Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Herman Melville and Robert G. OMeally

Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales, by Herman Melville, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.

Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Herman Melville mastered not only the great American novel but also the short story and novella forms. In Billy Budd and ThePiazza Tales, Melville reveals an uncanny awareness of the inscrutable nature of reality.

Published posthumously in 1924, Billy Budd is a masterpiece second only to Melville’s Moby-Dick. This complex short novel tells the story of “the handsome sailor” Billy who, provoked by a false charge, accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. Unable to defend himself due to a stammer, he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Although typically ambiguous, Billy Budd is seen by many as a testament to Melville’s ultimate reconciliation with the incongruities and injustices of life.

The Piazza Tales (1856) comprises six short stories, including the perpetually popular “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby,” a tale of a scrivener who repeatedly distills his mordant criticism of the workplace into the deceptively simple phrase “I would prefer not to.”

Robert G. O’Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for seventeen years; since 1999 he has been the director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and the principal writer of Seeing Jazz, the catalog for the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit on jazz painting and literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411433595

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and poet. His most notable work, Moby Dick, is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

Book preview

THE WORLD OF HERMAN MELVILLE AND BILLY BUDD, SAILOR

WHALING AND WAILING: A BLUES FOR HERMAN MELVILLE

We could dig Melville on his ship

confronting the huge white mad beast

speeding death cross the sea to we.

But we whalers. We can kill whales.

We could get on top of a whale

and wail.

—Amiri Baraka¹

Like a blues sung by such an artist as Bessie Smith, its lyric prose

evokes the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singing

lustily as he probes his own grievous wound.

-Ralph Ellison²

Re-reading Herman Melville has been something like a religious experience, or, more to the point, it is like the experience of losing one’s Sunday School religion: the discovery of the grown-up world of belief haunted by the long shadow of unbelief—haunted, we might say, by the long shadow of the blues.

I first read Melville as an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1960s. Why, in one class, we were assigned a pocket-sized expurgated edition of Moby-Dick, and why in another we were given simplistic study-sheet formulas for the kaleidoscopic Billy Budd, I cannot fathom today. Even harder to explain is that on my own I missed taking the Melville course offered by H. Bruce Franklin, who was famous all over the campus for the eloquent and impassioned intellectual drive of his lectures. It was also widely discussed among the students that he once tested his Melville class solely (one is tempted to add, soulfully) by requiring them merely to list in their finals blue-books as many names of working-class or déclassé characters from Melville’s created world as they could. The longer your list, the more likely you were to get an A; the shorter, the more likely you were to have missed the point of the course as he was teaching it.

Bruce, as we called him in those days of sixties-style familiarity, was also a recognizable figure because of his on-campus political speeches and activities. How strange and thrilling it was for me, as an African-American student (in the days when we were so scarce on such campuses that when we saw one another we stopped, whatever the rush of our schedules, to celebrate and commiserate together)—how significant for me to see this bold young white professor, typically in leather and shades, easing toward a microphone on the public campus square, obviously on friendly terms with the members of the Black Panther Party and other radical black groups of that era, his fellow-speakers. How disturbing, then and now, to realize that Bruce, who had earned tenure with his Melville books before I arrived at Stanford,³ would be summarily dismissed for the forthrightness of his activities in protest against the war in Vietnam—the only professor with tenure I ever knew to be fired.⁴

I unearth this history in this context because Bruce’s audacious insistence on the deep and yet currently relevant politics of Herman Melville’s art frames my re-reading, all these years later. Is there a radical—now in the primary meaning of the word as rooted and fundamental—American impulse in these narratives, an American revolutionary story? And for all of Melville’s revolutionary zeal—that is, his abiding will to fight to the death for freedom, is there an anti-war warning in these pages as well?⁵ (We do know that Melville regarded the U.S. annexation by force of Mexican territories in the West in the 1840s as maliciously expansionist.)⁶ How many working-class and déclassé characters (including numerous slaves and impressed sailors, who, at least while at sea, were virtual slaves in the hands of their captain-owners) can you and I, as contemporary readers, chart as we read this work today? What are their nationalities, their race and class affiliations, their perspectives on the actions in the stories they inhabit, sometimes as heroes? And by the way—considering that Bruce Franklin was the first literary historian, as far as I can tell, to posit the slave-narrative as the primary cornerstone of American literature⁷-is there a slave-narrative form and motive underlying not only Benito Cereno but also the other fiction reprinted here—a layered fugitive’s tale of slavery and freedom?⁸ Should we be teaching Melville in our black literature classes?

These questions of politics and history (including literary history) stir and enable this fresh return to Melville’s eloquent pages.

So do questions springing from one more personal experience, if I may, before we turn to the tales themselves. In 1973 (one year after Bruce’s dismissal from Stanford), I was a graduate student at Harvard writing my dissertation on Ralph Ellison (best known for his novel of 1952, Invisible Man). In the process of gathering research materials on my subject, I was fortunate that the writer Albert Murray permitted me to read a packet of the letters he had received over the years from Ellison, whom he had known since the 1930s when the two of them were undergraduates together at Tuskegee Institute (now University) in Alabama. In a long, wonderful letter from Rome, dated July 28, 1957, Ellison had written:

Dear Ole Albert ... Been rereading Moby-Dick again and appreciating for the first time what a truly good time Melville was having when he wrote it. Some of it is quite funny and all of it is pervaded by the spirit of play, like real jazz sounds when a master is manipulating it. The thing’s full of riffs, man; no wonder the book wasn’t understood in its own time, not enough moses [that is, black people] were able to read it!⁹

Here again is rare richness for our return to Melville. While every sentence in this section from the letter suggests a book-length study, I will be focusing here on Ellison’s intriguing assertion that this mid-nineteenth-century writer’s greatest work was like real jazz ... full of riffs, man—this novel, paradoxically enough, coming fifty years before the first celebrated jazz artist, Buddy Bolden (the shadowy, never-recorded trumpet player who arrived a generation before Louis Armstrong, who himself has been called the Chaucer of Jazz, its founding father), raised his horn all over old New Orleans.

How can Melville’s work be like jazz before there was jazz—or even a music called the blues? I think the answer lies in a certain tragicomic attitude that informs the free-spirited gaiety of Billy Budd (soon undone), and the inward smiles and winks of Babo and his co-conspirators (briefly fulfilled), in Benito Cereno. The key to this ambivalence is the vexing and central problem of Melville’s audience, including the mystery of the mose audience to which Ellison alludes.

Five years before writing his letter to Murray, Ellison had published his landmark novel Invisible Man—named by a reviewer of that year (and then by many others) "the Moby-Dick of the racial crisis. In a lecture that Ellison delivered at Harvard during the days when he was just getting started on his monumental novel, he noted that Melville, along with a few other nineteenth-century writers such as Whitman and Twain, presented the Negro as a symbol of Man—the reversal of what he represents in most contemporary thought."¹⁰ If the Negro cast a shadow upon Cereno, blacks in the United States cast painful light on the lie of American democracy.

Whether with the whiteness of the whale or with the blackness of darkness—the latter is Melville’s oft-quoted phrase for the true subject of great American art (and perhaps of all art)—Melville wrestled with problems of race, of white and black, of bleakness, as it were, and blackness. For Melville the problem of evil was a problem of black and white. The dictionary on Melville’s writing table, Webster’s 1828, underscored the paradoxically close etymological links between these color terms typically figured as opposites; that dictionary’s entry for black indicates a Saxon root blac and blaccian, meaning to become pale, to turn white, to become black, to blacken, and then adds: It is remarkable that black, bleak, and bleach are radically one word. The primary sense seems to be pale, wan, or sallow, from which has proceeded the present variety of significations. ¹¹ Thus could Melville’s phrase the blackness of darkness-identifying the artist’s plunge into labyrinthine and ambiguous mysteries—have as easily been referred to as the whiteness of lightness! Melville’s best-known symbol for evil, incidentally, Ellison reminds us in his Harvard lecture, "was white."¹² In a key essay, Toni Morrison adds that the drive to chart and destroy the white whale, which at one point Melville named a grand, hooded phantom, can be seen as a superheroic mission to annihilate the preternatural monstrosity of American racism itself.¹³

All of which helps explain the many references to nineteenth-century American writers in Invisible Man, whose protagonist informs us that he resides underground on the edge of Harlem in a border-area where he lives rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century.¹⁴ To bring the Melville references face to face with jazz and blues (and politics), Ellison’s character listens to a protest song by Louis Armstrong called (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue? and hears, deep in the music, a voice preaching in call-recall style on the subject The Blackness of Blackness. This scene echoes Moby-Dick’s chapter 2, in which Ishmael stumbles through New Bedford’s blocks of blackness, not houses and finds himself in the doorway of a negro church where a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit ... And the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.¹⁵ True to Melville not just in its sermonic text but in its deeper message of trouble in the land and ambiguity all around, Invisible Man’s preacher and congregation create the sermon together; the preacher calls:

In the beginning...

At the very start, they cried.

"... there was blackness ..."

"Preach it .......

Now black is... the preacher shouted...

Preach it, brother...

‘: .. an’ black ain’t... ...

Amen, brother...

Black will git you...

"Yes, it will..."

Yes, it will...

... an’ black won’t...

Naw, it won’t!

It do......

"... an‘it don’t"

Halleluiah ... ...

"... It’ll put you, glory, glory, Oh my Lawd, in the WHALE’S

BELLY."

"Preach it, dear brother ..."

"... .. an’ make you tempt ..."

"Good God a-mighty!"

"Old Aunt Nelly!"

"Black will make you ..."

"Black ... "

‘: .. or black will un-make you."

‘:Ain’t it the truth, Lawd?"¹⁶

Through such narrative set pieces, we see Ellison playing not only on Moby-Dick’s themes, but on its forms and diction as well. Both famous novels contain many mansions (or what Melville more humbly called shanties)¹⁷ and are episodic in their construction. Indeed, it is the episodic form of these works (and in a sense of all the two authors’ writings, fiction and essays) that links them most emphatically to the tradition of blues and jazz composition. Writer and commentator Stanley Crouch has said that both big novels, Moby-Dick and Invisible Man (like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegans Wake) are shaped with an exuberant playfulness that parallels Duke Ellington’s Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue¹⁸—based on a twelve-bar blues structure, and arranged in sections and subsections that state and restate themes, elaborate or improvise upon them, build tension, release, elaborate again, etc., chorus by chorus: The thing’s full of riffs, man!

Further, both of these first-person narrative novels are filled with tragic dimensions, but both books are comic in general thrust or arc. In Ellison’s famous formulation, the blues attempts to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.¹⁹ Both Ellison’s and Melville’s works are charged with the spirit of jazz and its parent, the blues: inseparably tragic but somehow healingly laughing at the sad facts of life, sometimes laughing out loud.

Ralph Ellison and Bruce Franklin, jazz and politics—these brilliant witnesses and their concerns frame these meditations on Melville.

But what about our present volume of short fiction? Where did its pieces come from, and how do they fit into our Melville-to-Ellison-to-our-present-moment march toward the American modern?

When Melville wrote most of the pieces here, he had already written the travel novels Omoo and Typee, for which he would remain best known in his lifetime; he had completed Redburn and White-Jacket, both pushed out, he said in a letter, for money as other men are forced to saw wood.²⁰ He had finished his masterwork Moby-Dick-a failure with critics and general readers alike in its day—and he had witnessed, miserably, the decline of his favor with the public, down to the dismal low point at which the reviewers of Pierre were calling both him and his new work literally insane. When all of the narratives in the present volume except the posthumous Billy Budd were being prepared for publication as the collection called The Piazza Tales, Melville was already working on The Confidence-Man, the last novel published in his lifetime, and it also was deeply scorned by almost all nineteenth-century reviewers. We might regard the tales in this volume, certainly Billy Budd (composed in the writer’s twilight years), as Melville’s last salute to a world of readers that had written him off—at thirty-seven!—as an old man manifestly past his prime.²¹ And while we do sense here some of the abundant fresh intensity and optimistic playfulness of Melville’s earlier fiction, in general the blues-spirit of the late tales is more somber and muted, more tragedy-haunted, and understatedly wry in its humor: not a whale but a wail.

Born in New York City on August 1, 1819, Herman Melville came from an upright eastern family who claimed heroes of the American Revolution on both sides. A clutch of tea leaves thought to have come from the Boston Tea Party was passed down through the generations to commemorate the part played there by Melville’s grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill. Melville’s mother was the daughter of General Peter Gansevoort, of a family in Albany called by writer (and Melville biographer) Elizabeth Hardwick solid Dutch patroons. She continues:

Despite that, the family history is of a somewhat unbalancing kind, especially on the Melville side. Things should have gone better with them, and they give the feeling of a defeated nation or, more exactly, of certain European families with a fading title, handicapped by the sweep of history or by maladaptation.²²

Herman Melville’s father tried by fits and starts to make a success of his various import businesses, but nothing seemed to work; one venture after another faltered and then failed. The family strained to keep up appearances, but the balancing act of uncertain times was not to be denied, and when Herman was thirteen, his father collapsed, physically and mentally. I found him very sick, Melville’s uncle wrote, under great mental excitement—at times, fierce, even maniacal.²³ For ten days of pain that Melville could not forget, his father lingered and then died. To help the family’s coffers, that year he clerked in a bank in Albany and then worked his uncle Thomas’s farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; back in Albany at sixteen, he clerked and kept the financial records for his brother’s fur business which, with a lurid repetitiveness, went into receivership.²⁴ At eighteen Melville taught school for a term in Massachusetts. At nineteen, one might say, Herman Melville’s life began: He published his first two pieces under the rubric Fragments for a Writing Desk and signed on as a crew member on the trading vessel called the St. Lawrence.

By August 1847, when he married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Melville already had been on several trips by sea and had published two books of travel adventures—the second, Omoo, coming just a few months before the marriage. Though Melville had little money in hand, the glitter of promise was very bright.

Sadly enough, it was soon clear that Melville and his new wife were fated to repeat his family’s history of financial unsteadiness. The next novels, including Moby-Dick, did not meet with critical approval or sell well. By early 1853 Melville’s health was faltering too, and his loans from publishers, along with other debts—notably his frequent and doubtless humiliating borrowings from his wife’s father—were mounting. That year a host of family and friends were pressing, without success, to obtain a government post for him, something easier than writing novels—which some of them feared was producing something like his father’s professional failure and attendant psychic pain. The marriage bed was troubled, too, Hardwick among others is convinced, by Herman’s yearning for the love of another man; whether or not this is true, John Updike certainly is justified in calling Melville’s long, heartfelt missives to Hawthorne unexplicit but still passionate love letters.²⁵ Through the next quarter century, one source reports, his wife’s family was worried about Elizabeth’s life with Melville, involving as it did, chronic financial insecurity and his recurrent depression.²⁶ Hardwick ruefully summarizes:

He was not a gifted angel winging up from the streets, the slums of the great metropolis Manhattan. Instead, he was well-born as any American of his time. And yet funds were scarce and scanty throughout his youth and not always forthcoming for one who published ten works of fiction in eleven years before giving up to spend nineteen years as a customs inspector down on the Battery, before dying at the age of seventy-two. ²⁷

From 1853 through 1856, prior to his accepting his post as customs inspector, Melville began to write most of the short fiction included here—sketches and stories tailor-made for the magazines Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine-some of them stretching across several issues and saving their punch-line episodes until the final one. In the dollars of Melville’s day, these efforts paid well ($5 a page) and offered the promise of a writing life whether his books were popular or not. As we read these tales, let us not forget this background of mental and financial strain: the effort to push out sentences that pay bills. To get a sense of the stresses of the writing scene, we should recall that Melville’s "work on Moby-Dick was competing with the demands of his 160-acre farm, Arrowhead, in the hills of western Massachusetts, and of a household that included his wife, his mother, two or three unmarried sisters, an infant son, and various servants."²⁸

In an important letter to Hawthorne, he had been particularly candid about his situation. Dollars damn me, he told his friend, and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,—I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. Just as poignant and significant are the lines that follow:

What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. I’m rather sore, perhaps, in this letter; but see my hand!—four blisters on this palm, made by hoes and hammers within the last few days. It is a rainy morning; so I am indoors, and all work suspended. I feel cheerfully disposed, and therefore I write a little bluely.²⁹

Despite these blues, Melville would not write for just any magazine, as his correspondence shows. He wrote for Putnam’s and Harper’s because they paid top dollar, true, but also because of their high literary quality. Each magazine was, so to speak, the New Yorker of its day. So although he knew that as a professional writer he had to entertain his audience (his hero Shakespeare had done so), he was unequivocally opposed to writing the other way—in a strictly commercial fashion, which all his life he refused to do. And what he felt most moved to write, as he had spelled out over and over again—was the Truth. For him the Truth worth telling was reflected most strongly in certain books of the Bible, in Shakespeare, and in Hawthorne’s fiction—the hard-won verities of life’s stubborn ambiguity (in a note to himself on the manuscript of Invisible Man, Ellison called it ambivisibility).³⁰ This was the truth about the painful blackness/bleakness/bleachedness of life, the anguished toil and struggle for meaning in a world that seemed so godless and so doomed.

Those critics reading Melville’s exuberant praise for Hawthorne in the essay Hawthorne and His Mosses as more of a manifesto and guide to Melville’s own writing than to Hawthorne’s certainly are justified in doing so. In an eloquent passage worth quoting at length, Melville spells out a perspective through which—along with Bruce Franklin’s and Ralph Ellison’s perspectives—we might well examine the stories in this present volume, with their often crushing sadness, suffering, and intimations of nihilism. This is a perspective reflecting a tragic sense of life, to be sure, but also broadcasting through the darkness a strong measure of light, the ever-moving dawn:

For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black. But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,—this, I cannot altogether tell. Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitation, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain Moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance. At all events, perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne. Still more: this black conceit pervades him, through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you;—but there is the blackness of darkness beyond.³¹

For Melville this mystical blackness, ten times black, is the conscientious writer’s backdrop for Truth, flying through:

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.³²

With Melville’s aesthetic of the power of blackness in mind, along with his sense that his audience can receive this power, this Truth, only by glimpses and glances—and his fear that his truth just won’t sell (What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay)—let us turn to these stories themselves. As we do so, bear in mind that while The Piazza Tales has been received as a classic in our time, in Melville’s own day he was correct; the book did not sell well. In a sad exchange of letters, Melville eventually turned down the publisher’s offer to sell the metal plates used to print the book, in case he wanted them for possible future printings, but, alas, he could not afford them. Having no further use for the plates for The Piazza Tales, Harper had them melted down and sold as scrap metal.

For further perspective on The Piazza Tales, let us commence with Billy Budd, our volume’s first narrative. This is Melville’s last work of fiction, written, along with occasional poems, not with a clear sense of the market but for himself, left unfinished (brought to a sort of completion but clearly not as polished as he intended), and then not published until 1924, thirty-three years after the writer’s death. Here is a mighty tale, compressed in the manner of a Greek tragedy, tersely eloquent, and informed, as we shall see, by a strange comedy and by an even stranger murmurous sound that is close to the spirit of the blues.

Like so much of Melville’s writing, Billy Budd is shadowed by the presence of a powerful and beautiful black figure associated with freedom. In the novel’s second paragraph, the stage is set for the reader to meet the mythically handsome and mystically good sailor Billy (called by some Baby) Budd, with an invitation to consider a prior case of perfection in the shape of a common sailor so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham—a symmetric figure much above the average height. Ear-ringed with large gold hoops and dressed in colorful silk, this black sailor, seen in Liverpool, was the uncontested leader of such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race. As the charismatic figure in black walked among the other sailors, exchanging pleasantries, his colleagues praised him, paused and stared at him, they took that sort of pride ... which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves (p. 8). This black man is like a figurehead to Melville’s ship of a novella; we glimpse him only as we board. But he shadows the text in the godlike figure of Billy Budd himself.

Billy is a leader not by virtue of official rank, treasury, or pedigree (like many mythic heroes he is uncertain of his family origins or true home) but through his personal excellence alone. Breathtakingly handsome, Billy is admired by his shipmates for his bubbling good cheer, for his love of doing good deeds, and when the situation demanded it, for his terrible swift fists. And like the black sailor in Liverpool—or any sailor on any ship within the scope of the British fleet (which sailed the world)—Billy Budd is subject to English impressment, the practice of boarding ships at sea and seizing men for service in the British navy. Thus taken from the ship called, significantly enough, the Rights-of-Man (so christened, we are informed, after Thomas Paine’s pamphlet in defense of the French Revolution), Billy has been impressed into service as a British seaman. According to his steady nature and fatalistic outlook, the seized man does not complain. But, indeed, as the tale’s narrator informs us, any demur would have been as idle as the protest of a goldfinch popped into a cage (p. 9).

Though ruddy of complexion, Billy Budd is not black (as far as we know!), nor is he literally a slave. But as an impressed common sailor at sea, he has no significant democratic rights, and once he is forced to give up the Rights-of-Man to join the crew of H.M.S. Bellipotent-from the Latin bellum (war) and potens (power)—the shift in the direction of Billy’s powerlessness is clear. How fascinating, then, to read Billy Budd alongside Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom—where, among other things, Douglass reveals the route from slavery to freedom and then the unexpected complexities of unfreedom for blacks in the North (including Melville’s New York and New Bedford) after slavery. Or to read Billy Budd along with the narrative of that other beautiful and brilliant ex-slave, Harriet Jacobs.

In Melville’s parable of good versus evil, the Christ-like Billy Budd is fatally flawed, according to the pattern in classic tragedy; and Melville criticism universally cites his flaw to be the physical impediment of his stutter, a compelling enough interpretation. Under pressure, Billy cannot express himself in words and, tragically, he deals sudden death with his quick, hard fist. With the slave narratives (and the blues) in mind, though, I contend that Billy’s celebrated innocence is just as much a problem as his halting speech, and that the two flaws are linked, as fatal. That Billy can neither read nor write—that he is innocent of these disciplines—indicates a deadly failure of discernment. I refer now to literal reading and writing but also to powers of reading situations, of analysis and understanding that American slaves celebrated and nurtured, and that those most likely to escape slavery realized were tightly linked to their chances for freedom. A slave’s successful run for freedom often depended quite directly on his or her ability to read a newspaper and/or a map, to read and write a note to a fellow conspirator, or to compose a pass purporting to be from one white man to another, a ticket toward the North Star. As one brilliant literary historian has observed,³³ for black American slaves, freedom and literacy—the power to read, write, discern, and speak up when the occasion insisted—ran arm in arm.

Not only is Billy flawed by a deadly innocence/ignorance, but for all his splendid good cheer he also lacks the saving grace of a comic view of life—another fatal flaw. This dullness first causes trouble when he jumps from his old ship onto the new, bidding his former mates a genial good-bye and "then, making a salutation as to the ship herself, And good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man. The lieutenant on the Bellipotent roars at Billy for what he takes to be his sarcasm or satire—his sly slur at impressment in general, and that of himself in especial." But Billy owns no such comic wit:

If satire it was in effect, it was hardly so by intention, for Billy, though happily endowed with the gaiety of high health, youth, and a free heart, was yet by no means of a satirical turn. The will to it and the sinister dexterity were alike wanting. To deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature (p. 13).

Billy Budd’s lack of a comic sensibility also is an aspect of his illiteracy—his gross incapacity to read the complex and dangerous absurdities of the ship of fools on which he travels. What he lacks is a comic frame of reference that includes the capacity to step outside the limits of oneself and to regard oneself as well as one’s fellow creatures as actors in a shifting and peculiar human drama involving, always, a full measure of double meanings and insinuations along with a lush display of sins and sinners.

Such a bluesily comic view might have aided Billy in comprehending the secret smile of the lieutenant in the scene noted above. A comic view might have prepared Billy for the double-agentry of petty officer John Claggart, a serpent and torpedo fish in human form; Claggart who, staring at Billy with color-shifting, protrusive eyes like those of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep (p. 61), falsely accuses Billy of plotting revolt. A comic sense of life also might have warned Billy of Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere, the absurd yet dangerous figure whose name suggests a veering or capricious shifting with the wind; that comic sense might have warned him of Starry Vere, the dry academic who is committed to a line of reading that confirms his own thinking and who is rumored to have a queer streak of the pedantic (p. 27).

Billy acts with righteous impulsiveness, and it is part of his sad fate that he cannot quite comprehend or communicate what he has done. Though he never seems to realize it (witness his blessing Vere with his final words), in clobbering Claggart Billy strikes at the evil of Captain Vere, too. For Vere is Claggart’s urbane ally in support of the virtual slavery of impressment and, by extension, of tyranny wherever it blows. Vere’s rush to condemn Billy to death—in a sham-trial with Vere the only witness as well as judge and jury—is designed to make an example of Billy and thus to thwart any thoughts of revolt by the crew. Like many a slave and many an ex-slave in America, Billy is a scapegoat, strung up in a ritual in which strict power relations are pronounced and secured. The hasty execution comes, we should recall, in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, and of well-publicized mutinies against the British fleet.

For Melville, incidentally, the most direct source for Billy Budd was the 1842 case of the American naval vessel Somers, whose young midshipman Philip Spencer was hanged on board ship for the crime of mutiny. Melville’s cousin Guert Gansevoort, the Somers’ executive officer, presided over the drumhead court. Many who sympathized with young Spenser blamed Melville’s relative for what they considered a stark breach of justice. "Whether they were right or not, Guert Gansevoort appears to have brooded remorsefully over the incident during the rest of this life; to have been embittered and even broken by it. The case of the brig Somers had come home to