[2009.04.02] John Hope Franklin 美国史学家J.H.富兰克林

John Hope Franklin
约翰·霍普·富兰克林

Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

John Hope Franklin, historian of race in America, died on March 25th, aged 94
美国种族问题史学家J.H.富兰克林于3月25日去世，享年94岁

HIS chief pleasures were contemplative and patient. With watering can and clippers, he would potter in his greenhouse among hundreds of varieties of orchids. Or, standing in a river, he would wait for hours until a fish tickled his line. These were, one could say, typical historian’s amusements; very close, in rhythm and character, to the painstaking, careful accumulation of tiny pieces of fact.

      劳神费心的事儿，冥思苦想的活儿，都成了J.H.富兰克林平生最主要的乐儿。若是给他一个浇花壶，再加一把剪子，他就会忘情地泡在自家的花房里，悠游于那数百株品种各异姹紫嫣红的兰花中。或者，他又会整个人插在河里，石雕般地站上好几小时，直到那鱼儿“胳肢”他的鱼线。有人说，这没什么，一个历史学家的典型消遣不就是这些么；那种节奏舒缓而又心无旁骛的娱乐精神，与他在认真聚拢、梳理那些极琐碎的真人真事中所表现出来的细腻之风是合拍的，也是融通的。

And yet what John Hope Franklin collected, over a lifetime of scholarship, were scraps of horror. Five dollars for the cost of a branding iron. A deed of sale, in Virginia in 1829, for a male slave “of a yellow colour” who “is not in the habit of running away”. Or the testimony from 1860 of Edward Johnson, a black child apprentice:

      不过，终其学术生涯一生，富氏所收集的却是零散的惊怖之材：一块价值五美元的烙铁；一桩发生在1829年的弗吉尼亚的奴隶买卖，该名待售的“黄皮肤”男奴“并不惯于潜逃”；抑或是幼小的爱德华·约翰逊于1860年提供的一段证词。这名黑人学徒如是说道：

I was tacon and plased with a rope a round my rists my back intiarly naked and swong up then and there Each of [the men] tuck a cow hide one on Either side and beet me in such a manner when they let me down I fanted and lay on the ground 2 hours

     “俺被一根麻绳密密匝匝地绑着它缠俺的手腕绕俺的裸背俺被吊在半空中站在两旁的每个（男人）都拿着牛皮鞭然后他们就用这种方式对俺一阵鞭打等俺被放下来时俺都晕死过去在地上趴了2个小时”

To these Mr Franklin could add from his own experience. The train journey to Checotah, Oklahoma, when he was six, that ended when his mother refused to move from the whites-only carriage. His father’s small law office in Tulsa, reduced to rubble after a race riot in 1921. The day he was told by a white woman whom he was helping, at 12, across the road, that he should take his “filthy hands” off her. And the warm evening when he went to buy ice cream in Macon, Mississippi—a tall 19-year-old student from Fisk University, scholarly in his glasses—only to find as he left the store that a semi-circle of white farmers had formed to block his exit, silently implying that he should not try to break through their line.

      富氏也能添加这类源于亲身经历的生动素材。6岁时，他曾和母亲一道乘车去俄州的Checotah旅行。因其母拒绝离开白人专属车厢，这段旅程于是中途夭折。其父在塔尔萨的小律师事务所亦因1921年的一次种族骚乱而被夷为平地。那天，12岁的他搀着一名白人女子过马路，那女人却提醒“黑雷锋”应当把那“肮脏的手”从她身上缩回去。若干年后，这名密西西比州的男孩已成长为菲斯克大学的一名戴眼镜、儒雅气十足的19岁高个子男生。那个暖夜，他跑到梅肯去买冰激淋，正欲离开商店，却发现一群务农的白人崽围成个半圆形，早已截断了他的去路。这白茫茫半片的包围圈无声地暗示他———你，别想从这突围出去，想都不应该想。

Academia offered no shelter. He excelled from high school onwards, eventually earning a doctorate at Harvard and becoming, in 1956, the first black head of an all-white history department at a mostly white university, Brooklyn College. Later, the University of Chicago recruited him. But in Montgomery, Louisiana, the archivist called him a “Harvard nigger” to his face. In the state archives in Raleigh, North Carolina, he was confined to a tiny separate room and allowed free run of the stacks because the white assistants would not serve him. At Duke in 1943, a university to which he returned 40 years later as a teaching professor, he could not use the library cafeteria or the washrooms.

      学术界竟也无处藏身。从中学开始，他在学业上便是同龄人中的佼佼者，最后还拿到哈佛的博士学位。1956年，他成为布鲁克林大学历史系系主任。该职破天荒授予一位黑人。而该校的白人堪称绝对主流，至于该系，则人人肤色皆白。随后他任教于芝大。但在路易斯安那的蒙哥马利，一名档案保管员曾当面呼他为“来自哈佛的黑鬼”。而在北卡州Raleigh的州立档案馆，他像是被关了禁闭，活动范围仅限于一所局促不堪且遭隔离的房间，可自由使用的也仅是那种尘封已久的书库，这一切不得不归因于那名不愿受其“差遣”的白人助教。1943年的他甚至连杜克大学（四十年后富氏作为授课教授重返该校）图书馆的自助餐厅或盥洗室都进不了。

Whites, he noted, had no qualms about “undervaluing an entire race”. Blacks were excluded both from their histories, and from their understanding of how America had been made. Mr Franklin’s intention was to weave the black experience back into the national story. Unlike many after him, he did not see “black history” as an independent discipline, and never taught a formal course in it. What he was doing was revising American history as a whole. His books, especially “From Slavery to Freedom” (1947), offered Americans their first complete view of themselves.

      富氏特别提到，白人在“低估一个完整的种族的价值”上乃是心安理得的。在他们的历史中，在他们对于美利坚如何孕育而来的诠释与理解中，你找不到任何有关黑色人种的位置，黑人被“理所当然”地排除了。而他的意图便是将黑人的群体经验与个体经历重新编入该国的民族故事中。与诸多后来者不同的是，他并未自立门户，视“黑人历史”为一门独立学科，他也从未把它当成一门正式课程前去教授。他所作的一切不啻为将原先残缺的美国史打磨成一个较完满的修订版。富氏的著述中，尤其是那部《从奴隶制到自由》（1947年）可谓为美国人提供了如何全面完整认识他们自身的原初路径。

Thomas Jefferson’s wine
托马斯·杰斐逊的红酒

Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, that he loved it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given him $500 to see him through Harvard. Yet, alongside the dignity and the ready smiles, a sense of outrage burned. He longed to tell white tourists thronging Washington that the Capitol had been built by slaves, and that Pennsylvania Avenue had held a slave market, “right by where the Smithsonian is”. Profits made possible by enslaving blacks had not only allowed Thomas Jefferson to enjoy fine French wines: they had also underpinned America’s banks, its economic dynamism and its dominance in the world. The exploitation of blacks was something he admitted he had “never got over”.

      富兰克林天生就不是好勇斗狠之人。（对激进的革命派而言，）作为一名历史学家，他过于耿直审慎；而他的为人则显得太过谦卑。有人问其是否痛恨南方，他却回答，恰好相反，我热爱那块土地。他职业生涯中最深切的人情债莫过于一名白人———泰德·柯里尔对他的帮助。此人曾鼓励他以史为业，曾资助他500美元助其度过哈佛的艰难岁月。然而在他庄重与谦和的微笑之下，内心却燃烧着愤怒。他渴望告诉那些涌向华盛顿的白人游客，国会大厦乃是无数奴隶一砖一瓦地垒起来的。他还想说，宾夕法尼亚大道昔日的奴隶市场，“正好就坐落在现今的史密森尼博物院旁边”。奴役黑人所得的丰厚利润不单是让托马斯·杰斐逊享受到精美的法国红酒，它们同样也夯实了美国众多银行的根基，巩固了这个国家的经济活力及全球统治力。他也承认，提及美利坚对黑人的剥削，他便如鲠在喉，心结“从未解开”。

Nor had America got over it, despite the march from Selma, in which Mr Franklin led a posse of historians, and Brown v Board of Education, where he lent his scholarship to help prove that the Framers had not meant to impose segregation on the public schools. The “colour line”, as he called it, remained “the most tragic and persistent social problem” the country faced. His own many black firsts—president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association, membership of Washington’s Cosmos Club—had not necessarily opened the door to others. The night before he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a woman at the Cosmos Club asked him to fetch her coat. He was overjoyed by Barack Obama’s election, but could not forget the poor, immobile blacks revealed by Hurricane Katrina.

      美利坚也难“恢复”过来。虽然富氏曾领导一群志同道合的同行参加了始于塞尔玛的游行示威，也不管“布朗诉教育委员会案”（Brown v Board of Education）取得多么辉煌的成果（此案中的他才学并用，力证国家的宪法制定者并非要对公共学校施加“种族隔离”），似乎她都难以释怀。如他所言，那道“肤色分界线”仍是横亘在这个国家面前的“一个最可悲也最顽固的社会问题”。反观富氏自身，所取得的空前成就包括：曾任美国历史协会与南方历史学会的会长，亦是华盛顿科斯莫俱乐部（Cosmos Club）的会员。而这些显赫之位此前根本就没必要对他人开放。1995年，他获得“总统自由勋章”。之前的那晚，科斯莫俱乐部的一名女子还冲他一阵吆喝，命他去取她的外套。奥巴马成功当选总统几乎让他喜极而泣，但卡特里娜飓风席卷下的那些仓皇四顾、穷途末路的黑人同胞却在脑海中始终挥之不去。

He yearned to improve things, but wondered how. Financial reparations he was doubtful about; apologies seemed trifling. Only time, in historical quantities, seemed likely to make a difference. For some months he was chairman of Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race, a disorganised effort that ended by recommending “community co-operation”. Hostile letters poured in, mostly from people who did not think the subject worth talking about. Mr Franklin took them in his stride. He would go and work on his next book, or retire to the greenhouse, implements in hand; and practise patience.

      他渴求改良，却又叹无良策。财政赔款令其疑虑重重，而道歉，仿佛也并不重要。或许惟有时间才能在历史的长河中透出关键的光亮来。富氏担任“克林顿种族方案”主席期间（任期仅数月），因举荐“社区合作互助”计划，致使本就缺乏条理的克氏方案最终流产。威胁信随即纷至沓来（大多出自于那些认为该话题不值一提的人们），富氏却处之泰然。他会继续去写他的下一本书，间或溜进他那安静的花房，手执修剪，修行“耐心”二字。

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欲知本讣告的背景、细节及对富氏著述的介绍（绝对的著作等身），请参见杜克大学有关富兰克林（美国史学界研究“非裔美国人历史”的权威之一）的纪念网页：http://www.duke.edu/johnhopefranklin/

 

 

译者/alex147:  http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=18422&extra=page%3D1