Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

This piece is fictional, but it reads as an allegory of two elements of race in America—the function of the notion of a Black homeland in African American identity and the wider culture’s acceptance of the idea that African Americans in America are simply a problem to be solved.

Bell calls to mind utopias in Western culture by naming this homeland after Atlantis. Utopia, as many readers may know, means “no place,” so his naming of this new land foreshadows that a perfect African American homeland is ultimately just a dream. The location of the island off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina is a choice that locates the land in the very waters where many of the enslaved ancestors of African Americans entered the North American leg of their induction into slavery. This geography is a clue that even in paradise, African Americans may not be able to escape history.

In addition, the language people who covet Afroatlantica use to describe the land—“its substantial deposits of precious minerals, including gold and silver” (40), its “strange shores” (41), a land “aching for exploration” (41)—calls up just the same colonialist language European explorers used as they took over the Americas. This language also echoes that used by modern Western countries as they subjugated countries through imperialism and economic arrangements that gave powerful countries all the advantages. In short, this new land seems poised to reinforce political arrangements that have made African Americans a permanent underclass.

Bell makes clever use of the many-sided debate over whether African Americans should go to Afroatlantica to take the reader through a lightning speed history of the many ways African American and white Americans have struggled to situate African Americans in the American social and political order. He makes the connection to this longstanding debate explicit by having each faction cite historical figures, like Frederick Douglass, Paul Cuffe, and Marcus Garvey, as support for their positions. He also references the ugly underside of covert government responses to African American efforts for liberation, motivated by supposed fears of Soviet meddling in African American politics. Finally, Bell references real-life historical efforts to carve out an African American homeland in America and in Liberia, experiments that died or struggled as soon as they came up against America’s national and international commitment to white privilege.

In the end, the homeland disappears. In having this be the end of that dream of a homeland, Bell seems to be advancing the idea that efforts to re-settle African Americans outside of the US or to carve out a nation within the nation are doomed to failure. America needs African Americans, if for no other reason than its identity depends on having an oppressed racial minority to keep working-class white people in check. This ending should be depressing, but Bell manages to make it less so by creating an idealistic moment of union emerging from the struggle to get to Afroatlantica. This outcome is Bell’s way of showing that struggle and defiance, not achievement of an African American paradise, are what save African Americans after centuries of disappointment.