This essay is based on the discussion of self-consciousness as a literary device in Madelyn Jablon's Black Metafiction: Sefl-Consciousness in African American Literature, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1997. ISBN: 0-88745-656-9 paper.

On p. 77, op.cit., Madelyn Jablon describes a "speakerly text": "Also noteworthy is the switch to second-person point of view. Because of this shift in point of view, Gates describes Zora Neale Hurston's their Eyes Wer Watching God as a "speakerly text" and a momentus contribution to the evolution of African American literature . . . . [These] theorists refer to a narrative voice that "slips" from first person to second and third, singular and plural, like the blurred notes played by a jazz guitarist."

In Way Down Souf!, Elliott Blaine Henderson does this:

Dis, dat an' tutter : poems
by Elliott Baline Henderson
Scroll about a tird of the way down the file, to Way Down Souf!, page 16:

Sing dat song once mo'!
Miss Mandy.
Jes' once mo', jes' ef' yo' please.
. . . .
It kyars me back!--way back yonder!
Way down souf!
Whah we tromp'd froo de
Cotton fields,
An' when ah hearts was sad,
We sung dat chune,
To make ah souls glad!
Way down soul!

Yo' know nuffin' bout dem days,
Miss Mandy--
Dem was befo' yo' time.
. . . .

Jablon suggests that the interchangeability of the "me," "you," "we" serves to empahsize community. "This shift from third person to second person also creates a community of reader, character, and narrator that has sympathetic understanding as its foundation." (op.cit., at p. 78) Consider the way in which Elliott Blaine Henderson creates a feeling of inclusion by this switching of pronouns. Miss Mandy is the one to whom he recounts the memories, but her not being part of them was just because they happened before her time. Now the narrator includes her, in the history of the community.

Jablon addresses this style in terms of the novel. But one can sense the shaping of community in this brief excerpt of Way Down Souf! Jablon speaks of this style as re-creating the "the oral tradition of storytelling. It emphasizes the importance of storyteller-audience interaction while positing a definition of identity as tansient and amorphous rather than fixed. It is as if narrator, audience, and characters participate in a game of musical chairs."

What does this suggest about the teaching of mutuality?

• That it goes on all the time, everywhere, that our storytellers as well as our teachers are teaching the love and sharing of the community.

• That teaching must be inclusive and shared, for the stylistic device of including the Other to whom we tell the story is one of the very tools through which we can teach inclusion.

• Reference: Philip W. Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art, Yale University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-300-08289-4 (pbk). Notes from this reference up shortly. jeanne

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