Racial Alliances in a White Neo-Slave Narrative: Susan Straight’s A Million Nightingales

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The subject matter and political import of neo-slave narratives lends itself to African American writers, but the imaginative possibilities of antebellum slave voices have also attracted the creativity of non-black authors. However, in the wake of the heated controversy surrounding William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, there has been a significant absence of white writers venturing into this politically fraught literary genre. Consequently, Susan Straight’s recent novel, A Million Nightingales marks an important foray into the growing body of neo-slave narratives. Though Straight has adopted the perspective of black characters in many of her previous novels, A Million Nightingales is her first work narrated by an African American living in the antebellum South. Moinette is a young girl conceived through the rape of a female slave by a white planter. While the novel shares such prominent neo-slave narrative themes as concern with black female agency and the subjectivity of slave mothers, it is distinguished by its examination of interracial alliances and suggestive parallels between the condition of slaves and disenfranchised whites. By examining critical links between persecuted groups including women of both races, homosexual men and Jews, A Million Nightingales suggests that antebellum slavery and the mores of nineteenth-century America entrapped a whole host of individuals. Slavery certainly left its deepest impress upon blacks, but in her exploration of the conventions governing gender roles and sexual behavior as well as the deep-seeded prejudices against non-white ethnic groups, Straight implies that bonds forged across categories of social identity foster both constructive resistance and lasting forms of community.