Violence and Race in Benito Cereno

We collectively came up with several explanations in class yesterday that excuse Delano’s naivety and inability to detect the slave revolt sooner. We said that he is optimistic, can’t “read” blackness, is blind to his own racism, and that he is unable to imagine a world in which white people are oppressed by and made victim to African Americans’ control. These interpretations are valid readings of the text, but they all exempt Delano from responsibility and dismiss the fact that he is actively involved in convicting the slaves and ensuring their re-enslavement and punishment. While the slaves initially subvert race relations by capturing their white masters, Delano helps ensure that the typical black slave-white master relationship is reasserted. Melville implies that “order” is restored through the reassertion of white control.

As Erin mentions in her post, the story retells the violent and cruel death Babo experiences. He is chained and brought to an unfair trial in which his death is presumably ordered. His severed head is speared and placed on display—a form of public shaming—before his body is burned to ashes. The physical dismembering and deterioration of his body imply that his identity and attempt to free himself and his fellows slaves is entirely erased or discredited. This cruel act made me question whether Melville is proposing that violence is a necessarily solution to violence. Or is he just suggesting that violence is inherent in the slave and master relationship?

In The Nation’s recent article, “Melville and the Language of Denial,” African American writer Toni Morrison reveals her thoughts about Delano and the acts of violence committed in “Benito Cereno” after reading it for the first time. She claims, “I understood that the massacre of violently rebelling slaves would be condoned in nineteenth-century “slave history” as the erasure of evil or the culling of herds. But I saw the equally violent response of the slaves on the ship as that of rational, if enraged, humans unwilling to be kidnapped for profit.” To Morrison, the slaves’ violence enacted against their white oppressors is a necessary means of escaping a system that commodifies human beings.  Commenting on the part of the story on pg. 1569 in which Delano promises his officers gold and silver to motivate them to recapture the ship, Morrison believes that “following the discovery of Babo’s rebellion, Amasa Delano has a choice between fear and profit.” Ultimately, “when measuring fear and the loss of control against money, money wins,” and “Delano has to lie and promise his men gold and silver to encourage them to recapture the ship.” Morrison’s analysis of the text highlights that the system of enslavement is entirely motivated by profit--from the beginning of the story to the end. The slaves’ rebellion undermines the Spaniards’ profit and ownership of valuable “property.” Delano then has to offer a monetary incentive to his officers to ensure the slaves’ capture. While the slaves use violence to escape their own commodification, Delano uses violence to ensure that a system he and other white men profit from remains in place. In this way, he is complicit in the oppression of African Americans and cannot be dismissed as blind to his own racism.