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In "The America Play" (1994) by Suzan-Lori Parks, Lucy and Brazil dig deep into the Great Hole of History in search of the Foundling Father, a descendant of slaves who made a living impersonating Abraham Lincoln. With "a wink to Mr. Lincoln's pasteboard cutout" (Parks 160), the Foundling Father would don a false beard and tophat, sit in a rocking-chair, and wait for customers paying a Lincoln penny to take up a gun loaded with blanks and "kill" Lincoln. Why? Perhaps Lucy and Brazil want to feel connected to history, or not history itself but a representation of history that deliberately foregrounds its ephemeral and artificial nature. They do their digging not in the actual Great Hole of History, a theme park where "Reconstructed Historicities" parade for the pleasure of patrons, but at a lesser replica of the memory theme park (163); while digging they unearth echoes and traces, false beards and false teeth, deeds and documents and medals "For cookin and for cleanin. For bowin and scrapin. Uh medal for fakin" (199). Most importantly, they find the Foundling Father himself, or a silenced and mediated representation of himself in the form of a television set showing the Foundling Father's Lincoln act without sound. '"Howuhboutthat!"' says Lucy, and Brazil explains, "'He's dead but not really'" (195).
Dead but not really: the Foundling Father embodies history as an ephemeral sign masking the absence of a past to which survivors gain access only through mediated memory. In her essay "Possession," Parks explains the essential connection between literature and history: "because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to ... locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing" (4). But whose bones are they, and what song do they sing? How can the exile restore a sense of connection to the past when the ancestral bones are hidden, when the song they sing is ambiguous or uninterpretable? Or, as Homi K. Bhabha phrases the question, "How is historical agency enacted in the slenderness of narrative? How do we historicize the event of the dehistoricized?" (198). This question motivates the central action in a number of late-twentieth-century novels representing a variety...