The Longest Memory: Remembering Summary & Analysis

In a mournful voice, Whitechapel, the oldest and most respected slave on Mr. Whitechapel’s plantation in Virginia, begins to speak. He explains that the future is a repetition of the past, and that he has now decided to erase his own past, so he no longer has any identity. His entire life, he concludes, now lies in his hands—not inside his consciousness or through what he sees—because he has decided to give up on thought itself, choosing to surrender his name and be nothing more than “boy, mule, nigger, slave,” whatever people might want him to be.

Whitechapel also rejects emotion, admitting that he is no longer able to cry because the last time he cried was after the death of a boy he considered his own (later introduced as Chapel). Ever since that last, harrowing shedding of tears, he has refused to feel such pain again. He hopes to forget the unjust whipping of this boy—a punishment that was far too severe. To this end, he works hard to forget what has happened, in order to avoid spiritual and physical pain.