The letters from the briefcase in the dream, the letters that Bledsoe, and other chapters all recount this same image.

But this is also a common theme in black folklore and literature, connected even to the idea of the escape from slavery.  It was quite common in slave songs and folktales (as we’ve discussed surrounding the uses of Brer Rabbit and others) to encode ideas of resistance and escape.  Some slave songs mapped out safe routes for escape; others found ways to express resentment or resistance.

Here’s a quick version from Dorothy Scarborough’s On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs:

Dis nigger run, he run his best
Stuck his head in a hornet’s nest,
Jumped de fence and run fru de paster;
white man run, but nigger run faster.

Another verse reads:

Wid eyes open and head hangin’ down,
Like de rabbit before de houn’,
Dis nigger streak it for de pasture;
Nigger run fast, white man run faster.

These two are Trickster figures, popular in a number of cultures around the world, the idea of the individual able to trick up or escape the social order through humor, “common” sense, and, perhaps most importantly, misdirection.

Anyone should ask you who made up this song
Tell them Jack the Rabbit, he’s been here and gone.

Anonymity was important to blacks who encoded messages into their tales and songs during times of slavery and oppression. The Bear figures largely in convict work songs; the word “jack” is also equated to magic, a charm, or a conjure.

Note how the IM in Chapter 11 says, “sing a song in silence in a strange land, Jack it up, bear it in the dark, it’s heavy as the world.” The narrator also hibernates, having escaped what Peter Wheatstraw calls the bear’s den of Harlem; he calls himself Jack the Bear.

Jack the rabbit! Jack the bear!
Can’t you line him just a hair,
Just a hair, just a hair?
Annie Weaver and her daughter
Ran a boarding house on the water.
She’s got chicken, she’s got ham,
She’s got everything I’ll be damned.
Old Joe Logan he’s gone north
To get the money for to pay us off.

As you might expect, the Dog figure is one despised by blacks who were hunted by them in times of slavery. The dog chases the blacks, keeps them runnin’. Here’s a story that recounts how.

Why Mr. Dog Runs Brer Rabbit

One morning, Mr. Buzzard he says he stomach hungry for some fish, and he tell Mrs. Buzzard he think he go down to the branch, and catch some for breakfast. So he take he basket, and he sail along till he come to the branch.

He fish right smart, and by sun up he have he basket plum full. But Mr. Buzzard am a powerful greedy man, and he say to hisself, he did, I just catch one more. But while he done gone for this last one, Brer Rabbit he come along, clipity clipity, and when he see basket full of fine whitefish he stop, and he say, “I ‘clare to goodness, the old woman just gwine on up to the cabin, ’cause they got nothing for to fry for breakfast. I wonder what she think of this yer fish,” and so he put the basket on his head, Brer Rabbit did, and make off to the cabin.

Direc’ly he met up with Mr. Dog, and he ax him where he been fishing that early in the day, and Brer Rabbit he say how he done sot on the log ‘longside of the branch, and let he tail hang in the water and catch all the fish, and he done tell Mr. Dog, the old rascal did, that he tail mighty short for the work, but that Mr. Dog’s tail just the right sort for fishing.

So Mr. Dog, he teeth just ache for them whitefish, and he go set on the log and hang he tail in the water, and it mighty cold for he tail, and the fish don’t bite, but he mouth just set for them fish, and so he just sot dar, and it turn that cold that when he feel he gin up, sure’s you born, Mr. Dog, he tail froze fast in the branch, and he call he chillens, and they come and break the ice.

And then, to be sure, he start off to settle Ole Brer Rabbit, and he get on the track and he run the poor ole man to beat all, and directly he sight him he rum him round and round the woods and holler, “Hallelujah! hallelujah!” and the puppies come on behind and they holler, “Glory! glory!” and they make such a fuss, all the creeters in the woods, they run to see what the matter. Well, sah, from that day, Mr. Dog he run Brer Rabbit, and when they just got gwine on the wing in the big woods, you can hear old Ben dar just letting hisself out, “Hallelujah! hallelujah!” and them pups just gwine “Glory! glory!” and it surely am the sound what has the music dar, it surely has the music dar.

To live in Harlem is to live in the very bowels of the city.  Harlem is a ruin—many of its ordinary aspects are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with a hidden and threatening significance.

For if Harlem is the scene of the folk-Negro’s death agony,  it is also the setting of his transcendence.  Here the grandchildren of those who possessed no written literature examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre.  They feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions:  Who am I, What am I, Why am I, and Where?  Significantly, in Harlem the reply to the greeting “How are you?” is very often, “Oh, man, I’m nowhere—“  Negroes are not unaware that the conditions of their lives demand new definitions of terms like primitive and modern, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral, patriotism and treason, tragedy and comedy, sanity and insanity.

His family disintegrates, his church splinters; his folk-wisdom is discarded in the mistaken notion that it in no way applies to urban living; and his formal education (never really his own) provides him neither with scientific description nor rounded philosophical interpretation of the profound forces that are transforming his total being.  Yet even his art is transformed; the lyrical ritual elements of folk jazz—that artistic projection of the only real individuality possible for him in the South, that embodiment of a superior democracy in which each individual cultivated his uniqueness and yet did not clash with his neighbors—have given way to the near-themeless technical virtuosity of be-bop, a further triumph of technology over humanism.  His speech hardens; his movements are geared to the time clock; his diet changes; his sensibilities quicken and his intelligence expands.  But without institutions to give him direction, and lacking a clear explanation of his predicament—the religious ones being inadequate, and those offered by political and labor leaders obviously incomplete and opportunistic—the individual feels that his world and his personality are out of key.  The phrase “I’m nowhere” expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society.  One’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable.  One “is” literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a “displaced person” of American democracy.