Internal Migration Portrayed in Literature

Overview

Two patterns for the movement of people emerge from American history. One or the other pattern, or some combination, characterizes most internal migration. The first pattern is migration, a voluntary move; the second pattern is dislocation, a forced move. North America is often called a land of immigrants, populated by people who came from other countries or whose ancestors did. Immigrants come seeking the American Dream: freedom, success, prosperity, a home. Some soon found what they were seeking, but many others did not, so they moved on, generally westward. From the beginning, then, Americans have been restless seekers, on the move, pursuing their dreams. This spirit takes its purest form in road stories, prominent in American literature, whether the “road” is the Mississippi River in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or the Beat generation’s highways in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) or the cheap motels in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Paradoxically, the Beat generation’s pursuit of drugs and sex and the pursuit of perversity in Lolita are, in one sense, continuations of the ancestral Puritan quest for salvation depicted in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). In stories of internal migration, people are seeking something good, whether or not they know exactly what it is.

Foreign critics tend to see this restlessness as a source of energy and as an ominous flaw in the American character. To them, Americans seem unsettled, shallow, maybe empty. For example, D. H. Lawrence bluntly called “Amerika” the “Death Continent.” Variations on this theme appear in Evelyn Waugh’s satirical The Loved One (1948), whose opening paragraph characterizes Americans as savages, and in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), in which the character Sabina escapes Communism only to succumb to American “lightness.”

Perhaps a more substantial criticism of the migrant pattern is implied by its opposite, the dislocation pattern. The dislocation model is represented by the Native Americans whose homelands were snatched from them, and by African Americans, who were snatched from their homelands. This model is full not of promise but of loss—loss of land, family, language, culture, identity, freedom, life. Stories of internal migration often reflect the same sense of loss as are told in stories of dislocation. People miss something good in both stories, whether or not they can remember exactly what it was.

In practice, the same literary work may reflect both patterns, even if one predominates. Older characters may see internal migration as uprooting and loss, whereas younger characters may see it as escape and promise. Immediate feelings about internal migration might also be modified by what eventually happens in the new place: The older generation might adjust and be unable to go home again, whereas for the younger generation the new place is home. One of the paradoxes of American mobility is that an Appalachian can have a grandson who speaks with a Boston accent. For these reasons, internal migration makes an interesting subject for literary works: It offers insights about American identity.

History

Internal migration in literary works set during the nineteenth century and earlier is generally westward, part of the settlement movement. Written almost always from the point of view of the settlers, the works emphasize frontier conditions, pioneer challenges, and relations with Native Americans. Typical of such works, except that he considers the Native American point of view, are James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823–1841), such as The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Much later representative works are those by Willa Cather, such as O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Few individual chroniclers of the westward migration stand out. Instead, such literature consists primarily of factual accounts of travel and exploration, of works by minor authors, and of popular literature. This literature contributed to a composite national myth for which no epic has yet been written, but which led to the creation of the Western and children’s classics such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935).

Based on the migrant model, the literature of westward migration tends to celebrate an aggressive, acquisitive American identity. It culminates in tales of the gold rush (to California or Alaska) written by such authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Jack London. An exception to the migrant model is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847), about the forced removal of Acadians to Louisiana. Other exceptions, usually written in the twentieth century, include stories of Indian removals, such as the Trail of Tears of the Cherokees from the Great Smoky Mountains to Oklahoma. In Twain’s satirical edge and in London’s embrace of Darwinism, a seamier, uglier side of the migrant model appears. Significantly, the migrant pattern died as inspiring literature only after the western limits of the continent had been reached and historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the end of the frontier.

In the twentieth century, literature of internal migration leaned toward a sense of disillusion. After the United States became settled, this trend was perhaps inevitable. This more complex trend has also produced the greatest literature about internal migration. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is about the flight of farmers from Oklahoma ("Okies") to California during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Following the Joad family, The Grapes of Wrath in many ways typifies literature of internal migration in the twentieth century. When Oklahoma tenant farmers are pushed off the land, the Joads invest all their pitiful resources on a troubled but hopeful trek west, only to arrive in California and be exploited as migrant laborers. The novel mixes elements of forced and of voluntary migration. The novel’s end, in which the character Rose of Sharon breastfeeds a starving man, holds out symbolic hope.

The South Moves North

The most common direction of internal migration in twentieth century literature has been from the South to the North. During the first half of the century, there was a massive migration of African Americans north. Around the middle of the century and a bit later, there was also a steady stream of Appalachians moving north. To a great extent, both migrations were from a rural to an urban environment, from the Deep South and the Southern mountains to Northern cities of all sizes.

During the 1920s and 1930s the congregation of African American writers in uptown Manhattan, or Harlem, produced the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of artistic creativity, including literature by such writers as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Arna Bontemps. These writers tended to write about where they came from rather than their trip; it remained for the next two generations of African American writers to say more about the great migration itself.

Among African American writers the Great Migration, as it was called, evokes the immigrant pattern of seeking the American Dream. Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was like a personal declaration of independence. The North was the promised land, and Harlem was heaven. Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), set in 1926 Harlem, captures this mood:

At last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.

The ironic voice here—“History is over, you all”—suggests that the euphoric mood could not be sustained. It seemed to be based as much on escaping the South as on finding anything in the North.

What African American migrants found in the North was much like what they had left behind, except in a colder climate. Ralph Ellison’s protagonist migrates to the North only to discover that he is an invisible man (in the novel Invisible Man, 1952). Gloria Naylor documents the ghetto conditions that migrants found in The Women of Brewster Place (1982):

Mattie saw that . . . the northern light would be blocked from her plants. All the beautiful plants that once had an entire sun porch for themselves in the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for would now have to fight for life on a crowded windowsill. . . . She pitied them because she refused to pity herself.

In a comment preceding his play Fences (1985), August Wilson contrasts the fates of European immigrants and African American migrants: The European immigrants “won” their dream, but when African American immigrants came north “strong, eager, searching . . . the city rejected them.” Still, as Darryl Pinckney shows in High Cotton (1992), African Americans succeeded in establishing a remarkably vibrant culture in Harlem, even if the pull of the “Old Country” (as Pinckney’s protagonist refers to the South) continues.

If disillusion often sets in for African American migrants in literature, Appalachian migrants are frequently overcome by loss. As are Steinbeck’s Okies, the Appalachians are usually forced off their land by economic conditions and attracted by the lure of jobs in the North. In exchange, they leave behind a traditional culture and small communities in which each person has a place. They lose their identity and, as do the Okies and African Americans, come face to face with stereotypes of themselves. Appalachian poet Jim Wayne Miller compares the experience to being in a house of mirrors, a trope he explores in The Mountains Have Come Closer (1980), while the classic novel of Appalachian migration is Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954).

While the large-scale US internal migrations and displacements of the settlement of the West, the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Migration seem like unrepeatable historical episodes, it is well to remember that the natural disasters of the twenty-first century are displacing people on a large scale too. For example, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina displaced more than one million people from New Orleans, Louisiana, and its environs, many of them black and poor and having few resources; many never returned. Author Jesmyn Ward, who herself lived through the storm, traces the plight of one African American family before, during, and after Hurricane Katrian in Salvage the Bones (2011).

Bibliography

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