultant uncovers an alternate narrative of Winthrop’s history. Thisversion—the one whose publication was not underwritten by Winthrop familymoney—includes important details about the freed slaves who founded Freedom/Winthrop. In it, with a predictable sadness, Abraham Goode and William Fieldfigure as types overdetermined by the clichés of slavery’s discourse: not only hadGoode and Field originally decided on the name Freedom, but they themselveswere nicknamed “the Light” and “the Dark,” respectively, corresponding to theiroutlooks on life.

On the paucity of imagination evident in the town’s founders’ names, the textmuses: “The Light, the Dark. Freedom. My people, my people. Regina’s forebearswere the laziest namers [the consultant had] ever come across” (95). Narratologicallyspeaking, it is unclear to whom a reader should attribute the genesis of this freeindirect admonishment. At one level, it could simply register as the familiar chidingexpression, a common and primarily black American idiom. But it could also indicatea kind of disappointment, particularly given the protagonist’s relationship to naming:these�are my people? It, too, could be the voice of the narrator, introducing his readingaudience to his antecedents, as in, “my readers, meet my forebears.” Then again,the caesura within the clause emphasizes division also symbolized by Sterling

WItH NAMES, No CoINCIdENCE: CoLSoN WHItEHEAd’S PoStRACIAL PURItAN ALLEgoRy 287


Winthrop’s barbed wire, highlighting that the consultant’s community is composedof Americans and thus partly of blacks: a community simultaneously unified (bynationality) and divided (by race). And, of course, there are the divisions within theblack community itself—lightskinned and darkskinned; house (Goode) slaves andfield (Field) slaves. Moments like these render assigning the source of this utteranceunintelligible, and allow all the possibilities to exist at once. While such semanticopenness reflects poetic expression across all periods, Whitehead’s novel brings cer-tain consistent questions of articulation to the fore and calls attention to momentswhen less obvious polysemy also forestalls conclusive judgments; Albie’s appeal tothe consultant is one example among many of this force at work. Stripping definitiveauthority away from its narrator may seem initially to undermine Apex’s cause (thatis, its empowering a black man to revise what is usually considered Anglo-Americanhistory), but the pervasiveness of this technique suggests an altogether differenteffect.

In addition to the punning logic of Whitehead’s style, Apex’s narrator nearlystates outright that an investigation into colonial literary history can help orient thereader to possible connotations of the novel’s historiographic play, noting thatalthough the protagonist “didn’t have a map of the area . . . he told himself that ifhe ever got lost he should look for the next deeper level of Winthrop, Winthrop tothe next power, and he would find his way” (13-14). For Whitehead’s sometimeslabyrinthine allegory of social processes, the Winthrop legacy is a point of orienta-tion that ultimately connects Apex’s present with the colonial era. Apex draws theseconnections by reference to what popular history tends to represent about Americaas well as what these myths fail to convey. In this case, Apex uses the renaming ofWinthrop to stage a second conflict, one whose relationship to the town-namecontroversy initially baffles: whence the hotel bartender’s ire toward the consultant?And why is the housekeeper so insistent that she clean his room, despite the consul-tant’s obvious wish that it be left undisturbed? With a sense of inevitability, the oldGoode/Field binary divides the consultant from the bartender Muttonchops, socalled due to his old-fashioned sideburns, and the woman later identified as his wife.4

This is made all the more apparent in Regina’s assuming a sympathetic connectionbetween herself and the consultant due to their racial identities.

Highlighting class conflict within and among black Americans aligns Apex withother contemporary African American novels that have, as Rolland Murray shows,“continued to play a critical role in troubling middle-class calls for class solidarity”(Murray 12). Murray claims that much contemporary African American fictionresists the impulse to ignore internecine class conflict, despite Marxist-inflected criesfor uniformity, by “stag[ing] the interplay between class and literary form” (16).Even before Apex�was published, William Ramsey expertly presaged its key themesand techniques by explaining that Whitehead’s prior two novels, The�Intuitionist�andJohn�Henry�Days, are not concerned with “historical events themselves but how wespin them” (783). Ramsey explains that by “choosing not to counter a totalizingmaster narrative with an alternative, black micronarrative, [Whitehead] exposes allhistory as a suspicious text” (783). Whitehead encodes this suspicion, Ramseyexplains, in his prose style:

Because Whitehead gives us bemused skepticism rather than tragedy, and irony not politicalengagement, he may fail to satisfy readers long accustomed to seeking a solid stance forprogressive social action. After all, if one is singing “We Shall Overcome” while marchingon behalf of a civil rights cause, one needs to believe in a fixed, transcendent principle—some grand narrative of higher justice—that explains and indeed impels one’s civil protest.Yet importantly, Whitehead’s irony does have a vitally progressive potential—namely itsradical tendency toward openness, not fixity. (783)



Openness, particularly regarding the “meaning” of the past, is what makes Whitehead’sengagement with history so vibrant, if somewhat diffuse.

Saldívar contends that Whitehead’s politics of form differs in kind from that ofWhitehead’s parents and grandparents. Whitehead (and those Saldívar calls his“postracial” contemporaries) came of age a generation after the civil rights era: this iswhat he means by the term “postracial.” He explains that it

does not mean that we are beyond race; the prefix “post” here does not mean a chronological“superseding,” a triumphant posteriority. Rather, the term entails a conceptual shift to thequestion of what meaning the idea of “race” carries in our own times. . . . [Postrace is] aterm designating not a chronological but a conceptual frame, one that refers to the logic ofsomething having been “shaped as a consequence of” imperialism and racism. (575)

Partway through his first, better-known novel The�Intuitionist, Whitehead’s politicstake shape in reimagining New York City’s 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of AllNations. Whitehead’s version of the fair features the Vice President of the UnitedStates delivering a powerful address at its opening ceremony. “Our exhibition,” heintones,

cannot fail to soften, if not eradicate altogether, the prejudices and animosities which haveso long retarded the happiness of nations. We are living in a period of most wonderfultransition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind. . . . [T]he exhibition of 1853 is to give us a true testand a living picture of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived and a newstarting point to direct their further exertions. (Whitehead, Intuitionist 80-81)

Set in the context of a dispute between rival factions of elevator inspectors, TheIntuitionist’s narrative partly implies hope that the safety elevator, which was in factintroduced by Elisha Otis at the New York exhibition, would prefigure an importantsocial change. But the Vice President of the United States did not deliver that speechabout unity. Nor was that speech delivered at the 1853 event, as Whitehead’s novelinsists. Instead, an almost identical address was given by England’s Prince Albert indefense of the 1851 London World’s Fair, which its New York-based followeremulated (Auerbach 60). Moreover, the U. S. Vice Presidency was vacant in 1853,after William King died in office and was never replaced. As U. S. President, however,Franklin Pierce gave a dramatically different World’s Fair commencement speechthat year on July 14.

Placing a British master narrative of capitalism in the mouth of an entirelyfictional American political leader effectively allows the U. S. political structure itselfto speak—since no one individual can be credited with these words (particularly oneso fallible as Franklin Pierce), one cannot simply dismiss them as the iteration of asingle misguided soul. Slavery’s existence on U. S. soil plainly belies claims abouttechnology and advancing human freedom at that time. Not three weeks beforeWhitehead’s version of the speech was putatively delivered, Harriet Jacobs publishedher “Letter from a Fugitive Slave” in the real-world New�York�Daily�Tribune.

Since, as Ramsey points out, Whitehead’s narratives pose open and multiple—rather than singular—challenges to dominant historical narratives, it follows that TheIntuitionist�and Apex�question received notions of multiple periods in U. S. history atthe same time. To date, however, critics have followed Whitehead’s work no furtherback than the endpoint of de jure chattel slavery in considering his engagementwith America’s past.5 Jeffrey Allen Tucker notes that The�Intuitionist “presents bothelevators and racial conflict as structural features of a twentieth-century Americabuilt on nineteenth-century foundations” (152), and he convincingly demonstrateshow nineteenth-century detective fictions comprise the literary foundations of TheIntuitionist. So too Saundra Liggins finds precedent in The�Intuitionist’s antebellumgothic forebears. While Apex does focus some of its attention on the Reconstructionera, for example in the mural in The�Intuitionist’s Fanny Briggs Memorial building,




it also calls attention to the moment of American Indian-European Contact and thesubsequent colonial period.

A mural in the Briggs building, which is named after a slave who taught herselfto read, functions as precisely the kind of postracial irony Saldívar identifies. Themural adorns a capacious lobby made from “ersatz marble” and a “circle of Doriccolumns” (Intuitionist 47), neoclassical touches that amplify the Eurocentric ideologyof the mural itself. Beginning at its left with depictions of “cheerless Indians” whomthe narrative admits are the “original tenants, sure,” it quickly features explorers’vessels of uncertain national origin. Next come “beaming Indians trading beads to agang of white men—the infamous sale of the island” (47). Then the mural proceedsto depict the American Revolutionary War, having “skipped over a lot of stuff ” (47).Notably, the painting is incomplete and there is little space remaining to update themural’s tale. “Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the inter-vening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please” (48).

Whitehead’s satire here is plain. The exploitation—and the mass murder—of indigenous Americans is appallingly diminished in an image of equal exchange.Equally shamefully, the painting that ostensibly purports to represent the historyof Manhattan neglects treating the problem of slavery—and the mass murder—of Africans abducted from their homes and forced into slavery in the Britishcolonies-cum-United States. The painting thus hollows out the “Fanny Briggs”signifier and replaces its signified with a carefully censored vision of Manhattan.In this way, Fanny becomes less evidence of a history of slavery than a componentin the narrative toward ever-greater access to equality on U. S. soil. By encoding hishistoriography at the fiction’s metadiegetic level like this painting, Whitehead’scritique of the past (both in fact and in its popular representation) breaks clearlythrough to the present of the Real.

Apex’s consultant similarly scrapes the gild (or rather, the “Sterling” silver) off thedross of broad-strokes narratives of progress by revising “Winthrop” as “Struggle.”Liggins astutely identifies the fact that the conflict in The�Intuitionist works bothwithin and across races, which works contrary to Winthrop’s narrative of racialunity implied by Apex’s initial Goode/Field origin story. In her quest to become thefirst black female elevator inspector, Lila Mae is preceded by Pompey, the firstAfrican American elevator inspector of any sex. Yet rather than forging solidaritywith him, Lila Mae suspects Pompey caused the catastrophe in the Briggs buildingthat sets off the narrative’s central tension. Liggins explains that

the divisiveness between Lila Mae and Pompey is a product of one of Whitehead’s maintenets in The�Intuitionist, what he calls “the lie of whiteness.” All of the characters, white andblack, are afflicted by a blindness that prohibits them from realizing their position in societyand from determining their own fate. All of them are searching for a means of escape, ofrising above their present individual and social circumstances. (365)

Lila’s and Pompey’s micronarratives highlight that this “lie of whiteness” also afflictsthe protagonist of Apex—his success within a largely white, upper-class social sphereblinds him to the fact that blackness still hinders most black Americans. The scalesfall from his eyes only when the nomenclature consultant comes to knowMuttonchops’s story.

Apex’s Hotel Winthrop instructively parallels the Fanny Briggs building by similarlyreifying historiography; as the Briggs elevator crash drives the plot of The�Intuitionist,so the Hotel Winthrop’s centrality to Apex’s geography is outlined frankly. None toosubtly, the consultant is said to stay “in the Winthrop Suite of the Hotel Winthropon Winthrop Street in Winthrop Square in the Town of Winthrop in WinthropCounty” (13), a suite that had once accommodated U. S. Presidents and othernational elites. “The only thing unscathed” in the room by the ravages of time “wasa painting,” the narrator explains, “of one of the Winthrop elders. Winthrop stood



in a field with some hunting dogs, preserved in his kingdom. Guests came andwent, guests registered, retired, and checked out, but this man remained. He neverblinked” (12). Like the Briggs building’s mural, the Winthrop portrait speaks volumesabout American history. Offered as an exemplar of the American entrepreneurialspirit within the pages of Winthrop lore, Whitehead’s novel employs not the dictionof democracy to render the first Winthrops, but instead the lexicon of lords andkings. I wish to show later how Whitehead’s portrayal of John Winthrop rings truerthan the image he generally carries today.

Apex persists in this vein of reminding its reader of Old World Europe’s eco-nomic values. Albie Winthrop’s language is particularly loaded with unintendedmeanings that take on new life in the context of a revivified Puritan tradition. Albieis a descendent of the Winthrop after whom Quincy’s library is named, a fact thatsurprises the consultant, who “should have known that with names there is no coin-cidence. Only design, design above it all. . . . [T]here were a lot of rich white peoplenamed Winthrop and they were all related, if not by blood then by philosophy” (68),a philosophy that was laid out in John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity,”the kind of material that is required reading in a Quincy curriculum. “And now thatname was supposed to bind�them�together,” the narrative asserts. “Like it always did”(68; emphasis added).

Albie’s “eyes sparkled,” and the loveable loser leans heavily on another termloaded by John Winthrop’s sermon, in trying to win the consultant’s favor:

There is a bond. . . . Winthrop means something. Goode’s people, sure, they’re the ones firstsettled here, sure. Can’t dispute that if I wanted to. But it was nothing until my great-great-granddad opened up the factory here. Just a bunch of trees until there was a Winthrop nameto say: This is here. It’s tradition. Guys like you and me, we understand that. (81; originalemphasis)

Here Albie is asking the protagonist to tack toward his conception of Quincy-as-America, and to identify with one tradition as the tradition. Asserting that in theQuincy Way “there is a bond,” he echoes John Winthrop’s famous sermon thatclaims that such bonds are built on the fundamental necessity—and even religiousveneration—of economic exploitation. Although Albie would surely have his useof “bond” signify the sense of “compact” or “contract” to the exclusion of otherresonances, Whitehead’s Signifyin(g) form also reverberates with the language ofslavery, an historical reality too rarely referenced in considerations of the New Englandcolonies. Indeed, Brown University, another Quincy-like Ivy League institution, wasfounded in part by a slave trader, Nicholas Brown. In this way, the Winthrop nameparticipates in the cover-up of the historical reality of Northern slavery, even as itrelies upon that tradition for its authority. Albie’s appeal to Winthrop’s “tradition”(like that of many contemporary politicians) poaches selectively from that history;citing his family’s economic contribution to the town’s early development in pro-moting his claim that its name should remain unchanged, he fails to acknowledgethat the product that generated all that economic activity was fundamentally anapparatus of divisiveness. This fact is not lost on the consultant, who notes that the“Winthrops made their fortune in barbed wire, not too bad a gig at the end of thenineteenth century. Land grants, land grabs, you needed something cheap to keepeverything in, and keep everything out” (61).

By its end, Apex’s nominal crisis sadly echoes the novel’s arguably more mean-ingful conflict: the consultant’s baffling antagonism with the hotel’s bartender andits housekeeper, who are both also black. This tension questions whether ideas ofrace can forge shared identities across the chasm of class. Choosing Struggle toreplace Winthrop’s name neither eases the friction between the white-collar and blue-collar characters, nor is the consultant pleased by the choice; ergo, his amputatedtoe hurts worse than when he began his visit.



Apex’s protagonist, who does not seem to question that his facility with wordsshould be so valued, initially proceeds blithely through his urban multiculturallifestyle. That is, he is largely untroubled by his consulting position until his toeinjury drives him into his solitary lifestyle. Then he thinks through the meaning ofthe Winthrop legacy even as he muses over his future prospects, when Muttonchopsforthrightly queries, “Hell kind of job is that?” (220). For the consultant, “a hardone” is not an available answer—certainly not in comparison with the bartenderand his wife, who work every day each year but two (209).

Jesse Cohn has shown, by reading Apex�as a refashioning of the Oedipus myth,that the consultant represses powerful feelings of guilt regarding his profession,which prevent him from siding with Lucky and naming the town New Prospera(18). While the success of the consultant’s choice to name a brand of multicoloredbandages “Apex” temporarily allows him to ignore his infected wounds, both psychicand physical, he ultimately sees that the bandage permits him as an individual toparticipate in a world that works actively in general against his own success as ablack American. Surely the consultant has reached an elevated position, but the costof doing so has required that he perpetuate by disguising with clever names anddevices a system of stratification that left so many suffering under the weight ofthose above them.

When he recognizes that his success places him in a position over and againstfellow black Americans such as Muttonchops and his wife, the consultant’s achingfoot throbs all the worse. For while a greater variety of career options exist forblack Americans at executive levels than ever before, this vertical expansion isdiminished by the contraction of livable working-class employment opportunities andthe rapid evaporation of wealth from America’s poorest and worst off. Muttonchopsis a direct inheritor of Field’s muted tradition, “Struggle,” and represents theoppressive economic reality of life in Goode’s Freedom as well as life under thebanner of Winthrop.

Muttonchops’s oppressed reality, however, is partly masked in the present byLucky’s coterie of young executives. “They were a pretty mixed group,” we are told,“so well-hued” that they “could have been an Apex ad” (83). Seemingly promising amore egalitarian future, the narrator ruminates: “put a picture of Sterling Winthrop’slaborers next to a picture of Lucky’s multiculti crew and caption the tableauCHANGING TIMES” (83; original emphasis). The novel hints that this is allfaçade, a mere adhesive bandage over an infected wound, which sickness manifestsin the bartender’s lived reality. When once power rested on capital—alluded to bythe name Sterling—opportunity in the new economy seems to be pure happenstance,as represented by the forthrightly allegorical moniker “Lucky.” There may be reallo-cation of resources at work, but on what grounds? Just as hard labor and moralrectitude were fictions of American self-invention in the time of sterling currency,so education and hard work as vehicles to certain self-improvement are the fictionsof Apex’s present.

That Lucky represents no meaningful change is made clear by his obsessionwith constructing “Version 2.0.” Boasting that he constantly pushes his employeesto the next level of innovation, he confesses, “I love this town, but what’s the nextthing?” (86). Although it takes the protagonist some time to realize it, New Prosperaitself is only “Winthrop 2.0” (175). Like Winthrop the name, it disguises rather thanreveals the reality of life in America. It makes gestures to inclusiveness and surface-level fixes like a “multiculti” cadre but still works Prospero’s old magic in keeping“others” in a rigidly stratified social structure. In effect, the narrator’s rejectingLucky and Albie alike expresses the same disapproval. If Albie has a fading Winthroptradition, Lucky reaches back to that Old World power (in this case Shakespeare’snarrative of colonial magic as figured in The�Tempest) to keep the social order in line.



If the consultant ultimately stands up against the system that keeps so manyworking black people in poverty, why does he not choose “Freedom,” the namefirst used by the freed slaves that settled the town? The name’s biggest advocate,Mayor Regina Goode, provides the answer herself, when she explains that Goode’schoice is founded on the basic inequality inherent in the Puritan logic of theAmerican project. “The white people know what the Goode name means in thiscommunity—tradition, like Winthrop means tradition” (114), she explains.Unwittingly, Regina Goode undoes her own cause by showing that Freedom signifiesthe freed slaves’ intentions, but it does not Signify the reality of the experience, nordoes it properly Signify upon the past. This is because the name emerged from aunivocal vision of what the lives of the new “citizens” would be like. The name isall Goode, no Field; it is unrestrained optimism without a realistic counterbalance,not unlike how our contemporaries too often tend to (re-)read the Winthrop visionof America.

From Early Modern to Postmodern: Winthrop in America

In what is known as his “Farewell Address,” Ronald Reagan invoked JohnWinthrop’s vision of the Puritan foray into the New World by touting what he

saw as the economic successes of his presidency. Reagan’s 1989 vision poachesfrom the rhetoric of the “city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop indelibly forged it inAmerica’s cultural memory in 1630: “For we must consider that we shall be as a cityupon a hill,” Winthrop cautioned his followers. “The eyes of all people are upon us,so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, andso cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and aby-word through the world” (par. 45).

For Reagan as for so many others, Winthrop’s utopian ideal prefigures Americanhistory to come.6 Here, specifically, is how Reagan imagined Winthrop’s contributionto America:

The past few days . . . I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comesfrom John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imaginedwas important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here onwhat today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for ahome that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quitecommunicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocksstronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds livingin harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity,and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyonewith the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still. (Reagan 326-27)

That Reagan sees Winthrop as a “freedom man” is frankly risible given the Puritans’notorious tyranny with respect to other religions, their complicity in race-basedslavery, their brutal wars with the extant Indian populations, and their swift andunequivocal marginalization of internal political/theological opponents.7 One mightalso quibble by pointing out that the “Separating non-conformists” that establishedPlymouth in 1620 are what are commonly known as the Pilgrims; Winthrop’s fleet,now referred to as the Puritans, came first to Salem and then moved to Boston afull decade after the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock.8

After Reagan, Winthrop emerges into discourse an ur-American, a demiurge ofthe modern American way of life. Boston�Globe columnist James Carroll affirms this



reading. “[I]t was John Kennedy, speaking on the eve of his inauguration, whostamped the contemporary political lexicon with the [City] image, a reference bothto a saying of Jesus and mystic Jerusalem,” he wrote in November 2011.

But it was Ronald Reagan who made the phrase so dear to the conservative heart. He beganand ended his presidency by invoking the “shining city,” always with a lump in his throat.

Since then, other Republican notables have taken his cue. Sandra Day O’Connor readthe entire Winthrop sermon at Reagan’s funeral. As Reagan had, Sarah Palin invoked theCity on a Hill in her acceptance speech at the Republican convention. And now Gingrich.(n. pag.)

Newt Gingrich recently produced a film entitled A�City�upon�a�Hill:�The�Spirit�ofAmerican�Exceptionalism; it’s clear the Winthrop brand continues to enjoy Reaganizedrecognition in conservative circles.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Barack Obama has also usedWinthrop’s city metaphor uncritically in his own speeches. Within academic andprofessional writing, the first decade of the twenty-first century saw a distinct moveto more fully interpolate the Winthrop narrative into that of America’s politicalvisionaries. Francis J. Bremer and Matthew S. Holland situate Winthrop in the pan-theon of America’s leading voices of liberty,9 following the naming of “A Modelof Christian Charity” the most influential sermon of the last millennium in a 1999issue of the New�York�Times�Magazine.10 Apex views Winthrop in a less celebratorymanner than Bremer or Holland, although it is no less respectful of the Puritangovernor’s historical impact. In the form of Sterling Winthrop’s ubiquitous barbedwire, the Puritan legacy shapes the terrain of Whitehead’s Reconstruction-eraMidwest by literally dividing it. The novel’s critique is surely warranted, for whileWinthrop was at times gentler than his contemporaries, his vision of the idealcommunity insists on a necessary but fundamental inequality in society. “A Model ofChristian Charity” makes plain that Puritanism not only admits but indeed championsinequality as a virtue—or at least as a condition which provides for the greatestapplication of the metavirtue of charity.11

The most famous of all American sermons, which is said to have given “fertileseed to America’s political heritage,” was delivered in 1630, either aboard the Arbellaor just before setting sail.12 Viewed by some as “America’s first great speech”(Holland 27), Winthrop biographer Edmund Morgan contends that now “it representsthe ideal by which the later actuality is measured or the key by which to explain thesense of mission that engaged first New England and then later the United States”(145). Peter Gomes also adopts this view, choosing to read the sermon optimistically,despite its evident flaws. Apex, however, complicates by Signifyin(g) on the Winthrop/Reagan myth of American opportunity.

In its time, “A Model” was not offered as an ideological substrate for the for-mation of a new nation, as contemporaries have refashioned it. Instead, Winthropsought to inspire confidence and ensure subordination to his cause, beginning: “Godalmighty in his most wise and holy providence hath so disposed of the condition ofmankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent inpower and dignity, others mean and in subjection.”13 Later, he will clarify: “All menbeing thus (by divine providence) ranked into two sorts: rich and poor, under thefirst are comprehended all such as are able to live comfortably by their own meansduly improved; and all others are poor” (83). Winthrop unquestioningly accepts thegivenness of, and as we will see, the necessity for economic inequality, to the pointthat some are and will be unable to live without assistance from a benefactor class.

Morgan points out that this type of talk was common for leaders of risky voy-ages in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (145). Winthrop’s openingsentence, the “model” indicated in the title, “was the central platitude of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century social and political thought, invoked whenever the occasion



seemed to suggest a need for reinforcing authority” (145-46). Rather than contrivinga unique sentiment, “Winthrop was . . . developing a conventional doctrine . . . [and]he wrote or spoke in a context where that doctrine was regularly called upon for animmediate practical purpose, a purpose that Winthrop too embraced even as heexalted it into something more than the success of a voyage” (149-50).

Winthrop’s insistence that destitution is divinely ordered for some, whichcondition they should not simply accept but embrace with gratitude, is a well-worntopos of English social thought in the New World. Hence Reagan’s vision of the“shining city” is as much a throwback to European aristocracy as a vision for thefuture. Morgan also shows that Winthrop’s invoking Christian duty in his appealfor subjection to authority hardly bears noting as a rhetorical innovation (147).14

Nevertheless, Morgan insists that Winthrop’s sermon holds a unique place in thecanon of expressions identified as formative of American political character; how-ever, this post-Reagan view demonstrates a dramatic shift from his own mid-1950s’position, which largely ignored the “Model” in his biography of Winthrop. Elevatingthe “Model” to the status of proto-American archetype either requires one toemphasize Winthrop’s consideration of Christian love over social subordination(which leads to the popular impression that Winthrop’s speech is really aboutAmerican idealism), or else it forces the issue that the ends of equality are a fictionthat cover over the reality of class conflict in America. The fact remains thatWinthrop’s document, for all its influence, suppresses a vision of liberty and activelyworks against any sense of social mobility, let alone fuel hope for economic equality.

Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” insists further that love is “a bond ofperfection” (par. 21), but one that he earlier established as ultimately the product ofneed. God structured an unequal society so “that every man might have need ofother, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds ofbrotherly affection” (par. 4). So the argument runs roughly as follows: God madesome people rich and some people poor to create within each group a need for theother. The rich need the poor to practice mercy—not “eat up the poor” (par. 3)—while the poor need the rich to enact justice—that is, to enact god’s order andremain in their designated social station. This need generates closeness, and thiscloseness manifests love.

Winthrop’s sensibility of economic inequality as divinely ordered gave wealthyNew Englanders ample opportunity to exercise mercy, which is precisely howHolland characterizes Winthrop’s vision of agapē. Far from exalting equality in1980s’ America, Reagan implicitly contends that harmony and peace result from ahighly stratified class structure; for Winthrop, that harmony and peace was a functionof caritas (charity), not the égalité articulated in the Declaration of Independenceand more fully effected as a reality through emancipation, suffrage, the civil rightsmovement, or other progressive reforms that antedated Reagan’s “ConservativeRevolution.”15

Channeling Winthrop, Reagan calls implicitly upon the language of inequalityand explicitly upon the metaphor of the community as a body bound by the ligamentsof inequality’s “love” to describe his idea of America. Doubtless, both Reagan andWinthrop would have the rest of the community of nations look that body in theeyes, and both leaders made clear who constitutes the head of that body. In keyinghis narrative of racial division to a severed toe, and suffusing his novel with thewords and names of Puritanism, Apex’s double-voicedness calls out to JohnWinthrop’s normative, early modern ideology of the body politic. And it remindsus who make up that body’s feet. In a social cosmology where (white, Protestant)religious and political leaders form the head of the metaphorical community, certainlyblack slaves would represent that class of people that get stuck, to use Apex’s ownreferences, in the dung.



Scrubbed from the “official” narrative of the town’s past as presented in thevolume produced by the Winthrop Foundation and funded by the Winthrop fortune(58), “Struggle” is represented only in the first draft of Winthrop’s history, one pro-vided him by the librarian Beverly. The work reveals that, while stricken by fever,Field was absent from the vote that changed Freedom to Winthrop. Field’s suggestion,Struggle, persists in the shape of Muttonchops’s day-to-day existence; it appears inthe form of his wife, the bullheaded housekeeper. These two low-level hotel staffmembers serve as a source of revelation as well as difficulty for the consultant.

Although Muttonchops, like the town’s mayor, is a direct descendant of an origi-nal settler, his apex is not political power. Instead, he works his way up from being ashoeshine boy in the men’s room to his position in the hotel lounge—just like hisfather, and his grandfather before that. His is the other story of America: of entirecommunities not only failing to advance in this country but actually moving�backwardeconomically as a result of Reagan’s policies. Johnson explains:

The other side of the social and economic ledger in the eighties portrayed a starkly differentpicture of American society. For all the prosperity, new wealth, and affluent living achievedby many, abundant statistical evidence showed that the number of Americans living inpoverty had increased sharply during the Reagan years; that class lines were lengthening . . .that after decades of moving up the economic ladder, American workers found themselvesforced to accept lower standards of living. They were now moving down the economicscale. (243)

Muttonchops’s acerbic commentary on the naming situation facing the consultantreflects the fact that “as usual in virtually all studies of individual and family income,blacks trailed far behind every other demographic population group” (Johnson243ff). In the words of Whitehead’s mixologist, “This is Winthrop. Always will beWinthrop. Shit around here never changes. You can change the name but you can’tchange the place. It stays the same” (26).

Freedom is what the freed slaves desired of their experience in their new town.Instead they got Winthrop: a new version of the old aristocratic order, with awhite elite profiting from division. Confronted with the economic reality of a third-generation bartender whose station had not improved in a century and a half, or withthat of the bartender’s wife (who both, as noted, work all but two days a year),the consultant finds himself pulled in different directions by his success on the onehand and his race on the other.

In Playing�in�the�Dark:�Whiteness�and�the�American�Literary�Imagination, ToniMorrison writes that “there is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummyreminiscences of ‘individualism’ and ‘freedom’ if the tree upon which such fruithangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite” (64). ForWhitehead’s consultant, the dawning awareness of complicity in such a systemplagues his own ability to enjoy that juice unreservedly. If, as Morrison posits, “indi-vidualism is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified,enforced dependency [and f]reedom . . . can be relished more deeply in a cheek-by-jowl existence with the bound and the unfree, the economically oppressed,the marginalized, the silenced” (64), Apex’s protagonist finds himself both rich andblack, and therefore economically unbound but still a black man in a nation thatprovides less equally for its citizens based on an antiquated notion of “freedom.”

Whitehead’s reliance on working-class blacks to define his upper-class blackprotagonist marks his postracial development within American letters: a conspicuoustheme in Sag�Harbor, his 2009 novel. Just as Morrison claims American whites needblackness to produce a national literary self, so the consultant needs a market formulticolored bandages from which to ascend to his personal heights. As Saldívarformulates it, fantasy in postracial fiction


compels our attention to the gap or deficit between the ideals of redemptive liberal demo-cratic national histories concerning inclusiveness, equality, justice, universal rights, freedomguaranteed by rule of law, and the deeds that have constituted nations and their histories aspublic collective fantasies. Accounting for this democratic deficit and locating those whopass unacknowledged by it is the dynamic of the new postrace novel. (594)

In the end, when Apex’s consultant chooses to reintroduce the voice of the Darkinto the narrative of history in the form of Struggle, he does partly capture theexperience of the bellicose bartender, who persists but does not climb the social latter.Struggle is the name of the housekeeper’s daily battles to enter the protagonist’sroom and reorder both his things and his consciousness; Struggle is the foundation onwhich John Winthrop’s city on a hill was erected, where Ronald Reagan’s continuedto stand, and where we stand today. In the end, the throbbing of the protagonist’sphantom toe serves as a psychological reminder that the liberal multicultural ideal ofAmerica has not yet effaced the difficulties facing (particularly black) working-classand poor Americans. Like The�Intuitionist’s Lila Mae, who ultimately places the inter-ests of racial minorities as a whole ahead of personal accolades by adopting Fulton’spersona and continuing to work toward the perfect elevator in his name, Apex’sconsultant realizes that his own prestige is not evidence of a new rule as much asit is an exception to America’s oldest ideologies. He also presumably scuttles hisfuture with his nomenclature firm to call Winthrop by its most proper name.

“Struggle” is, however, a word with broad semantic range. It is both a noun anda verb—a condition and an action—and in choosing this name to redefine theWinthrop legacy, Apex resists the closure for stories about Winthrop narratives thatthe contemporary nostalgic reminiscences would achieve. It reopens this discourseto other voices, reminding us that simply because the economy grows does not meanit grows for all, and simply because certain ceilings are shattered does not mean thatall community members can fit through the holes made by the exceptional.

Following the logic of Apex�to its conclusion calls attention to the fact thatReagan’s appeals to charity controverted real equality. Whitehead’s work associating“Winthrop” (and thereby the City image) with “Struggle” does more than merelydescribe the conditions of contemporary society; it also shows how language canconceal the very economic realities it produces. Writing in 1989, Edsall observedthat

[n]ot just the chasm between the rich . . . and the poor . . . but the gap between the rich andthe great American middle class has grown wider over the past decades. From 1977 to 1988the majority of the population has experienced a stagnating income or a net loss in after-taxincome, according to an October, 1987, report by the Congressional Budget Office.Meanwhile, the top twentieth of the population has seen average family income grow. . . .The important debate over whether the middle class is expanding or contracting . . .obscures the meaning of those sobering statistics: economic and political power are flowingfrom the middle class to the affluent. (88)

In a later book, Ronald W. Walters documents the effects of Reagan-era and subse-quent conservative policies on many nonwhite Americans. Citing U. S. Census data,he shows that when Reagan took office, the national poverty rate was at 13.2%;10% of the white population was classified as poor, while 32% and 26% of blackand Hispanic Americans, respectively, were impoverished. “By 1992,” after Reaganslashed welfare under the banner of thwarting America’s “welfare queens,” “theproportion of people in poverty had grown to 14.5%. . . . 11.6% (24.5 million) wereclassified as poor; 33.3% of Blacks (10.6 million); and 29.3% of Hispanics (6.6 mil-lion)” (146).

By challenging narratives of economic progress couched in Puritan nostalgia,Apex�Hides�the�Hurt describes and acts out the struggle, not the shining, in the city upona hill. Whitehead’s novel, then, works as much to give voice to forgotten elementsof American life as it does to tease out layers of signification that Reagan-inspired



speeches strategically stripped away. In an interesting contrast to Toni Morrison’s2008 novel, A�Mercy, which “inserts” itself from the present “into early Americandiscourses” (Babb 152) about race and American identity, Apex pulls seventeenth-century discourses through Reconstruction strife vitally into its twenty-first-centurycontext. Both Morrison and Whitehead resist the “ ‘forgetting’ that is ‘a crucialfactor in the creation of a nation’ ” (Renan qtd. in Babb 148). Whitehead’s novelspecifically raises questions about how race might identify two men in the samecategory when class seems profoundly more determinative. It shows the strain thatracial identification bears on a man whose success is defined more by the wealthaccrued from his fortunate profession than by the difficulty of his work. Finally,Apex reveals the hurt disproportionately affecting some people—no matter howappealing the alternative narratives of self-determination and deservingness in post-Reagan America.

I would like to thank Kathryn Hume, Alex Mueller, Matthew Reynolds, and Michael Clody for their

insight and productive feedback. The anonymous readers whose care and intelligence helped improve this

essay dramatically also deserve special thanks.

1. Cohn persuasively connects the unmentioned name to Whitehead’s second novel, John�Henry�Days

(2001), although Ralph Ellison’s Invisible�Man (1952) may be a more apposite antecedent. Its unnamed

hero is ultimately shut out from the Northern business world into which he hopes to gain entry, in large

part because of a harmful letter of reference authored by his school’s headmaster. Both novels undermine

the presumption of intraracial solidarity.

2. Suggestively, historians and political theorists agree that Winthrop’s “Model” served as an inspiration

for John Quincy Adams’s foreign policy, yet another point of connection between Apex and the Winthrop

legacy (see Chace 105).

3. I use the term “Puritan” with some trepidation. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have

documented the “imaginary” quality of the Puritans and highlight that Winthrop did not call himself by

this name, nor did any other evangelical reformers who formed the Massachusetts Bay colony in the early

1630s. See Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The�Imaginary�Puritan:�Literature,�Intellectual�Labor,�and�the�Origins

of�Personal�Life (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). Puritans, however, feature centrally in Anglo-American

origin myths; Saldívar’s “postracial” novels (namely Salvador Plascencia’s The�People�of�Paper and Junot

Díaz’s The�Brief�Wondrous�Life�of�Oscar�Wao) also begin within larger cultural origin narratives.

4. Muttonchops’s notably out-of-style sideburns represent another productive element of Whitehead’s

historical layering. Not only would they befit the style of his ancestor, William Field, and thus serve as a tie

to the Reconstruction era; they also recall fashion trends from the late 1960s and early ’70s, suggesting a

connection to the Black Panther Party and black nationalist sensibilities. The consultant’s easy trafficking

in normatively “white” business—and the injustices his complicity with them implies—could serve to

explain the bartender’s immediate antipathy.

5. Cohn and Lukin see clear connections to Sophocles’s dramatic works, but these only enrich my claim

that Whitehead appeals to numerous historical periods in a single instance.

6. Reagan seems to recapitulate later Puritans such as Cotton Mather, whose typological practices saw

history as a revelation of foreordained truths rather than as a causal sequence whose outcome is determined

by human agency. For a further explanation of Puritan typology, see Davis.

7. Part of the historical confusion regarding the Puritans’ stance toward freedom of religious practice

stems from their understanding of the phrase, “liberty of conscience.” Not only do modern readers often

fail to capture the Puritans’ intentions when using these words: their contemporaries often did as well.

Explaining the New Englanders’ position to overseas investors, John Cotton contends that a conscience,

properly justified by God’s grace, will interpret scripture in accordance with the interpretations of other

justified (or Elect) persons (Cotton 209-12). To act against the consensus of the godly is then to act against

conscience, which effectively mandates adherence with Congregationalist doctrine; all other belief by

contrast was seen as acting against conscience. Remember that truth was singular and largely uncomplicated

to those who believed themselves saved. Very quickly, however, it became clear that those we now call

Puritans did not agree on the specifics of the gospel truth.

8. Kennedy gets these facts straight; Reagan was probably aware of the distinction as well. Johnson docu-

ments several other of Reagan’s misuses—or outright inventions—of history for his political gain: see

especially 52-64. His misuse of historiography is documented in this essay’s epigraph.


Notes


9. Meacham’s American�Gospel is more balanced, but too brief, in its installation of Winthrop into the

pantheon of American founders. “Looking back at Winthrop and Massachusetts Bay,” Meacham writes,

“the question is how to draw the good out of the New England Puritan experience while learning from the

bad” (47). He seems to be responding to Reagan’s call to “teach history based not on what’s in fashion,”

a thing Reagan himself never truly fulfilled. Nevertheless, Meacham also interpolates Winthrop in the

founding narrative of the United States.

10. The contribution of the Harvard Divinity School preacher, Peter J. Gomes, to the whitewashing

of Winthrop’s sermon concludes: “Having established mutual love as the model of Christian charity,

he summarizes the object of the enterprise: ‘The end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord

. . . that ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world.’

Winthrop’s is a layman’s vision for a new civil body politic, a vision that still lives and awaits fulfillment”

(103). Gomes was a prominent black Republican for much of his adult life, and was appointed to the faculty

of Harvard University at the same time as Whitehead studied there.

11. Hugh J. Dawson explains the theory that charity functions almost as a set within which different

kinds exist—or perhaps the metaphor of a “gateway virtue” is more appropriate: “As the seat of charity,

the reformed heart would initiate good acts, performing as a God-like ‘first mouer or maine wheele’

(Winthrop Papers 2:288). Its superiority as an agency for good would be seen in the changes that were sure

to follow from its motions, within both persons and society. The deficiencies of reason-based acts would

be succeeded by organic relatedness and affection. That new, integral condition would be energized by

‘habit,’ Winthrop’s equivalent of habitus, the spiritual predisposition that scholastic moral psychologists

who had adapted Aristotle’s hexis explained operated to facilitate future acts. As a constant prompting of

the heart, this would make possible the increase of generosity that would prove a continuing influence in

transforming the lives of the regenerate” (124).

12. The only manuscript copy of “A Model of Christian Charity” was not recorded in Winthrop’s hand,

and surprisingly he makes no mention of its delivery in his journal. Hence no one knows for sure when this

speech was given, if it was given at all, or if it was delivered several times. Dawson argues convincingly

that it was intended primarily for an English audience, and was likely given prior to setting sail in England.

13. I have chosen to duplicate the modern orthography as printed in Holland, Appendix A. The syntax

is alien enough to a modern reader unpracticed in reading early seventeenth-century amateur writing;

respecting the rules of contemporary spelling here is helpful. All subsequent references are to this source.

14. To prove this claim, Morgan cites two other captains, Edward Fenton and Robert Dudley, who

delivered speeches that relied heavily on the language of sacrament and unity in the body of Christ (148-49).

15. I should note here that many scholars deny the claim that true egalitarianism underpins the Founders’

intentions. While much folk wisdom reads equality into Revolutionary ideas, others demonstrate that the

Constitution makes representatives as much a bulwark against as a medium for expressing and enacting a

majority will. See Young and Meiser, “Race in the Early American Republic.”

Armstrong, Nancy, ed. Theories�of�the�Novel�Now,�Part�III. Spec. issue of Novel:�A�Forum�on�Fiction 43.1 (2010).

Auerbach, Jeffrey A. The�Great�Exhibition�of�1851:�A�Nation�on�Display. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

Babb, Valerie. “E�Pluribus�Unum?: The American Origins Narrative in Toni Morrison’s A�Mercy.” MELUS

36.2 (2011): 148-64.

Bremer, Francis J. John�Winthrop:�America’s�Forgotten�Founding�Father. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Carroll, James. Boston�Globe. 24 Nov. 2011. Web.

Chace, James. “The Dilemmas of the City upon a Hill.” World�Policy�Journal 14.1 (1997): 105-07.

Cohn, Jesse S. “Old Afflictions: Colson Whitehead’s Apex�Hides�the�Hurt�and the ‘Post-Soul Condition.’ ”

Journal�of�the�Midwest�Modern�Language�Association 42.1 (2009): 15-24.

Davis, Thomas M. “The Traditions of Puritan Typology.” Typology�and�Early�American�Literature.

Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972. 11-45.

Dawson, Hugh J. “ ‘Christian Charitie’ as Colonial Discourse: Rereading Winthrop’s Sermon in Its

English Context.” Early�American�Literature 33.2 (1998): 117-48.

Edsall, Thomas Byrne. “The Return of Inequality.” Atlantic 261.6 (June 1988): 86-94.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The�Signifying�Monkey:�A�Theory�of�African-American�Literary�Criticism. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1988.

Gingrich, Newt, exec. prod. A�City�upon�a�Hill:�The�Spirit�of�American�Exceptionalism. Citizens United, 2011.

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Gomes, Peter J. “Best Sermon; A Pilgrim’s Progress.” New�York�Times�Magazine 18 Apr. 1999: 102-03.

Holland, Matthew S. Bonds�of�Affection:�Civic�Charity�and�the�Making�of�America. Washington, D.C.:

Georgetown UP, 2007.

Jacobs, Harriet. “Letter from a Fugitive Slave.” New�York�Daily�Tribune 21 June 1853: 6.


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Documents

With Names, No Coincidence: Colson Whitehead's Postracial Puritan Allegory