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THE QUARREL IN AUNT HAGAR’S GARDEN:
THE IMPACT OF INTRARACIAL COLOR AND
CLASS BIAS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN
POPULAR CULTURE

By

Dolores V. Sisco

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2005

ABSTRACT
THE QUARREL 1N AUNT HAGAR’S GARDEN: THE INFLUENCE OF
INTRARACIAL CLASS AND COLOR BIAS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN
POPULAR CULTURE
By
Dolores V. Sisco
The purpose of this cultural study is to put into perspective, the issue of intraracial
class and color bias which continues to affect the everyday lives, and the cultural products
(literature and ﬁlm) of African Americans. As I maintain, differences in skin color and
economic class position have determined oppositional ideologies that claim the rights to
black cultural authenticity. The broad differences in these claims have been between those
who ﬁnd an end to racial privilege in cultural assimilation with the dominant culture, and
those who advocate a cultural essentialism based on the visibility of color differences. We
need to examine these two political stances as they reﬂect the tensions in the black
community over who gets the right to name black authenticity. The question I want to
consider throughout is what constitutes an authentically black cultural product? Claims for
black cultural authenticity, however, have not been created in a vacuum, and the issue of
intraracial color and class bias - the result of white hegemony — informs and shapes black
group positionalities of class, gender, and sexuality throughout, what cultural critics Isaac
J ulien and Kobena Mercer have insightfully termed, “representational practices.” It is these

“representational practices” that are at issue here.

Copyright by
DOLORES V. SISCO
2005

DEDICATIONS

For my Daddy — Alfred E. Sisco

For my family, who now know why many family functions were missed: Diane M.
Sisco, Alﬁed E. Sisco, Jr., Frank J. Sisco, Desiree M. Sisco, Matlynn Jones, Chynna M.
Sisco, Ijumaa S. Shelton, Jr., Cherise V. Sisco, and the late Lawrence Carl Seldon. Above
all, I could not ﬁnish my education and the arduous task of scholarship with out the love and

support of my mother Naomi — love you, Mom.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since creative work is never created in a vacuum, I would like to thank the many
graduate and under-graduate students who contributed their own personal stories of color and
class bias to this work. I owe a huge debt to my students at Michigan State and Lansing
Community College who allowed me to use them as a critical sound board through many
drafts and revisions of this project. Thanks also to the support staff at Michigan State
University: Sharon Tyree and Lisa Noelp who guided me through the thicket of oﬂ'lcial forms
and regulations. A big hug to my “posse” - Lamonda Horton-Stallings, Phyllis Burns, and
Tammy Wacopeniah who provided not only scholarly support, but also much needed relief
from the often tedious work entailed in bringing this project to ﬁ'uition. Many thanks to
Allison Samuels for the Caribbean sustenance, and to Marshanda Smith and Geoﬂ‘rey Johns
who answered my computer disaster questions (you two are computer Gods). I would also
like to thank Dr. Susan A. Schiller, Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, Dr. Gloria T. Randle, and Dr.
Geneva Smitherrnan for their examples of academic rigor. As every graduate student knows,
the committee members are the key to a successful dissertation, and I have the best: Dr.
Jyotsna Singh, Dr. Theresa Melendez, and Dr. Salah Hassan. Lastly, I would especially like
to thank my committee head - Dr. Kenneth W. Harrow — not only for his invaluable advice
and patience, but also for his outstanding example as a true scholar in and out of the

classroom.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1

FRAMING BLACK CULTURE: THE NAPPY ROOTS OF COLORISM ...................... 38
CHAPTER 2

“SHE’S PREI I Y — FOR A BLACK GIRL” - COLOR, CLASS, AND GENDER ......... 56
CHAPTER 3

REPRESENTIN’ AND FRONTIN’ : IMAGES IN COLOR ............................................. 97
CHAPTER 4

ARE WE NOT MEN? : THE MALE IMAGE PROBLEM ............................................. 184
CONCLUSION

BEYOND THE COLOR-LINE ........................................................................................ 263
WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................. 280

vi

The Quarrel in Aunt Hagar’s Garden: The Impact of Intraracial Colorism on African

American Popular Culture

Introduction

The purpose of this cultural study is to put the issue of intraracial color and class
bias into perspective. As I maintain, differences in skin color and economic class position
have determined oppositional ideologies that claim the lights to black cultural
authenticity, oppositional ideologies that are reﬂected in black produced writing and
black commercial ﬁlm making. The broad differences in these opposing claims have
historically been between those who ﬁnd an end to racial privilege in cultural
assimilation with the dominant culture, and those who advocate a cultural essentialism
based on loosely deﬁned Afro-centric cultural practices. However, both ideologic camps
assign certain values - whether assimilationist or essentialist - based on gradations of
skin color and other visible signs of European physical attributes. As we know, the
darkness of skin has often been an indicator of economic success in a racist America, but
within black communities, there has also been a simultaneous need to defy this dicta as
detrimental to African American political and cultural cohesiveness — such as the late
19603 Black is Beautiﬁil Movement. Thus, this study argues that we need to examine
these two political stances as they reﬂect the tensions over skin color and economic class
movements in the black community over who gets the right to name a black political and

cultural authenticity. The questions to be considered throughout this study is what exactly

constitutes an authentically black cultural product? Claims for black cultural authenticity,
however, have not been created in a vacuum, and the issue of intraracial color bias -— the
result of white hegemony - informs and shapes black group positionalities of class,
gender, and sexuality throughout, what cultural critics Isaac J ulien and Kobena Mercer
have insightfully termed, “representational practices.” It is these “representational
practices” that are at issue here.

Why examine black representational practices? To answer this question we need to
consider Stuart Hall’s much anthologized essay What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular
Culture? . Hall’s essay provides a means to put this question into context in considering
black cultural authenticity. Hall contends that: “By deﬁnition, black popular culture is a
contradictory space. It is a sight [sic] of a strategic contestation.” As black cultural
formations have historically emerged, reformulated, and reconﬁgured themselves from
plantation tales, songs, and dances to the latest style of hip—hop, Hall’s definition, as he
rightly points out, ﬁrmly establishes black popular culture as a postmodern formation.

However deformed, incorporated, and inauthentic are the forms
in which black people and black communities and traditions
appear and are represented in popular culture, we continue to see,
in the ﬁgures and the repertoires on which popular culture draws,
the experiences that stand behind them. (27)
Hall identiﬁes three broad constituents that identify what we mean by “black” culture in
the use of style, the substitution of music for “the mastery of writing,” and the use of the

body. As Hall concludes “repertoires of black popular culture” were affected on two

fronts, ﬁrst from the retention of disparate African folkways, and secondly from the
conditions that come out of exclusion from — and resistance to -— mainstream culture.

There is a long tradition of black political thinking that longs for an imaginary,
essential blackness that is somehow recognized as the sign of “authenticity,” this
ideology, for example, is represented in its overdetermination in the current logics of
Afro-centrism. While there is some sense in the thinking of a West African source of
cultural retention, the problem with Afro-centrism is its stubborn refusal to see clearly
the hybridity and creolization that have come from the contact with many other cultures,
including the dominant European. It is “weak,” writes Hall, “because it naturalizes and
de-historicizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural,
biological, and genetic” (29), a thought I will come back to, but in its most extreme
manifestation is the impulse to reject any signiﬁer of a European co-option, much like its
older turn of negritude which puts the Afrocentn'c imperative at odds with the
assimilationists.

At issue for both assimilationists and essentialists is the authority to speak, the
authority to deﬁne an African American cultural identity by forcing hybrid cultural forms
into rigid ideologies. This presumption is shared by both the advocates for racial
essentialism, and those who argue that cultural assimilation is the best way to succeed in
a racist environment. “Who needs identity? ,” queries Stuart Hall:

In common sense language, identiﬁcation is constructed
on the back of a recognition of some common origin or

shared characteristics with another person or group, or

with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity

and allegiance established on this foundation. In contrast

with the ‘naturalism’ of this deﬁnition, the discursive

approach sees identiﬁcation as a construction, a process

never completed — always ‘in process.’ (2)
What Hall describes is common to both groups; however, extremists exist on both sides
who use skin color and economic class position as markers for cultural authority. For
example, cultural assimilationists insist on ﬁnding common ground in their shared ideals
with the wider American culture and often insist that class is more important than racial
differences. Within the black community, such thinking has allowed them to organize
around the commonalities of skin color, and educational and professional occupations in
an effort to separate themselves from racial stigmas. Thus, there is an insistence on an
adherence to what some see as “white values,” “white language patterns, “etc. bell hooks
sees harm in the “Integrated educational structures” as the locations where whites could
best colonize the minds and imaginations of black folks”(1995, 109). “Aping whites,
assirnilating their values (i.e., white supremacist attitudes and assumptions) was clearly
the way to achieve material success.” However, such an evaluation of the racist agenda
which supports colorism and classism does not mean that hooks herself advocates an
oppositional ideology of an uncritical essentialism. hooks advocates, instead, an active
resistance and a self-love as practices to ending the divisions in the black community.

If, as Stuart Hall contends, black culture is rooted in those forms which come from

the black vernacular of the plantation, then the cultural assimilationists used their genetic

difference, their visible color and class position to distance themselves from those forms.
Darkness of skin denoted the degradation of slavery, a reminder of positions a lighter-
skinned elite strove to distance them from. The proponents of Afrovcentrism, on the other
hand, used the signiﬁer of black skin as an embrace of the same “degradation.” “The
moment the signiﬁer ‘black’ is torn ﬁ'om its historical, cultural, and political embedding
and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category,” explains Hall, “we valorize, by
inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct.” .
In addition, as always happens when we naturalize historical categories
(think about gender and sexuality), we ﬁx that signiﬁer outside of history,
outside of change, outside of political intervention. And once it is ﬁxed,
we are tempted to use “black” as sufﬁcient in itself to guarantee the
progressive character of the politics we ﬁght under the banner — as if we
don’t have any other politics to argue about except whether something’s
black or not. (30)
The above passage bears special attention in the struggle to use visible and social
positions of demarcation. What this study proposes is an examination of the signiﬁer of
“blackness”on both sides of a color-line that, as Hall points out, is based problematically
in “political, symbolic, and positional boundaries — as if they were genetic.”
For example, the proponents of black nationalism believe in a cultural transmission
uniquely African and unadulterated by European constituents where dark skin color is
one of the attributes of cultural authenticity. Instead of assimilationist co-options, black

nationalism focuses on a heightened awareness of an undifferentiated African identity

rooted in the communal values that speak more to the experience of plantation slavery.
Unity of the masses, and their roots as ﬁeld hands, was where African American cultural
authenticity and resistance to white domination were located. Black political and cultural
nationalists often cite the dark-skinned ﬁeld hand as the true instigator of slave rebellions
which gave their eager listeners a sense of pride in a culture that saw their African skin
and features as negative values. Lightness of skin and the assimilation of the master’s
cultural values were indicators of betrayal to Aﬁican communal values and the cultural
traditions that sustained the black masses during slavery. Appealing to the masses of
darker-skinned, and economically disadvantaged blacks, points out Michael C. Dawson,
“produced both the reality and the illusion of shared interests and unity, but it has also
served to mask severe disagreements over strategy, tactics, and goals within the black
community” (133). What I want to stress is that, although this type of political thinking
was reductionist and historically inaccurate, the use of skin color divisions tapped into a
long history of intraracial resentment as black cultural groups vied for political and
cultural authority in the twentieth century, years before the Black Power movement of
the 19605.

The darkness of his skin, for example, is what attracted many working-class blacks
to the Garvey movement in the 19203. Regardless of his organizational shortcomings,
Garvey offered his working-class adherents a sense of pride in their color, a point over
looked by the integrationist and light-skinned elitist NAACP. Even W. E. B. Du Bois
publically denied such divisions existed within the black community, and accused

Garvey of bringing a “Caribbean problem” to Afro-America. The Nation of Islam was

another group whose essentialist teachings were attractive to darker-skinned blacks who
resented the elitism and middle-class values of the traditional civil rights organizations,
although according to Karl Evanzz, the leadership of the N01 preferred light-skinned
males. Although their own colorist choices, as either a matter of political tactics or
personal preference is a matter of debate. “One gifted orator,” relates Evanzz, “was
regarded as too dark-skinned to attract recruits. Muhammad selected ministers based on a
ranking system which included intelligence, oratorical skills, and physical features”
(288).

In the early 19705, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing began to publish her scientiﬁc
papers on what she termed The Cress Theory of Color-Conﬁontation. Dr. Welsing’s
theories, in brief, used a complicated scientiﬁc equation to explain racism as a lack of
genetic melanin, and “proved” the superiority of black skin. Welsing often showed
valuable insights about the need to resist racism in the collected papers, The Isis Papers:
The Keys to the Colors, but like other proponents of black nationalism Welsing’s brand
of Afrocentrism was rigid in its adherence to a pseudo-African cultural tradition based on
a strict patriarchal heterosexism. In Welsing’s view, deviations of black feminism and
black homosexuality were dismissed as white cultural brainwashing. Welsing’s views, a
revisioning of 19th century scientiﬁc racism at its best, were extremely popular among
male nationalists during the late sixties, and continues to resonate today among blacks.

Political and black cultural satirist Aaron McGruder uses the form of the daily
comic-strip to comment on the complicated relationships between contesting ideologies

within the black community. Thg Boondocks allows McGruder “free play” in which to

articulate the contradictions in black cultural formations by personalizing them in the
ﬁctional Freeman household. The household consists of Grandfather Freeman, a veteran
of the civil rights movement, Huey, the black nationalist radical who sees racial
conspiracies at every turn, and Riley, a pint-sized gangsta’ thug in training who
represents the nihilism and mindless hedonism of rap. All three represent the changing
ideology of a history of deﬁning the meaning of “black cultural authenticity,” as the
diatribes of black nationalist Huey are dismissed and ignored by his working-class
Grandfather, and the black middle-class, symbolized in the character of Tom Dubois. The
interaction between Riley and his 74-year-old grandfather accurately reﬂects the
animosity from an older generation who cannot understand the hip hop translation of “I
had a Dream” to the desire for “bitches,” “hos,” “gats,” and magnums of Cristal. Moved
to an all-white suburb, McGruder further complicates the character’s ideological stances
as they react to various levels of white perceptions to inner-city blacks suddenly in their
rrridst. But it is in the confrontations with intraracial color and class that makes _'I_'_h_e
Boondocks a pertinent example of the ways in which these tensions continue to be
reﬂected in Aﬁ'ican American popular culture.

McGruder critiques the existence of intraracial color and class bias by introducing
the assimilationist Dubois family to the world of black cultural authorities Huey and
Riley Freeman. McGruder uses the upper-middle class Thomas Dubois ( a lawyer for the
NAACP) to slyly signify on the outmoded relevancy of the traditional middle-class civil
rights organization. Tom and his white wife are the parents of the biracial Jazmine who

insists that she “is not black,” and black nationalist Huey constantly reminds her of the

sign of blackness - her hair. When Huey “labels” her black because of her “Afro,”
Jazmine protests that she does not have an “Afro,” that her hair is just “frizzy.”The Afro-
wearing, cultural nationalist Huey scoffs — “Well ﬁrst of all Mariah, your Afro is bigger
than mine. Angela Davis’ hair was a little frizzy. You have an Afro.” Huey, the black
cultural voice of authority, declares that Jazrnine suffers from a case of “Afro-Denial”
which is typical of “Ethno-Amibguo Hostility Syndrome”, and prescribes — “An
immediate intervention of positive Nubian reinforcement.”Huey takes his case to Tom
Dubois, Jazrnine’s black father, in an effort to reach Tom’s black consciousness, but Tom
explains to Huey how he and his wife have used every chemical method so that the hair-
sensitive Jazrnine can have hair like her white mother’s. “Have you tried emphasizing the
natural beauty of her African features,? ”suggests the Afro-centric Huey. Tom is,
however, oblivious to Huey’s message as he suggests maybe a treatment of lye will burn
her hair straight.

Although in many of his strips McGruder points to the structural fallacies in the
arguments of black nationalism (as if an authentic cultural “blackness” is based on
nothing more substantial than recognizing cultural and revolutionary black icons), he also
comments on the perceived cultural “racelessness” of the assimilationists. McGruder
highlights both sides of this cultural simplicity by signifying on the biracial Jazrnine’s
lack of cultural history when she has no idea of who icons Angela Davis and Richard
Roundtree are. In addition, McGruder pointedly demonstrates the lack of communication
between ideological and class positions in the black community as the middle class black

Tom (in suit and tie) attempts to “explain” to working-class Huey what a lawyer is. The

lack of communication is ﬁlrther revealed when Huey explains that he was named for
Huey P. Newton, and the assimilated Tom counters that he thought Huey was named for
Huey Lewis “from Huey Lewis and the News, pop star of the mid-eighties.” It is
signiﬁcant that Huey acerbically informs Tom that the eighties were “before my time,”
and yet he connects politically with the black power groups of the late sixties and early
seventies who remain politically and culturally relevant to aware black people.
Furthermore, the Dubois family represent what many black nationalists view with
apprehension as today’s “multi-culturals” lobby for a separate racial category. Huey asks
Jazmine “If you’re not black, then what are you?” And Jazmine ticks off a list of one-
half, one-quarter ethnic groups, with African signiﬁcantly missing. Huey wryly tells her
that he too is “mixed” — “I’m part black, part African and part colored.”
McGruder’s critique of cultural and political ideologies suggest what Kobena

Mercer terms as “critical dialogism” by questioning the shifting positions of cultural
authority in the black community. Mercer sees in a critical dialogism “the potential to
overturn the binaristic relations of hegemonic boundary maintenance by multiplying
critical dialogues within particular communities and between the various constituencies
that make up the “imagined community of the nation.”

At once articulating the personal and the political, such dialogism

shows that our “other” is already inside each of us, that black

identities are plural and heterogeneous and that political divisions

of gender and sexual identity are to be transformed as much as those

of race and class. (65)

10

McGruder’s “critical dialogism” also reﬂects the New Black Aesthetic outlined by Trey
Ellis where the children of the Civil Rights era turn a critical eye, not only on past
generations, but also on their own. “NBA artists are now deﬁning blacks in black
contexts,” explains Ellis, “so we are no longer preoccupied with the subjects of
interracial dating or integration. And these artists aren’t ﬂinching before they lift the
hood on our collective psyches now that they have liberated themselves from both white
envy and self-hate” (267). For the New Black Aesthetics there are no simple binaries, and
many feel free to accept (and reject) multiple cultural identities that cross class and color
boundaries. But as I demonstrate in Chapter three, some of the artists who create under
NBA sensibilities continue to replicate the color and class attitudes of previous
generations, especially in their depictions of black women.

In her essay, If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like,
novelist Alice Walker eloquently questions the unexamined issue of what she deﬁnes as
colorism within African American communities. Colorism, Walker maintains, is “the
prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color. . . .If
we continue to envelope, and invest our selves in the practice, “we cannot, as a people,
progress. For colorism, like colonialism, sexism, and racism impedes us” (291). The
issue of color bias within the black community is a special kind of black on black pain,
which along with divisions of class, continue to plague a sense of black unity constantly
under threat. Cultural critic bell hooks, although naming it a self-hatred, argues that the
totality of white supremacy is so complete, that we are “obsessed with whiteness,” and

calls for a much needed resistance agenda of “loving blackness.”

ll

Many black folks see us as “lacking,” as inferior when compared

to whites. The paucity of scholarly work looking at the issue of

black self-hatred, examining the ways in which the colonization

and exploitation of black people is reinforced by internalized

racial hatred via white supremacist thinking, is awesome. Few

black scholars have explored extensively black obsession with

whiteness. (1995, 148)
Although there is some truth in hooks assessment, the existence of color and class
differences and hostilities have been examined in clinical detail by social scientists
Cedric Herring, Verna M. Keith, and Hayward Derrick Horton in Skin Deep: How Race
and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era. The signiﬁcance of the urgency of
exploring the problem is indicated by the use of the double quotation marks around
color-blind because it reminds us of the current myth that racism in American life is a
“dead issue.” But the quotation marks also indicate the lack of recognition by many
whites that they are complicit in maintaining the internal divisions between blacks. The
authors, however, pose a signiﬁcant question which has been veriﬁed by other studies
done by social scientists: “Does skin tone mediate the likelihood of being discriminated
against in the 21St century? The answer, veriﬁed by others in the ﬁeld concurs with what
we know has been a very real fact: “The evidence with respect to color—differentiated
stratiﬁcation outcomes is fairly clear. Empirically, skin color has been a consistent

predictor of education, occupation, and income . . . .”(9).

l2

This occurrence is not unique to African Americans, however, but it does highlight
the intricate connections of color and class in African American populations. The authors
of Skin Deep cite previous studies that documented the impact of racial hierarchies
imposed on African Americans for inclusion in American social and political life.

These studies demonstrated that higher status Blacks tended

to be of lighter skin tone than lower status Blacks. Moreover,

they demonstrated how lighter skinned Blacks were extended

more social and economic amenities than the larger group.

This translated over successive generations into the Black elite

being of fairer complexion. (9)
While the studies cited by the authors were conducted in the mid to late twentieth
century, historians have noted that the internal stratiﬁcations predate the twentieth
century, but I consider the cultural importance of the ascendancy of a light-skinned elite
from post-Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance, and later I want to examine the
beginnings of a concerted opposition to the ideology propagated by Alain Locke and
others to put their imprimatur on a speciﬁc black cultural authenticity. But the authors of
Skin Deep rightly identify a historic moment that was engendered by the polarized
political stances of the 19205 when “among Blacks during the 19605 and 19705, dark
skin coloring lost its negative connotations and associated stereotypes. The term “Black”
became a unifying description of the entire race rather than a divisive term used in a
derogatory manner” (9). This is the type of impulse to essentialize that Hall warns makes

the Afrocentric so problematic, which is not to say that a modicum of essentialism as a

13

critical corrective is a bad thing, but to replicate the same discourse of racial difference
does not change the implications inherent in racializing differences.

The aim of this study is to hopefully add to the scholarly work that hooks and
Walker both call for. In that regard, my aim is to highlight the urgency of continuing the
critique of color and class bias in the Aﬁ'ican American community that was begun in
earnest during the 19605. In order to closely examine the continued existence of color
and class bias, we need to consider several factors. First, there is the impact of slavery
and the sexual abuse of black women, and the intersections of race and gender,
intersections which have been covered extensively elsewhere; however, I want to
highlight the ways in which these intersections are further problematic under the lens of
color, class, and sexuality. Second, we also must take into account highly competitive
black political ideologies (either assimilationist, or nationalist) as sites where the
contestation of a black cultural authenticity is historically formulated, often politicized,
and eventually disseminated for mass consumption outside of the black community.
Thus, my emphasis on black popular culture where color and class biases are reﬂected,
resisted and refuted in the cultural productions of African Americans.

While on the surface, skin color may appear to be a less potent issue than race, the
unspoken attitude toward skin color within African American communities is implied
even in the current debates over the moral failings of the black underclass who are often
darker-skinned than those who accuse them of not “holding up their end of the bargain”
in the ﬁght against systemic racism. While colorist attitudes on both sides of the line are

most often perceived as a “nonissue,”in many ways, blacks “see it” while refusing to

14

“name it”since an admittance to the psychological investment in racist values seems to be
a contradiction in the ﬁght against racism, or what black conservative Shelby Steele
argues is an investment in the “innocence of victim-hood.”But group victim-hood,
however, hardly equates to a blameless, and uncritical group sainthood. Marita Golden
recalls that her selection of appropriate colleges was dictated by the specter of color and
class bias: “I had been wounded, and quite deeply, by colorism in my eighteen years.
Now that I was nearly an adult, I wanted to opt out of any situations that could rekindle
pain that was never far from the surface” (47-48). Golden relates that she chose a white
school instead of Howard — “Howard’s colorist history was one of the reasons that I did
not apply to the school” — preferring the racism of an all-white school to the intraracial
colorism at Howard.

Because the color complex is a form of intraracial genocide,

because it positions Blacks versus Blacks, the emotional toll

it imposes and the lack of trust or acceptance of others that it

breeds are exhausting and demoralizing. (47)
Even the internal struggle with naming ourselves indicates division over skin color as
reﬂected in the internal designations of “Negro” and “Colo ” near the end of the
nineteenth century. Negroes were understood to have dark skin, kinky (bad hair), big lips,
and wide noses. On the other hand, as historian Deborah Gray White suggests, the term
Colored was preferred by those of lighter-skin, or visibly of mixed race. The fact that
both terms come from the ﬁeld of “scientiﬁc racism,”underscores the consequences of

assimilating centuries of mainstream racist ideology.

15

Similar to the contestations over whether or not systemic racism currently exists,

the efficacy of light-skin in today’s culture remains on the same parallel course as a
matter of concern for healthy black esteem. “Coming of age before black power,”
explains bell hooks, “most black folks faced the implications of color caste either through
devaluation or overvaluation.”

In other words to be born light meant that one was born with an

advantage, recognized by everyone. To be born dark was to start

life handicapped, with a serious disadvantage. (1995, 121)
Although blacks as a visible minority are quick to point out the uneven playing ﬁeld in a
racist mainstream America, we hesitate to call each other out for the same type of
discriminatory practices followed in our own institutions. Internal divisions are the
“dirty” secrets many blacks insist we keep “in the family,” but as Jill Nelson contends
“secrets are not healthy, they are always more trouble than they are worth.”

The act of keeping secrets eventually becomes all-consuming:

the initial secret spawns lies created in order to protect the

secret, which spawns bigger and more dangerous lies, and

more secrets. By its very nature, the keeping of secrets

presupposes the greater importance of those from whom the

secrets are being kept, whoever they are. (18)
On the one hand, keeping the divisive issue of internal color and class bias as secret
allows blacks to continue the myth of an essential black unity — that because of race, and

the unitary experience of cultural loss and exile in the West — blacks speak and act as one

16

in the resistance to racism. On the other hand, we should consider Nelson’s statement as
extremely pertinent to the consequences of keeping colorism a secret. The consequences
are not inconsiderable. Not exposing the issue of colorism makes us complicit in the
same racist agenda we purport to ﬁght by not using the issue to demonstrate to whites
‘ their own complicity in the matter. When, for example, Afﬁrmative Action is under
attack by a conservative government as a racially biased system of racial preference, we
circle the wagons in a quick response to a perceived attack on African Americans as a
whole. But the same type of response — or even a deep, self-critical interrogation — is
never aimed at the intraracial color and class racism of our own cultural institutions. The
obvious question we need to ask is why there has not been a concerted attack against
such an insidious practice.

The failure to include a critical engagement with internal color and class
differences implicitly glosses over an aspect of the very racism blacks continue to ﬁght
today. For Aﬁican Americans, the darkness of skin has been a troublesome indicator of
worth in a world that prizes Caucasian standards and values; at various times the issue of
intraracial color bias has received a “public” airing, but again there is the hesitation of
implying a disunity to outsiders that will be turned against the group as a whole.
Sociologist Ronald Hall, however, admits that in his own experience he believed
differences between blacks were based on class. Turning from a psychological study of
race, Hall clearly found intraracial color differences as equally damaging, and focused
instead on the clinical implications of skin bleaching by African Americans. One possible

answer to the assimilated racism of blacks toward other blacks is offered by psychiatrists

l7

William H. Grier, and Price M. Cobbs. Black Rage offers a psychiatric approach to the
problem of intraracial color bias as an internalized process, but it is in understanding the
past — the authors point - that offers the best evidence of where the internalization
begins. Slavery taught the African “that his color” was the badge of degradation and
white skin signiﬁed unlimited power. As the authors state - “Teachings so painstakingly
applied do not disappear easily” (26). The early (and painful) lessons of skin color
values, the authors argue, resulted in a lesson well learned: “That blacks are inferior,”
and as we know, the closer the resemblance to that signiﬁer of “unlimited power,” the
further the distance from black degradation.

No one knew, or could express the intense psychological impact of European
cultural and racial hegemony, or the resulting degradation on black psyches in more
bitter terms than the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon who wrote in stinging tones
about the self-hatred that assimilated racism engenders in the colonized subject which we

can deem applicable to African-Americans. In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon argues

 

that the colonizing mission is to plant an inferiority complex in the colonized subject at
the point of the initial encounter with Europe. “ The colonized are elevated above his
jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He
becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle” (18). Here Fanon speaks of a
cultural “blackness,” a distancing from the original culture that makes the self-hating
black a marginal man adrift in an alien culture that has not made him “white” because he

is sealed in his blackness by the color of his skin. This blackness under cover is the

18

problem with assimilation and the adoption of class attitudes that become explosive
issues during the 19605 black nationalist movement mentioned earlier.

Quite often, criticism of color bias is embedded in the critical accusations directed
toward black class privilege. Class and color have been so entwined that, at ﬁrst glance,
the two categories appear hard to extricate and examine as two mutually exclusive
categories. Historically, whites have (and still) preferred blacks who closely resembled
themselves in coloring and phenotype from the era of slavery to today’s mainstream
embrace of the biracial body. Many of the “old-guard” elite black families continue to
use their genealogical connections to “illustrious” white Southern families, or their
lineage as “free blacks” in order to keep the intraracial color-line intact. Phenotypical
afﬁnity often resulted in better economic and educational advantages for light-skinned
blacks during slavery (in the black vernacular the myth about the house-slave and the
ﬁeld-slave is still current shorthand for color and class divisions), and years later in the
rigidly segregated economic markets that have loosened incrementally. As the authors of
The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans point out:

The unique privileges granted to mulattoes under slavery enabled
them to advance further, educationally and occupationally, than
Blacks who were dark skinned. The result was a leadership pool of
light-skinned Blacks with both money and education. Within that
pool, it was often those Blacks light enough to pass who became

the Black community’s most vocal and active leaders. (35)

I9

Again, their observations concur with the assessments pointed out by the authors of &in_
Dgep. The signiﬁcance that both social studies stress is that as recognized, and as self-
appointed leaders, the light-skinned middle and upper-classes guarded their
“private”institutions against dark lower-class encroachments from below as stringently
as those of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Historically this ease of mobility is rooted on
a hierarchy of color gradations which were foisted on the psyches of African Americans
due to their group racial status under a system that insisted on simple binaries of “so-
called”racial and cultural values. Consequently these values — whose signs were equated
with American inclusion and exclusion —- were assimilated by privileged groups of
African Americans whose adopted values inevitably surfaced as intraracial fractures in a

seemingly cohesive group cultural ident i t y . Although there have always been

challenges to the colorist attitudes of a black, lighter-skinned elite, darker-skinned less
economically advantage folks were rarely given a public forum to express their rebuke of
black folks hating on other black folks. As I discuss later, the working-classes were not
mute, and silent sufferers. Criticism was a part of the oppositional cultural practices
aimed at thwarting the social work of “uplift” that began in earnest during the Great
Migration. But the late 19605 offered a perfect forum for a more sophisticated agenda for
cultural “uplift”in time to take advantage of a radical mood of change in the country.

By the late] 960's the fractures of color and class become vehemently contentious
during a renewed Afrocentric ideology that promulgated a black cultural model based on
the conditions under which the black working classes were forced to live, and the origins

of black political solidarity which political radicals found in the devastating experience

20

of slavery. However, the fact that the black working and lower-classes were often darker
in appearance than the handful of black elites in the middle-class Civil Rights Movement
was an inescapable fact that did not escape criticism from those in radical black
movements. bell hooks recalls the most “unnoticed and undiscussed” achievement of the
black radical movement was the open challenge to intraracial color hierarchies.

Issues of skin color and caste were highlighted by militant

black struggle for rights. The slogan “black is beautiful”

worked to intervene in and alter those racist stereotypes

that had always insisted black was ugly, monstrous,

undesirable. One of the primary achievements of black

power movement was the critique and in some instances

dismantling of color-caste hierarchies. (1995, 120)
books, although romanticizing the period, views the issue as one of “self-love,” however,
skin color hierarchies remain. The question is why? If, as hooks, asserts the agenda of
such a radical idea called into question a reevaluation of color supremacy which was
welcomed by black working-class people who were marginalized and devalued by color
and class, then why weren’t they eradicated in the 19605?

Clearly, the ambivalence over matters of skin color denotes ongoing ambivalence
over the acceptance (or nonacceptance) of European standards among blacks. Tellingly,
author Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, in her introduction to Wallace Thurman’s novel of
colorism during the Harlem Renaissance, The Blacker me Beg, states that even during

periods of vehement self-love, and civil rights gains, Blacks are still ambivalent over the

21

value of color gradations within Black populations. “Despite the ‘Black is Beautiful’
movement of the sixties,” she writes, “and the increasing images of blacks in ﬁlms,
videos, and advertisements, the preference patterns persist.”

Quietly. We can’t talk about it. We don’t want to talk about it.

And when we do talk about it, the discussion is usually so

emotionally freighted that it breaks down into name calling

recriminations. (12-13)
However, Haizlip wrongly implies that the appearance of blacks in popular media should
somehow render the existence of continued intraracial color bias a nonissue. In fact,
Haizlip misreads the issue by assuming that the very visibility of black faces in popular
culture are given the same value by the creators (black and white) and the spectators of
these images. And what Haizlip fails to discern is the skin color of these visible blacks in
mainstream culture. “The idea that Black is beautiful remains controversial, questioned,
and doubted. Even as Black women’s magazines have begun routinely featuring darker-
skinned models,” explains Marita Golden, “and as African models like Alek Wek from
Sudan, Liya Kebede from Ethiopia, and Oluchi from Nigeria grace the pages and covers
of Vogue, Elle, and other women’s fashion glossies in America and abroad, the question
still remains: Is Black beautiful? (93).

books, realizing that the problem of class and colorist attitudes have outlived the

19605, “blames” integration and cultural assimilation. hooks accedes the point that the
“collective militant black struggle for self-determination began to wane,” but she states

that “alternative ways of seeing blackness and deﬁning beauty continued to ﬂourish,”

22

without describing what these “alternatives” were, and falls back on the evils of
assimilation as black folks acquiesced to the dominant hegemony in order to enter the
mainstream.

Since freedom for black folks had been deﬁned as gaining the

rights to enter mainstream society, to assume the values and/or

economic standing of white privileged classes, it logically

follows that it did not take long for interracial interaction in the

areas of education and jobs to reinstitutionalize, in less overt

ways, a system wherein individual black folks who were most

like white folks in the way they looked, talked, dressed, etc.,

would ﬁnd it easier to be socially mobile. (1995, 123)
At ﬁrst glance, hooks’ assertion that civil rights gains were to blame for a resurgence in
colorism seems (at least hooks means it to be) a plausible answer. But if we examine her
answer closely, hooks’ answer skirts too closely to the rhetoric of “blaming the victim”
for not holding up their end of the bargain. Furthermore, hooks “buys” into the
romanticization of the black power radicals who, for the most part, were the children of
light-skinned, college educated black parents themselves. While the “leaders” of the
Black Power Movement with their theories culled from the works of F anon, Cabral and
the three Ms — Marx, Memrrri, and Mao - clearly indicated that the “masses” were not
“intellectually” capable of understanding revolution, the black working-classes no doubt
secretly resented being harangued at every turn. And it is this sense of resentment where

hooks correctly gets to the heart of the problem about the persistence of colorist values.

23

“Those black activists who remained in the public eye did not continue a militant
critique and interrogation of white standards of beauty. They did not continually call for a
focus on a black self-love, on ending internalized racism”(124). Simply put, a black self-
love did not extend to a love of dark-skinned , African featured women. hooks describes
' a well-established practice that many black women have observed since the post-
Reconstruction era about black male “race” leaders of all ideological political
persuasions. “Heterosexual black male leaders openly chose their partners and spouses
using the standards of the color-caste system.”

During the most rrrilitant stages of black power movement

they had never really stopped allowing racist notions of

beauty to deﬁne female desirability even as they preached a

message of self-love and an end to internalized racism. This

hypocrisy also played a major role in creating a ﬁamework

where color-caste systems could become once again the

accepted norm. (1995, 125)
Although there is no way to verify hooks’ assertion that this seeming betrayal of the
black is beautiful mantra contributed to the persistence of colorism, if we take into
account the reactions of dark-skinned, working-class women to the daily assaults against
their own desirability, then the Afrocentric rhetoric that proclaimed them cherished
African Queens, no doubt made the colorist choices of these salne “leaders” a rank
betrayal on the deepest level. Many dark-skinned women were uncomfortably too close

to the cultural joke that has remained a staple of black humor: “Said one black man to

24

another as they sized up women on a street comer: ‘Man, I don’t want nothin’ black but a
Cadillac!” As Marita Golden sadly assesses: “even while focusing on the sins of ‘The
Man’ and ‘The System’ and ‘White Racism,’ my generation squandered a precious,
perfect moment that could have allowed us to move from a theoretical assertion that
Black Is Beautiful, to the ﬁrst necessary, halting acceptance that it really is beautiful in
fact” (3 8).

Increasingly the number of critical voices are those of black feminists who locate

the ﬁxity of color supremacy as part of a black patriarchal and heterosexist form of

controlling and dividing black women, a fact which points to the important intersections
of gender and color. Felicia R. Lee in her review of Marita Golden’s Dpn’ Play in the
Sin, refers to a previous review of Golden’s memoir by African American professor of
journalism David J. Dent. Dent, whose own book In Search of Blagk America (2000)
purports to dispel, as William Julius Wilson terms it, “the familiar themes about racial
perceptions and attitudes in the African-American community,”for a readership “who
have grown weary” of the “race problem,” gathers anecdotes about “race and politics”
from the experiences of what he terms “the black majority — middle-and upper-middle-
class African Americans.” Dent, in his review of Golden’s book is a perfect example of
the way in which Dent — like many black conservatives who ﬁrmly believe that race no
longer matters — also dismisses the intersections between color and gender as either
irrelevant, or no longer important. Lee quotes Dent —
I admire Marita Golden, but you can’t take her personal story and

impose it on the whole of black America. That’s a problem with a

25

lot of contemporary black memoirs. Recently, he said, “the most

visible woman in the world was Condoleeza Rice. She’s a dark -

skinned woman. Was she concerned at all about her skin color?

The issues for Ms. Rice are the commission and 9/11,” Mr. Dent

said. “People were not focused on her skin color and features.

That’s where the world has gone.”
Dent, however, completely misses Golden’s point. Either he is being purposely obtuse
about the issue and impact of colorism, or he blindly ignores the issue because of his own
book’s agenda of calling attention to his vision of upper—class black America (how he
could have ignored the issue of skin color here is disturbing), Rice is not a dark-skinned
woman. Dent is again dismissing colorism for race, and by “people” who “were not
focused on her skin color and features,” Dent forgets the history of skin color as avenues

for advancement in America — and Rice has certainly played by the “rules.” However,

what is most disturbing is Dent’s cavalier dismissal of Golden’s book, implied in his
statement that “whining” over color differences is “a problem with a lot of contemporary
black memoirs,” is what he really means: “That’s a problem with a lot of bitchy black
women.”

But the resentment of color — or lack of color — cuts both ways. Many light-
skinned women with the long, pretty hair actively resent their “trophy status,” and the
implication that their identity exists of nothing more than their close resemblance to
white women. And in some cases, they ﬁnd that they can be passed over for a lighter-

skinned, or worse, yet, a real white woman. “While dark women can be rendered

26

invisible,” observes Marita Golden, “the objectiﬁcation and hyper-sexualization of light
women imposes a kind of invisibility on them as well. And in both cases the women
suffer considerable pain” (109). However, as the authors of The Color Complex point
out, the issue of colorism is not exclusive to black heterosexual relationships, as black
gays note the color preferences of “dinge and snow queens.” Black lesbians note the
same color preferences in their own community where women suffer the same color and
hair anxieties of their heterosexual sisters. “Sadly, it seems the most intimate of
relationships are still governed by the politics of color and race” (107).

The issue of color and class bias within African American communities is one
fraught with a tangle of contradictions and ambiguity about identity. While the history of
a collective identity as a speciﬁc racialized group is too long, and intricate a history to go
into here, let us just consider for the moment the effect skin color and class differences
have on the dynamics of black families. In a way, the black family is a microcosm of the
larger black community. Undoubtedly, many African Americans can recount the
quarrels, accusations, and recriminations at family reunions between those who “made
it,” and those family members left behind in the PJ’s. How many “escapees” are labeled
“sellouts,” or accused of not “acting” black enough? How many ﬂaunt their light-
skinned, green-eyed trophy wives who are accused (sometimes rightly so) of being stuck-
up? Or correct their cousin’s English, and refuse to eat “ghetto food?” How many black
folks can recall the problems of sibling rivalry which were exacerbated by the lighter
skin and “good hair” of a sibling who was showered with parental approval, just because

the “lucky one” has escaped the stigma of what blackness holds in a world that does not

27

equate beauty or worth with black skin. How many countless little black girls had to
suffer because they had “bad hair,” or had to listen to the old folks tell them they were
pretty “cute” for someone so damn black - “and take off that red dress, yo’ ass is too
black to wear red.” Or perhaps the family approval goes the other way since for some
blacks, looking close to whites is a painful reminder of a painful past.

First, the issue of class within some large African American families can be painful
as the black middle-class rapidly expands. Many are accused of leaving behind the
cultural patterns that helped blacks as a recognized group survive the harsh environments

of slavery and the four hundred years of systemic racism. Leaving behind this tradition is
the equivalent, many believe, of a racial self-hatred; a disdain for a unique Aﬁican
American tradition. But the adherence to an identiﬁable African American tradition calls
into question what the tradition actually consists of. Often the class animosities
presuppose that in terms of economic class position, all African Americans are signiﬁed
by color as belonging to the working classes. Since Africans began at the nadir of an
American class system this may have been true at one time, but even under slavery the
exigencies of plantation economies developed a hierarchal division of slave labor, often
based on skin color. Nevertheless, the system was recognizable as a class system
recognized as such by slaves. Furthermore, the period of legal slavery uniﬁed slaves
under their conditional position as slaves, recognized as such by their color, and since the
majority of slaves were visibly closer to African phenotype than they were to whites, a
mystique rose around “blackness” as more authentic as blacks began to face life as

politically free people.

28

In many ways, I want to consider these family tensions as quarrels between the
personal fulﬁllment of desire by assimilation and the essentialization of racial identity as
survival tactic. I consider the realm of African American popular culture as the best site
in which to examine these issues as competing values internal and external to the African
American community.

Chapter One: Framing Black Culture: The Nappy Roots centers on the competing
ideologies — cultural and political — that were rehearsals for the cultural ﬁghts over
cultural authenticity today between the assimilationists and those who argue for a black
nationalism based on race and skin color. The period of the Harlem Renaissance is
important for two reasons: ﬁrst, the cultural expressions from a darker-skinned working
and lower-class establish themselves as an authentic, and distinct cultural formation. The
second reason comes from the inﬂuence of the Garvey movement which challenged the
light-skinned, middle and upper black classes as black community leaders. As I argue,
Garvey sets the template for the growth of oppositional voices to the modern Civil Rights
movement by establishing a space for other voices in the black community, especially
from women who “called out” the heterosexist constituents of black resistance
movements.

Chapter Two: She’s Pretty - For a Black Girl: Genderized Colorism discusses the

 

literary and oral vernacular responses to the centrality of the biracial woman in the texts
of early black women writers. The purpose here is to underscore the intertextuality,
revisioning, and signiﬁcation in black women’s cultural products. I focus on the dialogic

textual strategies of post-Reconstruction writing that continue the questioning of rigid

29

racial categories in the classic female slave narrative. However, the post-Reconstruction
era called for a renewed attack on the inhumanity of newly freed blacks which presented
literate and socially active black women to use the ﬁgure of the biracial woman for two
audiences. Keeping this dualistic nature of these texts in mind, I consider the
reconﬁguration of the rape motif in accordance with the rise of a lighter-skinned elite
who take upon themselves the authority of presenting models of black female “social
value.”

Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy: or Shadows Uplifted is utilized here as a
representative example of reconﬁguring the black woman’s mythical sexual identity with
an overdetermined ethos of a new model for black female “social value” that would, in
turn, “uplift”the race. This ideology of “uplift,” as I argue, was based on policing under-
class black female behavior which was felt to be detrimental to the main-streaming of the
race as a whole. To further support the black woman’s role as a ﬁgure of “social value,”
policing of behavior included providing models of dress, color, and hair as the attributes
of Christian piety which would serve to insure the reputation of chastity in the black
woman. I examine the results of erasing objectionable black female behavior in
Quicksand by Nella Larsen.

Using Quicksand for textual support, I attempt to illuminate the tensions between
Larsen’s effort in establishing the black woman as a sexual subject and the imperatives of
19205 black middle-class codes of behavior. To illustrate the constraints under which
Larsen was forced to revise former tropes, I discuss the impact of the urban blues as a

competing, underclass alternative for a black female agency. The blues woman, I argue,

30

directly confronted and challenged the values demanded by patriarchal and heterosexist
cultural institutions in the black community. Furthermore, as a cultural product from the
working and urban poor, the rise of the blues questions the supremacy of the upper
classes to dictate the terms of a black cultural authenticity. My overall aim for this
' chapter is to demonstrate a legacy of challenges to a uniﬁed picture of the middle-class
light-skinned heroine as the only possibility for the public face of the black woman. I
demonstrate this by including oppositional examples from W and M
P_u_rp1t_:.

Similar to the challenges faced by black women in the political turmoil of the late
nineteenth century, black men were challenged by the debilitating images of mainstream
America. Chapter Three Are We Not Me_n? : Color. Class and Black Masculinig focuses
on the ways black men sought to provide an alternative image of a black masculinity, that
was, nevertheless, based on its resemblance to the constituents of idealized white
manhood and economic class standing. Caught between the docile Sambo-like ﬁgure of
the plantation myth, and the raging, black rapists of white fears, late nineteenth century
writers Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt were forced to combat the racist
myths about the African’s inability to access the privileges of “whiteness” such as the
capacity to produce the creative hallmarks of civilization.

By adopting the ﬁgure of Sambo and Henry Louis Gates’ trope of the black and
white costume of the African ﬁgure of Harlequin, as a critical lens, I attempt to explore
the difﬁculties Dunbar faced caught between the signiﬁer of his Aﬁican features and his

creative impulse. The issue of language use is central to my discussion as Dunbar was

31

faced with the “code-switching” in his poetry. I also offer an alternative reading of his
novel The Spprt of the Gods as a signiﬁcation on the importance of skin color.
Continuing with the meaning of the black and white motif of the Harlequin
costume, I posit Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars as a revisioning of the “tragic
mulatto” genre. Chesnutt’s “trick” is a narrative misdirection away from the tragedy of
his female biracial character which renders the central male character to disappear from
the text, and ﬂour the white readers fears of miscegenation. But I also want to point out
Chesnutt’s agenda of the face of black manhood that depends on the accessability to, and
the capturing of the “properties of whiteness” in economic terms, as the novel argues that
inclusion in American life can only be achieved by a conscious rejection of blackness.

This theme of rejecting the maternal blackness connects House with James Weldon

 

Johnson’s The Autobioggphy of An Ex-Colored Man. In addition, I argue that Johnson’s
novel begins a conversation about the sexual attributes signiﬁed by skin color where, I
maintain, is explicitly stated in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Begy.

In Thurman’s novel I consider the suggestion between the connections of light-skin
and a moral degeneracy begun by Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s The Smrt of the Gﬁ.
However, Thurman is quite direct in his association of light-skin with “femininity” as he
charts the downward spiral of the light-skinned Alva into homosexuality. Fellow Harlem
Renaissance author, Claude McKay furthers Thurman’s agenda by situating black
masculinity in the darker-skinned working-class character Jake. The point I attempt here

is to call attention to the changing openness to sexual differences in order to

32

acknowledge an alternative to the heterosexual, light-skinned image of a public black masculinity.

The ﬁnal chapter of my study — Representin’ and Frontin’: Cinematic Images in
Black and Beige — explores the ways in which color, class, and gender are represented in
black ﬁlmmaking. I begin with a consideration of the impact of black pioneer
ﬁlmmakers, especially Oscar Micheaux, who reﬂect the same types of bourgeois models
called for by cultural gatekeepers of cultural “uplift” — W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain
Locke. Although there appears to be a gap in chronology between the black ﬁlmmaking
praxis of Micheaux and the next black ﬁlmmaker I examine - Melvin Van Peebles —
there are several reasons for the lapse in a chronological continuum. First, I want to
emphasize the importance of Micheaux to the establishment of a truly, independent black
ﬁlmmaking praxis. Second, in cultural importance and impact, no other black
independent (or commercial) ﬁlm made the type of seismic impression on how blacks
would be portrayed on ﬁlm like Van Peebles Sweet, Sweetback’s Badasssss Song. The
cultural importance of the ﬁlm is such that young, black ﬁlmmakers from Spike Lee to
John Singleton do not consider Oscar Micheaux at all as a cinematic forefather due to his
perceived preoccupation with perpetuating color and class bourgeois values. In a recent
documentary Conversation, producer/director Warrington Hudlin introduced his and
other young, black ﬁlmmaker’s cinematic idols: the late Ossie Davis, Gordon Parks, and
Melvin Van Peebles.

Furthermore, I want to consider carefully the demarcations between independent
black ﬁlmmaking and commercial black ﬁlmmaking. Because of the difﬁculties and the

vagaries of ﬁlm ﬁnancing, I am interested in the black ﬁlmmaking which presents a

33

biased view of black women to wider audiences. Furthermore, by choosing to focus on
commercial black ﬁlmmaking, I want to suggest a certain elitism in black intellectual
circles that privileges the noncommercial over the “popular.” Such disdain for the appeal
of commercial success, I discuss, led to the generational, class and gender oppositions to
Sweetback and the emergence of the Blaxploitation film which appealed to a core
audience composed of a darker-skinned male underclass. Moreover, the demonization of
the “popular”continues to dog the career of once-independent Spike Lee who continues
to defy the “ghettoization” of the black independent ﬁlm whose only available venues are
often in the bastions of white cultural institutions where many working-class and urban
poor youth feel unwelcome.

As I point out, certain black male ﬁlmmakers and actors have a certain box-ofﬁce
appeal that allows them a voice in casting choices in regards to the genderized skin color
in their ﬁlms. For example, John Singleton’s Boyz n’ the Hood depicts both polarized,
and conﬂicting images of dark-skinned black women, which not only reﬂects the
ambivalence surrounding the mythic economic independence of the modern, successful

black woman, but also the mythic dependence of the “welfare queen,” a staple in the

 

repertoire of white political conservatives. Antwone Fisher the directorial debut of the
biggest box-office black actor, Denzel Washington, ftuther demonizes the dark-skinned
black woman in telling iconography by resurrecting the tropes of the inherent sexual
deviancy of the lower-class black woman by positing the lighter-skinned black woman as
a properly chaste model of black female virtue that recalls the late nineteenth-century

exemplars from the ﬁctions of Charles W. Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins.

34

I end this chapter with a complaint voiced by many dark-skinned female actors
who see their replacement as romantic leads by “exotic” women. Many blacks have
noticed a new trend that pairs a black male with a female Latina coostar in order to
capture the widest box-ofﬁce appeal. The excuse Hollywood gives for this new trend is
an embrace of diversity, however, the trend does not extend to a pairing of black women
with white A-list male stars and when white males are paired with black female actors,
the casting-choices turn to the small pool of young, biracial women typiﬁed by actor
Halle Beny.

Finally, I end this work with the state of a black America still in turmoil over the
meanings of class and color as the twenty-ﬁrst century begins. Some of the challenges
remain the same as a much larger black middle-class grapples with its geographic and
cultural distance from those left behind in America’s inner cities. However, there are
more critical voices as black women protest the demeaning way they are portrayed in a
visual and musical culture controlled by young, black underclass men. The widespread
appeal of hip-hop as an authentic black cultural product is actively opposed by a black
middle and upper-class in strident and disparaging tones that outdo the stinging rebukes
of W. E. B. Du Bois when he was confronted with the open sexuality of the blues. But
other challenges face the black upper classes who worry that the distance they have
achieved has negatively affected their children as they mistakenly reinforce class
attitudes in their attempts to instill racial unity in their children who have grown up in

deracinated environments.

35

As black leaders warily eye declining population group numbers, a new brand of
colorism is beginning to loom as biracial (multi-cultis) politically lobby the federal
government for their own “racial” category. In many ways, the movement attempts a new
challenge to the “one-drop—rule” of American racial categorization, however, I would
argue, in the case of black and white mixtures the implicit message lies in the “social
meanings” attached to African ancestry. The movement is gaining ground on college
campuses as biracial students feel “pressured” to label themselves as “black” for political
and cultural purposes. Currently, as I ﬁnish this project, many biracial students have
announced the formation of their own support group here at Michigan State University
for the Fall semester of 2005.

When Alice Walker penned the essay — “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What
Does the Future Look Like?” — as a letter from a dark-skinned woman to a light-skinned
woman to examine her own light—skinned complicity in the genderizing of color, Walker
admitted that her own biracial child would inherit the legacy of privilege accorded to the
light-skinned female, to which Walker herself was sadly excluded. In her own answer to
her mother’s plaint, Rebecca Walker describes —— in an echoing of W. E. B. Du Bois’s
theme of double-consciousness — what it “feels” like to have “two warring souls in one
body.” In a genre I would term light-skin-black-female-apologia, a number of “racially-
rrrixed” women critically assess a loss of culture, either intentionally, or unintentionally
in a series of racial “mournings,” or in an embrace of exuberance over their lack of racial
conﬂict typiﬁed by the well-adjusted Lisa Jones, the daughter of black nationalist

activist/poet Amiri Baraka. Clearly, there are no easy solutions for eradicating what

36

appears to be an investment in color and class differences within the black community.
Mired in capitalist systems of racial hierarchies, and the concomitant gulf between the
minority of blacks who have become American success stories, and the majority of those
who continue to slip behind, there seems to be as much black community confusion over

race and culture as there was at the beginning of the twentieth century.

37

Chapter One: Framing. Black Culture: The Nappy Roots
Introduction

Historically, the ﬁght over the “sign of blackness” in popular culture has been
waged by two warring camps: the assimilationists (or proponents for racial integration),
and those who counter argue that a distinct African American cultural form is by
necessity born of, and should reﬂect the very real experiences of resistance and other
oppositional resistance practices of African slave descendants to the horrors of racial
injustice. Both positions, however, raise their own problematic questions about the
doubled uses of a racial privilege: the utilization of skin color gradations as visible
markers of class and racial inclusion, and the politicized commodiﬁcation of the “sign of
blackness” in the marketplace of popular culture as prima facie evidence of racial
authenticity. Moreover, these issues are at the base in explaining how — and possibly
why — contemporary African Americans have utilized historic cultural representations
in order to access a black authenticity rooted in cultural codes that for some are no longer
relevant, or are yearnings of a bygone cultural romance. However, black cultural
authenticity remains problematic as “authentic” black cultural representations, such as
the rise of hip-hop culture and its allure for other nonwhite minorities, continues to
emanate from America’s post-industrial cities, especially at a time of an ever-widening
chasm between middle and working (and under) class blacks, and a renewed
interrogation concerning the borders of racial categories.

The very admittance of a group color and class hierarchy exposes a deep

cleavage in the public myth of an African American cultural and social unity. Very often,

38

a unity based on common origins is politically rooted in nationalist notions of a diasporic
Pan African solidarity; a solidarity many black intellectuals were convinced would result
in a black political ideology committed to opposing the hegemony of a European racial
supremacy. This is not to say that these were not laudable ideals, but the impulse led to a
racial essentialism that was doomed to failure. We now understand that the dangers of a
racial essentialism in many ways glosses over the very real legacies of historic
differences in African American lives where warring camps ﬁght for the cultural image
of black America.

In many ways, such cultural fractures problematize the very use of the term “black
community.” As Dwight A. McBride perceptively points out, the term “assumes a kind of
monolith,” or rather, a series of agreed upon responses to white oppression on a
recognized racial group as a whole. However, I am impelled to agree with McBride when
he cogently suggests that we understand the term as “a shifter, or ﬂoating signiﬁer.” The
term ‘black community,” he points out, “presumes a cultural speciﬁcity that works as

much on a politics of exclusion as it does on a politics of inclusion” (27). There are

many communities that the modiﬁer “black” glosses over or totally renders invisible. For
example, McBride notes the exclusionary practice of rendering black gays and lesbians
as outside of the cultural meaning of “black community.” McBride’s query of the
meanings of the term call into question of who really has the authority to deﬁne the
contours of what we mean when we refer to a black community. Traditionally, the black
community has been conﬁgured in heterosexist terms, but like the issue of sexual

diversity, black community has glosses over a host of slippery categories based on the

39

authority to “speak.” As McBride asks “Who speaks for “the race,” and on what
authority?” My purpose is to attempt a brief examination of competing ideologies based
on internal struggles to “speak for the race,” and what these voices mean for black
popular cultural formations.
Ideology Is A Sometime Thing

Without replicating the history that resulted in a light-skin elite at the approach of
the twentieth-century, we will just consider the obvious political imperatives that
stretched before them. First, there was the belief in the promise of American inclusion,
although the reality of the Jim Crow era indicated otherwise. But the implications in the
promise were read by many blacks in authority as meaning that blacks would have to be
as close to whites in thinking and culture as possible in order to be “granted” the rights to
full Americaness. This reading by blacks was not as fool-hardy as it seems on the
surface. After all, the promised expectations of American inclusion was working for the
millions of European immigrants who traded their “otherness” for American inclusion.
For many blacks who could visibly do the same, dropping the stigma of “blackness” was
as easy as changing geographical location and excising themselves from the associations
that assigned degraded positions for those legally black. For those who couldn’t easily
escape the badge of color, or for those who refused, the other option of assimilation
presented itself.

In order to refute the myths surrounding the humanity of African Americans, a set
of oppositional values to that myth were instituted that mimicked the values of the

dominant culture. The plan may have been in Marxian terms an example of “false

40

consciousness” in the face of bitter reality, but it was a much needed construction of
blacks that presented a reality of themselves. To paraphrase the theories of Louis
Althusser, the black community was under the most repressive of a “certain number of
realities, which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and
specialized institutions” (2001 , 96). Clearly, as a racialized group, blacks were subject to
a variety of Repressive State Apparatus deﬁned by Althusser as entirely under the public
domain. In this case, the most repressive was the violence of lynching supported by the
ideology a body of values that constructed the black subject, or as Althusser terms an act
of interpellation — “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete
subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject” (2001, 117). I take this as
meaning that the skin color of blacks equal slave, therefore, slave equals black an
ideology (racism) that supported and reiﬁed the Repressive State Apparatus of Jim Crow
law. However, as ﬁ'ee men — at least constitutionally - black people did not see
themselves as hailed. The answer, as blacks viewed it, was to counter with an opposing
discourse supported by a series of internal Ideological State Apparatuses.

That an opposing internal set of corrective values were copied from the white
middle-class was not accidental. As I have pointed out, a light-skinned emerging middle-
class ﬁrmly believed in the promise of inclusion for African Americans only if they
mimicked the observable values of the dominant society. The discourse of “up-lift,” or
the “cult of respectability” settled on a set of values that aimed to correct the practices
deemed offensive to whites — color could not change, but an insistence on behavior and

appearance was insisted on.“Many African Americans,” notes Noliwe Rooks, “who had

41

been living in urban areas since before the Great Migration identiﬁed themselves as
middle class and constructed representations of themselves that portrayed them as
educated, reﬁned, and forward thinking” (72). Newly arriving black migrants were often
at train stations, or visited in whatever over-crowded housing they could ﬁnd by black
charitable organizations, including the Urban League, with card-board illustrations of
how the migrants were expected to appear in a wider public arena in order not to
embarrass, or set-back “the Race.” Although these instruments were repressive in their
way, the more formal black institutions that served as ISAs were rooted in the black
church, black education, and the emergence of black writing. “It was in this volatile
milieu of cultural conﬂict,” argues Robert E. Washington, “that the young black writers
formed both their perceptions of the American racial scene and their ideas about black
American literature’s mission” (29).

The contestation over the practices that make the “black” in black popular culture,
are of course, best exempliﬁed in the crowning moment of modern black cultural
formation in the 19205 cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Sociologist
Robert E. Washington cites the 19205 as “a most extraordinary period in American
cultural history.”

Marking the nation’s transformation from a rural and small-town
way of life into a predominately urban and industrial society, the
decade produced a dizzying array of changes in both the mainstream

white society and the black American community. (13)

42

Houston Baker, Jr. recognizes the period as part of the modernist movement that begins
in 1910. However, Baker reaches further back to locate African American modernism to
Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Address in 1895 where Washington understood the
“game” of wearing the mask of minstrelsy in front of whites for black survival. Thus,
Washington, Dunbar and Chesnutt reconﬁgured existing tropes of blackness for political
and cultural survival. Dunbar and Chesnutt, of course, demonstrated narrative strategies
under-cover of the minstrel mask for the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. I deal
extensively with the cultural import of both Dunbar and Chesnutt as black male artists
who are forced to contend with the prevailing myths about black masculinity in Chapter
3, Chapter 1 focuses instead on the 19205 as the point in which ﬁactures in black cultural
representation become public. As this chapter maintains the 19205 clearly demonstrated
the political and cultural rifts in the black community as the traditional civil rights
organizations were opposed by the nationalist Garvey movement, and the cultural
ideology of the Harlem Renaissance was met with the inﬂuence of the African vernacular
as a cultural formation. However, these fractures were an early rehearsal for the black
nationalist and black feminist movements of the late twentieth century which challenged
an elite black leadership on the grounds of their exclusivity toward skin color, economic
class, gender, and sexuality.

The Harlem Renaissance is momentous in the contestation for black popular
culture formation because of the movement of plantation cultural forms from the rural to
the urban, and because the cultural practices in the forms recognized by Hall (style,

music, emphasis on the body) were easily commodiﬁed to reach a broader audience

43

where mainstream America “discovered” that it had a distinctive culture itself — separate
and apart from European forms — in “black American popular vernacular traditions.” The
seamless quality of the embedding of Africanness, or the sign of blackness as an
invisible, haunting shadow is explicated by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark.

Even, and especially, when American texts are not “about” Africanist

presences or characters or narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in

implication, in sign, in line of demarcation. It is no accident and no

mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant literature)

understood their “Americanness” as an opposition to the resident

black population. (47)
Morrison’s accurate statement also applies to an urban, black population who tied their
own political future to, not so much as an embrace of European culture, but a rejection of
the blackness pouring out from the past. This was the imperative of a new, highly
educated black middle-class elite who ﬁrmly believed that the way out of racial
inequality was through the cultural imitation of European aesthetic forms. However, the
geographic movement of black populations, and the technological advances of mass
communications seriously exacerbated the hidden fractures in a black community
struggling to liberate itself from the cultural images created by the same dominant
ideology they sought to refute. Since the post-Reconstruction era, as a recognized racial
group, African Americans have been in contestation with an image created outside of
themselves, and the political imperative was to demonstrate their “Americaness” as much

as possible.

A The New Negro & The Criteria of Negro Art
The very public, and modern “birth” of The New Negro in arts and letters was at
the 1924 dinner sponsored by the Urban League’s Charles Johnson. The occasion was,
according to David Levering Lewis, “the dress rehearsal of what was soon to be known
’ as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’.” Aware that a small coterie of white American writers were
beginning to experiment with new artistic forms on the ashes of a spiritually depleted
Western civilization, some white writers turned to the subject of the “negro as the perfect
symbol of cultural innocence and regeneration,” the artistic black community saw their
chance to represent their own engagement with the new age of modernity. Although
many black intellectuals had their reservations “about this new wave of white discovery.”
Nothing could have seemed to most Afro-Americans more extravagantly
impractical as a means of improving racial standing than writing poetry
or novels, or painting, but Charles Johnson and a few older Harlem
luminaries were keenly aware that some white writers had already found
the Afro-American a salable commodity in the literary world. The times
were obviously ripe. (Lewis 90-91)
Undeterred, Johnson joined with the black intellectuals of the day — Jessie Fauset and
Alain Locke — to present young, black artists to willing, and eager white publishers who
were eager to get in on the interest in the Negro.
However, there were disagreements from the start between the Urban League and
the NAACP as both organizations vied for the dollars of white, wealthy patrons, and the

interests of white publishing houses. Still under the inﬂuence of the long-deceased

45

Booker T. Washington, wealthy patrons like the Rockefellers were reluctant to give
money in aid of something as “ﬁivolous” as “the literary efforts of the New Negro.” But
the cash-strapped organizations found equally deep pockets in the Rosenwald Fund, and
individual white donors, and although “white capital and inﬂuence were crucial, and the
white presence, at least in the early years, hovered over the New Negro world of art and
literature like a benevolent censor, politely but pervasively setting the outer limits of its
creative boundaries.”

The motives of the whites, however, were as varied as those

of the Afro-American intelligentsia were single-minded, and

the whites’ disunity provided room to play fast and loose along

the borders of the arts or for raids even into the heartland of

racism. (Lewis 98)
Although the intemecine squabbles between the two civil rights organizations are not my
concern here, the issue is what they both could ﬁnd as common cause in presenting black
cultural representations as a plank in the civil rights agenda.

According to David Levering Lewis, in spite of their own “temperamental
discordances,” Locke and Johnson “both wanted the same art for the same purposes”
which Locke solidiﬁed in his essay “Enter the New Negro” in the special issue of the
Urban League’s Survey Graphic of March 1925. What they wanted represented,
continues Lewis, was highly polished stuff, preferably about polished people, but
certainly untainted by racial stereotypes or embarrassing vulgarity. Too much blackness,

too much streetgeist and folklore — nitty-gritty music, prose, and verse — were not

46

welcome” (95). It was the “Old Negro” that was not wanted. “The Old Negro,” wrote
Locke “we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. He
has been a stock ﬁgure perpetuated as an historical ﬁction partly in innocent
sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism.” In one fell swoop, the Harlem
Renaissance attempted to divorce themselves from the masses. As Locke implicitly
suggests, the New Negro will put an end to the myth about the African American’s lack
of civilization and humanity. Locke and Johnson’s sentiments were not far from those of
their rival W. E. B. Du Bois, although Du Bois made it quite clear that he was not for art
for art’s sake, but for an art that would serve the purpose of racial propaganda.

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the

purists. I stand in utter shalnelessness and say that whatever art I have

for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right

of black folk to live and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is

not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is conﬁned to

one side while the other is stripped and silent. . . .
What Du Bois and the other middle-class intellectuals were ﬁghting was the fascination
of whites with the “primitive” side of black life; the tasteful imitations of white life in the
works of the more conservative artists reﬂected in the pages of Opportunity and The
Crisis. “Although he warned that the ‘migrating peasant’ held the ﬁnal answer to the
success of the New Negro,” explains David Levering Lewis, “Locke’s second essay,
‘Enter the New Negro,’ made it clear that migrating peasants were expected to leave the

immediate future to the upper crust — Du Bois’s Talented Ten ” (1997, 115).

47

Jes’ Grew Meets the Harlem Renaissance
“Du Bois, whom Arna Bontemps described as a fastidious gentleman of

aristocratic leanings,” writes Cary D. Wintz, “always found it difﬁcult to embrace the
black masses unless they had been thoroughly regenerated and cleansed of all traces of
the curse of their slave heritage. Perhaps because of his own literary tastes, Du Bois was
an early supporter of black art and literature. However, it is also possible to detect very
early the attitudes that would alienate him from much of the Renaissance” (142-143)

For example, as early as 1905 he had proposed the establishment of a

“Negro Journal,” which would attempt to portray black life “on its

beautiful and interesting side.” Two decades later he would castigate

Rudolph Fisher, Claude McKay, and other young black writers for

neglecting the beautiful in their rush to depict ghetto life. (143)
What the conservative members of the Harlem Renaissance failed to realize was that the
ideology of the New Negro was too imitative, and could not compete with the folk
culture and music that jes ’ grew with darker-skinned Southern migrants. “Like the other
black civil rights intellectuals,” maintains Robert E. Washington, “he [Du Bois] took a
dim view of literary works that celebrated the black lower class’s putative emotional
freedom and sensuality’ (41). But what galled the younger black artists under the
ideology of black middle-class respectability in the arts was the 1926 publication of
white art’s patron Carl Van Vechten’s sensational Nigger Heaven which illuminated the
primitive life to be had in Harlem’s underworld. For artists Langston Hughes, Zora Neale

Hurston, Wallace Thurman and others, the time was ripe to forge an alliance with the

48

folk culture of the masses, to discover, as Arna Bontemps recalled that “it was'fun to be a

”

Negro.
Furthermore, Du Bois and the other staid traditional civil rights organizations

failed to correctly assess the iconic power of Marcus Garvey and the attractiveness of his
black nationalist ideology on the very people Du Bois tried to inﬂuence. In speech after
speech, Garvey became the voice of the black working and lower classes in rhetorical
phrases that would be common in the latter half of the twentieth century. Garvey made
his dark-skinned listeners and readers “generals and ﬁeld-marshals” in his evocation of a
glorious African past and future to be. But it was Garvey’s skin color and features that
most resonated with the black masses who resented the hands-off, up-lift leadership who
Garvey categorized as “half-breed mulattoes.” The West Indian Marxist Cyril Briggs, the
editor of The Messenger, successfully sued Garvey when he publically denounced Briggs
as a “white man,”and Garvey stirred up the already bitter tensions between the West
Indian and Aﬁican American professional classes. “For the ﬁrst time outside the genteel
sphere of literature, the concealed tensions and subconscious antipathies of dark and light
Afro-Americans were furiously exposed and nurtured.”

The days of “subtle and underhand propaganda fostered by a few

men of color in America, the West Indies, and Aﬁica to destroy

the pride of the Negro race by building up what is commonly

known as ‘blue vein’ aristocracy” were ﬁnished he warned. (41)
Alarmed at this disruption of his integration-through-acceptable-values-and-behavior

ideology, Du Bois through the Crisis retaliated with ad hominem attacks on Garvey’s

49

appearance. In “Back to Africa” (1923), Du Bois described Garvey as “A little, fat black
man, ugly, but with intelligent eyes and a big head. . . .” Further describing a Garvey
meeting (which he did not attend in person), Du Bois dismissed the Garveyites as
deluded, and the elaborate uniforms as belonging to “comic opera” and “simply silly.” To
a casual observer, the ceremonies would appear sinister, “this enthroning of a
demagogue, a blatant boaster, who with monkey-shines was deluding the people and
taking their hard-earned dollars; and in High Harlem there rose an insistent cry, “Garvey
must go!”

“The sad truth of the Garvey-Du Bois feud,” opines David Levering Lewis, “ is
that it might well have been avoided. That Du Bois was viscerally, even aesthetically,
repelled by Marcus Garvey to the point of being intellectually deaf to anything the
President General of Africa had to say, is well known. If the Bookerite feud was
ultimately ideological, that with the Garveyites was ultimately one about power.” As
Lewis explains, at issue was Garvey’s capacity to raise money and “issuing marching
orders to twelve million second-class American citizens”a feat beyond the traditional
middle-class civil rights groups. Garvey also anticipated the theories of Dr. Frances Cress
Welsing and the black power movement‘ of the late 19605 and early 19705 when he
preached to his avid followers that “all the beauties of creation are the black man’s.”
Although Du Bois accused Garvey of bringing “to the United States a new Negro
problem, it is doubtful if even Du Bois was convinced of his own argument, but he did

(within his attach on Garvey) presciently predict the structural failing of a nationalism

 

' And like many black leaders, Garvey married a woman so light that she could pass for white.

50

based on race and skin color supremacy. The distinctions of intraracial color differences,
argues Du Bois, is in the “poorest taste for a Negro to refer.”

Colored folk as white as the whitest came to describe themselves as

Negroes. Imagine, then, the surprise and disgust of these Americans

when Garvey launched his Jamaican color scheme. . . .for what shall

this poor world gain if it exchange one race supremacy for another?
Like future nationalist groups who were inﬂuenced by his ideology, Garvey over-stepped
himself in wrapping his back-to-Aﬁica and black separatist movement too closely to the
ideology of white supremacists, and by 1927 the Garvey movement was destroyed by the
co-operation of the traditional civil rights organizations with the Federal government, and
Garvey’s ﬁnancial and political naivete. But Garvey’s importance was in his ideology of
African race pride and African American self-determination, an ethos kept alive in the
black nationalist groups that continued to ﬁght black cultural assimilation.

The Struggle For Cultural Authenticity

Although the NAACP and the Urban League joined together in an “integrationist
ideology” under the recognized race leaders Du Bois, Walter White and Charles Johnson,
their base in the black community was primarily among the conservative black middle-
class who deplored the culture of the darker-skinned masses whose
“dysﬁmctional”folkways many felt would disrupt the fragile new accord between black
and white intellectuals. Although they acted as self-appointed spokesmen for the black
community as a whole, they disapproved of the black vernacular and the blues forms that

jes’ grew in public spaces reserved for the best of the race. What was worse for the more

51

conservative members, like Du Bois, was the inﬂuence of the migrant culture in the
works of the younger artists. But the civil rights organizations saw, instead of a vital
addition to the American cultural mainstream, a gloriﬁcation of lower-class lifestyles.
Robert E. Washington provides a relevant framework in which we can quickly sort
out a tangle of political and cultural divisions which aligned themselves along color and
class in order to claim black cultural authority. As we have seen above, the conservative
members of the Harlem Renaissance disagreed on the place of traditional African
American cultural formations that attracted black and white proponents of the “primitive”
school. Notably, Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson were sympathetic to what
Houston Baker, Jr. calls the “blues ideology.” As Washington identiﬁes, there were two
sectors of the Harlem Renaissance “located within the social base of the black cultural
intelligentsia.” One sector of cultural producers whose “social location”was “restricted to
the segregated black community,” but the second, argues Washington, a cosmopolitan
group, were socially located “outside the black community in the newly forming,
predominately white Jazz Age social milieu in downtown Manhattan. It was the local
cultural intelligentsia that became the chief bearer of the Harlem Renaissance doctrine”
(44). The ﬁrst group included the black singers, and dancers of the new black musical
comedies of which the middle-class disapproved, but this sector also included the early
jazz performers and female blues shouters. Washington points out that facing on the one
hand, the “primitive” culture of the masses, and on the other, the political threat of the

Garvey movement, “the black middle class needed a cultural ideology that would allow it

52

to proﬁt from these developments by affirming its aspirations and identity as the driving
forces behind black American culture.”
This it did by appropriating the new public symbols of black ethnic
identity, a feat that the narrowly focused and defensive civil rights
ideology, rooted in assimilationist assumptions, lacked the ﬂexibility
and scope to accomplish. (44)
However, Washington’s sweeping generalization needs a closer examination; in his
cosmopolitan sector were, as I mentioned earlier, the younger members who, as
Washington is forced to admit, signiﬁed on the black middle-class ideology by
“mocking, deriding, and parodying their lifestyle and values, with a level of rancor and
meanness that went beyond any previous public criticism of the group” (46). But what
exactly did they critique?

Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Claude McKay
severely critiqued the color and class elitism of the middle-class civil rights leadership in
works that celebrated the color and rhythm of black vernacular speech and the music of
the darker-skinned masses in much the same way exhibited by the New Black Aesthetics
of the last decade of the twentieth century. Signiﬁcantly, Hughes, and Hurston came from
economically poor backgrounds and derided the class pretensions of the black “genteel”
brand of literature famously “mid-wived” by Jessie Fauset, Hughes (and McKay) were
grateful for Fauset’s early support. Hurston and Hughes both also relied on the ﬁnancial
support of the wealthy white Charlotte Osgood Mason who often dictated to Hughes and

Hurston what “primitive” topics she was willing to pay for. However, as much as they

53

mocked the color and class elitism of the black nriddle-class, they never became attracted
to the Garvey movement because “it lacked a literary school,” and, except for McKay,
“they loathed racial nationalism. Moreover, it is doubtful that Garvey’s largely working-
class followers would have become consumers of black literary wor ” (53).

The melding of black cultural representations with political nationalism comes to
fruition in the late sixties with the Black Aesthetic and the Black Arts movement which
developed some of the ideological assumptions found in the works of these younger
Harlem Renaissance writers, and in the back-to-Africa movement of Marcus Garvey.
These impulses are identiﬁed by Washington as: .

l. A biological conception of black American ethnic culture which was
seen as derived from their African ancestry.

2. Equation of African ancestry with primitive instinctualism.

3. Depiction of lower-class blacks as the chief bearers of primitive
instinctualism, the deﬁning feature of black ethnic culture, which is
manifested in their carefree and hedonistic lifestyles.

4. Depiction of middle-class blacks as social misﬁts, alienated from the
emotional vitality of black ethnic culture.

5. Depiction of white Western culture as being emotionally repressed
and sterile.

Although these assumptions about the working-classes suggest class condescension,
some of these assumptions still exist in the ideology of today’s hip-hop culture of
“keepin’it real,”but the important structural issues faced by the black working and lower-
classes are conspicuously missing Notes Washington “absent in their primitivist
depictions of black America were images of racial problems, environmental inﬂuences
(e.g., family, neighborhood, school, church), poverty, black nationalism, and the white

American social world” (69). These were problems that awaited the pens of Richard

Wright and James Baldwin, especially Baldwin who lived long enough to see his own

54

black cultural authenticity (and relevancy) attacked under the Garvey inﬂuenced Black
Panther Party.

The Jazz Age party of the Harlem Renaissance ended with the crash of Wall Street,
and by 1929 Harold J ackman and Langston Hughes agreed that “the genteel letters team
was losing badly,” but the period limped on as the promise of achieving full American
parity through black cultural representations declared the experiment a “failure.”

By the end of 1931, the most detached artist and resolute optimist

realized that nothing was any longer quite as it should be, that the

aggravating national chaos could impinge in unexpectedly cruel

ways even upon the lives of distinguished Aﬁo-Americans. (Lewis 254)
Although some literary critics account the Harlem Renaissance a “failure,” in part, their
assessment is true when we consider that the “naturalist” school exempliﬁed by Richard
Wright established the political and cultural movements to come as “masculirrist” in
form. This “failure,” unfortunately erased the black vernacular work of Zora Neale
Hurston until the work of black feminists demanded a political voice, and reached back
to ﬁnd Zora’s. But what was important for the strength of authority from a black elite to
dictate the boundaries of black cultural and political representations, was that their reign
was over. Black cultural expressive culture continues to rise from the “under-class” of
black America, this does not mean, however, that oppositional voices have surrendered.
But as I have hoped to demonstrate, the struggles over cultural and political ideology
were ﬁrst rehearsed during the Harlem Renaissance which means that the period was not

a “failure.”

55

Chapter Two: “She’s Pretty — For A Black Girl”: Color, Class and Gender
Introduction

I want to begin this chapter by recalling one of the traditional expressions of black
women’s creativity: the quilt. Besides its obvious utilitarian capacity, slave women used
the occasion of a quilting party to gather for community far from the surveillance of
white mistresses, white masters, and just white people period. A quilting party was a
chance for slave women to gossip, share long, remembered stories, and give advice to
each other about surviving the special hell slavery presented for women. Alice Walker
refers to this tradition in the short story “Everyday Use” which uses the quilt as cultural
artifact, and as an occasion for female bonding in The Color P_1_rlple where Celie, Soﬁa
and Shug work on a pattern Celie names “Sister’s Choice.” As I discuss below, it is
signiﬁcant that Celie is joined by the two women who teach her an independence
unavailable, or expected from a woman like Celie. Quilts are laden with cultural import
as aged hands came together with younger ones as a motley collection of patches are
incorporated from favorite dresses that recall happier times, remnants from the clothing
of loved ones whose existence was too brief, or snatches of bright cloth that happen to
take the maker’s fancy because of the shear marvellousness of its existence.

But the quilt also had other uses — if you were able to read the signs. On its surface,
the intricate designs of a quilt hanging on a make-shift laundry-line was a mute testament
to the skill and artistry of the black female hands who created it, but embedded in the
same, colorful designs was another story that pointed to the physical road to freedom. If

one could “read” the quilts correctly, then the signs woven into them were narratives of

56

the liberation and freedom that a collective creativity brings at a time when many black
women bound by class, color, and race had neither.

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) as Celie takes her ﬁrst steps to self-
liberation she lays one of those old Southern female-to male curses on her abusive
husband. “He laugh. Who you think you is? he say. You can’t curse nobody. Look at you.
You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (176).
Nothing at all is the way Pecola Breedlove feels in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
(1970). Wishing for blond hair and blue eyes, black-skinned Pecola devours the
talismatic Mary Jane candy as hopefully as dark-skinned women devoured tabs of arsenic
in the 19205 in the vain hope that the toxic substance would bleach their skin. Teenaged
Terri, in April Sinclair’s Coffee Will Make You Black (1994), tries to convince her color
and class conscious mother that the Black Is Beautiful movement means no more hot
combs and chemical perms, as her mother pushes the latest bleaching creams at her;
while weight-conscious domestic Blanche, worries about her encounter with elite “light-
skinned folks who act light-skinned” in Barbara Neely’s Blanche Among the Talented
le_n_t_h (1994). I offer these books to indicate the centrality, and longevity of color and
class in the works by black women. Equally signiﬁcant is the fact that these works are
from the daughters of the working class, often the ﬁrst college educated children in their
families, and their works respond to the legacy of a culture that based their worth on the
attributes of skin color and economic class.

“There is hardly a novel by a black woman, “ states Daryl Cumber Dance, “that

does not touch upon the issues of complexion, hair, and general physical appearance. . .

57

.” (92). The truth of Dance’s observation is born out in the tradition of black women’s
writing ﬁ'om the era of the slave narrative to the ﬁction of Gwendolyn Brooks during the
19505, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker in the 19705, and the less “canonical” ﬁctional
narratives of Barbara Neely and April Sinclair at the end of the twentieth century. The
legacy of the model black heroine whose white features were central to black women’s
creative writing remains a constant reminder of the value color and European phenotype
has for African American women. “Color-based social stratiﬁcation within the race was
real,” observes Deborah E. McDowell.

Though not the only basis for divisions in black communities, color -

consciousness was real and pervasive and found subtle, perhaps un -

conscious, expression in strategies of nineteenth-century black ﬁction

and overt expression in the structures of everyday life that affected

those who wrote it. (57)
1 consider the purpose of this chapter, in a way, like the construction of quilts — an early
example of black female cultural expression — as a patchwork of signs pointing to the
past, while simultaneously pointing out the avenues to escape and personal freedom. I
want to consider the construction of the quilt as a metaphoric frame in which to examine
the way in which black women respond to the issue of color and class. The issue of
genderized colorism runs throughout the lives of black women like the basting thread that
attaches disparate clutches of colorful patches in the formation of a quilt, and each patch
represents an individual pain over contesting the worthlessness of their bodies based on

standards they have, at various times, struggled to emulate and reject.

58

What black women face is the “beauty myth,” a description from Naomi Wolf’s
mwrmwwmxm a deﬁnition which
is useful to consider here. The beauty myth, explains Wolf, “is actually composed of
emotional distance, politics, ﬁnance, and sexual repression. The beauty myth is not about
women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power” (13). Although
Wolf’s description is apt -— and as I demonstrate later - the problem with the beauty myth
is that Wolf describes a condition that assumes that the beauty myth applies to white
women only, but it is in this “white women only” context that we can apply Wolf 5 term
to the issue of colorism, for the simple fact, that colorism is grounded on European
aesthetic values as applied to women of color. There is “emotional distance” because
skin color divides black women; it is “political,” and in conjunction with living in a
patriarchal society, colorism is supported by black men. Although Wolf does not take
into consideration how the beauty myth affects women of color, I will come back to the
second half of her title as part of the discussion.

Alice Walker points out that “colorism,” not only divides African Americans, but
skin color envy, resentment, and denial are divisive tools supported by a mainstream
culture that denies the worth of black women. “Ironically,” confesses Walker, “much of
what I’ve learned about color I’ve learned because I have a mixed-race child.”

Because she is lighter-skinned, straighter-haired than 1, her life — in
this moist society — is inﬁnitely easier. And so I understand the subtle
programming 1, my mother, and my grandmother before me fell victim

to. Escape the pain, the ridicule, escape the jokes, the lack of attention,

59

respect, dates, even a job, any way you can. And if you can’t escape,

help your children to escape. Don’t let them suffer as you have done.

and yet, what have we been escaping to? (1983, 291)
Trellie Jeffers succinctly captures the issue of women and gender in class terms, and
bluntly “calls out” the black middle-classes on its class and color bias: “What it is, is an
insanity that has helped whites turn blacks on themselves and that has caused the black
middle class to claw itself into a form of psychic annihilation.” Jeffers joins Walker in
setting her sights on “the great cannon of cruel racism directed toward the black black
woman by the black middle class.” Traditionally, the shade of skin and the straightness
of hair have been indicators of economic class in African American communities, and as
sources of economic gain, black women’s bodies have been judged according to skin
color since the days of the auction block.

As Jeffers argues, the black middle-class only “pretends to honor blackness while
secretly despising working class blackskinned [sic] . . . .” I discuss Jeffers charge in
greater detail as it informs the movie casting choices of black commercial ﬁlmmakers in
the next chapter. But for now, I want to examine the critical reader’s response to the
images in black women’s writing that support Jeffer’s charge. Walker, for example,
scrutinizes the earliest representations of creative writing by nineteenth century middle-
class African American women and ﬁnds the expected: “black heroines depicted as white
— and non-working class” (296). What Walker ﬁnds in her examination of early black
women’s writing, however, does not indicate entirely a misreading on her part, but

instead points to the dialogic nature of early nineteenth and twentieth century black

60

writing. While Walker’s observation is true at ﬁrst glance, unfortunately, she falls into
the trap of applying twentieth century attitudes (or a lack of bracketing) to the nineteenth
century circumstances which severely circumscribed, and dictated the terms under which
middle-class black women could enter the public sphere of arts and letters.

The speciﬁc narrative strategies employed by early black women writers, the
dualistic purposes — the double-voicing - of their texts mediated through the bodies of
the near-white black woman were ideological strategies forced upon them because of the
historical period that denied the humanity of blacks as a whole. I offer Frances E.W.
Harper’s novel Iola Leroy: Or Shadows Up_-Lifted as a representative post-
Reconstruction text in which Harper’s construction of the mulatta heroine is designed to
explicitly “speak” to a reader knowledgeable of the formal conventions of a speciﬁc
textual genre. But contained in Harper’s text is another reading, an unmediated voice that
allows Harper’s black middle-class readers to read a different utterance that does not
“recognize” the mediation of the mulatta ﬁgure as “different.” What this means for my
purposes is that lola Leroy is able to contest the boundaries of race, on the one hand,
while projecting a distinct ideology of black female social value, on the other. Black
women writers of the post-Reconstruction were acutely aware of their unique status as
black elites, ready to take their positions at the head of the vanguard of the New Negro. If
literacy gave a voice to the millions of ex-slaves, then the activity of reading and writing
gave voice to the most voiceless of blacks: the black woman.

After slavery, American mainstream culture may have preferred to “forget”the

effects of slavery on the bodies of black women, but, as Paula Giddings recounts “Black

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women may have been the only group in America able to see not only the degradation
but the triumph of transcending what the system would make of them. In their minds, the
experience of slavery provided evidence of the Black woman’s moral strength and
resiliency” (87). Writing in the post-Reconstruction era, literate and educated women like
Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins speciﬁcally
directed attention to the physical and psychic effects of slavery on the black woman to a
divided audience, divided not so much by gender as it was by race and the entrenched
belief in the absence of the black woman’s sexual integrity. By continuing to center
their texts on the body of the biracial woman early ﬁction by black women writers
speciﬁcally signiﬁed on an existent text of female racial difference by revising the core
text of mainstream American cultural history by borrowing models of female heroics
from mainstream and slave texts. Secondly, both Harper, Hopkins and other literate and
politically active black women were aware that an important by-product of their work
was to be one of racial up-lift; that by providing models of respectable black womanhood
their female characters would not only refute the vicious myths about black womanhood,
but also act to enlist the masses of black women below them in the cause, or as Frances
Smith Foster accurately sums up their aim: “They used the Word as both a tool and a
weapon to correct, to create, and to conﬁrm their visions of life as it was and as it could
become” (2).

Claudia Tate refers to post-Reconstruction ﬁction as black narratives of domestic
liberation and political desire for a formerly enslaved people who had neither. As she

argues, the novels of bourgeois domesticity was a concerted revision of the American

62

narrative of family — “the family being implicitly understood as white and patriarchal.”ln
this case, we need to consider the multiple narrative strategies, or as Iser terms the
intentionality of the slave narrative text whose textual intent is to illicit a response ﬁ'om
an implied reader that “accommodates both thematically and historically conditioned
changes, and variations in reader response.” The American novel has long been used as a
tool, both for moral instruction and for entertainment which made the genre an ideal form
in which to combat the degrading image of blacks as a race, and in particular, the image
of the black woman. In this form, early black writers were able to reforrnulate the black
experience on two fronts. In what she terms as “the multidimensionality of racial
rearticulation,” Maxine Leeds Craig points to the bodies of black women as sites of
group racial resistance in the struggle for racial equality. “Though both black men and
women live in ‘marked’ bodies, many African American efforts to reclaim the honor due
to the race have particularly focused on celebrating and defending the beauty or dignity
of black women” (l4).But for black readers, these “marked” bodies were also the site of
color and class ambiguity as evidenced by an unreconciled gap between accepting and
rejecting racial hierarchal standards. One of the responses to class hierarchies I examine
is the vernacular form of the blues as a contestation of darker-skinned, lower class
women who refused to place racism over gender, and circumspect female behavior over
personal female sexual liberation.

One intent of the slave’s narrative comes out of a public desire for political
resistance, and one of private desire to assert a self-hood denied by forces beyond the

text. However, all slave narratives contain another text that remind the white reader of

63

the humanity of the slave in the omnipresence of the racially ambiguous narrator whose
body contains the marks of the “white patriarchal family.”The female slave narrative
only increased the white family inclusion stakes, as her body was the conduit through
which visible race could disappear. Thus, the post-Reconstruction novels often-tirnes
addressed the issue of inclusion to the mainstream of American (white) society on two
separate and conﬂicting grounds for the scores of interracial bodies who were white and
black; free and unfree under Jim Crow. On the one hand, they posited their well-bred,
“white” skinned characters as a separate caste between the white and black barring a full,
legal and social embrace by the paternal family. On the other hand, publically they
advocated for the rights of all African Americans, including the sanctity of their legal
domestic rights. Thus, early writing focused on themes of black middle-class
domesticity, Christian morality, and the sexual chastity of black women among a
growing class of African Americans at the turn of the century who sought to distance
themselves from the stigrnas associated with the mass of blacks. As many critics of post-
Reconstruction African American writing have pointed out, the political intent of black
ﬁction steadfastly argued for American inclusion, but unfortunately at the expense of the
millions of darker-skinned blacks.

As we have come to understand, the black woman’s autobiography (the slave
narrative) placed the black woman’s body at the center of a national debate about race
and gender in 19‘h century America. That the black woman was biracial only high-lighted
the unspoken, but visible truths about slavery and gender that were glossed over in the

male slave narratives that posited race over gender. But the racial instability presented by

biracial female body represented more than a plea for humanity based on a racial
identiﬁcation between author and reader where, as Alice Walker notes, the white female
reader “could identify human feeling, humanness, only if it came in a white or near white
body” (301). Not only did the slave narrator call attention to the constant threat of sexual
abuse, but she also provided a model of black womanhood for the post-Reconstruction
period of the late nineteenth century where early black women novelists utilized the
light-skinned, European featured woman as central to the evolving trope of racial “up-
lift.”

In order to uphold the dignity of black women, an intraracial ideology evolved
based on the visible amounts of white ancestry as a standard for African American
female respectability. An intraracial demythologizing of the scurrilous beliefs about
black women, many male black political and cultural leaders argued, would inevitably
help to erode the color barriers to American inclusion for all African Americans as a new
generation copied mainstream ideals of middle class female domesticity at its core. This
was the problem faced by Harlem Renaissance writers Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.
Larsen’s Quicksand, especially, struggles with the tension between black nriddle-class
female respectability, and the new sexual openness of the early 19205. I consider
Larsen’s narrative strategies as she suggests a coming to terms with the erasure of sexual
desire in the biracial female’s body.

Much has been written about the nature of early black women’s writing, especially
in the use of the biracial heroine in the ﬁctional works of post-Reconstruction authors

Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins. As Claudia Tate notes “Problematic attitudes

65

about class and color emerge in the portrayals of heroes and heroines in post-
Reconstruction black ﬁction.” The novels, Tate continues, “reveal a preponderance of
light-skinned heroes and heroines, while the comic and local-color character roles are
reserved for the folk who are literally black in hue” (62). Indeed, as Henry Louis Gates
points out in his introduction to the important Schomburg series of 19‘h century black
women writers: “Black women writers dominated the ﬁnal decade of the nineteenth
century.” But, as scholars have come to recognize, the early twentieth century writing of
black women was forced to confront two related tasks. One task was the reclamation of
the black woman from a historic myth of their inherent sexuality, and the other task
confronting them as educated, literate women, was the burden of representation to be
shouldered for the “race.”

Signiﬁcantly, over one hundred years of writing by African American women has
established an engagement with what Deborah E. McDowell has correctly observed as
“the shifting aesthetic, critical, cultural conventions and values that inﬂuence, and at
times determine, writing by and about black women” (xii). In other words, the works
under discussion did not spring fully formed in an ahistorical, acultural vacuum in which
they happened to emerge as imitators of black male writers. While I set these works
within their cultural milieu, attention must be accorded to their formal literary structures
also. As I indicated earlier, I want to highlight the inter-textuality of black women’s
writing besides its dialogic nature as Iola Leroy and the rise of black women’s magazines
in the late nineteenth-century issues a call Quicksand and the rise of the blues vernacular

responded at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The works also call attention to a

66

repetition of tropes that are readily identiﬁed in African American women’s writing. This
pattern of repetition, revision and difference are tropes that Henry Louis Gates notes are
unique to what he calls the “discrete black text.” The act of Signifyin(g) - an act rooted
in the black vernacular -- is “the trope of revision, of repetition, and difference” found in
the works of African American creative writers in general, and I ﬁnd useful in this focus
on African American women’s writing and oral expressions.
To Be of Social Value: 101p Leroy

“Like Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson,” recounts Hazel V. Carby, [Frances]
Harper told her readers that though black writers did not write out of situations where
they had both money and leisure, they were determined to write books that could both
take their place in ‘the literature of the country’ and be ‘of lasting service for the race.’
These two desires,” continue Carby, “were fused into a didactic novel” (71). In her
groundbreaking survey, Black Women Novelists: The Development of A Traditipg
1892-1976, scholar Barbara Christian asks an important question about Frances Harper:
“What images of black women was Harper struggling against, and why was it important
for her to use the novel as a form in refuting them?” (5). To answer Christian’s question
it is useful to consider historian Deborah Gray White’s argument on the moments of
repetition and revising of the female slave narrative. “Pairing the psychological with the
enslaved woman’s means of survival,” argues White, “has helped us analyze many
patterns that emerged after slavery.

America’s constant concern with black women’s morality, chastity, and

respectability ﬂow from slavery’s legacy, as well as the rape, medical

67

experimentation, and reproductive control that black women continued

to endure through the twentieth century.
bell hooks adds: “Devaluation of black womanhood after slavery ended was a conscious,
deliberate effort on the part of whites to sabotage mounting black female self-conﬁdence
' and self-respect” (1981, 59). To counter the continued efforts against black female “self-
conﬁdence and self-respect” was an over-determined insistence on the same gender
stereotypes that restricted the white women whose “purity” was deﬁned by their own
“impurity”. As Hazel V. Carby correctly asserts, the myth about the black Jezebel’s
inherent sexuality was used to deﬁne the proper boundaries for white female behavior by
the opposing image of the black female: “To qualify as a ‘true woman,’ the possession of
virtue was an imperative. Without it she was, in fact, no woman at all, but a member of
some lower order” (25). Thus, in order to “become” women Harper had to erase any
hints that her black model of female rectitude had any sexual desires at all. This over-
determined erasing of female sexuality as a class bound constituent will prove
problematic for black female writing in the 19205, but again, we need to consider the
peculiar cultural position these early writers found themselves writing in, and writing
without.

As historians and critics have noted, the two prevailing images of the black woman
were the young, inherently lascivious Jezebel, or the old, sex-less Mammy; either way,
both stereotypical images were in service to whites. “Mammy is consistent,” agree Gray,
hooks, and Christian. As Christian points out, the establishment of the Mammy was the

racist self-interested, mis-reading of the importance of mother-child bond in African

68

cultures - “her tendency to see maternal duties as natural and sacred must have reinforced
the southern planters’ stereotype that black women were perfectly suited to be mammies.
Tied to her physical characteristics are her personality traits” —

she is strong, for she certainly has enough girth, but this strength

is used in the service of her white master and as a way of keeping

her male counter-parts in check; she is kind and loyal, for she is a

mother; she is sexless, for she is ugly; and she is religious and

superstitious, because she is black. She prefers the master’s

children to her own, for as a member of a lower species, she

acknowledges almost instinctively the superiority of the higher

race. (12)
The ﬁgure of the all-knowing and all-loving black mammy was a stubborn (and
comforting) myth nearly impossible to eradicate from American popular culture. On the
other hand, as the young Jezebel, the black woman was understood to be controlled by
lust; that they were easy “prey” available to any man, white or black. For white women
protected by the cult of “lady-hood,”the image of the black Jezebel insured her
respectability for the simple fact that black women were implacably barred from “true
womanhood” because of the myth of their inherent hypersexuality. Thus, black women
themselves were forced to revise, and reconﬁgure the mainstream image of black women
under the very terms that excluded them with narratives that reﬂected past historic and
future social needs. To refute these images, and to provide a model of black female

respectability, however, meant that a new black female face would be forced to mirror as

69

closely as possible the standards of contemporary popular culture and ﬁction. For many
middle class blacks, behavior under the eyes of whites was believed to be the key to
American inclusion and acceptance. Thus, the emphasis on bodily integrity, religion, and
a strict attention to the domestic black home became the key components of black
respectability.

In Domestic Allegories of Political Desire (1992) Claudia Tate contends that,
although Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) the eponymous. black heroine is a
beautiful “mulatto”, the danger here is in reading the novel as an instance of Harper’s
own “racial ambivalence”. Instead, Tate reads the novel as an example of “virtuous
behavior and accomplishment, rather than physical appearance.” Tate formulates her
reading from a re-deﬁnition of “female value in mid-nineteenth-century British and
American women’s novels”, novels that Harper was forced (by literary market
considerations) to copy.

The white feminine ideal of early-nineteenth-century British and

American ﬁction emphasizes female piety, discretion, modesty,

and sympathy, all exempliﬁed by the white heroine’s fragile fair

beauty; by the mid-nineteenth century, however, that ideal centers

moral and physical well-being independent of appearance (144).
Tate refers to the “ bright, virtuous, and compassionate but decidedly plain” heroine of
Charlotte Bronté’s 1848 novel Jane Em as a pointed example of the literary shift in
gender construction, and concludes that such a shift “. . . probably inﬂuenced late-

nineteenth century black women authors’ revision of the unquestioned privilege of light

70

skin color”. If we follow a tradition of black writing that consciously refers to textual
forms outside of the black experience, then obvious questions arise — what precisely
makes a novel like Iola Leroy a speciﬁc black female text? Where does European
mimesis end and black particularity begin? How exactly does this “literary shift,” as
articulated by Tate, work in privileging the light-skinned black woman in an era of racial
up-lift that was meant to beneﬁt all black women?

Although Tate’s conclusion is logical (there is no denying her observations about
the “shift” in gender representations of European and American female main characters)
her argument insists that the black heroine of a post-Reconstruction novel like Iola Leroy
posits the weight of “social value”over appearance, closely following British and
American women’s writing. “As a result”, she asserts:

the social value of the heroine of post-Reconstruction black woman’s

domestic novels resides not in her white appearance but in her virtue,

comportment, and ability to enhance the virtuous prosperity of her

family, as Iola Leroy poignantly illustrates. (144)
However, her assertion calls into question the necessity of utilizing class and color as
arbiters of, what Tate indicates as constituents of “social value”. Nevertheless, the
preponderance of light-skinned black heroines exposes a gap in determining which
women in the black community are of “social value.” A careful reading of the works of
Harper, Hopkins and the social work of the black “club-women” reveals a demarcation of
class and color that are the constituents of what Tate argues is clearly an ideology of

“social value.” To be of “social value” is the overriding concern of nineteenth century

71

black women’s ﬁction whose stated purpose was to morally guide as well as entertain
black readers which separated the texts of Harper and Hopkins from the“ bright, virtuous,
and compassionate but decidedly plain” heroines of their white contemporaries, but
another distinction was the continued emphasis on the appearance of their central ﬁgure
who deﬁned “social value” in a variety of ways.

Clearly by centering their texts on white-skinned, well behaved black “ladies”, the
goal of many early black writers was aimed at an inclusion in a category whose purpose
by deﬁnition was to keep black women out. Based on her readings of the works of
Frances E. W. Harper, Frances Smith Foster aptly sums up the mission of black authors
like Harper: “African American writers , like other American writers, Foster relates,
“responded to the need to repair the psychic damage of a war between the states and to
adjust to a land without slavery but with an awesome number of former slaves.”

They believed that their stories of strength through adversity, of struggle
and achievement, of hard work and discipline replacing the slave’s rags
with the decorous attire of proper citizens, could serve to inspire other
blacks, assuage the fears of some whites, and help revive the American
Dream. (13 1)
However, many “well-behaved” young black women viewed their darker-skinned sisters
as either threats to their elevated positions as elite blacks, or secretly believed in the
inherent stigrnas attached to black skin. The up-lift of darker-skinned people - the
mission of “social value” to the race was considered a duty, a duty expected of race men

and women which did not translate into a corresponding social interaction between

72

classes. To be of “social value” meant a “rescuing” of blacks from their own culture, and
as “cultural conductors” between the white and the black, where the beautiful, reﬁned
light-skinned heroines of Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins “give to the black race”
the culture they have inherited from the white.
And what culture means is Western Christian civilization at its best. She
becomes, then, a cultural missionary to the ignorant, the loudmouth, the
coarse but essentially good-natured blacks, who need only to be shown
the way. (29)
But to be of “social value” also held a dual purpose as its visible meaning is centered in
the body of the light-skinned, cultured black woman. The implications were that the
dark-skinned black woman was not of “social value,” in the sense that physically they
were far from the white ideal, as Noliwe M. Rooks points out, “In a society that equated
color with character and civilization” (41 ).

In assessing the intentional values of texts like Harper’s Ipla Leroy , I want to
borrow Deborah E. McDowell’s intuitive paradigm of public and private forms of
narrative ﬁction, again suggestive of Bakhtin’s dialogics. As McDowell suggests there is
a distinction between texts by black women “that seem to imply a public readership (or
one outside the black cultural community) and those that imply a private readership or
one within that cultural matrix”(36). Although, as McDowell reminds us, that an author
can never “determine conclusively who their actual readers are. Nevertheless, all writers
begin by ﬁctionalizing or imagining an audience.” However, as I have noted earlier with

the female slave narrative, texts by post-Reconstruction authors such as Pauline Hopkins,

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Emma Dunham Kelley, and especially Frances Harper were intent on fashioning their
narratives to a public (read: white) audience for two very obvious reasons; ﬁrst, their
intent was to counter the charge against the incapability of African Americans to be fully
political and cultural functioning beings, and secondly, to demonstrate the existence of a
black nriddle-class who shared the same cultural and class affinities with the mainstream.
For a private readership their works offered a middle-class model of decorous,
respectable citizenship and moral instruction for black aspiration.
Our Sister’s Keepers: A Culture of Association

In her invaluable survey of African American women’s magazines, Noliwe M.
Rooks bears out the incalculable inﬂuence these magazines had on shaping a distinct
cultural matrix that was directly intended for black women. But, as worthy as these
magazines were for middle-class black women, the images in their pages had “signiﬁcant
consequences. . . . for African American women who were young, poor, uneducated, and
not biracial” (27) which were questioned, not only in oral narratives, but were actively
resisted in ﬁction by black women themselves in the wake of the black migration and the
Black Power movement of the late 19605 and early 19705. Although the women editors
of such well-regarded (but largely) forgotten journals like Ringwood ’s Aﬁ'o American
Journal of Fashion (1891-1894) and Half-Century Magazine for the Colored Home and
Homemaker (1916-1927) shared the same imperatives of post-Reconstruction female
novelists, the difference between the two types of narrative is in the use of images which
supplied a more immediate text for those black women who could not easily navigate

written texts, but who, nevertheless, aspired to elevate themselves in the patterns

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followed by the black classes above them. I consider the inﬂuence of these magazines
because they contribute to an internal narrative discourse of black female difference
based on European deﬁnitions of female appearance and respectable female behavior.
For African American women, the continued emphasis on these categories for women
' were inextricably tied to the racial comrrritrnent of black nation building. The intent of
these magazines — in the advice columns, advertisements, and images of clothing and
hairstyles — thus, equated the pride in appearance with the racial imperative of pride in
race. To do otherwise, these magazines argued, would reﬂect badly on the progress of
African Americans as a whole. However, the underlying results of this discourse — which
remains a narrative background throughout periods of twentieth century African
American cultural and social upheavals — proved to demonstrate the conﬂict,(and
contradictions) inherent in the black community over the meanings of class, color and
gender.

As Rooks recounts: “Between 1891 and 1950 there were eight African American
women’s magazines published for a variety of audiences and purposes” (4).
Signiﬁcantly, these the post-Reconstruction magazines replicated and textually supported
the idealized messages contained in contemporary ﬁction by middle-class black women,
and their content was as didactic in tone as the novels. Appearing in the same period
were Iola Leroy (1892), Fpur Girls At Come City (1898), and Contending Forces
(1900) all with unrealistic biracial female characters who publically worked at up-lifting
the masses. The overriding sentiment in black women’s journals was the ﬁrm belief in

the ideology of “culture by association.” In a letter to Ringwoods, one enthusiastic club-

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woman urged other right-thinking race women “to gather under their wing as many
young women as possible, whose minds should be enlightened, whose ﬁngers trained and
whose sentiments elevated by personal contact with cultured, reﬁned women” (Rooks
51). The unknown writer, of course, does not need to make clear whose minds needed to
be “enlightened,” but the establishment of black fashion magazines devoted to the
attributes that even elite women felt they lacked, offered a highly ambivalent agenda of
respectable representation to hundreds of poor black woman. Founded in 1891 by Julia
Ringwood Coston the offspring of a white master and a female slave, Ringwood’s Aﬁo
American Journal of Fashion was “The ﬁrst popular magazine aimed at an African
American female readership, it was also the ﬁrst fashion magazine for women of African
descent.”

Distributed and read throughout the United States and parts of the

Caribbean, it was published in Cleveland, Ohio by Ringwood, who

chose to use her birth name in the magazine’s title to ensure that so

“frivolous” a venture would not “embarrass” her husband, or damage

his social standing. (28)
The intent of these magazines, however, was not designed for an imagined reader outside
of the black cultural matrix (and an argument could be made that neither were they

directed at a black male readership), but the explicit message to black women contained a

 

2 Coston was married to the well-regarded W. H. Coston, pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Hagerstown, Maryland. Coston was also an editor and activist in service to the race. Together,
the couple appear to be a real-life example of the type of idealized black middle-class marriages Frances
Harper had in mind for Iola Leroy.

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direct appeal to black women that offered an association between them as receptive
readers, and the magazines as purveyors of desirable black female images.

This is not to say that the championing of black literary efforts, and black
achievements were not worthy and much psychologically needed efforts, but for each
reportage of black society, black “ﬁrsts”, and talented black literary efforts, there were
hundreds of advertisements that disrupted “the bonds of racial brotherhood,” bonds
which many of the magazines purported to embrace. “To gain access to the American
dream”, explains authors Ayana D. Byrd and Lori Tharps, “one of the ﬁrst things Blacks
had to do was make White people more comfortable with their very presence” (26). As
one article in Ringwood ’s Journal pointed out:“Women who eschew the garish and
gaudy in dress may demand more consideration and respect than those who violate this
principle.” Black women were counseled on what colors would deter or attract unwanted
sexual attention, especially “the lechery and depravity of the fair-skinned destroyers
whose hearts are blacker than Erebus” (52). In addition, as these magazines painfully
pointed out, skin color had to be regarded when choosing appropriate colors for dress.

Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Qpicksand repeats the types of injunctions against
placing black skin against “loud” colors at a typical Southern black college whose
purpose was to instill “respectability” to its black female students. “Bright colors are

3

vulgar ’— “Black, gray, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming colors for colored
people” — “Dark-complected people shouldn’t wear yellow, or green or red.” Helga
Crane who considers herself a “despised mulatto,” notices that the “women workers,”

wear “Drab colors, mostly navy blue, black, brown. . . .” and decides that “bright colors

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were ﬁtting and that dark-complexioned people should wear yellow, green, and red” (51).
Alice Walker, however, plays with this trope by embracing the signiﬁcance of what these
forbidden colors have for dark-skinned women in The Color Pipple. Celie is taken by the
sisters of Mr._ to the general store in order to buy material for clothing, and Celie
tries to think “what color Shug Avery would wear.”
She like a queen to me so I say to Kate, Somethin purple, maybe little
red in it too. But us look an look and no purple. Plenty red but she say,
Naw, he won’t want to pay for red. Too happy lookin. We got choice
of brown, maroon or navy blue. I say blue. (20)
Celie is enamored with Shug’s daring and open sexuality indicated by her going against
the conventional colors dictated by the respectable, bourgeois ideas of black female
respectability. Shug, a travelling blues woman, is the ﬁrst dark-skinned woman (with
nappy hair) that Celie has ever seen portrayed as a ﬁgure of “romance.”
She not lying down. She climbing down tween Harpo and Mr._.
And she dress to kill. She got on a red wool dress and chestful of black
beads. A shiny black hat with what look like chickinhawk feathers curve
down side one cheek, and she carrying a little snakeskin bag, match
her shoes. (42) -
As Angela Y. Davis recounts in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism about the stage
attire of Bessie Smith, who was partial to elaborate plumed headressess and clothing
liberally covered in “pearls, gold, and rhinestones,” Smith presented a rare vision of

sartorial display. In full Empress regalia she was bold, beautiful, outrageously out of line,

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and impossible to forget”(l37). Although the black middle-class sneered at such
costuming as “typical niggerish attire,” the importance to the mass of black women of
seeing one of their “own” dressed in anything else other than the typical “mammy”
regalia depicted in mainstream popular culture, was of no little psychological importance.

Modesty in dress at all times, Ringwood ’s stressed, “was part of a larger project
aimed at refuting charges of African American moral inferiority and distancing African
American women from cultural associations with rape and sexual availability.”Although,
the post-Reconstruction ideology strove to document their rise from the ignominy of
racial bondage in ﬁction in the aftermath of Reconstruction civil and social promise,
there was the chance, many frrrnly believed, that possible inclusion as ﬁll] American
citizens could be achieved by outward appearance. “The civil law protects us against
certain evils” wrote Charles W. Chesnutt on thetopic in1881, “but there are other evils
which the civil law does not and cannot reach”(2). For Chesnutt and other middle class
blacks accepting middle class mores meant the beginning of access to the privileges of
mainstream society. The goal was to be “. . . considered as gentlemen and ladies, or
received in good society,” although “good society” was clearly deﬁned by white
standards of Christian morality, sober behavior, and special attention to appearance.

Reconﬁguring Troubled Narratives

Acutely aware that the evidence of their own non-black bodies was the “proof” of
the “unspeakable,” prominent lighter-skinned black women of the upper-classes, like
Harper, “had to negotiate a complicated emotional, psychological, and cultural

landscape”in which the narrative of their tale centered on a putative love match between

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white males and black women against the laws of consensual miscegenation. Under
patriarchal standards of female worth, many women like Harper, Mary Church Terrell,
and Ida B.Wells utilized their patrimonial inheritance — both in economic terms, and in
the value of their skin color -— in order to rise above the darker masses in the black
community who were coming to terms with the responsibilities of freedom. Accordingly
as Noliwe M. Rooks observes, the reality of “rape” in their own pasts was often “
reinscribed as happy family narratives that resulted in light-skin privilege for the
offspring; the performance of middle-class identities and sartorial practices would wipe
the morality slate clean. In short, rape and violence were refashioned and rewritten,
though not forgotten” (42).

A history of consensual nriscegenation (real or ﬁctive), thus, erased what some in
the black community viewed as a reminder of the sexual abuse of black women. For
example, the reconﬁguration of sexual abuse into romantic mesalliances across racial
lines is repeated in Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter, Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1h;
House Behind the Cedars, and even as late as James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel he
Autobiomphy of An Ex-Colored Man. The point of these revisions of the very real
incidents in the lives of too many slave girls was in part a careful construction of new
genealogies for the light-skinned elite. In psychological terms, a romantic relationship
that accounted for their own color and class was preferable than one that had the violence
of rape in the background, and signiﬁcantly, allowed the upper-class of black elites an
opportunity to “claim” kinship with the best families of the South by glossing over any of

the real circumstances that caused their own coloring. Hence, by following the patrilineal

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line, elite black women wielded the symbolic power transferred from the white father as
the source of their authority to refashion the truth, and to dictate codes of behavior for
working and lower-class black women.

Furthermore, under the post Reconstruction imperative of establishing the virtue of
the black woman, many elite black women could point to the example of Harriet Jacobs
who consented to a sexual relationship in order to save herself ﬁom the sin of adultery.
As Harriett Jacobs’ own narrative demonstrates she chooses a sexual relationship with
the sympathetic, white Northerner Mr. Sands over her lecherous master. “I knew the
impassable gulf between us; but to be an object of interest to a man who is not her
master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave” (84). Furthermore, Jacobs
contributes to black women’s liberatory discourse by anticipating the relative freedom of
sexual autonomy (albeit under stress) that black women begin to articulate in the 19205.
But the point must be stressed that the black women at the center of these romantic
genealogical creations was the fact that they resembled white women, and the telling sub-
textual implications were that they could “escape” the sexual degradations that befell
their darker-skinned sisters because of their “exotic” otherness that leveled racial
animosities against racial rrriscegenation.

The Problematic Mulatta: Qg'cksand
Nella Larsen complicates the romantic notion of patriarchal genealogy associated
with class, color and gender by acknowledging another “truth” unaddressed in the
narrative ﬁction of black women — that of the unromantic (and unthinkable) inheritance

of a white matriarchal heritage. In Quicksand (1928), Larsen using the circumstances of

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her own parentage of white mother and black father, questions the values of the black
middle and upper classes that center on the body of the biracial black heroine. “Her
thoughts lingered with her mother, long dead. A fair Scandinavian girl in love with life,
with love, with passion, dreaming, and risking all in one blind surrender. A cruel
' sacriﬁce. In forgetting all but love she had forgotten, or had perhaps never known, that
some things the world never forgives” (56). And what the insular world of black “ﬁrst
families” will not forgive is that Helga cannot offer an “altemative,”or an acceptable
account for her European phenotype. This social signiﬁcance is underscored later in the
novel by the black socialite who takes Helga under her wing in New York, and gives her
a kindly bit of advice before she introduces Helga to her color-conscious friends: “And
by the way, I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people
won’t understand it. . . .” (75). Her benefactress proposes to introduce Helga as a “friend
of mine whose mother’s dead.” Engaged to the scion of an elite black family, the weight
of her lack of white patriarchal ancestry weighs on her decision to break a relationship
that the family does not approve of: “Her own lack of family disconcerted them. No
family. That was the crux of the whole matter. Negro society, she had learned, was as
complicated and as rigid in its ramiﬁcations as the highest strata of white society. If you
couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t
‘belong”’ (43).

Trying to dissuade Helga from leaving the insular world of the black college (and
by implication) her future advantageous connection to one of the black ﬁrst families, the

head of the college appeals to Helga’s “social value” and commitment to racial up-lift.

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“What we need is more people like you, people with a sense of values, and proportion, an
appreciation of the rarer things of life.” In this instance, Dr. Anderson assumes that
Helga’s light-skin denotes what the black community has come to believe are the
markers of rrriddle-class standing, and elite ancestry. “You’re a lady. You have dignity
and breeding.” But Helga is restless, suffering from the “nameless and sharneful”impulse
that the “cult of lady-hood” was instituted and insisted upon by the black middle-class in
order to “protect” her. Knowing that her “heritage” does not reﬂect the revised trope of
white ancestry, Helga snaps back — “If you’re thinking of family, Dr. Anderson, why, I
haven’t any,” but Dr. Anderson, a ﬁrm believer in the doctrine of “up-lift” (and clearly in
the values attributed to skin color) insists on her obvious “tendencies inherited from good
stock. You yourself prove that!” Finally, Helga answers: “The joke is on you, Dr.
Anderson. My father was a gambler who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is
even uncertain that they were married” (55). Thus, Larsen manages to follow established
tradition of using the biracial women to question the notions of race while attacking the
ﬁctional revisions of the trope itself by black ancestor worshipers. Furthermore, Larsen
attacks the revision of the “tragic mulatto” — in this case, Harper’s narrative redemption
of the ﬁgure in Iola Leroy who happily subsumes personal desires for self-less “service
to the race.” Instead Larsen signiﬁes on the hallmarks of respectability expected in one of
Helga’s coloring, and the “joke” is indeed on the values Dr. Anderson embraces and
expects from Helga’s appearance.

Larsen bluntly broaches the topic of sexuality as Helga searches for an identity as a

black woman trapped, not so much between races, as between stereotypes. “We might

83

say that Larsen wanted to tell the story of a black woman with sexual desires,” observes
Deborah E. McDowell, but was constrained by a competing desire to establish black
women as respectable in black middle-class terms.” As McDowell points out, Larsen’s
work expressed the pressures she felt ‘Vvith the conﬂicting demands of her racial and
sexual identities and the contradictions of a black and feminine aesthetic” (79).

How could she write about black female sexuality in a literary era that

often sensationalized it and pandered to the stereotype-of the primitive

exotic? How could she give a black female character the right to healthy

sexual expression and pleasure without offending the proprieties

established by the spokespersons of the black middle class? (80)
Although McDowell argues that Larsen “could only hint at the idea of black women as
sexual subjects,” I would add that Larsen’s textual and cultural dilemma is strategically
worked out by “splitting” the myth of the black woman in half. Larsen intimates Helga’s
healthy sexual nature in her “restlessness,” and in her love of the bright colors that
Larsen knows are forbidden to respectable black women, but it is in the character of
Anne, the respectable “race” woman, where Larsen demonstrates the “sterility” of
Anne’s sexlessness contained under the mantle of “social value.” Married to Dr.
Anderson, Anne senses the sexual attraction between the two, and here Larsen lays bare
the type of marriage that ends “happily” with two committed souls who dedicate
themselves to the “race.”

Anne had perceived that the decorous surface of her new husband’s

mind regarded Helga Crane with that intellectual and aesthetic

appreciation which attractive and intelligent women would always

draw from him, but that underneath that well-managed section, in

a more lawless place where she herself never hoped or desired to

enter, was another, a vagrant primitive groping toward something

shocking and frightening to the cold asceticism of his reason. (124)
As Anne concludes about her husban “. . . . with her he had not to struggle against that
nameless and to him shameful impulse. . . .,” but Anne also struggles against that impulse
because of the long tradition of separating black women from the myth of their inherent
sexuality.

The compromise of halving the myth of black female sexuality contributes to the
novel’s ambivalent closure. Larsen’s textual strategy of “splitting” the myth of the black
woman in half, as I suggested earlier, is close to the Lacanian notion of the “post-mirror
stage” of childhood development. The text reﬂects the tension Larsen faces between the
nineteenth century images of black women as non-sexual vessels of social value, and the
present questioning and challenges to those very same values by black women who were
themselves excluded from the models of black female respectability by their skin color
and class. But Larsen’s ending for Helga best exempliﬁes Larsen’s ambivalent desire of
creating spaces in the text- that manages to both depict and contain black female
sexuality.

Larsen brings Helga close to sexual disaster as she shares an unexpected kiss from
Dr. Anderson who gives in to the “nameless, shameless” impulse that his wife Anne

refuses in herself. But the passionate kiss between Helga and Anderson awakens

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unsatisﬁed desire in Helga: “. . . .all power seemed to ebb away, and a long-hidden, half-
understood desire welled up in her with the suddenness of a dream.” Later, at a formal
tea, Anderson tells her that he wants to see her again. “Alone.”

She had carried away from yesterday’s meeting a feeling of increasing

elation. It had seemed to her that she hadn’t been so happy, so exalted,

in years, if ever. All night, all day, she hadmentally prepared herself

for the coming consummation; physically too, spending hours before

the mirror. (135)
But Helga is torn between individual desire, and the imperatives of black middle-class
expectations; desire must be contained, the text argues, in order to refute the sexual
desires inirnical to healthy black marriages like Anderson’s and Anne’s.

Eight o’clock had come at last and with it Dr. Anderson. Only then had

uneasiness come upon her and a feeling of fear for possible exposure.

For Helga Crane wasn’t, after all, a rebel from society, Negro society.

It did mean something to her. She had no wish to stand alone. But these

late fears were overwhelmed by the hardiness of insistent desire. (135)
The ﬁnal meeting with Anderson, however, is not what she expects, as Anderson
apologizes for his boorish behavior - “I could kick myself. It was, it must have been,
Tavenor’s rotten cocktails.” Helga puts a good face on the rejection — “She had even
laughed a little.” But it is the “after all” in the text that resolves Larsen’s textual problem
in Anderson’s sexual rejection of Helga. “She felt that he had belittled and ridiculed her.

And thinking this, she had suddenly savagely slapped Robert Anderson with all her

86

might, in the face.” However, Anderson’s rejection does little to solve Helga’s — or for
that matter — Larsen’s struggle to both posit a female sexuality, and to conform to
expected societal conventions for single, black women.

The “slap,” and Anderson’s rejection, allows the text to momentarily resolve the
tension between desire and convention, but Helga is not convinced — “She had, she told
herself, been perfectly justiﬁed in slapping Dr. Anderson, but she was not convinced. She
had ruined everything.”

Ruined it because she had been so silly as to close her eyes to all

indications that pointed to the fact that no matter what the intensity

of his feelings or desires might be, he was not the sort of man who

would for any reason give up one particle of his own good opinion

of himself. Not even for her. Not even though he knew that she had

wanted so terribly something special ﬁ'om him. Something special.

And now she had forfeited it forever. Forever. (136-137)
Helga, rushing blindly into the unknown, stumbles into one of the store-front sanctiﬁed
churches common to Harlem Southern migrants. The working-class worshipers, catching
sight of her fancy attire, proclaim her “A scarlet ‘oman. Come to Jesus, you pore los’
Jezebel!” The interpellation of what she almost became, stirs Helga as the worshipers
whip themselves into orgiastic frenzy. “she felt herself possessed by the same madness;
she too felt a brutal desire to shout and to sling herself about.” Here the text brings back
the tension between Larsen’s ambivalence apropos black female sexuality, and deposits

the female sexual impulse where it belongs: with the black working and lower classes.

87

Still under the orgiastic sway of the black church: “Little by little the performance
took on an ahnost Bacchic vehemence. Behind her, before her, beside her, frenzied
women gesticulated, screamed, wept, and tottered to the praying of the preacher, which
had gradually become a cadenced chant.” And it is in this state, of what Roland Barthes
identiﬁes as jouissance, that the male representative of sexual order, the preacher, rescues
Helga from that “forever” of sexual negation.

That man! Was it possible? As easy as that? Instantly across her still
half-hypnotized consciousness little burning darts of fancy had shot
themselves. No. She couldn’t. It would be too awful. Just the same,
what or who was there to hold her back? Nothing. Simply nothing.
nobody. Nobody at all. (143)
Helga risks all, and succumbs to desire —- “After all, there was nothing to hold her back.
Nobody to care. She stopped sharply, shocked at what she was on the verge of
considering. Appalled at where it might lead her. . . .
The man - what was his name? - thinking that she was almost about to
fall again, had reached out his arms to her. Helga Crane had deliberately
stopped thinking. She had only smiled, a faint provocative smile, and
pressed her ﬁngers deep into his arms until a wild look had come into
his slightly bloodshot eyes. (144)
The preacher offers a life-line which eventually allows the text to resolve itself by
containing black female sexuality in the approved manner.

And so in the confusion of seductive repentance Helga Crane was married

88

to the grandiloquent Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, that rattish yellow

man who had so kindly, so unctuously, proffered his escort to her hotel

on the memorable night of her conversion. (145)
Helga’s moment of sexual bliss is already one that subverts the text of female
I respectability, but following Barthes, the text further disrupts the political intention of the
black middle- class who used legal, and lawful marriage as a political weapon in the ﬁght
for equal rights. For Helga, following the conventions does not present a happy closure to
the dilemma between sexual pleasure and sexual chastity. Helga soon learns the price she
must pay for covering her sexuality under legal marriage, as she hears four children in
quick succession, and grows to loath her husband even more. As McDowell notes —
“Closing the novel on this note, Larsen openly castigates the dual price — marriage and
pregnancy/childbearing -— that women pay for sexual expression” (87). But we should
also consider the text as a re-visioning of the conventional marriage plots of early women
writers whose texts discreetly closed around black middle-class up-lift. Black female
expressions of sexuality - and Larsen’s text has no other place to put it — resides in the
culture of the classes below respectable “race” women like Anne and Iola Leroy.
Although Larsen’s text attempts to solve the tension between a black female sexual
autonomy, the text, nevertheless, fails on that score, but it is important to consider the
very real challenges Larsen and her fellow writer Jessie Fauset were in contention with
during the Harlem Renaissance who because of their class and color were able to express

a sexual identity forbidden to black middle-class women.

89

Showing Their Collective Assess
In many black working and lower-class families whenever children misbehaved, or

“acted-out” in public, many black mothers would whip them for “showin’ their assess” in
front of grown folks. For the rise of a uniquely Aﬁican American cultural formation
“showing ass” became an important constituent of public performance which allowed
marginalized black folks the opportunity to show their “black assess” in a form that was
in their control. Arriving with Southern migrants to Northern cities, like Harlem, the
blues was formed from a black cultural matrix that combined the sacred with the profane,
but the thread that linked the two together was that of personal ﬁeedom. Angela Davis
points out that the blues form “rose to become the most prominent secular genre in early
twentieth-century black American music.”

As it came to displace sacred music in the everyday lives of black people,

it both reﬂected and helped to construct a new black consciousness. This

consciousness interpreted God as the Devil, religion as the not-secular,

God as the opposite of the Devil, religion as the not-secular, and the

as largely sexual. With the blues came the designations “God’s music”

and “the Devil’s music.” The former was performed in church — although

it could also accompany work - while the latter was performed in jook

jook joints, circuses, and traveling shows. (6)
Very often, the musical structure and “sexual” emotions were the same as the new blues
forms transformed the staid black spiritual into the Gospel, thus, it is not accidental that

Larsen depicts Helga’s sexual bliss in the midst of a black “sanctiﬁed” church. However,

90

the blues perfectly captured a new found freedom for many blacks wh had cause to
celebrate “owning” their own bodies.

“Sovereignty in sexual matters marked an important divide between life during
slavery and life after emancipation” (4). As Davis rightly pinpoints, material conditions
for former slaves did not improve after freedom, but “it was the status of their personal
relationships that was revolutionized.”

The birth of the blues was aesthetic evidence of new psychosocial

realities within the black population. This music was presented by

individuals singing alone, accompanying themselves on such

instruments as the banjo or guitar. The blues therefore marked the

advent of a popular culture of performance, with the borders of

performer and audience becoming increasingly differentiated. (5)
Rooted in the oral vernacular of the mass of darker-skinned blacks, the blues as a
revision of the plantation songs, allowed blacks an oral text in which to convey their
experiences in a hostile racial atmosphere. But it was in the personal realm, especially the
sexual, that offered an opposing text to the emerging black middle-class text that focused
on bodily restraint, sobriety, and Christian piety. The blues text was thus an attractive
text for liberatory expressivity, and like the written texts of black middle-class women,
the blues became an attractive vehicle for black women to express themselves as
sexually, autonomous subjects.

The blues form as it traveled North during the Great Migration in the early 19205

was dominated by two extraordinary women: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and Bessie Smith.

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First. both women in appearance challenged the prevailing colorist standards of black
middle-class female writers; their attractiveness to the millions of dark-skinned black
women who were made to feel the unattractiveness of their dark skin and “nappy” hair,
was the fact that here were women who placed “them” at the center of their oral
‘ narratives. The songs of these blues women gave friendly advice, and not lectures on how
to behave in front of white people. Unlike the early narratives of Frances E. W. Harper,
and their contemporaries Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset, in the blues narrative there was
no need for “double-voicing.” Although the blues was close to the black folkist narratives
of another contemporary, Zora Neale Hurston, much of Hurston’s work (as ﬁne as it is)
in many ways is conscious of its “anthropological” appeal to whites. In the songs of
Rainey and Smith, poor women could see their lives reﬂected in the blues. The important
part of the form, signiﬁcantly, was its collective nature which followed a familiar
tradition. “They were the collective property of the black community, disseminated, like
folktales, in accordance with the community’s oral tradition.”
A blues sung by one person and heard, remembered, revised, and resung ‘
by another belonged as much to the second performer as to the ﬁrst. This
socializing character of the blues rendered conscious the shared nature of
emotional experience as well as the collective character of the blues form
itself. (Davis 136)
However, their marginal status allowed the female blues singer to un-arnbivalently

project the black woman as a sexual subject, which is what Deborah E. McDowell refers

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to as their predicament between black bourgeois morality and the “free love” atmosphere
of the 19205.

In songs like “I’m Wild About That Thing” — “Give it to me, papa, I’m wild about
that thing/Do it easy, honey, don’t get rough/From you, papa, I can’t get enough/Please
don’t hold it, baby, when I cry/Gimme every bit of it, else I’ll die/ Gee, I like your ting-a-
ling” — the expression of open sexuality deliberately revised the established trope of
black female sexuality — the blues explicitly embraced, and signiﬁed on the myth of the
black Jezebel in a ways that horriﬁed the respectable black middle and upper-classes.
Equally horrifying was the fact that the blues — and the dark-skinned, lower class women
who sang them — were increasingly (thanks to the recording industry) noticed by whites
eager for something new. By “showing their assess” in public, the lighter-skinned elites
wrapped the entitlements of class and color even tighter around themselves as Smith,
especially, was vocal on her contempt for light-skinned women in general. The
appearance of the female blues singer, thus, allowed black conservative moralists to
“dump” the excess of female sexuality directly on the nappy heads of dark-skinned
J ezebels.

As Angela Davis argues because the blues were not ideologically bound by the
tenets of bourgeois black women’s clubs, “they could issue more direct and audacious
challenges to male dominance. . . . that refused to privilege racism over sexism, or the
conventional public realm over the private as the preeminent domain of power” (42).
Rainey and Smith, especially were know to be the “patriarchs” of their families of

traveling male and female musicians; Smith, a large imposing woman, was known for her

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“colorful” language when crossed, and was not averse to using her ﬁsts in physical
confrontations with other women, and men. Furthermore, the open sexuality of the blues
also includes the unmentionable topic of homosexuality. Rainey’s audience were well
aware of her sexual attraction for women, and for those who did not know, the lyrics of
“Prove It On Me Blues” demonstrates just how much of a “wild woman” Rainey was.
The point here is that the open contravening of patriarchal order often allowed the
disapproval of these women to cross class lines. The community reaction to Shug Avery
from The Color Mle is a telling example.

Shug Avery vividly recalls the ﬁerce independence of the blues women whose
independence from patriarchal control was seen as a detriment to domestic order, and
Christian values. For Celie, trapped in a marriage that treats her as little more than a
slave, Shug represents the impossible: a freedom reserved for men. A sick Shug returns
home to the community’s disapproval: “Shug Avery sick and nobody in this town want to
take the Queen Honeybee in. Her mammy say She told her 50. Her pappy say, Tramp. A
woman at church say she dying - maybe two berkulosis or some kind of nasty woman
disease.” Thus, the intent is to imply that Shug’s sexual independence is the cause of her
“nasty woman disease.” Accordingly, the minister takes Shug’s transgressive body as his
text as an example to the other women about falling from patriarchal control.

Even the preacher got his mouth on Shug Avery, now she down he take
her condition for his text. He don’t call no name, but he don’t have to.
Everybody know who he mean. He talk bout a strumpet in short skirts,

smoking cigarettes, drinking gin. Singing for money and taking other

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women mens. Talk bout slut, hussy, heifer and streetcleaner. (40)

As Davis notes, the female blues singer not only disrupted the strict binaries between
the sacred and the profane, but they also “provided a space in which the coercions of
bourgeois notions of sexual purity and ‘true womanhood’ were absent” (44). As their
lyrics suggest, the female blues singer in the work of working-class female up-lift
directly called into question the unitary model of black womanhood based on sexual
chastity. This re-working, however, does not mean that they were not insensible to the
effect of slavery on the female body, but the importance of their disruption of the black
patriarchal text for female sexual conformity exposed the spaces that allowed them to
suggest other options of “true-womanhood.”

The legacy of class and color tensions in the cultural products of African American
women that I have attempted to outline should be considered as pieces of a quilt that
stitches together a variety of “differences” that together make up — or at least indicates —
the problems of essentializing the black female experience. The problems of privileging
some experiences over others on the basis of skin color, phenotype, and economic class
position as I have attempted to argue, is a fruitless, and ultimately futile exercise as
different groups in the African American community continue to contest the class rights
to a black cultural authenticity. This consideration compelled an examination of the oral
vernacular of the blues in order to resist marginalizing working-class responses.

The importance of blues forms call attention also to the stylistic differences in
black women’s creative efforts in intentionality. On the one hand, the written texts of

authors of the post-Reconstruction and early twentieth century were readily available,

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and often intended for an audience outside of the black community which accounted for
their dualistic structure. However, this was not the case for the traditional oral vemacular,
a style that can be traced ﬁ'om the plantation to the blues, and ultimately to the works of
Walker, Morrison and other contemporary black women writers. This genealogy, in fact,
contributes to many women writers who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement to
trace their creative heritage to Zora Neale Hurston whose works reﬂect the agency of the
missing voices of rural black women, and captures the oral vernacular dismissed by the
cultural elite of the Harlem Renaissance. Although, I have not dealt with the works of
Hurston here, this is not an indication that I consider her works less of an important
component of my discussion.

Although my concern is not with tracing, or establishing a tradition of women’s
writing, I hope that I have suggested a variety of strategies that illuminate a thematic
trope that calls for a constant re-evaluation of the continued issues of intraracial and
intraclass difference based on how black women represented themselves from the late

nineteenth-century to the beginnings of the twenty-ﬁrst.

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Chapter Three: Representin’ and Frontin’: Images in Color
Introduction

As social critic bell hooks explains in Reel to Reel: Race, Sex and Class at the
Mayias, the movies provide a discursive narrative in which spectator and narrator share a
dialogue about the constitutive elements that we believe about “race, sex, and class.” For
many spectators, the movies provide not only aesthetic pleasure, but “a common starting
point” in which we are able to enter a series of dialogues about what we experience
through the communal narratives supplied by cinematic fantasy (2). However, shared
cinematic experiences are often dependent on the sharers’ ways of “seeing” and
assimilating images of race and gender, or rather the ways in which we are able to either
accept or resist cinematic illusion. “Whether we call it ‘willing suspension of disbelief
or just plain submission,” explains hooks, “in the darkness of the theater most audiences
choose to give themselves over, if only for a time, to the images depicted and the
imaginations that have created those images” (3). hooks’ clear and thorough analysis
provides a working theoretical paradigm for my analysis of the visual images produced
by African Americans that, in themselves, reinforce, and re-inscribe intraracial dialogues
concerning gender, color, and class from the very inception of independent black
ﬁlmmaking.

In order to approach color and class bias in Aﬁican American visual culture, I
examine the color-caste system in early African American independent ﬁlm-making as a
response to the negative and demeaning cultural attributes signaled by the dark skin

(often whites in black-face) contained in ﬁlms like The Birth of A Nation. Anna Everett

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contends that early black spectators “were able to bring a critical distance to the
cinematic texts that featured white actors burlesquing of black people’s lives.”

Since these portrayals had so little to do with their real or ideal lives

And everything to do with the white racial imaginary, it is unlikely

That early black spectators were subject to the mirror phase of

Cinematic identiﬁcation with these caricatures. Rather, the critical

Distance permitted black audiences to read cinematic texts differently,

Perhaps even oppositionally. (31)
However, by opposing the mainstream stigma of darkened skin early black ﬁlm pioneers
also inadvertently reinforced assimilated values that associated skin color with class
position and gender desirability, often highly dependent on the political and cultural
values and aims for each black generation. Thus, for example, the light-skin color and
class centrality of the Lincoln and Micheaux ﬁlm companies in the early twentieth
century reﬂected the aspirations of the New Negro, a minute portion of the black middle-
class marked by their color, education and white middle-class values that often served to
separate them from the darker masses. This is not to say that the black middle-class
wished to be white themselves (a charge that comes to political fruition in the early
seventies era of the Black Power and Black Arts movements), but the ideology of an
American mainstream inclusion based on class behavior was too often preached from a
light-skinned, European featured face, or academically trained cultural nationalists who

decided what aspects of African American folkways should be mediated through ﬁlm.

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A Black Film 15. . . .And Black Film Ain’t
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the ways in which African Americans

visually represent the black experience ﬁltered through skin color and economic class
tensions endemic to the black community as a whole. Although the response to the
racism of Hollywood cinema from its lowly beginnings as a “toy,”to the explosion of
broadcast and cable television, called for an independent black ﬁlm praxis in order to
refute the racist images parading across movie and (later) television screens, deﬁning an
oppositional black visual aesthetic is highly problematic at best. The ﬁrst problem
concerns deﬁnitions. What exactly is a “black ﬁlm?” Black ﬁlm scholar Mark A. Reid in
Redeﬁning Black Film notes the problems of deﬁnition shared by white movie and
television executives alike, deﬁnitions which he ﬁnds “faulty or limited.”

Many earlier books that document this area deﬁne black ﬁlm too broadly

and presume that any ﬁlm with black characters is a black ﬁlm. Other

works identify black ﬁlm as those works written or directed by blacks,

and some texts use subjective criteria such as aesthetics or a black

perspective to deﬁne black ﬁlm. (1)

However, not any ﬁlm with black characters qualiﬁes as a “black” ﬁlm. 1972's Sounder

 

based on the book by a white author, and ﬁlmed by a white director from a black
authored screen-play, and starring an all black cast is considered by many African
Americans as a black ﬁlm classic, whereas many of the ﬁlms ﬁ'om the Blaxploitation era
(released and distributed by white ﬁlm studios) are considered to be problematic by many

black cultural critics as examples of a politically engaged, cultural representation of an

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emerging black ﬁlm oppositional aesthetic. As I demonstrate later, the very term
“independent black ﬁlm” is freighted with multiple meanings that suggest infra-class
struggles for black cultural authenticity.

In his (re)deﬁnition of black ﬁlm, Mark A. Reid argues for a distinction between
“black commercial ﬁlm”and “black independent ﬁlm.” The black independent ﬁlm, he
argues, is “a ﬁlm that focuses on the black community and is written, directed, produced,
and distributed by individuals who have some ancestral link to black Aﬁica” (2). Ed
Guerrero adds that black independent ﬁlms “exemplify” the “struggle to render forth-
right, nuanced interpretations of black life against the co-opting, homogenizing pressures
of the commercial cinema system” (169).Black Film theorist Gladstone L. Yearwood
emphasizes a concerted Afrocentric praxis for black independent ﬁlmmaking that “gives
priority to producing its own expressive paradigms, which redeﬁne the nature of
entertainment as a social institution and narrative as a means of encoding the world based
on its cultural requirements” (11). Thomas Cripps, however, refuses to make the
distinction between commercial and independent ﬁlm, and deﬁnes black ﬁlm “as those
motion pictures made for theater distribution that have a black producer, director, and
writer, or black performers; that speak to black audiences or, incidentally, to white
audiences possessed of pretematural curiosity, attentiveness, or sensibility toward racial
matters; and that emerge from self-conscious intentions, whether artistic or political, to
illuminate the Afro-American experience” (357). Although, I would agree with the ﬁrst
half of Cripps’ assessment, I would argue that no matter how “curious” whites are about

black life, black and white spectators do not view the images of blacks in the same way.

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Pointedly, James Snead adds that black independent ﬁlms “since the sixties have the
feeling of intimate conversations between ﬁlmmaker and audience, and deal with issues
within the black community, without special regard for a theoretical white viewer”
(117).These deﬁnitions are all well and good, especially as oppositional representations
that refute the one-sided, homogeneous image of blacks in commercial Hollywood ﬁlms;
however, given the intricate and often confusing costs of ﬁlm ﬁnance, a truly black
independent ﬁlm making is a perilous undertaking for minority ﬁlmmakers.

For many black ﬁlmmakers, the issue of ﬁnancing compromises the label of
“independence” as many black ﬁlmmakers actively compete for academic, governmental,
corporate grants to accomplish their artistic visions. “One can declare one’s
independence,” notes James Snead, “but in ﬁlm — a particularly collective and capital-
intensive art form — true independence is hardly attainable, even in the most modest
productions” (108). And many black ﬁlmmakers have had their vision modiﬁed by the
lures of the large commercial studios. Director Spike Lee was famously forced to seek
the ﬁnancial help of inﬂuential and wealthy black entertainers in order to ﬁnish his vision
of Malcolm X (1992) when he exceeded Warner Brothers “skimpy” line-budget for the
three hour plus ﬁlm, and issued their preference “for the Malcolm after Mecca, when he
stopped calling white folk blue-eyed grafted devils” (Generation X 179). Smaller, and
inexpensive black ﬁlms, notes Guerrero, often have a harder time gaining the ﬁnancial
resources achieved by the glossier Malcolm X. Lee, of course, was no stranger to the lack
of ﬁnancing many black independents face, and recalls the arduous task of ﬁnancing his

break-out ﬁlm She’s Gotta Have It (1986): “I had no money coming in, so I had to hold

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off the debtors because I knew if I had enough time to at least get it in good shape to
show, we could have some investor screenings” (Diawara 7). Chameleon Street (1989),
for example, “was ﬁnanced and made for around $1 million, largely through his
[Wendell B. Harris] efforts at persuading friends, professionals, and community members
to invest in the project” (173). Noting that “independent ﬁlmmaking causes many people
to become poor,” Manthia Diawara, points out that: “It takes more than six years for
some ﬁlmmakers to gather the money for one ﬁlm. Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With
Angel, and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust came only after arduous years (10) of
fund-raising. Haile Gerima has been trying to raise funds for N_t_rpp for several years
now” (6).

Along with the difﬁcult issue of ﬁnancing, moreover, was the arduous task of
distribution. Small budgeted ﬁlms that dealt with the complexities of the black
experience, in other words, the black experience unfamiliar to a majority of whites, were
often relegated to boutique “art houses,” ﬁlm festivals, and museums in urban areas
sophisticated enough to support venues for “alternative” cinema. Further, adds Guerrero,
is the matter of marketing at a time (1990) when “much of the black audience is a youth
market and as such is action-adventure oriented” (172). Complex, black independent
ﬁlms like To Sleep With Anger and Daughters of the Dust (1990), thus, never reach
mainstream markets due to the failure of major ﬁlm distributors in marketing these ﬁlms

to black audiences’. Often ﬁlms like Daughters of the Dust and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa

 

 

’ We must also take into consideration the demise of “downtown” theaters in favor of the suburban multi-
plex which followed close on the heels of white-ﬂight ﬁ'om the inner cities.

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(1993) were speciﬁcally marketed by their respective ﬁlmmakers through the network of
black sororities and fraternities as elite black cultural events. Such marketing strategies,
unfortunately, were not conducive to wide-spread marketing through out black urban
America . Although some independent black ﬁlms did manage to break out of the “art
house” niche, ﬁlms like Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklm (1991) and Robert
Townsend’s Hollmood Shufﬂe (1987) found success with young, black urban audiences
who could relate to the urban grittiness of Straight Out of Brooklm , and the comedy of
Hollyvyood Shufﬂe more than they could to the subtle shadings (and subtitles) of an
intellectually complex ﬁlm like Julie Dash’s elegiac Daughters of the 2151.

However, the late 19905 witnessed the growth of a “true” black independent ﬁlin-
making with the combination of inexpensive digital cameras, and an inﬂux of hip-hop
money and hip-hop savvy. These ﬁlms by-passed white ﬁnancing, marketing, and
distribution by relying on young hip-hop entrepreneurs, rappers, and ex-gangbangers.
The bulk of the plots in these straight-to-video productions center on familiar tropes of
gang-warfare and the violent world of drug dealers, and were advertised by word-of-
mouth and in magazines devoted to hip-hop. As Ed Guerrero notes: “because of audience
segmentation, ever-shrinking release times from theater to tape, and a more nuanced and
ﬂexible video distribution system, the VCR format encourages medium-to low-budget
productions. . . .that mediate the territory between the independent and mainstream
sensibilities” (206). However, many aspiring video directors have used these ﬁlms as
additional training ground in order to move to video shoots which in themselves are

elaborate mirri-movies. With extremely low-budgets, and minimal marketing and

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manufacturing costs, ﬁlms like 11th (1998) — directed by music video director Hype
Williams, and with an all-black cast of hip-hop stars — are extremely popular (and un-
tracked. by white critical institutions) with young, black audiences. Additionally,
mainstream Hollywood has taken notice of the cross-over appeal of popular rap artists
whose “underground” ﬁlms have garnered attention,"and major distributors and ﬁlm
studios have partnered, for example, with ex-NWA rapper/actor Ice Cube and his
independent ﬁlm company CubeVision to distribute the highly popular (and proﬁtable)
May and Barbershop franchises.

A new site for independent black ﬁlmmaking, curiously enough, is the black
church, a traditional critic of black ﬁlm. Initially, the entrance to black Christian
dramatic works were through a series of popular formulaic plays that combined black
Christian values, comedy, and copious amounts of Gospel music often performed in
church, or in rented theaters. Although the level of play-writing skill varies, the plays
have failed to attract close critical attention as speciﬁc black cultural representations.
Currently, Hollywood and white critics have been astounded by the huge box-ofﬁce
success of Tyler Perry’s The Diary of A Mad Black Woman (2005) based on his long-
running series of plays targeted to black Christian conservative middle-class women.
Perry’s stage plays5 are highly proﬁtable precisely because his clever marketing strategy

(word of mouth)speciﬁcally targets black middle-class churches who enjoy his blend of

 

" Many of these ﬁlms are distributed by street-comer merchants. Video rental out-lets have also taken
notice of these ﬁlms’ appeal — they are usually found labeled as “Urban Hits.”

’ Perry’s plays have also enjoyed success on DVD, another outlet for independent black ﬁlm making out-
side of the white mainstream.

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African American religious and cultural values that many (especially black women) ﬁnd
missing in mainstream cinema. lngeniously, Perry’s plays are centered around black
women, the importance of family and cultural traditions, and generous helpings of broad
comedy. Perry’s career as black independent producer can be directly traced to black
pioneers Oscar Micheaux and his contemporary the Christian ﬁlm-maker Eloise Gist who
unlike Micheaux never had to resort to white ﬁnancing. But in terms of narrative
structure, and thematic material Perry is the spiritual heir of Spencer Williams whose
1941 ﬁlm The Blood of Jgsus “utilizes African American religious iconography and
practice as structural and stylistic devices.” Although Perry’s Tha Diag of A Mad Black
_W_orhah is not as overt in the use of religious iconography, his ﬁlm does share with
Williams’ ﬁlm the use of “Aﬁican American spiritual music. . . .as an integral formal
element of the narration” (Yearwood 36). My point here is that regardless of aesthetic
values, these ﬁlms do manage to ﬁt Reid and Guerrero’s deﬁnition of an independent
black ﬁlm and further recognition of a black heterogeneity that are over-looked because
of a class and cultural elitism practiced by black cultural critics.

Again, turning to Mark A. Reid’s narrow deﬁnition of a speciﬁcally entity labeled
“black ﬁlm,” Reid acknowledges the inherent problems in the black independent ﬁlm as I
have outlined. However, he goes further in his deﬁnition by separating the “commercial”
from what he identiﬁes as “the black independent ﬁlm.” The black commercial ﬁlm, he
states, “is limited. . . .to any feature-length ﬁction ﬁlm whose central focus is the Afro-
American community.”

This ﬁlm is written, directed, or produced by at least one black person in

105

collaboration with non-black people. F ilrns included in this category are

distributed by major American ﬁlm companies. (4)
Although Reid does point out the beneﬁts for black ﬁlrn-makers who, as he says, “will
seize any opportunity to work for a major motion picture studio,” because of the
Commercial studio’s structural ﬁnancial support, there is the implication that blacks
involved with the
big commercial studios, no matter how tangentially, are some how less “authentically”
black than those who rely on governmental and philanthropic grants and agencies. As he
notes, “there are some black ﬁlmmakers who resist the calls of fame and increased
production budgets.”

Blacks involved with major ﬁlm studios also receive automatic

publicity, which increases their sense of self-importance. . . .a

ﬁnancially and critically successful black ﬁlmmaker, such as Spike

Lee or John Singleton, gains a discernible amount of control over

future projects, crews, and production budgets. (125)
Reid does have a point, but his statement is infused with an elitism belied by his thinly
veiled tone about the content of ﬁlms which he considers proper black ﬁlm. Implicit in
Reid’s fulmination against Lee and Singleton is the assertion that true, independent black
ﬁlmmaking is purer and more authentically black; after all — as he points out — ﬁlms by
talented and brilliant ﬁlmmakers like Dash, Gerima, Burnett, and joumalist/ﬁlm-maker
William Greaves are important black cultural representations of African American

heterogeneity that do not pander to mainstream expectations like the work of Lee and

106

Singleton. However, the problem in Reid’s obvious bias lies in the inaccessibility of a
majority of black independent cinema to a wider African American audience who —
regardless of what Reid would hope for —— ﬁnd that these ﬁlms do not speak to them in the
same ways that the average Hollywood product does. Thus, Thomas Cripps is partly
correct when he points out that “Black ﬁlm taken in its narrowest sense then consists of
only a tiny body of work seen by a coterie of black moviegoers, then consigned to an
early death in dusty storerooms, not to be seen again until brought to light in ‘white’
repositories like the Library of Congress” (358).

Reid is correct, though, when he argues that the black commercial ﬁlm rarely
address issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality directly. But, I would counter that
implicit in many black commercial ﬁlms the issues of class and skin color — especially
when it intersects with gender — are indeed explicit in the images produced by blacks for
blacks. Films like Spike Lee’s School Daze and Jungle Fever , and John Singleton’s
Boyz N the Hood directly and indirectly address the legacy of genderized color and class
tensions within the Aﬁican American community. Singleton’s ﬁlm, in particular,
graphically articulates the hopes and limitations of class and race as means to ghetto
survival, or ghetto escape. School Daze (which I discuss later) satirized the color-struck
world of black colleges which earned Spike Lee the accusation of “airing dirty laundry”
for the titillation of white spectators. Furthermore, many white critics who became
“experts” on black life because they praised John Singleton’s Bog N the Hood (1991),
and Allen and Albert Hughes’s 1993 nihilistic gangsta’ tale Menace to Socieg were at a

critical loss when confronted with the world of middle-class, college educated, and

107

articulate blacks in ﬁlms like The Best Man (1999), and The Brothers (2001), or
Waiting to Exhale (1995) and 1998's How Stella Got Her Groove Back which combined
disturbed their image of African Americans as “different” from their own middle-class
values as Entrnan and Rojecki correctly assess:

Blacks are prisoners of the widespread acceptance by Whites of what is

understood to be the prototypical - the most representative — Black

person for Whites, the prototype of the Black person is a lower class or

“under” class individual of little economic attainment or status. That

means Blacks of outstanding attainment in several of the dimensions

will be seen as atypical, as the exception. (53)
However, the ﬁlms that actively resisted (white) expectations of African Americans
(along were immensely popular with black middle-class audiences who could not
identify with the plethora of one-dimensional “gangs-in-the-hood” style depictions of
black experience, no matter how well done. The critical reception of these ﬁlms of black,
rrriddle-class urban professionals (and this goes back to Cripps’ statement about white
“pretematural curiosity, attentiveness, or sensibility”) by white critics — and most likely a
majority of whites — could not “ﬁnd” the image of blacks that most replicated the images
seen on the evening news. The black resistance found in these ﬁlms does not mean that
black commercial ﬁlm-makers did not utilize the same color-coded signiﬁers familiar to
black spectators. As I argue later, gradations of skin color continue to be used by African
American visual artists to communicate class and gender values that are “rea ”

exclusively by black spectators.

108

Further compounding the problems of ﬁnancing, marketing, and distribution is the
issue of gender, both on camera and behind. Independent ﬁlm-maker Yvonne Welbom
recounts the difficulties of black female ﬁlm-makers in her documentary Sisters in

Cinema (2003) where she interviews a number of black women whose ﬁhrls center on

 

gender and sexuality issues. Signiﬁcantly, as Welbom makes clear, as we re-discover and
re-evaluate the early works of black male ﬁlm-makers like Oscar Micheaux and Spencer
Williams, little is known (or written) about Tressie Souders who wrote, produced, and
directed A Woman’s Error (1922), or Marie P. Williams who produced Flames of Wrath
(1923). The exclusion of both women in black cinema history, again, points to the
doubled oppression black women continue to face in a medium controlled by men where
women have little access to the means of production, although some have found success
in articulating the past and present lives of African American women. Continued limited
access based on gender, thus, circumscribes a true picture of heterogeneity in black
experience, or as the late Toni Cade Bambara terms black women
inclusion:”Afrafemcentric orientation.” Heterosexist control over the available images of
the black community (as oppositional practice) also negates sexual diversity as black gay
and lesbian voices are further marginalized under an increasingly black hetero-normative
ideology. .

In a way, my argument involves a middle ground between the widely seen black
commercial ﬁlm (and television) and what Mark A. Reid considers an authentic
independent black ﬁlm. As I have pointed out, an all-black ﬁlm is difﬁcult to deﬁne

because ﬁlm-making remains a hybrid entity of available, and technical talent, limited

109

access to ﬁnancial avenues, and ﬁnally, the important availability of marketing and
distribution. As Ed Guerrero suggests labels of “independent” and “commercial” cinemas
are not as clear cut as many would have them - and Spike Lee, once hailed as a
promising black independent, is a case in point. Hence, my criteria for black ﬁlm is a
ﬁlm with black talent behind and in front of the camera, and a narrative that speaks to, or
reﬂects any aspect of the Aﬁican American experience. As 1 demonstrate, the speciﬁc
aspects of African American ﬁlmmaking address issues of skin color and class bias, often
implicitly in casting and narrative choices that have historically made attempts to
recuperate an image of African Americans. These worthy attempts, I point out, also
reﬂect internal tensions within the community itself as political ideologies conﬂict and
compete for the prize of black cultural authenticity.
Overwhelmed By the Impossible: Early Black Independents
Biographer Richard Schickel writes about the pivotal position of D. W. Grifﬁth in
American ﬁlm history: “It may be argued that his contribution to the development of ﬁlm
technique” ——

a contribution that may be summarized by saying that he had the insight

to understand that a technological novelty could be converted into an

instrument capable of sustaining complex narrative development, an

instrument that partook of some of the qualities of several other arts, yet

had its own remarkable language and imperatives. . . .(12)
What Schickel and other mainstream ﬁlm historians point to, is Griffrth’s importance to

the artistic possibilities of American cinema as a concrete artistic form. This is not to say

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that Grifﬁth (as commonly believed) invented the technical aspects of ﬁlm-making, but
Grifﬁth’s importance consists in putting together the technology of ﬁlm-making and
American racial ideology that inﬂuenced generations of American ﬁlm-makers (black
and white) who came after him. “He borrowed, invented, and learned pacing,
strengthened the narrative ability of the medium, and adopted the conventions of
melodrama,” explains Thomas Cripps, “to the grammar of the ﬁlm” (27). Although
Griffith was not the ﬁrst American ﬁlm-maker to depict racial stereotypes to early
American spectators -— indeed, the issue of “racial difference” was already in evidence at
the beginnings of motion pictures as Jim Pines points out. “The black image was
inherently useful not just in terms of entertainment value, though this played a highly
important part overall, but also, and more dynamically, in terms of its iconic-cultural
recogrrizability” (7). But with one ﬁlm, Grifﬁth set the iconic standard for the appearance
of blackness in ﬁlm: both as practice, and as oppositional resistance.

In a way, Grifﬁth could be considered (at the very least) a progenitor to African
American independent ﬁhn-making due to the mainstream reception of The Birth pf A

Nation (1915). Outraged at the ﬁlm’s ugly racism and travesty of historical truth,

 

Northern civil rights groups demanded an end to the ﬁlm’s appearances in American
cinemas. “Grifﬁth’s picture,” recounts Thomas Cripps, “had produced hasty decisions,
nationwide protests, and more direct action than anyone in the black leadership had ever
contemplated” (71). As with Grifﬁth’s ﬁlm, “It is virtually impossible,” asserts Jim
Pines, “to ﬁnd what one might consider a sympathetic black characterization in the

ﬁction ﬁlm before 1910, and even after this period, the notion of sympathetic racial

lll

images is highly dubious”(10). One remedy was to boycott the ﬁlm in each Northern city
that the ﬁlm appeared. However, Cripps points out that one alternative response from
Aﬁican American civil rights and cultural groups was “to move toward a cinema, rather
than a censorship,” which meant a black cinematic response to Grifﬁth’s racial libel that
would also serve to “up-lift” the black masses who were arriving ﬁ'om a South —
gloriﬁed in The Birth of A Nation — in record numbers. The NAACP quickly organized a

ﬁlm production, Lincoln’s Dream a planned ﬁlm which, just as quickly, fell apart due to

 

“their fear of breaking the anonymity of the members and of losing money” (72).
Another cinematic response was the Aﬁican American produced W
(1918) planned by Booker T. Washington and his personal secretary, Emmett J. Scott.
However, the ambitious production, like the aborted Lrh' coln’s Dream adeptly
demonstrated the pitfalls of establishing a black cinematic praxis wholly independent
from white control and the ideological aims of competing civil rights agendas. The
results were disastrous due to the mismanagement of scanty ﬁnancing, and the complete
erasure of black interests. The lack of ﬁnancial backing, however, did not deter other
blacks ﬁ'om entering the market, among the most promising black ﬁlm companies
created in the wake of the controversy of Grifﬁth’s paean to white supremacy was the
Lincoln Motion Picture Company.

According to Thomas Cripps: “By the end of the war there were so many small
black companies that overextension and overproduction resulted.” Encouraged by the
limited success of George P. and Noble Johnson’s The Realization of A NegoL’s

Ambition (1915) and The Troomr of Troop K (1916) for their new Lincoln Motion

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Picture Company, dozens of hastily formed black motion picture companies appeared to
take advantage of, what many hoped to be, a new ﬁeld for black cultural representations.
The advertisements in black newspapers and journals promised lofty ambitions, and
glossy brochures reﬂected a turning point in Aﬁican American cinematic images
produced by blacks for blacks:

Charlatans and “good race men” competed in the same markets, each

claiming “to offset the evil effects of certain photoplays that have

libeled the Negro,” “to bring about interracial understanding,” “to

show the better side of Negro life,” and “to inspire in the Negro a

desire to ‘climb higher.”3 (84).
But, again, burgeoning ambitions for a black motion picture industry to offer up-lifting
images of the New Negro were hampered by the lack of ﬁnancing, and a reliable system
of distribution.“White companies not only had distribution centers,” continues Cripps, “
regional exchanges, and hookers, but even while their money was tied up in current
releases they could still conﬁdently expect loans from the Bank of America and other
staid institutions” (87). However, George Johnson acutely aware of the ﬁnancial and
distribution problems faced by black movie entrepreneurs, coupled by the “frauds” and
the “wasteful spreading of meagre (sic) capital,” “attempted to build a network of

personal friends across the nation to serve as hookers. Later he would move to Los

 

6 Signiﬁcantly (as Thomas Cripps notes) earlier cinematic productions by African American entertainers
Bill Poster (The Railroad Porter-1912), blackface comedian Bert Williams (A Nﬂral Born Gamma”,

and the special appearance of heavy-weight boxer Jack Johnson (Eor His Mpthpr’s Sake] “went largely
unrecorded, even in the black press” (76) most likely because of their “coonish antics.” (See chapter 4).

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Angeles so they could merge production and distribution under one roof” (79). To their
credit, the Johnsons also “created an all-Negro exchange, printed their own advertising
handouts to accompany each release, and made their own preview slides” (80). But
unfortunately, their independent enterprise was not enough. Compounding the lack of
access to mainstream ﬁnancial investors was the unfortunate fact that there were too
many black companies chasing the too few black dollars necessary to sustain a much
needed market. As Cripps explains: “To demand loyalty to the race from the black world
was an anomaly in the larger American economic system. The plight of blacks seemed to
require communal rather than competitive activity. Competition seemed wasteful and
debilitating, especially with the market sprinkled with hidden white hackers and
exploiters” (85).

However, in the eagerness of the Johnson brothers to provide cinematic images
that were constructed “to inspire in the Negro a desire to climb higher,” the all-black
casting of their black dramas of middle-class life set a color precedent endemic to black
commercial ﬁhn-making. Irnpelled by the revolting racial constructions on screen by
white Hollywood early African American ﬁlm companies (hampered always by the
scarcity of funds and distribution) produced motion pictures that showed blacks in
sophisticated urban settings, and in dramatic situations that were far from the
“plantation” stereotypes of white imagination. Unlike the Hollywood depictions of
African Americans where white ﬁlm-makers preferred their blacks unmistakably Negroid
and black, the Johnsons (and later Oscar Micheaux) stocked their ﬁlms with the lightest,

European featured Aﬁican Americans they could ﬁnd — regardless of acting talent. The

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all-black cast movies took pains to provide “up-lifting” stories which many black
producers believed represented the new “realities” of black life. Unfortunately, the ﬁlms
of the Johnsons scrupulously avoided any suggestion of racial struggle, or racial disparity
among its black upper and rrriddle-class characters who appeared to have sprtmg ﬁrlly
formed as exemplars of the American Dream in a world completely inhabited by African
Americans. Produced for the new “race market”7 many of these ﬁlms, nevertheless,
represented black elite aspirations that could not help but keep intact the
elevated status of light-skinned blacks in urban black communities across America.
Thomas Cripps points out, however, that: “The most tangled problem of aesthetics

was the need for a mythic ﬁgure.”

Critics had already begun to see the larger-than-life mythic quality of the

cinema beyond its form and expression as art. Hence, movies presented

a sometimes unstated conundrum for black ﬁhn-makers because whites

to one degree or another had assimilated the core values of American life

and had developed mythic heroes to symbolize the values. (171)
Thus, many early black ﬁlms merely tapped into existing mythic images by “coloring”
them brown, thus, in “race ﬁlms” audiences could thrill to a black Sherlock Holmes, or a
black Valentino who were all lighter-skinned than the majority of audiences who enjoyed

— at the very least - non-stereotypical images of African Americans. Oscar Micheaux,

 

7 Early “race” ﬁlms were also hampered by the fact that many urban blacks lacked the disposable income
that would allow them to support black ﬁlm efforts, either as investors or paying customers. Equally
important was the censure of traditional Southern black Baptist churches who viewed movie-going as an
humeral frivolity. My maternal great-grandfather, a Baptist minister, forbade his children and grand -

children ﬁom attending movie houses. However, his daughter relaxed the rule and allowed her children to
see the “religious ﬁlms” of Cecil B. De Mille, but forbade any other Hollywood product.

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famously, exploited the practice in advertising his own ﬁlms. According to Donald
Bogle: “He modeled his stars after white Hollywood personalities and publicized them
as black versions.”

Handsome and smooth Lorenzo Tucker was ﬁrst referred to as the “black

Valentino.” Later when talkies came in, he was the “colored William

Powell.” Sexy and insolent Bee Freeman, 3 vamp ﬁgure, was the “sepia

Mae West.” Slick Chester, a character actor who played gangster roles,

was the “colored Cagney.” Lovely Ethel Moses was sometimes touted

as the “Negro Harlow.” (114)
Furthermore, as beﬁtting his aggressive promotion for his ﬁlms, Micheaux would often
show potential investors for a future ﬁlm the stills of his “stars” touting their “sale-
ability” as familiar Hollywood types. But the utilization of such obvious mythic reversals
did not mean that black independent ﬁlm-makers routinely followed white models of
screen heroic image making. Although many of the early “race” ﬁlms remain lost, from
existing stills, screen outlines, and other descriptions, “race” ﬁlms often addressed issues
of concern to the black communities, but in keeping with the color and class standards
within the black community, the black faces were as “white” as possible.

“They all thought that I was ﬁnished, but I am only started. ”

Donald Bogle and Micheaux scholar Pearl Bowser both recount the criticism

leveled at Micheaux’s color and class preferences. “What remains Oscar Micheaux’s

greatest contribution,”argues Bogle, “is often viewed by contemporary black audiences

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as his severest short-coming. That his ﬁlms reﬂected the interests and outlooks of the
black bourgeoisie will no doubt always be held against him.”

His ﬁhns never centered on the ghetto; they seldom dealt with

racial rrrisery and decay. Instead they concentrated on the problems

of “passing” or the difficulties facing “professional people.”
What Bogle points out, the impulse to demonstrate class differences in the black
community, remains a difficult problem today as the black middle-class continues to
grow and turn away from the current mainstream commercial appeal of “hood-life”
movies of the 19905. But Micheaux did focus on the problems many new Southern
migrants faced in Northern cities in ﬁlms like The Scar of Shame and Body and Sor_ll,
although Micheaux did not dwell on “racial misery,” Within Our Gates (1920) with its
scenes of rape and the lynching of black men was forced to have its more “inﬂammatory”
scenes cut during a wave of Northern racial violence. However, Micheaux’s ﬁlms did
transmit his own color and class bias in his ﬁxation on his light-skinned casts in upper
and rrriddle-class settings where, writes Manthia Diawara, he “posits Black upper-class
culture as that which should be emulated by lower-class Blacks in order to humanize [my
emphasis] themselves” (Black American Cinema 7). I would argue that what is held
against Micheaux is not his emphasis on middle-class lives, but (more signiﬁcantly) his
emphasis on the uniform light-coloring of his casts as the visible sign of humanness.
Even Bogle ﬁnds some merit in charging Micheaux with colorism, although he makes the
charge as palatable as possible beﬁtting Micheaux’s stature as a black “ﬁrst.”

He [Micheaux] was determined to depict blacks as just as affluent,

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just as educated, just as “cultured” as white America. Though

Micheaux’s ﬁlms — with their light bright leads and their darker

“lower” classes — might embarrass people today, they represent

an important part of black ﬁlm and social history. (115-116)
While I would agree with Bogle’s assessment of Micheaux’s intended purpose in casting
light-skinned actors in black middle-class settings, light-skinned elitism was not new in
Micheaux’s time, nor in the late twentieth-century, Micheaux’s colorism does not in
anyway erase his status as a black pioneer ﬁlm-maker. As Manthia Diawara maintains,
early black ﬁlm-makers like Micheaux explicitly opposed the images of white ﬁlm-
makers in their own ﬁlms where “Black people are neither marginalized as a problem,
nor singled out as villainous stereotypes. . . .” (7). This is the lasting importance of Oscar
Micheaux. Any “embarrassment” late twentieth-century black spectators may feel about
these early examples of black ﬁlm-making are most likely that the issue of colorism has
lasted into the twenty-ﬁrst century.

Incisive critics of Micheaux’s ﬁlms, Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence in their
invaluable and insightful assessment of Micheaux’s “color-caste system,” claim that
although “the question of color is a recurring interest for Micheaux. . . . his is not a
simple ‘infatuation with color,’ nor is it simply a narrative contrivance. . . .it is far more
complex.”

Although he was sometimes accused of casting by color, he criticized
the color-caste system within the community as destructive social

behavior. And although he created a star system of many fair-skinned

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performers. . . .chosen for their “look” and potential appeal to audiences,

he didn’t necessarily associate these “looks” with certain qualities, such

as goodness. (171)
And to support their point, the authors cite the dark-skinned Paul Robeson who plays a
dual role (hero and villain) in Body and Soul (1925), and the extremely light-skinned
Micheaux regular Larry Chenault who plays a “scoundrel.” In addition, Bowser and
Spence also cite the inexperienced Carl Mahon who as the “rugged outdoorsman hero,
acquires his swarthy complexion with dark makeup” in The Sy1_nbol of the Uncongumg
(1920). But as they report: “Carl Mahon, who did not think of himself as an actor, felt
that Micheaux cast him in romantic leads because of his ‘exotic looks,’ the combination
of dark skin and straight hair” (171). But I would argue that these “exceptions” hardly
support their discounting of Micheaux’s skin-color bias. First, Bowser and Spence do not
take into consideration Robeson’s stature among African Americans at the time.
Secondly, both critics fail to consider the fact that darkness of skin does not weigh as
heavily on black men as it does on black women because of a heterosexist culture. Black
men could, thus, judge themselves by other attributes while up-holding Eurocentric
aesthetics of beauty for black women.

Body and Soul was the cinematic debut of singer/actor Paul Robeson, and

Micheaux must have counted himself lucky in order to present someone of Robeson’s

stature in a role that showcased Robeson’s considerable dramatic ranges. Robeson’s

 

' Robeson, much to his considerable regret, would never again get another movie role that allowed him to
exhibit the dramatic range that Micheaux’s ﬁlm offered.

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dramatic abilities were also bolstered by his equably superior academic record at Rutgers
College (1915-1918), and at Columbia University Law School (1919-1923) at a time
when college educated black men were rare, and success at prestigious white institutions
was a cause of celebration among the black middle-class. Bowser and Spence even
acknowledge Micheaux’s practice of utilizing well-known black celebrities as “shared
points of identiﬁcation to build audiences and, by surrounding himself with known
people and identiﬁable names, validating his role as a moviemaker” 45). Even more
important, was the fact that dark skin was “acceptable”for black men who were college
educated, and/or successful in their chosen ﬁelds. A perfect example is the dark-skinned
(and self-conscious) African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar who was embraced
by the light-skinned elite because of his cultured manners and wide-spread celebrity as
black America’s premiere poet. Similarly, the equally dark Micheaux was accepted by
the black nriddle-class as a successful business and “race” man’. Dark-skinned women,
of course, were not accorded the same type of “pass,”which is reﬂected in Micheaux’s
color choices for his leading ladies.

“Micheaux,” writes Gladstone L. Yearwood, “calls attention to women in his ﬁlms
through his choice of attractive, light-skinned actresses to play various roles. Yet, the
narration does not develop an excessive voyeurism and its attendant sexism” (34). But I
would suggest that Micheaux’s ﬁlms do suggest a racial voyeurism in their emphasis on

light-skinned women often in intimate settings, or as near victims of sexual assault.

 

9 Both men (including Robeson) also followed the expected pattern for dark-skinned successful men by
marrying extremely light-skinned women as out-ward symbols of their success.

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Although Micheaux’s female characters disrupted the familiar tr0pe of feminine
whiteness by including a range of female character types (mothers, sweethearts, wives,
varnps), nevertheless, the women in a Micheaux conformed to the expected color and
straight hair visual requirements. Working against the prevailing moist dogma of the
black woman’s inherent sexuality, bell hooks argues that the ﬁlmmaker “encourages
audiences to resist the urge to construct a totalizing vision of woman, one that sees the
female as embodying all that is evil, licentious, and morally corrupt” (Black Lopks 139).
Bowser and Spence tellingly include a sample of Micheaux’s casting opinions in his own
hand where the director routinely noted the physical attributes (“bright complexion with
good hair,”“can pass for white”) of future players. Although Bogle, Bowser, and Spence
(among other perceptive critics) point to Within m Gates (1920), The 8% of sme
(1928), God’s Stepphildren (193 8) and other ﬁlms which condemned white racism, or
intraracial color and class bias, I would counter that although the narratives of these ﬁlms
were of concern to Aﬁican American spectators, it was the images and not the story that
demonstrated Micheaux’s inability to transcend his own color and class bias.

What is clear, even in “race ﬁlms” created to answer the demeaning images of
African Americans in American popular culture, is the fact that the mere absence of
darker skinned people (especially black women) was too conspicuous to be ignored by a
black audience experienced with a long history of skin color and black class values. Jane
Gaines in “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama, and Oscar Micheaux,” concludes that

“The jury is still out on Oscar Micheaux,” and ﬁnds that “there is much to he gained by

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an approach to Micheaux that insists upon qualifying his African-American heritage with
his class position.”

It has already been well established that Micheaux epitomized the

Black bourgeois class, and that his novels as well as his ﬁlms are

thematic tributes to individualism as well as testimonies to the

possibility of transcending race and class handicaps. (65)
Thus, Gaines privileges Micheaux’s class distinctions over the images of skin color,
although I would point out that Micheaux is working within a uniquely African American
paradigm where class and skin color are often conﬂated, an indication the suggests the
difﬁculty of separating one category over the other. In this context, the ﬁlm-maker’s
color choices may not have been just his personal choices, but also dictated by ﬁnancial
reasons and providential happenstance. I

Traveling to black communities in order to advertise his various ﬁlm projects,

Micheaux was often invited into the comfortable homes of the black middle-class whose
well-appointed homes provided “movie sets” for Micheaux’s limited budget. Shooting in
black middle-class homes, complete with photographs of black families, and black icons
(such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass) “add an air of prosperity and
sense of intimacy. . . .” As Bowser and Spence correctly point out —

These small details of characters’ lives are not insigniﬁcant; they are

referential and strategic, establishing the character and a sense of

place. They are markers of “authenticity” that provide a comfort zone

in this social place where Blacks can see credible images of themselves

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and their lives on screen. (130)
Using such locations not only precluded added costs for studio rentals, or set recreations,
but became an indelible part of an emerging black “realism” unseen in mainstream
productions of rural black “homely” cabins of white fantasy. Since many of the owners
of these well-appointed homes were often the light-skinned elite, Micheaux often
“invit ” them to try their hand at ﬁlm acting as recompense; still others were
approached as future investors. Other cost-cutting measures included “costuming” an
expense Micheaux often circumvented by asking performers to provide their own
clothing, and placing advertisements in black newspapers for “well-dressed persons” for
his scenes of the wealthy at play. By and large, darker-skinned working-class black folks
did not have the homes or expensive clothing Micheaux’s narratives called for, a fact that
most likely contributed to the color-casting. Furthermore, Micheaux as a director needed
experienced black actors (certainly a precarious economic occupation for African
Americans in the 19205), and the realities of Jim Crow and the promise of steady work in
Northern cities no doubt severely curtailed any acting aspirations of lower and working
class blacks. However, as a 1924 photograph of the all-black Lafayette Players (one of
the small black acting theatrical troupes of the time) suggests that dark skin and African
features were also a bar to the dramatic arts. The use of light-skinned players merely
reﬂected the social realities of Aﬁ'ican American life, not only for the perpetually

ﬁnancially-strapped ﬁlm-maker, but also for the black community as a whole.

123

In her analysis of The Scar of Shame, Micheaux’s tale of intraracial caste (class)
boundaries, Jane Gaines describes the effects of the ﬁlm’s color-caste system on what
she terms “the reader-viewer’s space.”

In The Scar of Shame, the stylistic discourse carrying the melos is
connected to the aesthetics of skin tone and hair texture played out

in light, shadow, and shade. This color scheme or code would be
known in its ﬁner gradations and variations only to black audiences -
to the group that would read a wealth of signiﬁcance in the difference
between processed and unprocessed coiffure, and would be sensitive
to all kinds of hair-splitting along caste lines. (73)

Micheaux’s investment in the ideology of racial “up-lift,” and his ﬁrm belief in
“individual responsibility,” cite Bowser and Spence, “challenged white deﬁnitions of
race without actually changing the terms.” Bowser, Spence, and Gaines pose a critical
question about the reception of the colorism and class bias to the all-black audiences of
the “race market” which demonstrates the conﬂicted ambivalence (and divided political)
arnhitions many black cultural leaders endorsed for the promise of respectable black
image making in the hands of blacks themselves. Class and color tensions were not an
early twentieth century phenomena; a history of living with the results of miscegenation,
and white favoritism for those who looked closer to themselves was as old as American
slavery, and some fortunate blacks soon established themselves as a distinct “caste”
separate from the mass of blacks who lacked the physical evidence of “white” blood.

And it was those light-skinned blacks who took the reins in establishing beauty and class

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standards in the black community by their own ambivalent absorption of white
supremacy.

Not all black spectators of Micheaux’s ﬁlms watched them uncritically, as Bowser
and Spence report. A striking example engendered a call for a black consumer boycott of
1938's God’s Stethhildren when many blacks strenuously objected that the ﬁlm
“slandered Negroes, holding them up to ridicule, and set light-skinned Negroes against
their darker brothers” (Bowser and Spence 24). Micheaux’s color-caste system, however,
was not the only criticism the ﬁlmmaker received from the black community. Micheaux,
like every black cultural producer was charged with presenting the “best” of the Race, an
imperative that was at odds with Micheaux’s stated goals of telling the “truth” — no
matter how hurtful to black self-esteem or black unity. “Not all members of the
audience,” write Bowser and Spence, “for Oscar Micheaux’s silent ﬁlms were open to his
representations of Aﬁican American life.”

While some people applauded the pictures’ “realistic” representations

of particular aspects of community life and portraits of situations that

needed to be addressed, others objected to seeing the searnier side of

their experiences displayed on the screen. What appeared genuine to

one segment of the population was repugnant to the idealism of

another. (177)
Although Micheaux’s grand narrative strategy had always been to make motion pictures
that up-lifted the Race in “his own form of social realism”, like future black commercial

ﬁlmmakers, quickly found that “up-lifting” the “brother” was heavy work: “I have

125

always tried to make my photo-plays present the truth,” he answered one black detractor,
“to lay before the race a cross section of its own life, to view the colored heart from close
range” (Bowser and Spence 183). On the one hand, the “burden of representation” places
Micheaux in a difficult position as an African American “truth-teller.” Telling the truth
about black life came with a price, for the simple fact that the ideology of the time, not
only wanted to counter the negative cinematic images of blacks in mainstream ﬁlm, but
also to model “respectable” black living for the thousands of Southern migrants ﬂooding
the North. But for an artist, the “burden” also limits choices about reconciling those very
same individual choices (and for black ﬁlmmakers color and class are mineﬁelds of
meaning) with the burden of representing an entire race that refuses to acknowledge all
black voices for the sake of political expediency.

But the color-caste system also created a problem for lighter-skinned blacks as
Hollywood turned increasingly to realism — at least in the politically sensitive matter of
race. Realism for Hollywood (especially beginning with sound in 1927) meant the end of
using white actors in blackface. Although extremely light-skinned actors like Noble
Johnson attained work as silent Mexicans, Spaniards and exotic “Others,” they were
never used in prominent roles, not even as menial butlers and maids. Many light-skinned
actors actually worked as maids and handy-men to white Hollywood stars merely to say
that they worked in Hollywood, but for many college-trained black actors, the black ﬁhn
companies were their only avenues for employment. But, as Donald Bogle points out,
“By the 19205, the absurdity of the blackface tradition was apparent.”

For blacks in ﬁlms, the talkie era proved to be a major breakthrough.

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In the period 1927 to 1940, the number of Negro parts greatly increased.

From the start, Hollywood was aware that talking movies needed

sounds — music, rhythm, pizzazz, singing, dancing, clowning. And

who, according to American myth, were more rhythmic or more

musical than Negroes? (26)
The era of sound, thus, created jobs for blacks who could provide the light-hearted,
lackadaisical black, and not for the polished, middle-class (and extremely light-skinned)
actors used by the Lincoln and Micheaux companies whose connections with Hollywood
were tenuous at best. By 1929, Hollywood wanted the “real thing,” and the “real thing”
was unmistakably dark-skinned, and throughout the 19305 the color-caste system of
Black Hollywood turned up-side down as darker-skinned actors “tommed or jemirnaed
their ways through scores of bad movies.” “No other period,” writes Donald Bogle, “in
motion-picture history could boast of more black faces carrying mops and pails or lifting
pots and pans than the Depression years” (3 6). But even these performers were hurt by
NAACP protests, a new political mood in the country about race, and a changed audience
who, by the turbulent late sixties and earlier seventies, looked for a darker, and more
militant face to represent black America.

The Badasssss Effect: The Return of the Black Buck
As I argue, the difference between a ﬁlm like ml and, for example, Supgr Fly

(both 1972) are more intricate than the amount of white involvement, or Hollywood
studio control. Debates continue to rage on whether or not an African American true

independence can viably exist as a commodity without compromising, what I consider,

127

are shifting deﬁnitions of a black aesthetic that functions (or not) as a uniﬁed vision of
the black experience. “Despite the material progress most Americans enjoy,” points
Gladstone L. Yearwood, “ the full promise of American society still eludes signiﬁcant
numbers of the African American population” (2) — a problem which has been extremely
problematic for black cultural producers. First, I would argue that the yardstick for black
cultural representation owes a great deal to the unresolved tensions around the issue of
class within the black community and the heavy burden of representation expected from
all black cultural producers. Such a burden presents two complicated problems that do
not suggest easy answers. On the one hand, there is the impulse to impart to a highly
resistant white mainstream the best of the “race,” as if the visible fact of a black middle-
class would somehow erase the years of racial segregation, and animosity. Early black
ﬁlms, thus proffered a fantasy (at least to a majority of their black spectators) that blacks
exhibited the same class attributes of whites, and the implied message — at least to an
imaginary white spectator — was that not all blacks occupied the same economic rung in
American society. However, even this argument (given the minuscule white audience for
“race” ﬁlms) was wishful thinking at best. Thus, black cultural products begin from
positions of opposition and resistance in order to present visualized evidence (so many
argued) of a black heterogeneity, although the visual results tended to be one-sided which
leads to the second problem.

Although black ﬁlmmakers were determined to resurrect the homogeneous
portrayals of blacks in mainstream ﬁlm, for black spectators the issue was complicated

because of whose black experiences were privileged. Mark A. Reid points to, not only

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mainstream attempts at gauging an average African American moviegoer, but also the
same type of easy assumptions made by black ﬁlmmakers for the simple fact that “black
audiences employ different reading strategies based on their class, ethnicity, gender, and
sexual orientation” (49). Since the beginning days of black ﬁlmmaking, black audiences
have overwhelmingly been drawn from the urban working and under-classes, and have
alternately seen themselves portrayed through a historical and social cycle as debased,
demonized, erased, and validated depending on whose black cultural watch controlled the
images. To put it bluntly, by the 19705 class divisions in the black community became
more strident and divisive as exempliﬁed by the reactions to what soon became termed
the Blaxploitation movie. For years black organizations (most notably the NAACP)
agitated and protested the Hollywood image of blacks on screen without taking into ﬁll]
account the effects of mainstream visual products on subsequent generational needs of
young, black urban audiences, and changing political times. By the 19705 the mood in
urban cities turned more toward a more violent political action, more retaliatory and
confrontational than the didactic agenda that the older civil rights organizations were
willing to embrace - and the Blaxploitation ﬁhn supplied a vicarious “get whitey” thrill
that a respectable ﬁlm like Sm could not supply. And no black authored ﬁlm was
more aesthetically problematic than Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 Sweet Sweetbglis
Badasssss Song, a blue-print for black independent ﬁlmmaking in the latter part of the
twentieth century.

“In terms of Hollywood production economics and its narrative strategies for

representing blacks,” writes Ed Guerrero, “Sweet Sweetbagk was a maverick

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breakthrough movie” (86).Van Peebles ﬁnancial travails in getting the ﬁlm before an
audience have been well documented, and presaged Spike Lee’s turning to a coterie of
African American entertainers for ﬁnancial help during his ﬁght over the artistic
constraints Warner Brothers placed on Malcolm X (1992). But what is important was the
ﬁlm’s impact on black audiences that “brought to the surface of African American
discourse the subtle ﬁssures and cracks of class tension, ideological conﬂict, and
aesthetic arguments that had been simmering in the black social formation since the
winding down of the civil rights movement” (87). While I would not argue with
Guerrero’s astute assessment of the ﬁlm’s impact, as I point out in my discussion of
Oscar Micheaux’s career, these types of intraracial tensions were simmering long before
the advent of Sweetback. As Guerrero correctly emphasizes, the contention over the ﬁlm
was best represented by the ideological differences between the ﬁlm’s political and
vehement supporters, and its equally vociferous detractors. Thus, in spite of its seemingly
technical and narrative ﬂaws, Sweetback perfectly captured the oppositional political
stances, and intellectual black thought of the early 19705. The ﬁlm was endorsed as
“revolutionary” by the Black Panther party (although Van Peebles had a rocky
relationship with the party during ﬁlming), and an entire issue of the party’s paper was
devoted to praising the ﬁlm’s black revolutionary ideology. Writes Guerrero, Newton’s
most sweeping argument is that Sweetback “presents the need for unity among all the
members and institutions within the community of victims” (88).

However, not everyone in Newton’s “community of victims” was “feelin’” Brother

Newton’s appraisal of the ﬁlm’s revolutionary politics. “The ﬁlm was criticized both by

130

black cultural nationalists who wanted explicitly politicized black ﬁlms,” Frequent
contributor to the black middle-class image conscious Ebony magazine, African
American historian Lerone Bennett viewed Sweetback as the inevitable result of a “black
image confusion, that romanticizes the poverty and misery of the ghetto and that ‘some
men foolishly identify the black aesthetic with empty bellies and big bottomed
prostitutes." ’ “For Bennett,” continues Guerrero, “the ﬁlm is ‘neither revolutionary nor
black’ because it presents the spectator with sterile daydreams and a superhero who is
ahistorical, selﬁshly individualist with no revolutionary program, who acts out of panic
and desperation” (89). Finally, Bennett “caps” his argument by comparing the
revolutionary hero/hustler Sweetback with an earlier model of communal revolutionary
imaging in Gillo Pontecorvo’s superb anti-colonialist ﬁlm Battle of Algiers (1965) whose
ex-pimp hero “turns himself inside out, like a glove, like Malcolm, in fact. And, like
Malcolm, he confronts his former companions with the errors of their way” (89). With
the screen dedication to “the black community,” and his after-the-fact pro-black
revolutionary statements to the contrary, Van Peebles’ laconic “superhero” is strangely
distant from a politically conscious connection with the black community. However, this
does not mean that the audience for Sweetback did not ﬁnd the images “liberatory,” but
the ﬁlm merely posits the black community as back-drop to the super-hero’s efforts to
escape the police.

But the ﬁlm did connect on a class basis, albeit, not on the terms desired by black
nationalists or the black middle-class. There was a different mood after the Watts

rebellion in 1965 that Lerone Bennett observed compelled the black lower classes to

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view themselves as “counter-counter—contrast conceptions, as the opposite, in short, of
what Negroes said Negroes were.”

Clearly, beyond the mid-19605, lower-class blacks were increasingly

dissatisﬁed with the exhausted black bourgeois paradigm of upward

mobility through assimilation and started to identify the black

experience with the deﬁant images and culture of the “ghetto” and

hustling street life. (Guerrero 89)
Thus, Sweetback as a heroic, or central ﬁgure was not an anomaly to young, urban
spectators. Many black critics of the ﬁlm, like Donald Bogle, pointed out that the
character was simply the latest manifestation of the big, bad, bucks, and bad men of
Aﬁican American folklore, a folklore whose literary worth the black middle-class had yet
to come to terms with. Moreover, the overt emphasis on Sweetback’s deﬁant sexuality in
many ways acts as an antidote to the emasculating roles given to Sidney Poitier the era’s
biggest Aﬁican American image of black masculinity. But the landscape of the ghetto
with its pimps, hustlers, and black folks just trying to get by, was for many in the civil
rights organizations — and the college educated cultural nationalists — a terrain alien (and
ﬁ'ustrating) to both groups. For Sweet SweetlLach’s audience, the up-ward mobility cant
was as tired in 1965 as it was in 1905, but equally disdained was the radical
intellectualizing of their position in American society by the Maoist spouting Black
Panthers and the Black Arts Movement.

While deploring the ﬁlm’s politics, a more even-handed understanding of the

reasons for the ﬁlm’s popularity with image-starved black audiences came from a cadre

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of black ﬁlm students of UCLA’s ﬁlm school who, by 1971, “recognized cinema as a site
of struggle.”

A declaration of independence had been written in the overturning of

the ﬁlm school curriculum and in the formation of student-generated

alternatives. . . .and off-campus study groups. Some of Sweetback’s

techniques and procedures were acceptable to the insurgents, but its

politics were not. (Bambara 118)
The group included: Charles Burnett, Hailie Gerima, Julie Dash, and Clyde Taylor
among other young black ﬁlmmakers who would become the most innovative and
visionary black independent ﬁlmmakers whose “thematic foci” by 1977 became, notes
Toni Cade Bambara “family, women, history, and folklore.” The group, continues
Bambara, “engaged in interrogating conventions of dominant cinema, screening ﬁlms of
socially conscious cinema, and discussing ways to alter previous signiﬁcations as they
relate to Black people. In short, they were committed to developing a ﬁlm language to
respectfully express cultural particularity and Black thought” (119-120). According to the
new Black Aesthetic, the function of art was political and liberatory: “The aesthetic
function of Aﬁican American protest art,” Stuns up Gladstone L. Yearwood, is to visually
embody the political message of the black consciousness movement. Inspiring black
unity and dignity, articulating the black community’s needs and embodying the
experiences and potential of blacks through art. . . .” (47). However, as worthy as their

independent ﬁlms were in their inclusiveness of the varied strata of black life (as I

133

discuss later) their ﬁlms were considered too “arty” for mass distribution, and lacked the
marketing strategies employed by the self-promoting Van Peebles.

Equally troubling was Sweetback’s gender politics (not at all helped by Van
Peeble’s assertion that in order to receive distribution the ﬁlm had to be disguised as a
' “porno ﬂick”) where the hero, as Lerone Bennett bluntly terms it, “fucks his way to
freedom.” “Fucking will not set you free,” exhorts Bennett, “If fucking freed, black
people would have celebrated the millennium 400 years ago” (Guerrero 90). Similar to
the same self-justiﬁcations of “artistic vision” — from Oscar Micheaux to Spike Lee —
Van Peebles became his own worst enemy when confronted with his denigration of black
women at the expense of a true black communal impulse. To a question about the means
a black revolutionary must undertake to ﬁnance “his vision,” Van Peebles answered: “Put
a couple of chicks on the block, raise the money and make a ﬁlm” (Guerrero 91).
Guerrero points to the hero’s initiation into the sex-business as a hungry, homeless ten-
year old by a black prostitute who christens him “Sweetback” for his early sexual
promise — a scene disturbing on many levels. According to Guerrero, Panther Huey P.
Newton views the “initiation” as a blending of black spiritual and black nationalist rite of
black passage that “baptizes the young boy into his true manhood,”and “demonstrates the
importance of unity and love between Black men and women” (88). “People who look
upon this as a sex scene,” blasts Newton, “miss the point completely, and pe0ple who
look upon the movie as a sex movie miss the entire message of the ﬁlm” (Reid 80).
Bennett, however, correctly calls the incident what it is: “the rape of a child by a 40-year-

old prostitute.” Moreover, Sweetback’s graphic “revolutionary” resistance to “the man”

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also includes the rape of “a black woman at knifepoint” which can not help but recall
Eldridge Cleaver’s confession that he reﬁned his skills as a rapist of white women by
ﬁrst practicing “on black girls in the ghetto.”

Signiﬁcantly, Guerrero notes that black critics of the ﬁlm’s gender politics never, “
really addressed the fact that beyond their crude sexual objectiﬁcation, the ﬁlm contained
no complex female portrayals.”

This structured absence of black women’s perspectives on

Sweet Sweetback can be explained, at least in part, by scholars

and critics who point out that a politicized black woman’s agenda

was generally submerged under a male focused black nationalist

discourse aimed at rediscovering and articulating the mystique of

a liberated “black manhood”. . . .(91)
Furthermore, as the opposing class positions of Newton and Bennett clearly indicate, a
possible black feminist critique would, given the times, be subject to a foreclosing by
black nationalist views of “female liberation” as a white, middle-class counter-
revolutionary agenda. Because black women were publically silent about the ﬁlm’s
misogyny, their silence did not mean a wholesale embrace of the black revolutionary
masculinist dismissal of black female subjectivity — as the ground-breaking black
feminist anthology The Blgk Woman (1970) demonstrated. The hyper-masculine
imagery and narrative structure of Sweet Sweetba_ck’s Badasssss Song, however, ﬁt the
“political” mood of the times, especially with young, black inner-city males who equated

revolutionary fervor with a fantasy of themselves as having one hand on their dicks and

135

the other around the trigger of a gun. And Sweetback (portrayed by the ﬁlmmaker”)
provided the realization of the black macho fantasy by aiming both weapons at white
institutions, and the assimilated white values of the black middle-class. Thus, the
emphasis on the “criminal” enterprises of many Blaxploitation heroes, to the delight of
an audience traditionally shut-out from legitimate employment, and the dismay of blacks
who “made” it out of the ghetto.

The Blaxploitation ﬁlm was a cinematic argument compellingly seductive to
thousands of marginalized black youth searching for an identity of manhood outside of
the parameters of the typical well-mannered (read: emasculated) Sidney Poitier heroes
foisted on them. Michele Wallace in “Race, Gender and Psychoanalysis in Forties Film,”
strenuously deplores the ﬁlm’s continued popularity, and its canonization by young,
black male ﬁlmmakers, and refuses to excuse the ﬁlm’s misogyny (260). Van Peebles’
demonization of black women, for example, is evident in Bog N the Hood and other
male authored ﬁlms during the nineties. Director Spike Lee pays homage to Van Peebles
as an important inﬂuence on representing the black experience (completely dismissing
Oscar Micheaux) in his work, and the retro—seventies idealization of pimp culture in the
videos of Snoop-Dog are evidence of the hustling life extolled by the ﬁlm and the novels
of Donald Goines. As cultural critic Nelson George notes in Buggies, B-Boys, Bags &

Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture the seductive imagery of black women as

 

 

manhood deﬁning objects, and gun-play violence continues to resonate with late

 

'° Clearly by portraying the eponymous “hero” himself, Van Peebles not only saved money on hiring an
actor, but he also doubly thumbs his nose at the gate-keepers of the means to ﬁhnmaking, and who gets
to present the black image in visual media.

136

twentieth century under-class black male youth as they re-discover, not only Van
Peebles’ ﬁlm, but an entire realm of black macho ﬁhns from the era that provided models
for black female denigration that continues to live on in VHS and DVD formats.
But my point in examining the effect of Sweet SweetM—MsssssSmrg is to
illustrate the problems of deﬁning the term “black ﬁlm,” and deﬁning who the audience
is for “black ﬁlm.” The genre of blaxploitation ﬁlm is a case in point, as Gladstone L.
Yearwood points out, and ﬁlm critics continue to be divided over whether of not the
ﬁlms should be regarded as “black ﬁlmmaking,”or even black independent ﬁlmmaking.
As I suggest, many black critics make the distinction by measuring the amount of white
control involved in bringing a black aesthetic vision to market, and even Mark A Reid
dismisses Sweetback as a “black ﬁlm” because of its white distributor.“Blaxploitation
ﬁlms compromised black cultural signiﬁcation,” argues Yearwood, “because they were
contemporary white productions in blackface.”
These ﬁlms were produced by whites (and some blacks), featured black
casts and were set in black communities. EcOnomic exploitation of the
black audience was the principal reason for their existence. Aﬁer the
success of Sweetback (1971), _Sha_ﬁ (1971), and My (1972), the
industry moguls snapped to attention and began to turn out exploitation
ﬁhns with startling regularity. (43)

Yearwood is correct, but many popular black action ﬁlms of the era were, nevertheless,

written, produced, and directed by African Americans and starred such black action icons

as Fred Williamson and Jim Brown who became important visual images for urban

137

audiences starved for their own Clint Eastwood, or Charles Bronson; “for older members
of the black intellectual community,” writes Donald Bogle, the ﬁlms offered “not
direction but a daydream of triumph.” (236). Some of the ﬁlms had surer artistic hands at

the hehn, like Gordon Parks’ Shaﬁ (1971), Supgrﬂy (1972), Raymond St. Jacques’ Book

 

of Numbers (1973), and Bill Gunn’s W (1973), but the point here is that the
black heroes of these ﬁlms were unmistakably black — both in their darker skin color and
in their “ghetto”politics of swift retribution against the usual predators of the black urban
community.

Finally, I would argue that the lasting importance of the Blaxploitation era is its
visualization of the protests begun by writers Langston Hughes in “The Negro Artist and
the Racial Mountain” (1926) and Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing”
(1937). Together with the “black consciousness” movement of the 19603 and 1970s, the
Blaxploitation genre visually articulated the intra—class war between opposing ideologies
for the rights to a black cultural authenticity where the new black militancy ﬁrmly
rejected the ideology of the black bourgeoisie who had been vigorously “policing” the
contours of black cultural products since Reconstruction. The new “black aesthetic” now
viewed the black middle-class attempts at cultural assimilation as cultural and racial
suicide, and “romanticized” the black urban poor as authentic signiﬁers of “blackness.”
In short, “the tenements as well as the talk, the mannerisms, and the sophistication of the
streets. . . .” were all taken as a badge of “being real.”As Donald Bogle argues,
“Eventually, poverty and ghetto life (sometimes the very degrading constraints imposed

on Black America by White America) were frequently idealized and glamorized” (236).

138

Further, Bogle suggests what the cultural nationalists, and the black bourgeoisie could
agree on about the appeal of Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, and that was the
accusation that Van Peebles’ ﬁlm merely pandered to the un-educated sensibilities of the
masses.

With the glamourization of the ghetto, however, came also the

elevation of the pimp/outlaw/rebel as folk hero. Van Peebles

played up to this new sensibility, and his ﬁlm was the ﬁrst to

glorify the pimp. It failed, however, to explain the social conditions

that made the pimp such an important ﬁgure. At the same time, the

movie debased the black woman, depicting her as little more than

a whore. (236)
Although the criticisms of the ﬁlm are not wholly without merit, there is still the
implication from the critics of the Blaxploitation genre (and the champions of
independent black ﬁlm) that the masses do not posses a critical sensibility, and have to be
led to what is good for them, and the general consensus about Van Peebles’ ﬁlm is an
elitist point of view that continues to dictate the terms of cultural authenticity from the
top down.

The Buppie Effect: Spike’s Joint
The career of Lee straddles the line between Reid’s admiration for what he terms

the authentic black ﬁlm which addresses black community issues, and the compromised
commercial black ﬁlm which ignores relevant black content for wide mainstream appeal.

I would argue, that Lee should be considered, at the very least, as a “semi-independent”

139

producer because his emphasis on African American issues makes major ﬁnancing (see
the problems with Malcolm X)11 an iffy proposition for major Hollywood studios who
prefer comical images of blacks, or black/white “buddy” action/adventure ﬁlms for
maximum cross-over appeal. But Lee was something new; for the new demographic of
black urban professionals Following what Wahneema Lubiano describes as “the Spike
Lee Discourse,” Mel Watkins succinctly notes a critical problem with Lee’s narrative
strategies as a black ﬁlmmaker: “Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the Spike
Lee Discourse,” Watkins argues, “is that the ﬁlmmaker oftentimes mistakes putting a
social problem on cinematic display for a form of critique in and of itself” (143). As
Watkins, and other black cultural critics have pointed out, Lee’s narrative style
(especially in the early commercial ﬁlms) has remained largely “critic-proof.” Lee
arrived at the right time in commercial cinema when very few African American visual
cultural makers actually received mainstream attention, or garnered ﬁnancial support at
the box-ofﬁce. More importantly, for middle-class blacks, Lee was a third generation
Morehouse “man,”thus, Lee became saddled with the “burden of representation.” With
1989's Do the Right Thing, Lee addressed simmering urban racial tensions in what he
described as cinematic “truth-telling,” a claim that catapulted him as the black voice for
African American racial representation among a majority of white critical assessment
who were, no doubt, bowled over by Lee’s melding of Aﬁican American vernacular

styles in his use of popular rap, glossy color, and kinetic editing. Do the Ri t Thin was

 

" Financing was not the only problem Lee encountered. Donald Bogle reports: “Poet Amiri Baraka,
spokesman for the group the United Front to Preserve the Legacy of Malcolm X, was quoted in
Newsweek as saying, ‘We will not let Malcolm X’s life be trashed to make middle-class Negroes sleep
easier. I’m horriﬁed of seeing Spike Lee make Malcolm X” (351).

140

a heady mix, and Lee, through a careful positioning of himself in interviews, and college
speaking engagements, became a self-appointed (with white critical backing) as the truth-
teller of the black experience.

However, as a black ﬁlm-maker, Lee continues to be a contentious (Reid prefers
‘tendentious) subject for many black cultural critics who question his “black authenticity”
as a black independent ﬁlm maker. Wahneema Lubiano in “But Compared to What?:
Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Rith Thing,
and the Spike Lee Discourse” directly challenges the ﬁlrnmaker’s claim to an essential
“black reality.” Lubiano argues that Lee’s “lock” on the black experience is not
contextualized (compared to what?), or for that matter closely interrogated as
oppositional practice “within the constraints of Euro-American ﬁlm discourse.” Drawing
on what Gayatri Spivak identiﬁes as “doing one’s sample”” as “interventionist political
cultural project,” Lubiano ﬁnds Lee’s sole status as “ofﬁcial black truth-teller” highly
problematic, in part, because of the dearth of black heterogeneous visual representations
Lee’s wholesale embrace forecloses.

The problem of Spike Lee’s “sample,” his place in the sun, is that his
presence, empowered by Hollywood studio hegemony and media

consensus on his importance, can function to overshadow or make

difﬁcult other kinds of politically engaged cultural work, not because

 

'2 1 would counter that Lee engages in a speciﬁc form of “sampling” that is an integral part of hip-hop
production. For scores of black urban youth who lacked “musical skills,” putting together “samples” in
order to make a coherent ‘yvhole” that spoke to an audience of equally marginalized black youth was an
oppositional art form in itself. Lee’s genius is in intuitively tapping into a “new” art form by “sampling”
iconic black images, music, and clothing styles.

l4]

it is impossible for more than one Aﬁican American ﬁlmmaker to get

attention at a time, but because of the implications and manifestations

of the attention given to his work. (99)
Although it is hard to tell whether Lubiano’s anger is directed at Lee, or the mainstream
critical acceptance of Lee as “truth-teller,” the central issue appears to be Lee’s stature (at
the time of Lubiano’s writing) as a black voice of authenticity — although I am not
dismissing Lee’s own complicity in his self-crowning as the sole voice of black truth. But
part of Lee’s stature owes a great deal to the legacy of black cultural production when it
does get noticed by the mainstream: there is only room for one black voice that attempts
to essentialize the black experience for mass consumption as James Baldwin brilliantly
argued.

As Lee himself has argued, Do the Righ_t Thing with its treatment of racism as

mass entertainment, was his attempt at “truth and righteousness.” “It will be told from a
Black point of view. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to express the views of Black
people, who . . . don’t have access to power and the media” (Reid 105). But the question
many black critics want to know, especially reﬂected in Lubiano’s critique, is whose
truth is exactly expressed in Lee’s ﬁlms? “The climatic racial confrontation,” writes
Donald Bogle about the ﬁlm, “powerfully ﬁlmed and edited, endowed the action with
meaning and political power. It was also precisely what caused such a critical uproar”
(322). Astute black cultural critics quickly identiﬁed Spike’s “class issues” in the skillful

way the ﬁlm manipulates boundaries between the “real,” and cardboard posturing.

“Mookie’s character,” points out bell hooks in Yearning: Race, Gender, grd Cultural,

142

“has particular fascination for viewers who realize that he is both a character in the ﬁlm
and the ﬁlmmaker.”

Part of the new wave of avant—garde, up and coming young black

university-educated ﬁlmmakers and artists who constitute an elite

group (even though many of them came from underprivileged class

backgrounds or were raised in poor black neighborhoods), Lee brings

to ﬁlm a self-consciously Afrocentric aesthetic. He reveals the ins

and outs of life in an urban underclass black neighborhood. (174)
But, as hooks adds, Lee’s mise-en-scene has nothing “real” about it. “Little details
remind us that this is ﬁction (the always-clean designer clothes worn throughout the ﬁlm
by most characters irrespective of their role, the often noted absence of drugs, etc”).
Finally, hooks accuses the ﬁlmmaker of “posturing”: “Rather than inviting the audience
to escape, it compels them to stay at a distance like Mookie, to observe, to be non-
participatory. Brilliant cinematography and great music create an intimacy that the
narrative does not allow. Inviting the audience to maintain distance keeps separate the
events shown on the screen and the viewer’s daily life” (174-175). Although, hooks is
correct about the studied “prettiness” of Lee’s shiny ghetto — and it seems to me that
critics who take Lee’s urban iconography to task — are looking for a documentary realism

beyond the director’s scope. The point is ( Lee’s political posturing to the contrary) that

 

'3 Lee later made up for the charge of “no drugs” with 1995's Clgkgrs, but this may have been the
director’s response to the new breed of black directors — John Singleton and the Hughes brothers whose
grittier tales of the hood threatened to eclipse the power of Do the Rith Thing. The acclaim these ﬁlms
engendered — Bog N’ the Hood and Menace l I Socieg clearly proved that they were “doing the right
thing” in giving a voice to a generation that Lee did not, and could not connect with.

143

Spike Lee’s ﬁlms are ultimately ﬁction (the archetypes who stand in for characters are a
pointed example), but Lee adds to the ﬁction by glossing over uncomfortable truths about
gender constructions, and the privilege of the black bourgeoisie who deign to “speak” for
an entire community.

If Do the Right Thing “reassures white viewers that the ‘lunatic’ violence erupting
in ‘segregated’ black communities ﬁnally hurts black people more than anyone
else,”argues hooks, then what aesthetic pleasure does the ﬁlm afﬁrm for “underclass
urban black people?” As the ﬁlm does not engage in a critical examination of class and
power politics, “Poor folks can look and long,” and hooks argues that Lee merely
commodiﬁes the “real” lived experience of black urban life as self-appointed
spokesperson for those who “lack the means of production.”

Traditionally, the black middle class or a privileged intellectual

elite has drawn on the life experience of lower-class black people

to make aesthetic products which do not challenge the racist system

of domination that creates oppressive economic circumstances

exploiting essentialist notions of an authentic black experience that

is colorful, sensuous, lively, etc., images that obscure the reality of

pain and deprivation. (178)
Black cultural critics routinely attack Lee as a middle-class interloper, often betraying
their own mixed feelings about class and who gets to represent what. Mark A. Reid
recounts the black conservative Stanley Crouch’s denouncement of Lee’s images of

lower-class blacks (Lubiano notes that these images drove “Crouch to froth at the mouth

144

in print”) where he accused Lee of the “appropriation of black idioms to create a racist
vision of American justice” (105). But Crouch, instead of viewing the ﬁlm as an attack
on white racism (as faulty and unsatisfying Lee’s project is) accuses Lee of fomenting
violence directed toward whites by ghetto blacks: “It [is] irresponsible when a successful,
middle-class guy. . . makes a movie in which he essentially tells. . . the. . . black lower-
class, ‘Well, you’re not going to get justice. They are out there to get you. It’s you versus
them” (Reid 105). Amiri Baraka chides Lee speciﬁcally on his lack of class
consciousness in a Marxist polernical that, unfortunately, equates black authenticity with
the black proletariat, a sensibility that Baraka charges is lacking in Lee’s ﬁlms. Thus, the
criticism of Lee hinges, not only on the burden of representation for black artists (and
Lee’s egotism does not help), but also on the deep class conﬂicts endemic to the struggle
for a black cultural representation rooted in oppositional practices.
“Spike Lee expresses for me a recognizable type,” Amiri Baraka writes, “and trend

in American society.”

He is the quintessential buppie, almost the spirit of the young,

upwardly mobile, Black petit bourgeois professional. Broadened,

he is an American trend. Emerging as an indication of social and

class motion, his development is expressed as a political

economy, culture, and history. (146)
Baraka suggests that a black cinematic aesthetic, an aesthetic located in the black
working and under-classes, should be the privileged black experience an ideology that

arose during the 19203 in opposition to the cult of middle-class respectability. In many

145

ways, Baraka appears ﬁ'ozen in the Black Arts movement of the sixties, especially when
he views Lee (and other black urban professionals) as traitors to a movement that
ultimately “failed” to win support among the very “class” Baraka and others in the
movement artistically sought to represent.

There is a whole successful school of Negro theater and ﬁlm personalities

whose fundamental identity is as caricaturists of the Black revolutionary

politics and art of the 19603, as if Black consciousness and political

activism, and even the most historic and spontaneously creative aspects

of the African and Aﬁican-American culture, are merely Mantan

Moreland cartoons. (147)
Aside from his blanket condemnation of the black middle-class, Baraka’s “problem” with
Lee, on the face of it, appears to be that Lee’s ﬁlms lack a black political agenda, and that
they are “commercial” because they make a proﬁt. Even Ed Guerrero ﬁnds a troubling,
albeit, an expected paradox in Lee’s pursuit of “studio ﬁnancing, bigger production
venues, and broader-based consumer markets.”Although I would agree with Baraka that
Lee’s constant shilling for his ﬁlms - such as the store (Spike’s Joint) in Brooklyn that
sells promotional merchandise for his ﬁlms“, and the “making of” books that follow each

ﬁlm - border on the offensive,'5 and skirt the line of self-promotion; in defense of Lee,

 

" This also includes hawking X Potato Chips for his biographical ﬁlm Malcolm X

'5 Many older blacks were appalled at Lee’s lack of black history when young blacks began sporting
“gimme caps” emblazoned with an X to promote his ﬁlm biography of Malcolm X. Lee’s blatant
promotion led to charges that he had “commercialized the memory of Malcolm, especially after many
X cap sporting young hip-hoppers had no idea who Malcolm X was.

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one could counter that given the long history of black independent ﬁlmmaking, and the
lack of access to marketing and promotion, Lee follows in the foot-steps of the Johnson
brothers and Oscar Micheaux.

In his castigation of Lee’s lack of “class consciousness,” however, Baraka would
do well to remember that the Black Arts Movement is also guilty of the same type of
culture grabbing that the black radicals of the 19603 fought against. “Although some ﬁlm
commentators have attempted to acknowledge the disparity between the aesthetic values
of black audiences and the aesthetic values of ﬁlmmakers and critics,” points out Tommy
L. Lott, “ﬁlm criticism generally tends to adhere to a top~down view of aesthetics, as
though audiences have no role to play in the determination of aesthetic values.”

How can we best understand the fact that ﬁlms which aim to present a
more authentic black aesthetic are largely ignored by and unknown to
black audiences, while being extremely well-received in elite white
circles? Despite their admirable political orientation, such ﬁlms seem
to have achieved the status of art-for-art’s sake, with mainly an all-
white audience appeal. (47)
Lott perceptively addresses a problem that has plagued the black community for
generations: the intraracial class war for black cultural authenticity. While Lott points to
the difﬁculty of mass distribution of many black independent ﬁlms that take on the
“burden of representation,” too many of them, as Lott suggests, fail to connect as
aesthetic pleasure to mainstream black audiences expecting standard Hollywood fare,

especially the ﬁlms of the blaxploitation genre speciﬁcally targeted at young black, urban

147

audiences. Clyde Taylor notes the ﬁlm school training of young black directors like Lee
when he observes: “The conspicuous body of Black independents has been called, not
without reason, intellectual ﬁlmmakers. It helps to see this description as one half of an
antagonistic dialogue over intellectual versus populist Black cinema, that has gone on,
quite uninspired, for many years” (434). In addition, Mark A. Reid notes that the wide
acceptance of “black action” movies by black audiences was a reality deplored by both
black “cultural nationalists and blacks who espoused middle-class values” (90). As
cultural critic Nelson George astutely points out: “Not in the African-American art
mainstream and not accessible to the masses, black independent ﬁlms stood at a strange
angle to the community they tried to reﬂect. And to be completely honest, many of the
ﬁlms were slow going” (46).

A3 I pointed out earlier, many black critics have not reconciled the oﬁen huge gulf
between their critical evaluations of black cultural representations, and the embrace of
what they consider negative representations by the masses. Jacqueline Bobo correctly
calls for a “collaboration” between “the makers, the critics, and the audience.” In fact,
Bobo states, the black audience needs ﬁrrther analysis, and she outlines three tasks to
forward a harmonious relationship between black cultural critic and black mass audience.
“Although the most important part of gleaming information about how Black people
watch ﬁlms is interacting with the audience, the ﬁrst work of the critic is just to get the
word out” (68). And what Bobo refers to here is the lack of advertising and marketing for
black independent ﬁlm, and the lack of advertising directly to black audiences is

changing due to the Internet and web sites devoted to Aﬁican American interests. The

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use of the Internet has been especially favorable to ﬁlms by black women and black gays
and lesbians shut out of mainstream marketing and distribution avenues. However, the
fact remains that Internet access still remains out of reach for millions of African
Americans who may only ﬁnd these ﬁlms by browsing the shelves of the local video
outlet.

“The second task conﬁonting the critic,” continues Bobo, “is preparing the
audience to watch. A third task, and perhaps the most important work of the critic, is to
develop a better understanding of the Black ﬁlm audience” (69). How does the critic go
about “preparing the audience to watch?” Bobo makes some assumptions about general
black audiences, that regardless of her calls for “collaboration,” or even her suggestion
that the black critic should know the black audience, her assumptions still suggest a
cultural elitism that wants to tell a black audience what they should watch and support.

Black people watch a lot of television and spend a lot of money going

to see commercial ﬁlms. And these may not be ﬁlms that they ﬁnd

particularly useﬁrl, or that they even enjoy. Consequently, I believe

that if more works produced by black ﬁlm and video makers were

available, the Black audience would cultivate the habit of watching,

and watching critically. (69)
Thus, Bobo insists that if the mass (lower-class) black audience had access to a ﬁlm like
Bush Mama (1976) then the obvious deﬁciencies of a S_up_e_ﬂy would be readily
apparent. In her article, Bobo uses the example of Steven Speilberg’s ﬁlm adaptation of

The Color P_ur_'ple (1985). Amid all of the controversy over black male bashing,

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mainstream Hollywood money, distribution, and a white director, added to the
contentious ﬁght among black cultural critics was the invented musical scene that
reconciled the blues shouter Shug Avery with her Baptist preacher father as the juke-
jointers wend their way to the church, and blues music seamlessly gives way to gospel.
Bobo found that in interviews a majority of black female spectators responded favorably
to the scene. “That many Black women stood ﬁrm in their stated positive engagement
with The Color Pu_rple in the face of enormous public criticism of the ﬁlm demonstrates
that audience members are not the unthinking pawns, manipulated at will by the
mainstream media, that many critics make them out to be” (73). Bobo ﬁnally
acknowledges that even she misread her respondents, especially in recognizing the role
of black Christianity which her respondents did not see as “caricatures” of their lives.
Bobo’s experience partly explains the animosity of black cultural critics toward the work
of Spike Lee. Do the Rith Thing was popular because Lee understood his audience who
saw through the aesthetic ﬂaws of the ﬁlm at an essential truth that reﬂected their lives.
The appearance of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have 11(1986) was seen as a breaking-
away from the blaxploitation cinema disaster foisted on the black community (much to
the critical dismay of the black intelligentsia), but the critical attention the ﬁlm garnered
did little to dispel the suggestion of black class boundaries which point to the “choices”
Lee inevitably makes. The ﬁlm attracted the attention of young, black intellectuals,
college graduates, and a new bohemian sophistication shared by the ﬁlm’s creator.
“Outside the theater,” recalls Nelson George, “was a long, lively line of beautiful

Aﬁican-Americans. The peers of Nola, Greer, and the crew (but too many Mars) were all

150

lined up to see themselves” (81 ). The theater, Cinema Studio, was a long time haven for
independent and foreign ﬁlms popular with New York’s sophisticated, movie elite — not
the type of home to the popular Rocky and Rambo cartoon conﬁgurations popular with
young, black male audiences. But more disturbing is George’s class biased assertion that
in the crowd to see the ﬁlm were “too many Mars.”

Mars Blackmon, (Black Man?) a character in the ﬁlm was the essential B-boy,
street-wise, Nike-wearing member of the trio of men hovering around the central
character Nola. The character (played by Lee himself) was later used as a shill to sell
Nike’s basket-ball shoes to real street-wise young blacks like himself, but the point is
that the ﬁgure of a jive-talking, gold-name—plate wearing street player like the Mars
character (Ed Guerrero calls him an “economically marginalized urban black you ”)
does not belong among the black urban professionals ﬂocking to “see themselves” at one
of New York’s cinema art houses. Although George cites the ﬁlm’s constructions of class
and age differences “tapped some of the complexity of my generation, what was new and
ﬁmny, unfocused and old-fashioned about us, better than any ﬁlm before or since,”
George’s observations may give weight to Baraka’s criticisms about Lee’s class
consciousness, but more speciﬁcally, George deﬁnes a new generation — Baraka
derisively calls them buppies -— of what novelist/screenwriter Trey Ellis terms “today’s
cultural mulattoes.”

In his 1989 essay “The New Black Aesthetic” Trey Ellis articulated the
characteristics of a new generation of young black artists. “For the ﬁrst time in our

history,” Ellis writes about black America, “we are producing a critical mass of college

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graduates who are children of college graduates themselves” (266). In a salvo greatly
reminiscent of Langston Hughes, this new generation, Ellis argues, “all grew up feeling
misunderstood by both the black worlds and the white.”

Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can

oﬁen get along ﬁne with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto,

educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in

the white world. And it is by and large this rapidly growing group of

cultural mulattoes that fuels the NBA {New Black Aesthetic]. We no

longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated and

sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people

or black. (264)
The New Black Aesthetic was a blending of the old — the Black Arts Movement - and the
new: “We’re not saying racism doesn’t exist,” Ellis quotes Terry McMillan, “we’re just
saying it’s not an excuse,” and neither were they concerned with up-lifting the race with
one-sided positive portraits. “The New Black Aesthetic says you just have to be natural,
you don’t necessarily have to wear one.”

No longer are too many black characters either completely cool and

fearless (Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song) or completely loving

and selﬂess (Sounder). Says Spike Lee, “The number one problem

with the old reactionary school was they cared too much about what

white peOple think.” (266)

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Noting that “many other members of the NBA are the children of Civil Rights workers or
black nationalists (Amiri Baraka’s daughters were active NBA’ers), Ellis does note that a
“telltale sign of the work of the NBA is our parodying of the black nationalist movement.
There is now such a strong and vast body of great black work that the corny or mediocre
doesn’t need to be coddled. NBA artists aren’t afraid to ﬂout publicly the oﬁicial,
positivist black party line”. (265) And Spike Lee’s work was an integral part of the NBA.
Although astute black critics praised Lee’s She’s Gotta Have 11, many pointed to

the ﬁlrnmaker’s troubling misogynist view of a supposedly sexually liberated black
woman. However, critic Reid states quite baldly that the ﬁlm “is a denigrating portrait of
black womanhood. . . .” (94). “The ﬁlm narrative,” continues Reid, “fails to create an
image of a sexually independent black female protagonist who is comfortable among
women as well as with men who have no sexual desire for her.”

If Lee intended Nola to embody a sexually independent attitude, then his

ﬁlm fails. This failure reﬂects a badly written script and the ﬁlrnmaker’s

propensity to objectify women for the sexual liberation of certain types

of men. Most likely the ﬁlm’s failure results from the shortsightedness

of any young ﬁlmmaker who spends more time manipulating black

urban idioms than developing an equally novel statement. (98)
Many critics have noted Lee’s penchant for undeveloped characters, but Lee’s NBA
discourse remains staunchly heterosexist in its denigration of women and gays — even
Trey Ellis and fellow NBA critic Nelson George acknowledge the unfortunate hold-over

from the previous generation. Adds Todd Boyd: “Though noble in their aspirations, the

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NBA and its bourgeois underpinnings can transcend the culture only in ways that bring
individual success, but cannot address group elevation” (17). Many black feminist like
bell hooks, Wahneema Lubiano, and Toni Cade Bambara have written incisively about
Lee’s rampant sexism and homophobia (a charge he acknowledges in front of critical
black college audiences, but seems unable to untangle himself ﬁ'om) which I argue, is a
powerful sub-text in School Daze (1988).

Lee’s ﬁrst studio ﬁnanced ﬁlm, 1988's School Daze was purportedly constructed
as an uncompromising critique of the insular world of black college life, but drew even
more attention for its class privilege, masculinist posturing, and the overtly sexist images,
and empty caricatures of young, black women. In its sexist depiction of black women,
the ﬁlm engendered the type of cinematic portrayals (betrayals) to come in future Spike
Lee Joints. The ﬁlm fails to explore the deep divisions between black men and women,
or the divisions of class and color with any form of constructive dialogue. “The ﬁlm
narrative,” sums up S. Craig Watkins, “presents the Aﬁican American social world as a
fragmented and contested sphere composed of numerous hierarchies and conﬂicts that
operate somewhat independently from spheres of interracial conﬂict” (139) Thus, the
ﬁlm was accused of doing the same type of intraracial exposé that earlier black cultural
products attempted from the earliest part of the twentieth century — that of “airing dirty
laundry.”

In fact, one of the primary criticisms leveled at the ﬁlm and its director
was that it put on display many of the tensions that historically have

created deep divisions and antagonisms within the Aﬁican American

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community. (139)

Although many mainstream critics viewed School Daze as a type of tan-colored college
musical, the truth is that whites most likely did not know what to do with Lee’s stated
agenda of attacking intraracial class and colorism. But, as with many of his ﬁlm’s
cluttered thematic structures, School Daze , according to Nelson George, was “not a
sweet blend.” Wahneema Lubiano ﬁnds the ﬁlm (along with Do the Right Thing)
“engaged with problems of race and racism (external and internalized) in the context of a
nation where race as a construction is not much talked about. outside academic circles
and where the idea of racism as intellectual, systemic, or concrete individual practice is
cause for far more anger than theory, more recrimination and defensiveness than focus”
(100).

Lubiano correctly assess the problems of Lee’s narrative structure for the ﬁlm as
“sloppy but complicat .” in its simple reduction of identity politics. Although Lee’s
stated purpose was to satirize what he saw as black intraracial practices that are
detrimental to African American political identity, ultimately the ﬁlm trades visual
aesthetics for a trenchant political critique. In other words, the ﬁlm “samples” (Ellis
would consider it “parody”) black identity politics that ultimately lays the ﬁlm (and Lee)
open for what Baraka sees as a lack of real political consciousness in a series of “male-
oriented, internationally focused political practices such as protests, marches, or rallies”
which, continues Lubiano, makes the men in the ﬁlm (and Bobo’s uncritical viewer)
“participants in the aestlretization of these practices.”

The ﬁlm, unfortunately and myopically, presents aesthetics as formal

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matters of physical appearance in which women only participate. Men

do; they dance the beautifully choreographed Greek stomps, or the fellas’

clever parody stomp, or make careful selections of political posters and

other room decor items, and arrange that decor for sexual trysts. (116)
As Lubiano correctly observes about the ﬁlm: “Men do. . . .,” but what do they do
exactly? On the one hand, the narrative satirizes the activities of traditional Greek
fraternities without saying anything critical, and the ﬁlm’s aesthetic ﬁarning of the
traditional African American Greek stomps acted as real life college boosters as interest
in HBCUs increased. Class differences are also a matter of decor that reﬂects their class
position: Da Fellas’ crowded, ramshackle rooms come with the requisite political posters,
and their means of transportation is a nm-down car. Combined with their “political”
marches against the college, the ﬁlm attempts to convey their “authenticity” as opposed
to the “in-authenticity” of the Gammas whose members live in “a spacious ﬁaternity
home, drive foreign cars, and wear stylish clothing.” What the spectators observe is that
Da Fellas are “ghetto” while the Gammas are “bourgie,” but the ﬁlm also argues that it is
possible to maintain ghettoness (black authenticity) under middle-class surroundings.

What School Dye does not critically argue is an incisive look at class divisions, or

an approach to come to terms with class attitudes. “Perhaps one of the most striking
aspects of the Spike Lee Discourse,” opines Watkins, “is that the ﬁlmmaker oftentimes
mistakes putting a social problem on cinematic display for a form of critique in and of
itself” (143). Thus, a critique of class differences consists of a series of angry

confrontational tight-shoots were nothing is solved, or critically engaging. For example,

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every conﬁontation between the middle-class Julian “Big Brother Almighty” Eaves
(Giancarlo Esposito) and the working-class Dap Dunlap (Larry Fishbume) descends into
mere name-calling, but the conﬁontation between the Fellas and the group Lee derisively
terms Local Yokels in the script (and here Lee hypocritically hides his own class bias
from his audience) disturbingly sputters out as the real working-class confronts the Fellas
on their ostensible embrace of Pan Africanism that stops at the college’s borders. In an
angry exchange between Dap and Leeds (Samuel L. Jackson) about real issues between
the college and the black residents of the town, Dap resorts to narneecalling when his
“blackness” is questioned:

Leeds: I said are you black?

Dap: Don’t ever question whether I’m black. In fact, I was gonna ask yo’
country BAMA ass, why you put those dripdrop chemicals in your
hair?

As Watkins states the confrontation “repositions” the Fellas: “From the Local’s
perspective, there is no difference between Mission College students: they are all
disdainful of poor and working-class blacks” (144). Although the ﬁlm posits 3 Pan
African unity (Da Fellas’ main activity, besides getting laid, is agitating for South
African divestment by the college trustees), in Lee’s cinematic aesthetic their embrace of
African unity, the ﬁlm suggests, is merely a “pose” of black political involvement. The
cinematic non-engagement of the ﬁlm’s narrative structure contributes to the ﬁlm’s
purported satirical intent as an expression of the New Black Aesthetic seriously
problematic as the images compete, and ultimately, disrupt political intent.

Further, S. Craig Watson adds: “. . . .while Lee’s politicization of popular ﬁlm

represents an important form of intervention, his cinematic imagination generally tends

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to privilege the experiences of men over women. In this microcosmic black world, Lee
fails to represent the experiences of women in ways that break from prevailing gender
discourses and render them problematic” (145). Like the men in the ﬁlm, Lee’s women
are two armed camps — the dark-skinned Jigaboos led by Rachel (Kyme) and the light-
skinned Gamma Rays led by Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell). Both groups end up in
emotionally unsatisfying, contentious scenes over class and color — or as the ﬁlm
strenuously depicts — hair and color. bell hooks adds that “Merely exploiting the issue,
the ﬁlm is neither critically subversive nor oppositional. And in many theaters black
audiences loudly expressed their continued investment in color-caste hierarchies by
“dissing” darker-skinned female characters” (179). Instead of a useful critique of the
long, legacy of the color-caste system at HBCUs, the ﬁlm merely stages the controversy
as a series of angry tirades and a big, glossy production number"set in the familiarity of a
beauty salon, a traditional site for urban female bonding which Lee subversively turns
into a battle-ground. According to cast memories, the color and caste separation spilled
over into real life as the dark-skinned female actors complained about the extra attention
given to the “Wannabees.” “It seemed that the interest of the males really did lie in the
lighter-skinned women. The men were running after the Wannabees,” recalls Joie Lee,
“as if they were the last women on earth” (87). In representing the typical black college,
Lee fails to contain any scenes that would indicate female bonding, or a concerted black

feminist response to the patriarchal heterosexism typical on black college campuses. In

 

'6 Lee for some reason (and the ﬁlm’s admirers concur) that the ﬁhn is a “musical,” or a subversion of the
typical Hollywood musical. However, 1 would argue that one big production number hardly qualiﬁes as
a musical.

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many ways the women seem to be ﬁ'ozen in a type of ahistoric limbo, only waiting
around to be recognized for their anti-womanist tirades, and doin’ Da Butt for the
voyeuristic fantasies of male spectators.

Designated damningly as “J igaboos” and “Wannabees,”the women serve no other
purpose than as handmaidens in the construction of black manhood -— even Rachel
accuses Dap of being with her only because she is dark-skinned in order to prove his
black political authenticity. One of the rituals established by the Gamma men for
inclusion requires that all their pledges be men; they will not accept virgins or half-men,
and the script suggests that an enforced heterosexuality is needed to keep the onus of
homosexuality away from all-male group bonding rituals which Da Fellas parody in a
counter-stomp: “You say Gamma, I say Fagl”) Thus, “Half-Pint” (an incomplete male
suggested by his name, and played by Lee) is forced to ﬁnd a woman to prove his
maleness and proper sexual-pedigree — and not just any woman but a “sexual freak”
willing to initiate his fellow pledges into Gamma manliness. The “sexual freak” calls to
mind the early eighties Rick James hit “Superfreak” — “a very kinky girl who is never
hard to please - not the kind of girl that you take home to mother” - a dance hit, states
Patricia Hill Collins, that “catapults the term ‘freak’ into popular culture” (119). In a
series of jump cuts we see Half-Pint “rapping” to several women who he tries to “trick”
into going back to the “Bone Room” where she will be expected to “get her freak on”
with several of the Gamma pledges in order to “prove” their heterosexuality. When he is

turned down by a number of women, “Big Brother” Julian helps out by “offering” Jane to

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Half-Pint. For Big Brother Julian, Jane has become “tiresome,” and he lets the Gammas
know that she is now fair game.

Writing about Lee’s female characters in general, Jacquie Jones in “The
Construction of Black Sexuality” observes that “the central female characters are
powerless and, in one way or another, abused. The abusiveness of the treatment itself
removes the women in Spike Lee’s ﬁlms from the status of participant, and relegates
them to that of victim” (255). Jane reluctantly agrees to have sex with Half-Pint, as Julian
convinces her as a “test” of her love for him, and in a room full of male cat-calls she
makes Half-Pint a Gamma Man.(“It takes a real man to be a/ Gamma man because only a
Gamma/man is a real man”). When Jane returns to Julian -— rrrission accomplished -
Julian turns on her:

Jane: I did what you said.
Julian: What is that?
Jane: I did it with Half-Pint.
Julian: What?
Jane: You told me.
Julian: The hell I did. You gave
it up to Half-Pint? How
could you? I thought you
loved me. Now you’re boning
my own frat brother. My own
ﬁat brother.
Lee’s published script is interesting here. He writes: “At this point Jane is gone. She loses
it. She’s on the express to a breakdown” (320). It is an ugly, misogynist scene, and then
after serving her purpose in the script, Jane disappears. I would argue, that because of the

un-even narrative structure the audience does not quite know how to respond to Jane’s

“rape” for the simple fact that she is constructed as an unsympathetic “type.” The ﬁlm’s

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parodic, and light-heartedness is at the expense of black women who are (as Jane is
portrayed) un- natural “freaks” and must be punished. Although School Daze resists the
temptation to attribute the mythic, out-sized sexual nature of black women on the darker-
skinned Rachel instead of Jane, I would suggest that his failure to do so is in part simply
because he is not that interested in them as subjects. Thus, the narrative is un-clear about
Jane’s punishment. We know nothing about Jane except for the superiority she wields
because of her color; but at the same time the ﬁlm validates her light-skin color. 13 she
prurished because of her “non-blackness?” Or because she has validated the assumptions
black men have about the sexuality of black women?
Hot, Bitchy, and Out of Control

For Aﬁican Americans, the problem of the twentieth century may well be the
color-line between black and white predicted by w. E. B. Du Bois, but in terms of black
produced popular culture the problem has also been, and continues to be, the intraracial
color-line. “People of color”, points out historian Eleanor Alexander, “were taught that
they had been enslaved because God had cursed them. Dark skin was a sign of the curse,
and it made them inferior to whites” (41). Needless to say, intragroup color bias — an
insidious result of Euro-supremacy discourse - has been more effective than the physical
coercion aimed at devaluing the black body. Working, and rightly so, to correct the
demeaning, vicious portrayals of blacks in print and visual popular culture, black creative
efforts continue to struggle with what Hazel V. Carby terms “a crisis of representation”.
For Aﬁican American women, however, the “crisis” exists in the ways they are

represented in a popular culture that has become increasingly visual. “Much has been

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said and written about the racial stereotyping of Blacks in the media,” write the authors
of The Color Complex, “but less attention has been paid to the role of skin color.”
Yet look closely at the Black women who play romantic leads in ﬁlms:
they nearly always have light skin and long hair. Light-skinned Black
women with classic European features also predominate in beauty
pageants, music videos, and the world of modeling. In our media-driven
culture, print and visual imagery inevitably rrrirror and promote the
same color prejudices that are found in our larger society. (135)
The same type of color prejudices, of course, have been assimilated by many Aﬁican
American ﬁlrrnnakers, hence, I argue that the darker-skinned black woman in the hands
of African American male cultural producers are cast according to a valued phenotype in
order to “ﬁt” the needs of black male spectators ﬁom a shared male perspective. In terms
of presenting the black female subject, black male ﬁlmmakers ambivalently resorted to
the available female archetypes from mainstream commercial ﬁlmmaking while
maintaining the substance of a black cultural aesthetic.

In terms of ﬁlm iconography, the medium plays with light and dark; with
characters, such play allows the ﬁlmmaker to short-cut narrative exposition in order to
better associate certain character traits with a shared set of meanings about light and dark.
Thus, in classical Hollywood tradition the good guys in Westerns, for example, wear
white hats and ride white horses. For women, on screen divisions between “good girls”
and “bad girls” can be as simple as lighting effects, and a female character’s brunette or

blond hair. In her description of Oscar Micheaux’s “subversive stylistics” — a space of

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deference and antagonism — in The Scar of Shame Jane Gaines offers a useful frame in

 

which to discuss the attributes of light and dark attributes of black women by black male
ﬁlmmakers. “In _T_he Scar of Shag, the stylistic discourse carrying the melos is
connected to the aesthetics of skin tone and hair texture played out in light, shadow, and
shade.”

This color scheme or code would be known in its ﬁner gradations and

variations only to black audiences — to the group that would read a

wealth of signiﬁcance in the difference between processed and un -

processed coiffure, and would be sensitive to all kinds of hair-splitting

along caste lines. (73)
I would suggest that a color code is used by some black ﬁlmmakers that signal certain
attributes about black women to black male spectators. Light-skinned women with
European phenotype (or close to it) oﬁen signal desirable characteristics determined by a
black phallocentric gaze. Dark-skinned women, on the other hand, are usually scolds,
ultra-demanding, and sexually voracious. For example, Eddie Murphy and Reginald
Hudlin used color—coding effectively by casting “bad girl” Robin Givens against “good
girl” Halle Berry in 1992's Boomerang, not only signaling to the audience that men
preferred non-sexually aggressive women as mates, but only light-skinned women were
“lady-like.” John Singleton used this paradigm effectively in Boyz N me Hood (1991)

where dark-skinned women are coded as pathologically “bad single-parents.”

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Boyz II Men: Baby Mama Trauma Drama

Boyz N the Hood opens with young Tré getting into a ﬁght with another boy while
the white teacher stands by helpless. When the teacher telephones Tré’s’ mother Reeva
(Angela Bassett) she “assumes” Tre', like all angry, young black children does not have a
father, and Reeva Styles is just another ill-educated, irresponsible single black parent.
Angry at the white teacher for her assumptions, and angry at her son, Reeva calls on
Tré’s father Jason “Furious” Styles (Larry Fishbume). “The basic assertion in this
sequence — and the ﬁlm in general — ,” argues S. Craig Watkins, “is that women are
unable to teach young boys how to be responsible, productive male adults” (223). This is
an argument that holds weight with the ﬁlm Antwone Fisher that I discuss later. Thus, the
ﬁrst black woman we see is an angry, dark-skinned woman “abandoning” her child for a
career. “When he [Furious] meets his former wife at an upscale restaurant, he also subtly
suggests an underlying resentment of her success and upward mobility. Here,” suggests
Donald Bogle, “he gets at an emotional truth of certain Aﬁican American males, uneasy
with a successful educated black woman” (363). Although Watkins ﬁnds this “alternative
reading of Furious” as “far less favorable,” the fact remains that there is something
“emasculating” about independent black women who abandon traditional gender roles.

But on the other hand, stay-at-home-mothers are not necessarily the answer.
Although as Bogle correctly assess about the fear of “certain African American
males, uneasy with a successful educated black woman” what are we to make of the
dark-skinned mother of Tre’s friend Doughboy (Ice Cube)? Mrs. Baker (Tyra Ferrell)

clad in dingy house-coat and pink rollers is introduced to the spectator as a loud-mouth

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parent who yells at her oldest son Doughboy: “And you ain’t shit. You’re just like your
daddy.” Mrs. Baker an unmarried mother of two sons by two different fathers lives with
both sons, and the mother and child of her second son Ricky. As head of the household,
Mrs. Baker, the narrative suggests gets by on welfare, and the presence of high-school
Ricky’s family indicates Moynihan’s generational dependence on the resources of decent
taxpayers who raise their children in traditional families. But unlike single black fathers,
single black mothers — more often than not -— at the poverty line, are always singled out as
the number one societal problem. As Mark Anthony Neal points out: “A derivative of the
welfare mother has been the “welfare queen,” which implies that some welfare mothers
have exploited the welfare state to the point of living in fairly luxurious [my emphasis]
circumstances”?
Because the popular press often equated intense poverty with “blackness”
and the quintessential welfare recipient with a woman, the terms welfare
mother or the more insidious welfare queen have functioned as non -
racialized monikers of social deviance and dysﬁrnction. (74)
And screen-writer Singleton provides the images of Mrs. Barker’s “social deviance and
dysﬁrnction.” Although the Barker home is neat and tidy, the two Barker boys lack male
guidance and supervision; Doughboy runs the streets and becomes a gang-banger, and

Ricky (the good son) lives under his mother’s roof with his girlﬁiend and their baby.

Thus, Singleton’s images construct the model of the social deviance who does not parent

 

'7 The term “welfare queen” was used successfully by Ronald Reagan. Only white power-brokers beholden
to rich, white corporations could possibly (without a trace of irony) apply the term luxurious to the types
of housing available to poor black women and their children.

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her sons while collecting government money, community censure comes ﬁ'om the light-
skinned mother of Brandi who warns her well-cared for daughter to “Stay away ﬁom
those nappy-head niggers.” As S. Craig Watkins explains, Singleton’s purpose in
presenting alternative models of masculinity maybe laudable, but “many of his core
thematic ideas comply with the patriarchal assumptions of social conservatism” (222).
But the social conservatism displayed in Boyz N the Hood, is also shared by many
conservative blacks of the middle-class who have had a history 7- even before the
Moynihan Report -— of blaming black mothers for the ills of the black lower classes.
In Search of: The Black Middle Class Family

In 2002's Antwone Fisher directed by actor Denzel Washington, and based on the

 

harrowing memoir Finding F isl_r, the ﬁlmed version of the memoir follows the traditional
trope of African American autobiographical writing. As a commercial Hollywood ﬁlm,
Finding Fish was an attractive property that, in mainstream terms, could apply to non-
whites as well with its broad Horatio Algeresque outline of poor-boy- makes-good, but as
a visual spectacle Fisher’s tale becomes a space for contestation on the nature of black
motherhood. Similar to the images of dysﬁmctional black motherhood in the earlier 52%
in the Hood, Antwone Fisher demonizes single black mothers by encasing the film
version in middle-class values that are reminiscent of the black middle-class spectacles of
Oscar Micheaux. Fisher, at the time of the book’s publication, was an aspiring screen-
writer and security guard at Sony Entertainment, and w encouraged in his career goals
by his employers. An American mainstream audience largely white — were ﬁrst

acquainted with Fisher’s story by his numerous talk- ow appearances which helped to

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publicize and sell the book which gave the book the type of white endorsements
appended to early slave narratives. Fisher appeared before white middle-class audiences
as a studious, extremely telegenic dark-skinned young man at a time when many of his
peers either appeared on American television screens as “kill-whitey-rappers,” or as
shackled crack dealers on the way to prison. Since the issue of “race” was not central to
his memoir, and clearly he had “up-liﬁed” himself from the ghetto, Finding Fish lent
itself easily as a commodity for mainstream consumption.

On the one hand, Antwone Fisher is the harrowing tale of an abused child who
turns his life into the standard American success story. While I do not doubt Fisher’s
veracity, or his ﬁnely tuned emotionally powerful writing, I do want to emphasize
Fisher’s refashioning of his story that results in a different text on the screen. At a time
when the national conversation returned to a re-entrenchment of the mythic cultural and
family values of the “traditional”nuclear family, and the abandonment of post-industrial
inner cities , the ghost of the 1965 Moynihan Report (ﬁrst strenuously opposed by many
in the black political community) ominously appears over ﬁlms like Egg and Antwone
Em. But the Moynihan Report had its successors as Elaine Brown recounts: “The
image of the black girl as seductive predator and bearer of ‘illegitimate’ offspring dates,
of course, from the slave era, evolving in the post-Emancipation decades into a number
of mutations.”

By the 19603 she had come to be Daniel Moynihan’s “black matriarch,”
then Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen,”'and later Bill Clinton’s “unwed

teen mother.” Thus this viliﬁcation of black girls has become so in -

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grained in the culture that it inﬂuences sweeping public policy. (101)

The central conclusion of Moynihan’s and the successive reports on the black, lower—
class female-headed family was the same: the ills besetting the black family was the lack
of “morals”, and absence of a traditional father ﬁgure, or as Hortense Spillers
paraphrases in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”: the black
family “has no Father to speak of — his Name, his Law, his Symbolic function mark the
impressive rrrissing agencies in the essential life of the black community, the ‘Report’
maintains, and it is, surprisingly, the fault of the Daughter, or the female line” (258). In
other words, black-on-black violent crime, the saturation of gangsta rap, drug
dealing/addiction, and the increasing incarceration rates for young, black men were the
fault of single, black female parents. Thus, poor black mothers (and Moynihan’s report
explicitly blamed them for the absence of father3) were an easy scapegoat for whites in
control of the agencies that doled out support. Furthermore, many middle-class black
organizations increasingly added their own socially conservative voices to the blame
game.

Antwone Fisher’s personal narrative opens with the clearly troubled naval seaman
Fish (Derek Luke) ordered by his fatherly captain (James Brolin) to seek psychiatric help
for his emotional problems. While the narrative includes one confrontation that Fisher
concludes is racial, the narrative consciously stays away from race in the egalitarian
embrace of the United States Navy, itself a “patriarchal substitute” for young black men
lacking the Law of the Father. Ultimately, it is the Law of the Father that forces the

troubled adult Fisher to seek “help,” and the Law of the Father that guides him to

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wholeness as a man. Fisher is assigned to Dr. Jerome Davenport (Washington) who
impels the troubled young man to reach back into his past as a key to unlocking his
present day problems which, in a series of alternating ﬂashbacks, we learn the source of
Fisher’s anger. The ﬂashbacks provide important iconic images that contrast the middle-
class, patriarchal values of the bourgeois life-style of the Davenports (and here
screenwriter Fisher invents a suitable wife for the black doctor) with the dysfunctional
living space of his working-class foster home where the young Fisher sleeps in the
basement of the Tate home.

For Fisher, the life the Davenports present is similar to the dream he recalls as a
child, endlessly dreaming of the unattainable mother. The ﬁlm includes a dream-
sequence, where the young Fisher comes upon a huge family waiting to embrace and
nurture their lost “ﬂesh” at a table laden with food. The scene is ﬁlmed as a traditional
black “homecoming” which is replicated twice more in the ﬁlm: the Thanksgiving
celebration where he is “welcomed” by the large family of Berti Davenport’s, and at the
end when he ﬁnally ﬁnds his paternal relatives. At the Davenport’s table, Fisher has the
perfect model of patriarchal family values presented: Berti provides maternal physical
and psychological nourishment, while Father Davenport provides advice, discipline, and
patriarchal stability. The ﬁlm directs the spectator’s gaze to the spectacle of the well-
appointed middle-class home as the site of well-ordered domesticity, a sharp contrast to
the chaotic dis-order of the black working-class home of the foster parents. Hence, the
connection with traditional middle-class roles are contrasted with the dysfunction of his

foster home where the gender roles are reversed, and the nurturing aspect of food is

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absent. The alternate ﬂashbacks, thus, contrast the Davenport home with the Tates’
where Mrs. Tate dominates the acquiescent Rev. Tate who fails to be a “man” in
protecting the foster children ﬁ'om Mrs. Tate’s abuse.

I would suggest, however, that what makes the ﬁlm attractive to mainstream
audiences is the misconception that Angone Fisher is not about “race” in the overt
manner of Spike Lee’s Do the Rith Thing, or even John Singleton’s Bog N me HM.
Although Antwone fails to overtly address the racial injustices that would lead to his
anger, (and to the author’s credit his narrative does not shy away from the problems of
black children living in a racist society) but screenwriter Fisher compromises the “truth”
of a black experience for a white-washed “feel-good” movie that argues that black
dysfunction is not the result of systemic racism, but the fault of blacks themselves. And
the fault is laid at the door of “irresponsible black mothers” whose children, as Elijah
Anderson states, “come up hard.” Sociologist Anderson provides an apt description of
young men who “come up har ” as a result of circumstances not wholly the fault of
single-black mothers, a description that ﬁts the young black men of ﬁg; and the adult
Fisher:

They often learn to ﬁght at an early age, using short-tempered adults
around them as role models. The street-oriented home may be fraught
with anger, verbal disputes, physical aggression, even mayhem. The
children are victimized by these goings-on and quickly learn to hit

those who cross them. (49)

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The ﬁlm’s narrative suggests this condition as Fisher strikes out angrily at any suspected
slight from his ship-mates which is why the captain orders him to seek counseling, but
the source of Fisher’s problems, the ﬁlm ﬁnally argues, is the result of the apparent
dysfunctionality of black motherhood. However, I would suggest that the visualization of
' the women in Fisher’s ﬁlm tells another story where the function, or dysfunction of black
motherhood is mediated through the stratiﬁcations of class and color.

Fisher’s physically and mentally abusive foster mother Mrs. Tate (Novella Nelson)
teaches him to hate his dark skin color by repeatedly fawning over the light skin and
“good hair”of another foster child who is bi-racial. Thus, Fisher receives his ﬁrst lesson
in the value of light-skin which is barely touched on in the ﬁlm except in the implicit
visual differences in skin color. However, the camera centers on Mrs. Tate’s sneering
mouth as she ﬁ'equently refers to her male foster children as “black niggers,”and their
missing mothers as “trash.” The irony is that Mrs. Tate, as the matriarchal ﬁgure in the
home, also insists on the boys calling her “mother,” an irony not missed by the spectator
as the past -irnages of Mrs. Tate’s abuse are inter-cut with the present-day motherliness
of Berti Davenport. However, 1 want to point out the matter of casting where not only the
class position of these women are signiﬁed, but also their skin shade. The nurturing,
middle-class Berti Davenport is extremely light-skinned with Euro-centric facial features,
while Mrs. Tate is a medium-brown skin older woman with deﬁnite Afro-centric
features. Antwone, played by actor Derek Luke, matches the deep-dark complexion of
the author, and the discerning black viewer cannot help but notice the acceptance of

Antwone by Berti, and the rejection of him by the color-struck Mrs. Tate.

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Furthermore, Mrs. Tate conﬁrms the myth of the cheating Welfare Queen, as she
reproduces (takes in more children) in order to supplement her income ﬁ'om an
indifferent welfare system. In addition to exploiting the foster care system for monetary
gain, Mrs. Tate, the ﬁlm also suggests, is an “accomplice” of Nadine (Yolanda Ross)
who sexually abuses the child while ostensibly providing the household her services as
an occasional baby-sitter. If Mrs. Tate is the converse of Berti Davenport in class and
color, then Nadine, the dark-skinned, sexually voracious Jezebel is cinematically
contrasted with the chaste, light-skinned middle-class Cheryl Smolley the adult Fisher’s
romantic interest. By comparing the sexual abuse of the young Fisher with the chaste
romance with Cheryl, the ﬁlm suggests the powerﬁrl image of the sexual deviancy of the
darker-skinned Nadine. Furthermore, the relationship between Fisher and Cheryl directly
mirrors the relationship between the Davenports as a corrective to the dysfunction of
non-traditional relationships. Like Furious Styles in Egg, Jerome Davenport serves as a
role model for the young Fisher, especially in combating the negative images of sexually
irresponsible black men who are “trapped” by black Jezebels like Nadine. Hence, both
ﬁlms construct the traditional role of the Father to beat back the dark inﬂuence of
sexually irresponsible lower-class black women.

But who is ultimately responsible for the years of psychic and physical abuse
Fisher endures? It is the dark-skinned, unwed black woman who abandoned her child
after giving birth to him in prison. In the ﬁlm’s ending, Eva May is found living in ghetto
poverty, a beaten—down, forlorn dark-skinned woman who is barely responsive to the

accomplishments of her son. However, the ﬁlm fails to address the multitude of societal

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pressures that caused Fisher’s mother to give him up in the ﬁrst place; it is as if the
darkness of her skin is some how enough explanation for her abandonment of
motherhood, or to put it bluntly, her existence as some baby [sic] mama. “Whereas the
welfare mom/queen has largely been the creation of media outlets and political elites,”
explains Mark Anthony Neal, “the baby mama has been a creation of black communities
themselves. Generally speaking, the baby mama can [be] seen as an attempt by various
and sometimes competing black communities to mark those black female bodies that
remain outside ‘mainstream’ black culture.”

“Uneducated,” “impoverished,” “lazy,” and “undisciplined,” such

bodies are seen by some in the black community as threats to nearly

a century of attempts to sanitize the most negative perceptions of

black life and culture. (75)
I would argue that the invention for the screen of the middle-class Davenports and Cheryl
Smolley are attempts to contain another compelling story: that of Eva. Why the change in
emphasis? Mark Anthony Neal offers a very persuasive and apt reason for the adult,
screen-writer Antwone Fisher to modify his past: “. . . the baby mama also serves as a
particular sign within contemporary black male discourses that are connected to black
male desires to be seen as competent and meaningﬁrl players within social and political
spheres perceived as the white male domains of capital and material accumulation” (75).
So Eva’s inherent dysfunction must be muted in order for her son to join the ranks of
respectability. As the story lirnns, the importance of fathers are clearly more important in

raising black men to “handle their bizness,’ and middle-class fathers are more equipped

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than the depraved indifference of irresponsible baby mamas. As Patricia Hill Collins
notes: “Black bitches are one thing. Black bitches that are fertile and become mothers are
something else.”
Hot, Bitchy, and Out of Control
For too many young, black ﬁlmmakers dark-skinned women (in all black casts) are

constructed as either angry black “bitches,”or as a combination of the mythic
Jezebel/Sapphire sexual ﬁgure as deﬁned by historian Deborah Gray White. “As a
stereotype,” explains Deborah Gray White, “Sapphire is a domineering female who
consumes men and usurps their role” (176).

Her persona is not sexual but is as indomitable as Jezebel’s and

equally emasculating in effect. While Jezebel emasculates men

by annulling their ability to resist her temptations, and thus her

manipulations, Sapphire emasculates men by usurping their

role. . . Sapphire is as tough, efficient, and tireless as Mammy.

Mammy operates, however, within the boundaries prescribed

for women, while Sapphire is ﬁrmly anchored in a man’s world.
If the respectability of black women could reside in black women who were lighter-
skinned, or were. closer to white phenotypical ideals, then her opposite was constructed as
a darker-skinned malevolent (at least to male dominance) creature of deviant sexual
appetites. Thus the Amazonian exhibitionism of Blaxploitation female icon Pam Grier
who could titillate many male spectators while simultaneously giving a wink and a

cursory nod to an emerging black feminism as cinematic images as a “Black Bitch.”

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Patricia Hill Collins discovers that the term “bitch” conﬁgured by black women is
subject to active contestation like the term “nigger” embraced by hip-hop culture; thus,
“not all bitches are the same.”

Among Aﬁican American Studies undergraduate students at the

University of Cincinnati, the consensus was that “bitch” and “Bitch”

referenced two distinctive types of Black female representations.

all women potentially can be “bitches” with a small “b.” But the

students also identiﬁed a positive valuation of “bitch” and argued

(Some, vociferously so) that only Aﬁican American women can be

“Bitches” with a capital “B.” Bitches with a capital “B” or in their

language, “Black Bitches,” are super-tough, super-strong women

who are often celebrated. (123-124)
Grier’s characters may be called black bitches by the villains in her ﬁlms, but she
routinely kicked ass without sacriﬁcing her femininity. “She becomes a “Bad Bitch” (e. g.
a good Black woman), when she puts her looks, sexuality, intellect, and/or aggression in
service to African American communities” (124) However, the Blaxploitation genre was
hardly an acceptable representation of black women to the leaders of the middle class
civil rights movement, and proved to be too threatening to the male adherents of the New
Black Aesthetic who came of age after the feminist and gay and lesbian movements of
the 19703. Although, not all Aﬁican American male ﬁlmmakers color-coded black
female actors according to the Jezebel/Sapphire/bitch conﬁguration, nevertheless, it is

important to remember that this post-Soul generation have also inherited a world where

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interracial dating and marriage is not as uncommon for them as it was in the days of their
parents and grandparents, and as forward thinking as they believe themselves to be, the
use of dark-skinned, overtly sexual predatory black women becomes a useful short hand
for black ﬁhn-makers to express their suspicion of sexually aggressive, and independent
black women.

Black actor and independent ﬁlm maker Bill Duke cast dark-skinned Robin Givens
as the predatory Irnabelle who seduces a sexually naive Forest Whittaker in _A;R_age_i_n
ﬂa_r;l_e;n_ (1991). Based on the urban novels of Chester Himes, the novelist’s description of
Irnabelle: “She was a cushioned-lipped, hot-bodied, banana-skin chick with the speckled-
brown eyes of a natural-bom amante” (6) ﬁts the archetypal black Jezebel. But Givens’
skin-coloring, and “sexy” persona gives the ﬁlm a different perspective, and director
Duke no doubt approved her casting based on her real-life reputation as celebrity eye-
candy and second-generation “gold-digger.” Nelson George lauds her performance in the
ﬁlm, while acknowledging the “tabloid-baggage” that informed her character.
“Overcoming the bad publicity generated by her controversial marriage to heavy-weight
champ Mike Tyson, she gave an incredibly sexy, profoundly troubled, and fascinating
performance” (113). Givens’ was also used as the prototypical “black bitch” gold-digger
in 2003’s Head of State where she spurns local politician Chris Rock until he becomes a
viable presidential candidate.

As part of a criminal gang, Irnabelle routinely scolds the inept men in the gang, as
she verbally holds her own in the company of men who secretly lust after her, but are

aﬁaid of her “toughness.” The ﬁlm wears its mistrust of black women as sexual

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predators (J ezebels) and emasculating shrews (Sapphires) blatantly up-ﬁ'ont as it argues
the “unnaturalness,” and black “bitchiness” of the black woman. Irnabelle is the sexy
Jezebel/Sapphire who cannot be trusted; Jackson’s landlady Mrs. Canﬁeld (Helen
Martin) is the “black bitch who verbally emasculates him; and the deceased Mama
J ackson(bitch mother) insures his chastity by her disapproving image over Jackson’s bed,
the scene of his coming of age as a man. Finally, there is Big Kathy (Zakes Mokae) who
in the book impersonates women as part of a con-game, but screenwriter John Toles-Bey
turns Big Kathy into the gay-cross-dressing Madam of a black brothel - thereby
underscoring the sexual deviancy of black women. All of the women (including Big
Kathy) — except for Mama Jackson — are dark-skinned. But in spite of her color, Mama
Jackson is also de-feminized by a running gag through the ﬁlm when everyone who sees
her portrait thinks she is a man.

The ﬁlm posits the violent Slim (Badja Djole), Imabelle’s lover/partner in a con
game, as the only man “man” enough to keep her in her place, and the reasons for
lrnabelle’s double-cross of Slim and the gang (Slim of course, does not trust her) is
because he physically abuses her. But the ﬁlm’s narrative does not invite sympathy for
Irnabelle because of her construction as a greedy, conniving “black bitch,”furthermore,
Irnabelle uses her body to “rob” men of their reason which ﬁrmly places her in the other
familiar paradigm for black women: the Jezebel. Quickly seizing on the hapless non-
aggressive, Christian devout, mother’s boy Jackson as a “patsy” in her elaborate con to
swindle Slim, Irnabelle usurps male prerogative by seducing the virgin Jackson who,

quite naturally, falls in love with Irnabelle because she ﬁnally makes him a “man.”

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Jackson is not a man, the ﬁlm argues, because he allows his emasculation by the
Sapphire-character of his landlady who keeps up a running commentary about Jackson’s
lack of “women,” and his devotion to the injunctions of a long-dead mother. Jackson
sleeps under the eye of his, saintly dead mother whose picture stands guard over his bed.
' Thus, the religious Jackson is watched over by Mama Jackson — a stout, formidable, and
extremely light-skinned woman whose portrait glowers at any one approaching her baby,
and on the other side, a picture of the white sissieﬁed Jesus. Every morning Jackson
prays to both: “Dear Lord, thank you for letting me wake up in my right mind, and
keeping me from women.” It is assumed from the ﬁlm’s narrative that Jackson’s “un-
manliness”and unassuming manner comes from the parenting of his dead mother, and an
impotent Christianity.
Where’d the Black Women Go?

In the last hour of the PBS/BBC documentary - America Beyond the Color Lin —
scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. spoke with a group of aspiring black female actors about
the role skin color plays in casting black women in commercial ﬁlm. All of the women
agreed that the preferred skin color is beige. As the group of dark-skinned women
pointed out, women of their color are rarely - if ever — chosen for romantic leads, even
by Aﬁican American casting directors. The problem, points out actor Nia Long, isn’t so
much “racism,” but what mainstream (white) audiences are comfortable with: “Light-
skinned women playing romantic leads opposite white actors are less threatening,” she
explains, “they are more identiﬁable as white because (if they are bi-racial like Halle

Berry) then they have one white parent which counts.” In “The Real Taboo? Hollywood,

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Race, and Romance,” Torn Grayman ﬁnds that the real problem is a “reluctance toward
depicting romance between black men and black women.”As Grayman notes, actor
Denzel Washington, “the most popular black ﬁlm actor in American history — has been
romantically paired with a black woman lead exactly once” -— although he has appeared

as a married man in John Q and Antwone Fisher but in a traditional romantic structure,

 

Grayman points to The Preacher’s Wife where Washington’s romantic interest is played
by Whitney Houston. Mainstream American ﬁlmmaking, many black women note,
accepts black men paired with non-black female actors more readily than casting two
black leads, or even, black women and white men as romantic leads.

However, I would suggest that in matters of casting, Hollywood casting choices
depend more on the target audience than anything else. Actor Halle Berry has appeared
in so many ﬁlms with non-black leading men that many in the black community feel that
she refuses to appear opposite black male leads, but Berry has been marketed as the long-
suffering Tragic Mulatto which attracts an older, educated, middle-class white audience.
On the other hand, Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts were not allowed a romance in
The Pelican Brief a ﬁlm directed at the same type of age and income demographic as
Berry’s ﬁlms. Fihns targeted to the youth market, like _0_ (a hip-hop version of Othello)
and Save the Last Dance, 1 would argue, are more amenable to interracial romantic
pairings, in part due to the cross-over appeal of rap which in commercial Hollywood
translates to the belief that young people are more tolerant of interracial romantic
pairings. But, again, these ﬁlms insist on black male/white female pairings —- and the

reasons (and excuses) vary. Black and white males in the industry cite a long, list of

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reasons, from the old Shibboleth of Southern attitudes (as if racism stopped at the Mason-
Dixon line), to the supposed non-acceptance of interracial couplings in the international
market (international means Europe, and Europe does not have any black people), the
fact remains that in an industry where standards of beauty are controlled by men, black
women as romantic subjects opposite white men threatens the supremacy of white female
beauty.

~ In the March 14, 2005 edition of Newsweek columnist Allison Samuels notes a new
trend in Hollywood movies starring bankable black male actors: “. . . .there’s something
strange going on in such ﬁlms as the recent Will Smith blockbuster “Hitch”: these days
Aﬁican American leading men tend to be cast opposite Latinas instead of black
actresses.” Samuels’ article, “Why Can’t a Black Actress Play the Girlfriend?,” touched a
nerve as black women discussed the conﬁrmation of what they already knew about the
erasure of black women at a time when mainstream Hollywood appeared to embrace
racial diversity. “Hollywood’s recent multicultural casting certainly broadens the appeal
of its pictures,” notes Samuels, “and is meant to reﬂect - perhaps even to ﬂatter — a
society that increasingly sees itself as multicultural”— although mainstream Hollywood
has yet to produce a romantic ﬁlm with Latino leads.

According to Samuels, casting Latina female leads reﬂects a growing Hispanic
market: “businesswise, it’s a no-brainer,” but oddly enough, as black female actors point
out, the same multicultural casting does not apply to black women. The absence of dark-
skinned women as romantic leads was one thing, and now even the lightest-skinned black

women are not light enough. However, following the casting choices of Hollywood,

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black directors have followed suite in order to keep the paradigm of “good girl” “bad
girl” colorism intact while tacitly following the cultural agenda of racial diversity. “When
conservative black ﬁlmmakers make movies,” observes bell hooks, “the images of
blackness they create are often in keeping with the status quo, as informed by
internalized white supremacist aesthetics as images created by unenlightened white and
other non-black ﬁlmmakers” (Reel 72).

A perfect example of combining genderized colorism and racial diversity for
mainstream audiences is Out of TE (2003) directed by Carl Franklin who began his
ﬁlm career as a black independent ﬁlmmaker. In the ﬁlm, Denzel Washington juggles his
estranged wife Alex (Eva Mendes) a Miami detective and an affair with ex-high school
lover Ann Merai (Sanaa Lathan). Lathan plays the stereotypical gold-digging, black
Jezebel who uses her sexuality to scam the local sheriff Matt Whitlock (Washington) into
stealing conﬁscated drug money for a bogus cancer treatment. In an elaborate ruse
concocted with her husband Chris (Dean Cain). The success of the scam, thus, depends
on the good-guy decency and guilt of Whitlock who is still in love with his estranged
wife. In addition, Ann and her husband stage an elaborate scene where Whitlock must
“save” Ann from Chris’ physical abuse. What is disturbing about the ﬁlm is not only the
trope about the deviant sexuality of the black woman, but the fact that her husband, in
effect, agrees to “pimp” her out for monetary gain. Or, since the instigator of the plot is
not clear, one could assume that the money- grubbing Ann Merai “ﬁrcks” for money.

Since Whitlock is estranged ﬁ'om his wife Alex (Mendes) the two do not have any

overtly sexual scenes together; Washington’s steamy sex scenes are with Lathan which

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establishes the difference between the two. Furthermore, Ann Merai’s out-of-control
sexuality compromises the expected love plot between Whitlock and Alex who - the
narrative suggests- are still in love, and only the black Ann Merai stands in the way of
traditional marriage. In the end Ann Merai murders her husband and injures Whitlock
who tries to reason with her about giving back the money. But as the deviant black
woman, she remains unreasonable as she tells Whitlock that the con wasn’t all an act:
“But I can’t live broke. Life ain’t shit when you’re broke”— tries to murder him again,
and is in turn, shot to death by Whitlock’s estranged wife Alex. Once the evil, destructive
“black whore” has been executed for her sins, Whitlock and his wife can be reconciled.
Thus, the answer to columnist Samuels query: Why Can’t a Black Actress Play the
Girlfriend? - is yes, but only if she dies in the last reel.
Reckless Eyeballing: Interrogating the “Gaze”

In her Black Looks: Race and Representation cultural critic bell hooks explains the
intricate set of “black looking” relationships between the reality of African American life
and the fantasy which appears on American movie screens. As she and other critics have
theorized, the conscious act of “looking’ back at visual images uncritically is not a
passive activity in which blacks accept a version of their Otherness. In fact, argues hooks,
“In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and
cultivating ‘awareness’ politicizes ‘looking’ relations — one learns to look a certain way
in order to resist” (116). However, the “gaze” is not limited to the critique of racial
images in a medium controlled by whites. Within black ﬁlmmaking praxis there are

several intersecting sites that lend themselves to a variety of intraracial responses, or

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“looking” relations as oppositional contestations to mainstream cinematic practices. Todd
Boyd correctly points out that since “African American life is not monolithic, so it should
be represented broadly so as to accommodate its broad dimensions. We must accept that
as we proceed into the next century, the reconﬁguration of Black identity will be
informed by a myriad of possibilities, including gender, class, and sexuality” (23). To
achieve these goals is an ambitious one, and under the constraints and compromises
black ﬁlmmakers face in order to present their vision to a wider, and diverse black
audience, a more representative inclusion appears to be an up-hill struggle. But as ﬁlm
distribution technology increases in the forms of lntemet access, and direct-to-video and
DVD forms have proliferated, many marginalized voices from women and gays and
lesbians, at least have a better chance to have their voices heard. As I have argued, the
struggle to deﬁne a uniﬁed black cinematic aesthetic depends (rightly or wrongly) too
often on competing black political ideologies, essentialist intra-class divisions, and a
system of genderized colorism that reﬂects the masculinist control of a medium that has
yet to achieve parity in the means of production for all in order to express the ﬁrll
heterogeneity of the black diasporic experience so that no one will have to ask: Am I

black enough for you?

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Chapter Four: Are We Not Men?: The Image Problem
Introduction

The intent of this chapter is to examine the ways in which Aﬁican American men
were forced to create new images of themselves in order to refute the racist discourse of
mainstream post-Reconstruction America. I want to consider the cultural landscape that
brought together competing claims for black political and cultural autonomy during a
time described by many historians as the “nadir of race relations” in American history.
There are compelling reasons to consider for situating an examination of a construction
of black masculinity at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
century. As David Levering Lewis and other historians of the post-Reconstruction era
note after the notorious election of 1877 — “Henceforth, the white South would take care
of its black people and the North would take care of most of the nation’s business. The
Nation had said starkly what President Hayes had no need to say publicly about the
Aﬁican American: “Henceforth, the nation, as a Nation, will have nothing more to do
with him” (163).

In this racially charged political climate we need to keep in mind two relevant and
interconnected events that hardened in the aftermath of Reconstruction. First, there was
the virulence of the scientiﬁc racism that attacked the humanity of Aﬁican Americans on
two fronts: politically in the form of Jim Crow physical violence, and culturally in the
equally psychological violence to African Americans in American popular culture.
Historian John David Smith points out that — “From 1882, when statistics began to be

collected systematically, until 1903, white mobs lynched 1,941 blacks.” Moreover,

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during a time of entrenched racial attitudes, Jim Crow laws, and a return of semi-bondage
for black men, the sadistic rituals of lynching speciﬁcally revolved around the unnatural,
and hyper-sexuality of the black male toward the wholesale sexual assaults against
“pure” white women. “After 1890 Jim Crow laws,” writes Smith, “in one southern state
1 after another locked blacks into a truly separate and unequal world. Frightened by the
thought of “social equality” and economic competition with blacks, white southemers
employed all manner of racial violence to keep African Americans generally landless,
uneducated, and powerless” (xiv).

The second pertinent event was the appearance of a distinct Aﬁican American
culture whose inﬂuence forever changed the contours and deﬁnition of American popular
culture as a whole. The plantation culture of millions of slaves reﬂected a melange of
Aﬁican folk customs that were retained through the traumatic experience of the middle
passage to the New World. While historians and some cultural nationalists may still
debate whether or not the origins of a distinct, unitary Aﬁican culture survived to come
into contact with a European culture, is a debate that I do not consider here. But the
culture of plantation slaves was creolized ﬁ'om the ﬁrst as blacks came into contact with
different ethnic groups and adapted different customs for a new way of life as disparate
African ethnic groups became “seasoned” as a unitary racial group. As a group
categorized by race and status, however, the slave culture was characterized by similar
relationships with religion, music and language. It was in these areas that blacks were
perceived as culturally diﬂerent from whites as their folk ways suffered in comparison to

high European culture. At a time when European aesthetics were divided and valued as

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either “high” — the hallmarks of civilization, or “low” — the lack of civilization, slave
culture was at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that evaluated blacks as creators of nothing
of civilized value.

In Figges in Black: Worde, Sims, and the “Recia ” Self, Henry Louis Gates
argues a connection between the Harlequin ﬁgure and his possible origins as an Aﬁican
slave. Gates suggests that contained in Harlequin’s black and white mask lay the two
characters of minstrelsy - “the masks of Tarnbo and Bones.” Gates, pointing out the
negroid face of illustrations between 1783 and 1870, persuasively demonstrates the link
between Harlequin and American minstrelsy which makes the ﬁgure extremely
suggestive of the “critical signiﬁcation” between white and black relations, and between
white and black texts. Noting the play between “ﬁgures of light and darkness in the
works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe,” Gates sees this same trope in a signiﬁcation
relationship between these American Romantics, slave narratives, and the Confederate
romance (50). I want to borrow this concept as the controlling trope in the works of Paul
Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt as signifying tropes of resistance.

As Joseph Boskin explains in Smbo: The Rise e, Demise of An America Je§_t_er,
the life of the black Sambo, that Aﬁicanized version of the Jester or Fool, “began with
the early colonization efforts in the seventeenth century, if not considerably earlier” (7).
Indeed, as the trade in West Africans evolved in the New World, the ﬁgure became
connected to the black as a badge of his inhumanity. The connections between Jester-
black-Sambo are murky and tangled at best, as Boskin relates, but Boskin points to two

strong possibilities for the popular appellation. Boskin points to the name’s etymology

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that points to both African (sarn bo) and Hispanic origins (zarnbo). Boskin points to the
Hispanic origin as the most likely source of connecting the term with blacks, a
connection I consider useful for this chapter. A zarnbo, explains Boskin, “refers to a
person who is bowlegged or knock-kneed. In short, a ‘zambo’ is a type of monkey.” The
name, Boskin notes, has almost identical meanings in both Spanish and Portuguese.

It is conceivable that the Spanish and Portuguese slavers mocked the

Aﬁicans by calling them “zamboes.” It is not going too far to suggest

that that English translated “zarnbo” into “sambo.” In fact, it is possible

that the West Indian slave traders had already begun the practice. (3 8)
Regardless of the name’s origin, Sambo in the American South became the entertaining
slave, and a character of fun that out-lasted slavery well into the twentieth century. But
there were two different readings of the “slave as entertainer”which complicated the
search for an authentic black cultural expressivity by blacks themselves.

“Characterizing blacks as sambos meant they were careﬁ'ee buffoons,” points Ellis
Cashmore, “devoid of the kind of sensibilities of whites. They grinned a lot, danced a lot
and sang a lot” (27). But what troubled whites more than singing and dancing (which
they considered natural to the African nature), describes Boskin, was their robust,
raucous laughter (what one white listener characterized as “the peculiar hearty negro
guffaw”) of whoops, screams, and hollers that still perplexes whites to this day.

Blacks giving themselves to the moment, to frolic when their status
was the most demeaned, both angered and intrigued whites. That

slaves, or even poor free blacks, for that matter, were not depressed

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and sullen but extremely lively and merry confused whites. (53)
Adds Cashmore about the scenes of “happy” slaves - “A little evidence goes a long way:
this was meant to prove that they were all happy with life and totally committed to their
masters.”

Never mind the backbreaking daily toil in the ﬁelds, the habitual

lashing of the bullwhip, the wrenching away of loved ones and

the total denial of anything resembling a life; blacks were happy

in their social and moral void. Just look at them. (27)
I will leave for the moment the acts of resistance in the subterfuge, mis-direction, and
signifying nature of black cultural response to slavery in order to consider the very real
social meanings embedded in the character of black Sambo.

As cultural critics and perceptive historians have noted, whites needed the
psychological meaning of Sambo. First, Sambo was used as ammunition in the war of
words between the slave holding South and the righteous scorn of Northern abolitionists.
Knowing the effect of the tales of runaway-slaves, slave-owners could counter the
gruesome images with the dancing, singing, and laughing Sambo. Sambo was good
“public relations” as many recollections left by Northern visitors attest as grinning slaves
were lined-up to refute the lies told about their ill-treatment. How could they sing, dance,
laugh, and tell jokes if slavery was such an evil? Cashmore follows Jan Pieterse argument
that calls the Sambo a “ cultural talisman through which masters ‘sought to choreograph
reality’” (27). Sambo was the magic ﬁgure to ward off the increasing divisiveness that

would later rip the country apart over the issue of slavery. Not a few slave holders no

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doubt feared that the end of slavery was an inevitability, but there was another reason to
believe in the “magica ” powers of Sambo, and that was to ward off the very real
possibilities that at any time the numerous Sambos would stop grinning and force the
issue by violence.

The second reason for Sarnbo’s importance is in his relevance for keeping control
of former slaves in the messy work of nation-building aﬁer the South’s devastation. If
Sambo was a “cultural talisman,” and a “dramatic evasion” before the War, as Ellis
Cashmore insightfully argues, then his ﬁgure proved to be just as useful as a dramatic
possibility during Reconstruction. The social meanings of Sambo under slavery were just
transferred to a mainstream public North and South eager for white reconciliation, and
equally weary of war and blacks.

The slave system afforded slaves a structured environment, which

might appear to those who do not know it uncomfortable, though

not unbearable. Slaves themselves, however, are quite at home.

So went the slaveowner’s logic. (27)
The argument that blacks needed, indeed thrived in a structured environment resulted in
the agreement to end the experiment of Reconstruction. Structured environment meant
Sambo did not need to be taxed with the stress of self-govemment, or any civil rights at
all. Structured environment meant that Sambo needed forced labor under harsh
sharecropping arrangements, and even harsher prison camps.“Sambo was too content, too

dim and probably too lazy to challenge existing arrangements.”

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The images of black males as the wide-mouth grinning Sambo permeated every
aspect of American visual and print culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. “His style ﬁlled the literary ﬁeld in novels, short stories, children’s tales, dime
novels, essays, pamphlets, and leaﬂets” (Boskin 11). In the plantation tales of Joel
Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, Sambo became Uncle Remus and Uncle Mose
through out mainstream popular culture, and in combination with the minstrel show
“sold” whites an image — often contradictory and always illogical — of black men as
docile, lazy, born liars and thieves of chickens and watermelons, and forever child-like in
nature. “It would not be exaggeration,” adds Boskin, “to say that Sambo was the ﬁrst
truly indigenous American humor character throughout the culture, transcending region
and ethnicity” (8). Sambo with his magniﬁed “darky”features, malapropisms of speech,
and legendary musical abilities was perfect for America’s ﬁrst form of popular
entertainment. But it was a form controlled by whites and for the entertainment of whites
who were afraid of the alternative.

Within this cultural matrix, I want to consider a narrative discourse that combines
the attributes of both Harlequin and Sambo as black male writers deliberately transgress
and signify on the images of the uncivilized “savage,” as signiﬁers of “blackness” and
“whiteness” in the construction of masculinity. As popular authors who depended on a
white readership, Dunbar and Chesnutt were forced to hide behind masks of subterfuge,
and misdirection typical of Harlequin’s masking qualities of misdirection in order to
challenge the existing perceptions of the black male. But I also want to stress the act of

signifying as a trope rooted in an Aﬁican American tradition that comes out of the slave

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“entertainment” performed in front of whites. Hence, Dunbar and Chesnutt aware of dual
audiences “perform” dualistic acts of signiﬁcation, acts which suggest Bakhtin’s premise
of the double-voiced nature of speech acts, or what W. E. B. Du Bois recognized as the
“double-consciousness” of blacks rooted in a culture that supported the image of Sambo.

With Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), I am concerned with his mediation on
language in his poetry as he contests Sambo’s use of language as “gibberish” - black
dialect — and how the image of Sambo’s lack of language is hiddenbehind the mask of
Dunbar’s poems in “standar ” English. Dunbar’s novel. In turn, Dunbar’s poems in “the
master’s tongue”signiﬁes on the attributes of his color, and revises the image of Sambo
as incapable of language outside of mimicry. Such an act should be considered as an
inter-textual revision of what has been derisively termed the “Mockingbird
School,”where clever “Sambos” were mere parrots. The Smrt of me Gees offers an
especially pertinent moment to “read” the novel as signifyin’ directly on the color and
class bias within the Aﬁican American community by “calling out” the racist ideology
ambivalently assimilated by the black community.

Chesnutt’s method of “dramatic evasion”(to use Ellis Cashmore’s premise) is to
challenge what Cheryl 1. Harris terms the “properties of whiteness” in the character of
John Walden in The House Behind the Cedars. Although every black writer in the act of
cultural formation is forced to contest the exclusion ﬁom a property of whiteness — the
acquisition of language and the perception of Sambo’s inability to expressivity in arts and
letters which I take as a given — I consider Charles W. Chesnutt’s signiﬁcation on the

genre of the tragic mulatto as John Warwick, like Gates’ Harlequin “points to one of the

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black patches on his suit”(his return to his black family) and becomes invisible in the
text. Chesnutt also challenges the stability of race by highlighting the ﬂuidity of racial '
categories bound, not only by biology, but also by geographic space. For a black
readership, however, Chesnutt’s imagery of black masculinity remains an ambivalent
gesture as Chesnutt posits two faces to refute the Sambo, but is incapable of separating
himself from intraracial attitudes of color and class. Thus, Chesnutt’s “dramatic evasion”
of releasing John Walden from the text, suggests a dual reading of black masculinity.
Since James Weldon Johnson’s The A tobio h of An Ex-C 10

actually has two dates of publication — anonymously (masked) in 1912, and again with
Johnson’s name attached as author in 1927 —- I want to consider the novel as a thematic
bridge between the earlier texts of Dunbar and Chesnutt’s and Wallace Thurman’s _The
Blacker the Begy (1929) and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) as they both
challenge earlier examples of black masculinity and class as hetero-normative
subjectivities. Although I treat Thurman’s and McKay’s works out of chronological
order, I consider Thurman’s novel closer in inter-textual relationship with Johnson’s for
my purpose. Again, Johnson’s work presupposes a dual audience as he challenges racial
categories. Johnson also signiﬁes on the slave narrative as he suggests a post-modem
theme on the .performative nature of race, gender, sexuality, and cultural
commodiﬁcation. I want to suggest that Johnson’s text also begins an intraracial
conversation that posits a connection of skin color with sexuality, and in combination

with the Thurman and McKay texts, presciently capture the late twentieth century

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masculinist political Manichean thinking that equates “femininity” with white, or light
skin, and authentic black masculinity in dark skin.

Hence, Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry , inter-textually continuing the
opposition to colorist supremacy in The Sp_ort of the Gods, implies the inherent moral rot
and degeneracy of the light-skinned male in Alva and Braxton which explicitly connects
their arguments to the political imperatives of the 19603. McKay ﬁrrthers the argument
by focusing on the black cultural authenticity of the black lower classes, and the
intersections of gender, skin color, and male sexual desire. In my readings of these
novels, the consideration of dual racial audiences is not my explicit concern, rather, I am
interested in a black audience split of class and sexuality, and the ways in which these
texts act as phallophores in their contestation with Sambo.

The Caged Bird Sings the Master’s Tongue: Chesnutt and Dunbar

While Chesnutt signiﬁed on the sentimentality of the plantation “darky” by slyly
subverting the genre with his Conjure Tales, his novels suggested an American inclusion
for blacks based solely on the visible properties of “whiteness.” Although on the surface,
novels like The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and the un-published Mandy Oxendine
appeared to plead for an inclusion of black men as civil equals, Chesnutt instead offers a
compromise on the issue of race by a substitution of class. SallyAnn H. Ferguson
observes that Chesnutt’s works about the color-line, fails to overtly attack white privilege
by arguing that the privileges of whiteness should instead be shared by blacks who visibly
share a resemblance with whites.

Indeed, a great deal of Chesnutt’s work promotes his futuristic vision of

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a nonthreatning, miscegenated American citizen who, as his ﬁrst ‘Future
American’ essay states, will look ‘predominantly white,’ call himself
white, and be molded by the same culture and dominated by the same
ideals.’ (8)
However, for a sympathetic white readership who expected the fantasy of harmless old
black “rmcles” and old black “aunties,” non—dialect speaking, educated young, virile
black men who could ostensibly “pass” as white presented a cognitive dissonance to
proper racial hierarchy. This dissonance, of course, was reﬂected in Chesnutt’s book
sales as he moved beyond the plantations tales of “conjure,” and slave cultural retention
to a more dangerous narrative that focused on the racially ambiguous position of race-
mixed blacks. Although novelist/critic William Dean Howells admired the black author’s
tales of life on the color-line, as critic William L. Andrews notes: “. . . other reviewers
were put off by his unapologetic inquiries into topics considered too delicate or volatile
for short ﬁction. . .” Chesnutt soon found that he could not sustain a proﬁtable living with
his novels of black “Future Americans” who threatened to upset the racial balance in
works like The House Behind the Cedars , The Marrow ef TMition (1901), and _The
Colonel’s Dream (1905) whose sales, notes biographer Frances Richardson Keller, were
“negligible.”
About Charles W. Chesnutt, William L. Andrews correctly points out the fact that:
“No black American writer before Chesnutt showed either the interest or skill necessary
to attempt a ﬁction of manners concerned with light-skinned, middle- class Aﬁican

Americans” (xiii).What makes Chesnutt a compelling cultural ﬁgure is his historical and

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literary placement between the black male authored slave narrative and the literary
creativity of the Harlem Renaissance. As Dean McWilliams points out Chesnutt:
“understood the unique moment in which he lived and the challenges it posed” (57). The
challenges facing Chesnutt were the entrenchment of racism in the ﬁctions of American
racial custom which were irrevocably legalized under the Plessy decision of 1896. In an
era of hysterical racial fear and violence, the body of the black male was, by all accounts,
central to the national debate on race. Hoping to enter the debate on “race” on a more
critical level, Chesnutt faced what Eric J. Sundquist correctly states “was perhaps the
most pressing racial question of the era: Could the race advance culturally or ever be
accorded equal political and social rights without discarding the traces of its enslavement
and African origins?”

The post-Reconstruction years put African American culture under

intense pressure as the work of preservation and historical legitirnation

was set against the eroding forces of suppression. Corresponding to

the question of civil rights, then, was another: What life and what

historical memory were “authentically” black? (291)
Countering, and rightly so, the negative images of the black male — either as submissive
old Uncle Tom and Uncle Remus, or the young black bucks of racist imagination in the
works of rabid racists like Thomas Dixon. Although Chesnutt’s works addressed the very
real results of slaveholding miscegenation (and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s parents were
former slaves themselves) Chesnutt and Dunbar as representatives of a rising, educated

black middle-class were, thus, highly conscious of the explosive nature entailed in

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depicting black males that ran counter to prevailing white stereotypes. Chesnutt,
especially, vowed to do more in ﬁction and non-ﬁction than his contemporary white
peers by reﬂecting a narrative of black male progress as he and his caste knew it.
Although the older Chesnutt outlived his younger literary rival Paul Laurence
Dunbar, both men shared similar objectives in attempting a new cultural voice for
Aﬁican Americans, and both met with resistance from a white readership when they both
leﬁ the genres that gave them initial fame. Searching for a greater sense of authorial
control and individuality, like Chesnutt, Dunbar poured his genius into the hugely
popular plantation genre, and was hailed by the inﬂuential literary critic William Dean
Howells for his sympathetic and skillful rendition of black plantation life. As the
foremost critic of early twentieth American ﬁction, Howells spoke with authority to that
portion of a white readership enamored by the charming plantation tales of Joel Chandler
Harris and Thomas Nelson. However, the selling point of Howells critical evaluations
was that the dialect rendered plantation tales and poetry by Chesnutt and Dunbar were
the works of “genuine negroes,” and thus had the ring of black cultural authenticity. In
the hands of black writers the use of black dialect often marked the difference between
class groups in the African American community; between those who could linguistically
“pass,” and those who could not. At the turn of the century, the use of standard English
by African Americans over-tumed the racial anxieties and myths about black intellectual
abilities, and their status as equals in American political and social life. Although the
uses and abuses of the Aﬁican American vernacular have been covered by critics Henry

Louis Gates, Jr. and Geneva Smitherman, Aﬁican Americans continue to debate the

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value of a black vernacular that for many should remain (if at all) for “private” use.
Nevertheless, Howells insistence on “race,”and the linguistic attributes that black skin
implied, meant that neither Dunbar or Chesnutt would be able to escape the matter of
their individual coloring. Similar to the “excuses” made for the oratorical and literary
skills of the race-mixed Frederick Douglass, sympathetic whites were convinced that the
fact that Douglass and Chesnutt could even be logical and thinking men were evidently a
result of their infusion of European blood. However, in his earliest forays into the realm
of white publishing, Chesnutt did not reveal his race, or as I discuss later, Chesnutt
unconsciously masked his legal “race” as part of his literary agenda on the un-stability of
racial boundaries. Whereas Chesnutt’s coloring (he termed himself as “a voluntary
Negro) was no different than the color of the average white man, Dunbar’s coloring was
unmistakably black.

Reviewing Dunbar’s ﬁrst collection of poetry Majors and Minors (1895), Howells
praised the volume highly which made Dunbar an instant celebrity, especially among the
small book-buying black public starved for any cultural images of black men that did not
involve dialect speaking buffoons, or the vicious caricatures typiﬁed in the novels of
Thomas Dixon, and the racial warnings of anti-miscegenation pamphlets. But Howells’
praise came at a psychic price for the proud poet who was self-conscious, and conﬂicted
about his Aﬁican features and his abilities to create an art according to European cultural
standards. Historian Eleanor Alexander writes that Howells “emphasized that Paul was
obviously an African American, judging from the volume’s enclosed photograph of the

poet. His point was to inform the audience that Paul’s intellect was so very unusual [my

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emphasis] because he appeared to be of ‘pure African blood’” (39). Alexander provides
the telling portion of Howell’s review which bears repeating here.

The face which confronted me when I opened the volume was the

face of a young Negro, with the race traits strangely accented: the

black skin, the woolly hair, the thick out-rolling lips, and the mild,

soﬁ eyes of the pure African type. One cannot be very sure of the

age of these people, but I should have thought that the poet was

about twenty years old; and would have been worth, apart from his

literary gift, twelve or ﬁfteen hundred dollars under the [slave

auctioneer’ s] hammer. (Alexander 39)
Notwithstanding the casual racism of the time, Howell’s critical acclaim for Dunbar’s
work is muted by the decidedly linguistic terms that highlight two important problems for
African American writers who undertake the cultural tensions of utilizing the “master’s
tongue” for black cultural expression.

Signiﬁcantly, there is the fact - suggested by Howells’ own cultural, and patently
paternalistic position and linguistic control — that Dunbar’s facility and artistry is as
startling an achievement as if the volume of poetry came from a monkey, or any other
non-human species. Glossing on the oft repeated Hegelian concept that equated the trope
of “blackness” with an absence of the properties of European humanity, (i.e. rudimentary
reading and writing skills) Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in Figt_1_res in Black: Words, Signs, and
the “Racial” Self exquisitely and succinctly sums up Howells’ critical assessment,

equally applicable to Chesnutt and Dunbar as creative beings instead of imitative parrots.

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Without writing, there could exist no repeatable sign of the workings of
reason , of mind; without memory or mind, there could exist no history;
without history, there could exist no ‘humanity,’ as deﬁned consistently
ﬁ'om Vico to Hegel. (21)

Howells certainly alerts his readers in tones of wonderment that any prose coming from
some one without the “excuse” of white blood appears to the critic as doubly astonishing.
Gates refers to Howells’ evaluation as “a correlation between a metaphysical blackness
and a physical blackness” (22). But, as with the critical assessment of the dialect tales of
Chesnutt, the repeatable sign in this case is the authentic blackness signaled by both
writers use of African American vernacular. As the sales of Dunbar’s dialect poems out-
sold his poems in standard English, a similar condition experienced by Chesnutt, the
trope of a repeatable blackness not only refuted the myth about Aﬁican inferiority, but
the trope also trapped both writers as they sought to write a new Aﬁican American into a
life of genteel art.

The second problem, slightly related to the ﬁrst, concerns the problem that hovers
over all black cultural representation : that of demonstrating the African American’s
humanity through the acquisition and mimesis of European cultural forms. In Majors and
121mm Dunbar’s implicit aim is to expose the myth of black inferiority, his exposure of
the myth is evident in the poetry written in standard English which were never as popular
as his dialect poems with white (or, for that matter, middle-class black readers) and
Dunbar was forced to face the fact that white readers and critics reﬁrsed to release him

from a cultural-linguistic position as a “black” poet. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. refers to this

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position as “a curious dialectic between formal language use and the inscription of
metaphorical ‘racial’ difference.” Thus, the use of his mastery in the use of dialect, taken
as one of the irrefutable signiﬁers of blackness was judged to be Dunbar’s natural
position. Indeed, critic Howells over-praised the dialect verse to the detriment of
Dunbar’s verse in Standard English form (“Mr. Dunbar writes literary English when he is
least himself”) much to Dunbar’s dismay: “Mr. Howell’s has done me irrevocable harm,
“ he conﬁded to friends, “in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse”
(Alexander 40). The speech patterns of dark-skinned rural blacks, many of the lighter-
skinned black elite ﬁrmly believed, at least publically, was a sign of the lack of
educational opportunities for the millions of Aﬁican Americans hampered by the
stringencies of J irn Crow law and custom -- a matter that many hoped would be resolved
as more and more Aﬁican Americans signed on to the ideology of education, and other
middle-class values as a way out of grinding poverty and racial injustice.

In spite of what, the light-skinned elite proclaimed publically about the vernacular
and rural folk customs of the black masses, privately the feeling was that “darky
dialect”was just another one of the stigrnas that inscribed the black body as inferior, a
belief informally (and formally) disseminated through out Aﬁo-America. “For some
blacks,” explains Willard B. Gatewood, “there was a close link between the crudities of
the lower classes and the passage of discriminatory legislation.” During the debate over
enacting a Jim Crow law in 1900, one elite black Virginian felt called upon to remind the
racist legislators that a discriminating class of blacks existed who had “no

communication” with the lower black orders. Thus, “it was a gross injustice to humiliate

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the genteel Negro because of the shortcorrrings of the few” (Gatewood 192). The black
“genteel” reaction was, in part, due to the most odious caricatures of black Southern
speech as the mainstay of “darky” plantation tales and minstrelsy. Along with what they
saw as black pretensions to decorous dress, culture, and manners, Southern newspapers
deliberately constructed what they believed were black “speech”patterns in order to
further denigrate African American aspirations to civil equality and dignity. As I discuss
later, the language and speech patterns of rural blacks in the hands of racially ambivalent
authors like Chesnutt, Dunbar and later James Weldon Johnson were utilized in order to
mark, not only the difference of skin coloring, but an intraracial class system that
remained intact until the younger members of the Harlem Renaissance begin a re-
evaluation of the black vernacular as a distinct African American folk formation.
A Blues Book Most Excellent: The Sport of the Gods

Conscious of his dark coloring among the class and color-struck black elite, (who
gave him a “pass” because of his celebrity in the white world) Dunbar grew to despise
the very work that furnished access to the black upper-classes. If Charles W. Chesnutt
tried to trump race with class, Dunbar worked even harder to trump race with artistic
talent. But as hard as tried, Dunbar could not erase the color of his skin in a race-
conscious world, and more importantly, among the light-skinned elite who made him the
most famous black man in America. But celebrity was not enough. In a letter to his
mother, Dunbar wrote wistfully: “I am the most interviewed man in London. . . . At tea
with Henry Stanley. The French waiter in London took off his cap to me. . . . I am

entirely white.” If not in fact, Dunbar could be, however, white in literature by

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concealing his blackness through white surrogates. Dunbar’s little known four novels,
with the exception of his last W (1902), were all centered on white
characters. The themes of these novels in white-face are, writes Addison Gayle, Jr.
“based upon freedom as opposed to restraint, the individual as opposed to the group,
preference for the small town over the city, and the inﬂuence of fate/destiny in man’s
achievements occur in each wor ”(49). However, his criticism no doubt tempered by the
Black Arts Movement of the 19703 and an active proponent of the Black Aesthetic,
Gayle views Dunbar’s “individualism” as anti-black community: “Dunbar not only
identiﬁed with whites emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually; all too often be
sanctioned their evaluation of Blacks” (52). But Gayle does not take into consideration
Dunbar’s frustration with the racial custom that deprives him of individual manhood, or
Dunbar’s conﬂict over his own skin color.

Interestingly, Addison Gayle, Jr. reserves his most vitriolic attack on Dunbar’s
seemingly self-hatred for the one novel that Dunbar devoted to the condition of post-
Reconstruction blacks. Although Gayle praises the novel The Smrt of the Gods as the
ﬁrst African American novel to address “the purported sensationalism of black life,”
nevertheless, Gayle argues that the failure of young Joe Hamilton is a “failure. . .
primarily because the author is unable to believe in equality between Blacks and whites,
incapable of believing that black survival was not dependent upon white patronage and
benevolence” (56). I use Gayle’s assessment, in part, precisely to illustrate the critical
dangers of asking a work to do the impossible. This is not to say that Gayle’s critical

judgements are irrelevant (and Phyllis Wheatley also falls under this dicta), but after the

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modern Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, critical
expectations of black artistic representations were judged on the basis of their responses
to white racism, and Gayle ﬁnds Dunbar lacking in black power hyper-masculinity. Critic
Houston A. Baker, Jr. directly takes issue with Gayle’s dismissal of Smrt of the Gods
under a nus-application of historical context: “Gayle is bent on answering the question:
Was Dunbar’s authorial response to a determinate set of historical circumstances in
accord with my (Black Aesthetic) interpretation of Afro-American history?”

Some critics have almost automatically assumed that during the

nadir of race relations in tum-of-the-century America and unaided

by sophisticated literary inﬂuences and opportunities enjoyed by

his successors, Dunbar could not have produced literary works that

deserve serious attention by today’s scholars. (118)
Baker, instead situates the novel in its historical context at the moment of historical
change for Aﬁican American popular culture. Dunbar’s novel, he persuasively argues, is
a perfect melding of Southern black vernacular, and urban rhythm. “It relies for social
efﬁcacy,” writes Baker, “ on the ‘ordinary language’ and traditional historical grounding
of a human community” (116).

While I would agree with Baker that the novel is situated in what he terms “the
blues matrix,” I want to also suggest another alternative reading that I argue is Dunbar’s
response to the black political image of masculinity that reﬂects the supremacy of the
educated, light-skinned elite. Dunbar was deeply conﬂicted by his own race and skin

color, especially as a conspicuous member of an elite class of African Americans who

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embraced their “white heritage” while holding those who looked like Dunbar as ﬁgures
for derision. In response, Dunbar was equally conﬂicted over the values of the light skin
he simultaneously desired and loathed. In spite of his apparent conﬂict, however,
Dunbar’s The Smrt of the Gods presages the criticism of the colorist and bourgeois
values in the works of Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman that come later during the
Harlem Renaissance. As I argue later, Charles W. Chesnutt’s light-skinned heroes were
created in part to combat the virulent racism of the time. On the one hand, blacks were
child-like, docile beings of plantation fantasy, lost without the benevolence of superior
whites. On the other hand, black men were lustful hyper-sexual predators waiting for the
next defenseless white woman. However, the mulatto, or “racial hybrid”presented an
unstable quantity in racist discourse: one stream of nineteenth century racial theory
attacked the “mixed-race” person as “less proliﬁc,” prone to degeneracy and moral
corruption. Dunbar’s novel explicitly adheres to this notion of “mixed-blood” moral
instability as an equally unstable stage for a new black masculinity.

The popular literature by whites, especially the works by Thomas Dixon, routinely
portrayed them as cringing, cowardly types, hell-bent on polluting the blood of whites.
Chesnutt’s novels attacked this racial premise in his ﬁction by sacriﬁcing the status and
humanity of the darker-skinned (non-mixed) black man. However, I would suggest that
Dunbar tacitly accepted the view of visibly “mixed-race” men by directly challenging
their elite status within the black community. Moreover, entering the debate over blood
heredity and environment, Dunbar’s novel problematizes the debate even further by his

own inability to completely argue one side other the other in the way that Chesnutt does

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in his last novel The Om, hence his own ambivalence ultimately weakens the novel’s
structure. Nevertheless, The Spert of the Gods is more of a response to intraracial color
supremacy as a divisive threat to black communal values, black values which Black
Aesthetic critics argued Dunbar lacked. Even in her discussion of the black novelists who

severely critiqued the centrality of a “mulatto elite,” Judith R. Berzon’s 1978 Neither

 

White Nor MW does not mention Paul
Laurence Dunbar or any of his works, although Berzon does examine the racial
ambivalence of Chesnutt’s color-line characters. Although Gayle is more sympathetic to
Dunbar’s ﬁction in his 1971 biography of the writer, 93km critical attitudes like
Gayle’s and Berzon’s, thus, impel a reconsideration of Dunbar’s ﬁction.

Brieﬂy, The Smrt of the Gods relates the tale of ex-slaves Berry and Fanny
Hamilton who reside in “a homely cottage” on the estate of the white Oakleys. Berry,
writes Dunbar, “. . was one of the many slaves who upon their accession to freedom had
not leﬁ the South, but had wandered from place to place in their own beloved section,
waiting, working, and struggling to rise with its rehabilitated fortunes” (18). Berry and
Fanny are hired by the Oakleys as butler and housekeeper, and raise their children Kit
and Joe in relative comfort. But the Hanriltons are proud; proud of their light coloring
and proud of their class standing in the small black Southern community. After Berry is
falsely accused of stealing money from his white employer, he is convicted and
condemned to ten years in prison, and the family is turned out of their Southern home.
Dunbar records the reactions of the darker-skinned community to the misfortune of the

Hamiltons that reﬂect the very real animosity between light elites and dark masses in the

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African American community. But it is Joe Hamilton who bears the weight of Dunbar’s
unconcealed, and ambivalent animosity toward the light-skinned elite. Through the ﬁgure
of Joe Hamilton, Dunbar implies that Joe’s moral degradation comes about because of an
inherited moral degeneracy that is exacerbated by the lures of city life.

Before Berry’s humiliation, Joe is employed as a barber in a shop that caters
exclusively to white gentlemen. Young Joe assiduously copies the manners and superior
airs of his white customers, and keeps a social distance from his black peers who are not
unpleased at the Hamilton’s social fall. But Joe loses his place after his father’s
conviction and frnds that he must turn to the black barber shops in town in order to
support his mother and sister.

This was something of a condescension for Berry Hamilton’s son.
He had never yet shaved a black chin or put shears to what he
termed “naps,” and he was proud of it. He thought though, that
aﬁer the training he had received from the superior “Tonsorial
Parlours” where he had been employed, he had but to ask for a
place and he would be gladly accepted. (60-61)
Joe’s belated sense of community is derided as too-little-too-late by the people who now
turn their backs: “. . .you’re a white man’s bahbah.
We don’t shave nothin’ but niggahs hyeah.W’y, I hyeah you say dat
you couldn’t git a paih of sheahs thoo a niggah’s naps. You ain’t been
practisin’ lately, has you?. . .Oh, yes, you’re done with burr-heads, are

you? But burr-heads are good enough fu’ you now. (61)

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Rebuffed by the black community because of their sense of superiority, the family
reluctantly settles in Harlem where the family — away from the moral values of pastoral
life — easily succumb to the faster, and more sophisticated values of Harlem.

In many ways, The Smrt of the Gods follows the traditional city- as- site- of-
corruption cautionary tale familiar to black and white readers. Arlene Elder argues that
the novel posits “fate and environment” as equal causes for the downfall of the
Hamiltons enmeshed in the lures of city life. In Oak and Iyy, Addison Gayle, Jr. praises
the novel for making city environment “the novel’s chief villain.”

The city is portrayed as the center of evil, vice, sin, and corruption. Into
this hellhole falls the family of Berry Hamilton, a victim of the southern
plantation system, whose daughter and son are ruined by this hostile
environment. (1 51)
However, Dunbar’s tale also reads as a speciﬁc caution to young black men like young
Joe who ﬁnd in City life: “. . .the consciousness that already he was coming to be a man
of the world. . .One might ﬁnd it in him to feel sorry for this small-souled, warped being,
for he was so evidently the jest of Fate, if it were not that he was so blissﬁrlly, so
conceitedly, unconscious of his own nastiness.”
Down home he had shaved the wild young bucks of the town, and while
doing it drunk in eagerly their unguarded narrations of their gay exploits.
so he had started out with false ideals as to what was ﬁne and manly. He
was afflicted by a sort of moral and mental astigmatism that made him

see everything wrong. (83)

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Dunbar makes it quite clear that models of white manhood — either physical or
assimilated — lead to “moral and mental astigmatism.” Thus, in contradiction to what
Addison Gayle, Jr. ﬁnds as Dunbar’s “failure” to believe in racial equality, I would argue
that Dunbar is suggesting a more radical thesis of Aﬁican American individual
masculinity based on black, at the very least, models rooted in black communal values.
Although it can be argued that Dunbar’s City models of black masculinity are one-sided
portraits of con-men, drunkards, gamblers, and cheap hustlers these portraits are an
attempt by Dunbar to add a black voice to the contemporary genre of “realism” which
will not be seen again until the Harlem Renaissance. Moreover, Dunbar’s rendering of a
black “under-world” bluntly critiques the one-sided “cult of respectability” promulgated
by the black, light-skinned elite whose ideals he obliquely attacks in his last novel.

In the aptly titled chapter Frankenstein, m details the complete moral ruination
of the Hamiltons after ﬁve years in Harlem: “It may be true that the habits of years are
hard to change, but this is not true of the ﬁrst sixteen or seventeen years of a young
person’s life, else Kitty Hamilton and Joe could not so easily have become what they
were.” Mother Fanny lets herself be convinced that Berry’s incarceration is in fact a
“divorce,” and lives with an abusive gambler; Kitty, trading on her “white-skin,” and
pleasant singing voice takes to the stage; and young Joe becomes a “sweet-man” (“He did
not work, and yet he lived and ate and was proud of his degradation”) to the older and
affable “blues-shouter” Hattie Sterling. Dunbar points out that the change in Joe only
took a short time:

He was so ready to go down that it needed but a gentle push to start

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him, and once started, there was nothing within him to hold him

back from the depths. For his will was as ﬂabby as his conscience,

and his pride, which stands to some men for conscience, had no

deﬁnite aim or direction. (149-150)
In the end, Dunbar offers a complicated “happy ending.” Berry released early from
prison, thanks to the deus ex machina of a sympathetic white investigator reporter who
brings to light the perﬁdy of the white Oakleys, reunites with Fanny after the murder of
the abusive gambler. Kitty goes on the road with a musical comedy troupe, but even
Berry’s “white-skinned,” Virgina] daughter, Dunbar suggests, has not escaped the
changes caused by the City: “She had had experiences, and her voice was not as good as
it used to be, and her beauty had to be aided by cosmetics” (162). But it is Joe who fares
the worst: in a drunken haze Joe murders Hattie, who for the last time ﬁnally “throws
him over.” “Drunk half the time and half drunk the rest. Well, you know what I told you
the last time you got ‘loaded’? 1 mean it too. You’re not the only star in sight, see?” She
laughed meanly and began to sing, ‘You’ll have to ﬁnd another baby now’” (151). Found
with Hattie’s body, a stupeﬁed Joe (“The ﬁrst impression he gave was that of a man
over-acting insanity”) is given a life sentence for Hattie’s murder.

According to Gayle, such scenes of Joe and Kitty’s degradation and ruin “are
designed to appeal to a white audience. No matter how oppressive conditions in the
South, there, the black man is healthier — physically, mentally, and morally” (Gayle 56).
Gayle misses the fact that the North, even at this late date, was never the panacea for ill-

treatment in the South, and the North as racial refuge for this particular family is not

209

Dunbar’s project. And the catalyst for the Hamilton family’s leaving the South is the
false accusation of black male criminality which Gayle in his eagerness to charge the
novel with a political backwardness somehow overlooks. In many ways The Smrt of the
gage adheres to the narrative structure identiﬁed by Farah Jasmine Grifﬁn in “Who Set
'You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migr_ation Narrative: “Although there are
different reasons for migrating, in all cases the South is portrayed as an immediate,
identiﬁable, and oppressive power. Southern power is exercised by people known to its
victims - bosses, landlords, sheriffs. . .” (4). However, to the catalyst of white
oppression Dunbar adds black community censure, as pre-Fall the Hamilton’s embrace
their light-skinned superiority and racial otherness over a common racial collectivism.
Their children now irrevocably lost to them, Berry and Fanny return to the Southern
home: “New York held nothing for them now but sad memories. . .so they turned their
faces southward, back to the only place they could call home” (188). This return South
for the chastened elder Hamiltons, is equally problematic for Gayle, but Grifﬁn rightly
sees the South, not only as the site of terror and violence, but also as a “site of the
ancestor.”

If, on the other hand, the early Southern sections stress the signiﬁcance

of an ancestor, or the blood of any recently deceased black person, then

the South becomes a place where black blood earns a black birthright

to the land, a locus of history, culture, and possible redemption. If the

South is thus established as a place of birthright, then the ancestor will

be a signiﬁcant inﬂuence in the migrant’s life in the North. (5)

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I would argue that Dunbar intuitively returns the Hamiltons to what he ambivalently
locates as the site of black ancestral cultural and communal structures. Although at times,
Dunbar indicated that he had a strong dislike for black people in personal letters
(especially to his light-skinned wife Alice), and Gayle is certainly correct about Dunbar’s
racial ambivalence. Nevertheless, Dunbar contributed to the mainstream
commodiﬁcation of black folk culture as a cushion for black migrants facing the
difficulties of urban life. Moreover, Dunbar directly confronts the color of masculinity as
conﬁgured in the novels of Charles W. Chesnutt.
Blood Will Tell: Masculinity and Race
In a letter to George Washington Cable, Chesnutt bemoaned the literary depictions
of these stock black characters -— although he did acknowledge that they did exist to some
degree in black America —- “Such characters exist. . .” —
I notice that all of the good negroes (excepting your own creations) whose
virtues have been given to the world through the columns of The Century
have been blacks, full-blooded, [my emphasis] and their chief virtues have
been their dog-like ﬁdelity and devotion to their old masters. . .But I don’t
care to write about these people; 1 do not think these virtues by any means
the crown of manhood. (122)
Chesnutt’s letter prompts several intriguing observations regarding black manhood and
skin color. Although on the surface Chesnutt’s ire appears to be directed at the white
constructed behavior of these literary portrayals, the language and tone of his letter

suggests a curious ambivalence about his own belief in the properties of race and blood.

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As a self-proclaimed “voluntary Negro,”Chesnutt distances his own “white”masculine
body from the taint of “full-blooded” blackness which he equates with a modern view of
black masculinity. Although Chesnutt’s ﬁction and non-ﬁction repeatedly challenged the
racial discourse of his time, I would argue, that Chesnutt imbued with the assimilated
color prejudices of his own class consciously reﬂected a face of an idealized black
masculinity modeled on the contours that deﬁned mainstream notions of a genteel
masculinity shaped by patriarchal rniddle—class aspirations. However, this is not to say
that Chesnutt lacked black literary models from which to work from — namely the three
autobiographies of Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass’ 19th century refashioning of himself as a man and not a thing
was presented “in a way that hi gh-lighted the values and character traits most respected
by white men: courage, nobility, rationality, and physical strength” (Rooks l4) and as
America entered the twentieth century, a “new” cottage industry of scientiﬁc racist and
anti-immigrant textual polemics reﬂected the fears of white Americans about the hordes
of “dark bodies” invading white America. White American manhood, the majority of
these writings suggested, was under-siege by black men, especially, who lacked an
agreed upon set of masculine traits. Thus, slavery proved the absence of manhood
because Aﬁicans allowed themselves to be enslaved, lacked the nobility to protect their
women and the courage to confront white men on the ﬁeld of combat, or as rational
thinkers and participators in government. Lacking these traits, African American men
were judged politically and socially as “non-men;” black men were expected to be

submissive and docile, traits relegated to women. Hence, black male submission was

212'

enforced, often by violence. But in popular literature, as Chesnutt, observes, the
perception of blacks was “feminized” by insisting on their child-like qualities exhibited
by their un-rationality and child-like “gibberish.” Keenly aware that whites feared young,
virile black men, and that many were convinced that mixed-raced individuals deliberately
chose to mimic the values of the higher race over those of the lower, Chesnutt chose
instead to plead for a color and class based inclusion of black masculinity as factors in
the racial debate over black manhood. Chesnutt deliberately constructed a new black
male in novels like The Marrow of Tradition and The House Behind the Cedars;
however, it is in The House Behind the Cedars where Chesnutt’s embrace of the
properties of whiteness collude with his own ambivalence over race, class, and the color
of masculinity.

Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars was not a best-seller for a white
readership who embraced his authentic plantation tales in dialect; although Howell’s
praised Chesnutt’s stories of life on the “color-line,” .I_-Io_u_se contains a dangerous and
uncomfortable text for whites anxious about the possible racial pollution of white blood.
The text is speciﬁcally about the conscious acts of concealment in which Chesnutt
embeds his tale of racial and class ambiguity, but Chesnutt stops short of the possibility
of race contamination. As Arlene A. Elder notes: “Chesnutt’s tragic octoroon is trotted
forth to run her precarious course, suffer the discovery of her racial mixture, and
consequently, die” (175), hardly a major difference in the standard plot of tragic heroines
trapped between white and black. Instead, I argue that the tragic story of the “mixed-

race” Rena Walden is itself a racial sleight-of-hand, a racial misdirection in the sense that

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the novel is actually about the “mixed-race” male ﬁgure John Walden. Charles Duncan
also notes this misdirection: “John’s disappearance becomes an act of double passing,
both textual and social. He fades out of the scope of the novel’s plot while, more
subversively, he disappears into (not out of) the culture at large. . .” (15). As the novel
opens, it is John Walden/Warwick who has accomplished the “racial pollution” that
white readers fear, and not the threat of the white-skinned heroine. It is John, Rena’s
brother, who has married a white woman — not for love - but for material gain that would
be out of his reach under his “legal” racial status. Thus, the cedars that hide the maternal
home of John and Rena, also hide the uncomfortable truth about the masculine side of
life on the color-line.

The problem of the color-line and the shaping of black masculinity points to the
racialized ambivalence in Chesnutt’s work. I am interested here in the ways Chesnutt
reconﬁgures a new image of black masculinity where the admirable traits of “black”
masculinity are dependant also on the properties of whiteness and their assimilated
attachments to class and skin color. I would argue that these properties are central to
Chesnutt’s project of deﬁning black masculinity based on the properties of “whiteness”
rooted in the economic system of chattel slavery. Cheryl 1. Harris argues that: “Slavery as
a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property.”

Because the system of slavery was contingent on and conﬂated with
racial identity, it became crucial to be ‘white,’ to be identiﬁed as white,
to have the property of being white. Whiteness was the characteristic,

the attribute, the property of free human beings. . .(279)

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Chesnutt’s ostensible narrative for black equality is concealed beneath his own
assimilated beliefs about the properties of white manhood. “Becoming white,” explains
Harris, “meant gaining access to a whole set of privileges that materially and
permanently guaranteed basic subsistence needs and, therefore, survival. Becoming white
increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one’s life rather than being the
object of others’ domination” (277). Assessing Booker T. Washington’s own strategies of
black emasculation, Donald Gibson writes: “If ‘man’ is deﬁned in terms of the ﬁ'eedoms
and prerogatives belonging to white males politically, socially, and economically in
nineteenth—century postbellum American society, then blacks who do not aspire to such
power. . . are content to accept as their own the status then currently belonging to
women” (97).Using the advantages of skin-color to attain the properties of
whiteness/masculinity is key to Chesnutt’s tale of racial passing, but it is also central to
his own racial ambivalence. Signiﬁcantly, the author modeled his ﬁctional male
characters on himself in his novels about the problems of those who lived on the color-
line, and in an 1875 journal entry he notes: “Twice to-day, or oftener I have been taken
for ‘white.’ . . . I believe I’ll leave here and pass anyhow, for I am as white as any of
them” (M 78). Chesnutt’s description of himself is replicated in his description of
John Walden: “His playmates might call him black; the mirror proved that God, he had
been taught, made no mistakes, — having made him white, He must have meant him to be
white” (107).

Although Chesnutt makes a conscious decision to remain in the black community,

his alter ego accomplishes what Chesnutt does not : passes as a white man, and prospers

215

as a “white” man in a white world. But racial passing is not only a dangerous act of
concealment, but passing contains an equally dangerous psychological impasse — the
total erasure of the source of blackness. In John’s case, this means the erasure of his
black mother Molly Walden. Molly, notwithstanding her status as “free-born,” or her
light coloring is legally black under the law, but complicating her status even more is the
fact that she is the mother of two visibly “white” children. Mis’ Molly’s non-whiteness
is also suggested by her dialect speech, although she draws the class line between herself
and “pure” blacks like the Fowlers“. According to racialized domestic custom, this
arrangement makes Molly’s position analogous to the traditional black female caretaker
of white children under American slavery. As Ann Laura Stoler points out about white
colonial families, many white families worried about the moral effects of the closeness
between their white children and their black care-givers, who many families believed,
were a immoral source of class contamination. “The social grammar of prescriptions for
making a child into a bourgeois adult rested on distinctions that affirmed the virtues of
whiteness and the moral highground of bourgeois civilities. . .For becoming adult and
bourgeois meant distinguishing oneself ﬁ'om that which was uncivilized, lower-class, and
non-European” (151). Thus, in order to become a real “man,” John must separate himself
ﬁom the barrier that Molly’s blackness presents in order to become other than “being the
object of others’ domination.”

Donald B. Gibson notes that Chesnutt’s ﬁctional attitudes about race and class

uncomfortably reﬂect “the mythology built up by defenders of slavery. . .” “Time after

 

'3 The passing mulatto Mandy Oxendine, however, does speak in dialect in Chesnutt’s Mandy Oxendine.

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time he refers to the “blood” of his characters and seemingly believes that the character
of individuals is determined by who their ancestors are. . . There is much in the novel to
suggest that Chesnutt literally believes that social class matters and not money alone. The
“Best” people belong to the higher classes and they have money. (ﬂog xx) Moreover,
Gibson appears to be unconvinced of Chesnutt’s adoption of racial Darwinism, and
points out the author’s glaring ambivalent gestures regarding race, class, and social
determinism. When Chesnutt writes about John’s reasons for challenging the artiﬁciality
of race laws and customs, he is clear on where the racial lines should, indeed, be drawn.
Chesnutt, clearly aware of the matrilineal law applied to white-skinned blacks, argues for
a return to patrilineal racial descent, although his reasoning for following the patriarchal
line can only apply to those visibly “white” enough to escape detection as non-white.
Chesnutt knows that such a legal re-deﬁnition would not apply to blacks in general
because, regardless of the historical mixing of “races” in America, skin color and
European features would be prima facie evidence. But John’s father is white, John is
visibly white, and John claims the “white” inheritance of his father’s blood. “The blood
of his white fathers, the heirs of the ages, cried out for its own, and after the manner of
that blood set about getting the object of its desire” (109). Hence, John becomes, not a
fractured self between “races,” but a ﬁrll “white” subject before the law. Gibson argues
about this passage:
Such an observation, with no hint that such belief as expressed here
is held by the narrator or by the character and not the author, leads

unfortunately to the racist and untenable conclusion that whites are

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indeed superior to blacks. (xx)
I disagree, however, with Gibson’s apologia for Chesnutt’s assimilated racism;
Chesnutt’s novels plea for understanding that some blacks are equal to whites by
mirroring the racism of sympathetic white readers, who he hopes, will trade the stigrnas
of race for the shared racial attributes of class. As to whether or not these attitudes can be
attributed to Chesnutt, or his character, I would suggest that in many ways, John presents
one logical path — but not taken — considered by the youthful author in 1875.

Chesnutt’s reliance on the infusion of white blood in black communities, in many
ways, suggests a passing down of respectable bourgeois masculinity through the blood-
line of the white father. Although John Walden is legally black in North Carolina, to
regain the patrimony of his white father he must conceal his legal status; to not do so
would put him in the same lowly economic class and racial position with the black Frank
Fowler. Although on the surface Chesnutt constructs a sympathetic image of dark-
skinned Frank, he does make it clear that Frank by his race, and skin color cannot achieve
the properties of white masculinity. Frank is the son of two ex-slaves previously owned
by the white father of John and Rena Walden, and “willed” to Mis’ Molly who makes the
class distinctions between the two black families abundantly clear. Frank, against the
wishes of his father Peter, remains subservient to Mis’ Molly which further makes
Frank’s position antithetical to Chesnutt’s deﬁnition of manhood. However, Frank is
secretly in love with the “white” John Warwick’s equally “white-skinned” sister Rena,
and Chesnutt conceals the color-caste problem beneath one of thwarted romance.

Although Donald B. Gibson prefers to regard House as more class conscious than race

 

218

conscious, I would counter-argue that the novel is about race, especially as it shapes and
reﬂects the intraracial class and color attitudes among Chesnutt’s black middle-class
peers; in fact, Frank Fowler, in spite of his “dialect” is literate whereas Mis’ Molly, even
in her non-blackness, is not. This fact suggests that Mis’ Molly’s class standing is indeed
“borrowed” from her “white” children, and the expected attributes associated with skin
color in the black community. Hence, Mis’ Molly - herself not quite as “white” as her
children — considers Frank an unsuitable match for her daughter: “The idea of her
beautiﬁrl daughter riding home from the end of the world with Frank, in a cart, behind a
one—eye mule, struck Mis’ Molly as the height of the ridiculous. . .Her daughter was
going to live in a ﬁne house, and marry a rich man, and ride in her carriage. Of course a
negro [my emphasis] would drive the carriage, but that was different from riding with
one in a cart” (27).

Following her brother to South Carolina, Rena begins a romance with John’s
white friend George Tryon, and faithful Frank keeps her secret because he is willing to
sacriﬁce anything for Rena. Chesnutt structures the action of Frank’s sacriﬁce as one of
“true love,” but Frank’s “love” suggests the plantation fantasies of the devotional ties
between former slaves and their masters. “She’ll be better off wid me out’n de road.
She’ll marry dat rich w’ite gent’eman, — he won’t never know de diffe’nce, - an’ be a
w’ite lady, ez she would ‘a’ be’n, ef some ole witch had 11’ changed her in her cradle”
(86). Chesnutt implicitly places Frank among the non-threatening plantation blacks by

encasing Frank in the double trap of black speech, and the “backwardness” of black

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superstition”. But within the structure of the romantic plot Chesnutt explicitly counters
Frank’s non-valued blackness with the valued whiteness of John Walden’s. Since Frank
does not possess the visible signs of “whiteness,” he cannot expect, or persuade a change
in custom (or law) from his racialized position under the category “negro.” Since John
Walden/Warwick establishes his manhood under the patriarchal rights of “whiteness,” I
would argue, that Chesnutt’s narrative structure must contain the threat to the white
normative family structure presented by the blackness of Frank Fowler. A
As argued earlier, part of John’s strategy of claiming his white patrimony means
the erasure of familial contagion (the black mother). But John, as a “white” man, must
also enforce white heterosexuality by maintaining the white family, so he “rescues” Rena
as a replacement for his dead white wife, and a suitable care-giver for his “white” child
who “has a good enough nurse, as nurses go. But the nurse is ignorant, and not always
careful. A child needs some woman of its own blood to love it and look after it
intelligently” (16). Following the argument of Ann Laura Stoler about the putative racial
contamination of black care-givers, the nurse is black, and John, under the property
entitlements of masculine whiteness, confers ‘thiteness” on Rena in order to maintain
his own white family. Thus, he “rescues” his “white” sister from his black mother. But
what of the devoted Frank? Chesnutt also “rescues” Rena from the black Frank Fowler
by erasing/emasculating Frank ﬁom the romantic plot with the more “public” love affair

between Rena and the white George Tryon. Only Mis’ Molly — as a legally class and

 

'9 Even Mis’ Molly speaks in dialect as another sign that she cannot “racially” follow her children. Molly is
too dark to pass as white.

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color conscious black -— considers the possibility of Frank as a suitor for her daughter’s
hand, however, the possibility never occurs to her son because to do so would be to admit
his own blackness. Furthermore, to do so would be tantamount to including black Frank
in the code of masculinity reserved only for white men. Mason Stokes suggests that in
typical Southern “romance novels,” like Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spets (1902),
Chesnutt follows a typical trope of the genre. “In the novel’s (The Leopard’s Spets)
larger allegiance to the conventional romance plot, a white woman is given ﬁom white
man to white man in marriage, a move that ultimately consolidates white male political
power at the expense of both white women and black men, dramatizing the extant to
which white supremacy is more properly understood as white-male supremacy” (134).
John, thus, demonstrates his own “whiteness” as he “gives” his sister to his white ﬁiend
George Tryon thereby maintaining racial superiority of the white family — “ He knew of
no man [my emphasis] whom he would have preferred to Tryon as a husband for his
sister” (49) — and eliminates the possibility of admitting Frank’s black manhood in the
bond under the properties of whiteness between real men.

After Tryon ﬁnds out the truth of John and Rena’s race, he cannot ﬁnd it in him to
contaminate his future ‘Vvhite” family with Rena’s black blood-line. “A negro girl had
been foisted upon him for a white woman, and he had almost committed the
unpardonable sin against his race of marrying her” (96). However, the bonds of white
masculine brotherhood are stronger between George and John, under Chesnutt’s
argument, than those within the “race” between John and Frank. The bond of white

brotherhood is demonstrated in the letter George sends to his “white” friend John

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regretfully “renouncing any pretensions to Miss Warwick’s hand,” but George assures his
friend “that I shall keep your secret as though it were my own”. Personally, I shall never
be ableto think of you as other than a white man,
as you may gather from the tone of this letter. . . .” (103). As Sarnira Kawash states “For
passing,” (and this is what John and Rena attempt) “someone must recognize it as
passing; hence, the necessity of a knowing spectator.”

Narratively, such a spectator may be provided within the framework

of the episode of passing, or alternatively the reader her-or himself

may serve as the knowing spectator who witnesses the effects of

passing on the dupe. Thus, there is always passing within the text and

passing between text and reader. (145)
As I suggested earlier about the text, Chesnutt misdirects the readers attention away from
the expected plot of miscegenation by focusing on Rena Walden which allows the reader
to focus on the “dupe” of George Tryon. However, Frank provides the textual spectator
of George’s near duping presented by John and Rena. 1 But in keeping with the
conventions of the “tragic mulatto” plot, Rena dies, thus, erasing her as a threat to the
white family; but Chesnutt’s narrative of death before white dishonor also circumvents a
suggestion of a healthy black family presented by a possible union between black
spectator Frank and white participant Rena who is unmasked and ﬁnally returned to the

black community. Thus, Frank is further denied a patriarchal black manhood under the

 

2° It can be argued that under the circumstances, as a white man, George would not want his near escape to
be known.

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terms of white masculinity which remains undisturbed as John Walden “escapes” the
narrative of textual blackness under the guise of “whiteness.”
Remembrance of Things Past : The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man
As many critics of The House Behind the Cedars have pointed out, John’s ﬁnal
disappearance into whiteness foreshadows the racial predicament of the anonymous black
narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiogegphy of An Ex-Colored Mg ﬁrst
published anonymously by Johnson in 1912. Charles Duncan notes that Chesnutt, by

centering the narrative of House on John Walden, “anticipates the radical evocations” of

 

the theme of racial passing in Johnson’s text. Samira Kawash points out that the novel
traverses the boundaries of black and white as geographical space: “He is perpetually
homeless, traveling light, following at a whim whatever ' opportunity or adventure fate
brings him. He is never so much in a place as he is, to turn a phrase, passing through”
(139). Johnson’s novel is also indebted to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Smrt of the Gods
in its evocation of the City, especially the impact of black urban space on the formation
of a distinct (although, hybrid) African American culture as black geographical patterns
turned increasingly North. The Autobioggephy, indeed, reﬂects all of these tropes, but the
novel also contributes, to what I suggest, begins a deeper exploration of black male
sexuality that anticipates the issues of black male sexuality in the works of Jean Toomer,
Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. In my reading of the novel, I examine the close
intersections of racial and sexual passing with the properties of white heterosexual

masculinity.

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From the beginning, the anonymous ex-colored man informs his reader that he is

letting the reader (Kawash’s knowing spectator) in on “a practical joke on society.”

I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great

secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far

more care fully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a

curious study to me to analyze the motives which prompt me to do it. (1)
What the reader learns, by the end of the novel, is that the narrator’s most prized
possession is his “whiteness.” The son of a light-skinned black mother and a white
prosperous father, the narrator as a young child learns the connections between
masculinity and the properties of whiteness. In their modest Southern home, the narrator
recalls their only visitor: the white father whose whiteness brings the early connection
with wealth — even the occasional letter. (“I know, too, that at least once each month she
received a letter. . . .I knew later that they contained money. . .”).

I remember that his shoes or boots were always shiny, and that he

wore a gold chain and a great gold watch with which he was always

willing to let me play. My admiration was ahnost equally divided

between the watch and chain and the shoes. (3)
Great store is put into the fact that when the father “walks” into the lives of the narrator
and his mother, he receives “a bright coin, which my mother taught me to promptly drop
in a little tin bank.” The emphasis on money suggests the power of white masculinity,
especially in the right to buy and sell the bodies of black people as non-human

commodities. However, it is the tactile, male-on-male connection of white father, “white”

224

son, and the powerful physical properties of whiteness that remain with the narrator after
the passage of time.

I remember how I sat upon his knee and watched him laboriously drill

a hole through a ten-dollar gold piece, and then tie the coin around

my neck with a string. I have worn that gold piece around my neck the

greater part of my life, and still possess it, but more than once I have

wished that some other way had been found of attaching it to me besides

putting a hole through it. (3)
Quoting Jeremy Bentham, Cheryl 1. Harris points out that “property is nothing but the
basis of expectations consisting in an established expectation, in the persuasion of being
able to draw such and such advantage ﬁom the thing possessed” (280). The advantages
here are obvious, as the narrator, expects the desire for father to be fulﬁlled, but also the
monetary beneﬁts the father represents — the “established expectations.”Moreover, there
is the explicit suggestion that the whiteness of the father leads to properties (tangible, and
intangible) denied to the black mother, who like Chesnutt’s Walden family lives with her
“white” son in a type of “genteel colored ghetto” without connections to a visible black
community.

The autobiographical structure of the text functions as a method of reconciling the
present I who stands at the end, and the memory constructed 1 who travels between the
binary of race throughout the narrative in what Samira Kawash terms a “temporal split.”
In many ways this split reiﬁes the legal properties of whiteness against the non-properties

of blackness, or rather, the political and social stigrnas of inherited blackness. As in all

225

autobiographical recollection,” asserts Kawash, “the narrator is split between present and
past, between the I who experiences the event and the I who narrates it.”
Yet here that temporal splitting is explicitly marked as a displacement
Along the color line. The original whiteness of the narrator is
necessarily inauthentic because it can emerge narratively only as
already contaminated by the knowledge of not-whiteness. But the
narrator is no more originally black than he is originallywhite. His
blackness is also a copy, a specular image of the blackness he
observes in others. (140)

“Sometimes it seems to me that I have never really been a Negro,” the narrator states, “
that I have been only a privileged spectator of their inner life; at other times I feel that I
have been a coward, a deserter, and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s
people.” Thus, the concealed “colored man” who enjoys the properties of “whiteness” at
the end of the narrative offers, not a text of racial regret, but one that supports the
“correct” racial choice through the blood inheritance of the white father. “It is to my
children that I have devoted my life. . . .there is nothing I would not suffer to keep the
brand from being placed upon them.” Furthermore, the narrator textually erases the
tension, or split between black and white by bequeathing the properties of “whiteness” to
his son, the mirror image of his white wife, who is, hence, “whiter” than himself.

The connections between money and his visible “whiteness” are made even clearer
when the narrator ﬁnally makes the decision to be an ex-colored man:

I had made up my mind that since I was not going to be a Negro,

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1 would avail myself of every possible opportunity to make a

white man’ success; and that, it can be summed up in any one

word, means ‘money.’ (141)
Passing as “white” —- or in this case — “crossing over,” was often done by fair-skinned
blacks for convenience in order to get around the social embarrassment of J irn Crow; but
for those who could, “crossing over” was nothing more than accepting a heritage of
economic privileges denied under their legal status as “black.” In a passage that recalls
his earlier memory of the intersection of white father/monetary gain, the narrator
unconsciously invokes “the little tin bank” of his childhood:

What an interesting and absorbing game is money-making! After each

deposit at my savings-bank I used to sit and ﬁgure out, all over again,

my principal and interest, and make calculations on what the increase

would be in such and such time. Out of this 1 derived a great deal of

pleasure. (142)
Although in these passages the narrator connects his new found “pleasure” in the
economic advantages of “white prosperity,” the issue of “race” intrudes on his text as he
denies himself the pleasures associated with his “colored” past that reﬂects the temporal
split between the. present and past I (my/self). “I denied myself as much as possible in
order to swell my savings. As much as I enjoyed smoking, 1 limited myself to an
occasional cigar. . .Drinking I cut out altogether. . .” On the day that he realizes a
thousand dollars, he experiences “a pride and satisfaction which to me was an entirely

new sensation.”

227

In my gambling days and while I was with my millionaire I handled

sums running high up into the hundreds; but they had come to me like

fairy godrnother’s gifts, and at a time when my conception [my emphasis]

of money was that it was made only to spend. Here, on the other, was a

thousand dollars which I had earned by days of honest and patient

work. (143)
The unconscious split between black and white, thus, relegates class deﬁned “vices” —
smoking, drinking, and gambling with the myth of lower-class black masculine
irresponsibility; thriftiness (one of the precepts of the black middle-class) the narrator
suggests, is inherently impossible for the — in this context — darker black male who
cannot take advantage of “white” skin. As a young, “black” male among other black
men, he recalls: “I was a hail fellow well met with all of the workmen at the factory,
most of whom knew little and cared less about social distinctions. From their example I
learned to be careless about money. . .” He learns how “to take a drink occasionally,”
which he blames on his male companions: “I can’t remember that I ever did anything
disgraceful, or, as the usual standard for young men goes, anything to forfeit my claim to
respectability” (60-61). The alignment with middle-class values is not accidental here,
Booker T. Washington (who the narrator admires) advocated black male responsibility,
and class respectability as the comer-stone to building healthy, patriarchal black family
life. Although, he does mention the fact that he knew there were black families “worth a
hundred or so thousand dollars each,” still he “did not become acquainted with a single

respectable family” (83). In other words, thriﬁiness is white, thus, a value to be emulated

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while unthriftiness is a black valueless vice. Hence, to save himself from black male
dysfunction, the ex-colored man must become “white,” and contribute to the white
masculine heterosexual imperatives of white nation building.

It is signiﬁcant that like Chesnutt’s John Walden/Warwick, the anonymous “ex-
colored man” accepts the privileges of white masculine patriarchy by forming the white
family, and then textually erasing the white wife. I would suggest that the impulse — and
emphasis - on the economic gains attached to their visible “whiteness,” suggest another
more subtle reading of both texts in refashioning a black masculinity. Although I_h_e
Hopse Behind the Cedars does not explicitly interrogate the question of John’s sexuality
(Donald Gibson does note an uncomfortable sexual attention on John’s part toward Rena)
part of the text’s misdirection is the conﬂating of any sexual desire on John’s part to his
desire for the economic opportunities presented by white masculinity. Although John’s
marriage to a white woman is clearly for economic advantage, the “ex-colored man’s”
marriage (seemingly “tacked” on at the end of the narrative) suggests more than an
acceptance of the economic advantages of “white” skin. But both texts also erase the
black mother who represents the embodiment of the sin and the indeterminate
consequences of “un-lawful”(i.e. miscegenation) sexual desire.

In Forever England: Reﬂections on Masculinig and Empire, Jonathan Rutherford
offers an astute analysis of the mother/son bond in the shaping of masculinity, ﬁrst by
critiquing the Freudian father/son rivalry as instrumental to healthy heterosexuality. “In

Freudian psychoanalysis,” he argues, “the mother is incapable of nurturing her young son

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into independence. She becomes the potential gorgon who will deny men their potency and
autonomy and turn them to blocks of stone. . .” As Rutherford rightly states, this situation
resulted in a the simultaneous “patriarchal demonisation and idealisation of mothers.”
The patriarchal demand on a small boy to break his maternal attachment
derives from a cultural pathology, born of an anxiety to wean sons away
from the inﬂuence of their mothers. Consequently, a small boy’s bond
with his mother is frequently broken before he is ready to cope with its
loss. What feels lost in this premature separation is not his actual mother
but the feeling of her aliveness inside him (what is termed the maternal
object), and with it an inner sense of his ontological security. (21)
Although John Walden separates himself mentally from his black mother at ﬁfteen, and
physically leaves the Walden home at eighteen, Chesnutt does not indicate great feeling
on the part of John for his absent mother except for a lingering ﬁlial devotion that entails
a short visit. After Rena’s death, John presumably leaves the narrative (and Mis’ Molly)
forever. On the other hand, the ex-colored man remembers in lavish detail the special
bond between mother and son: “My mother dressed me very neatly, and I developed that
pride which well—dressed boys generally have. She was careful about my associates, and I
myself was quite particular” (4). What the passage indicates is the lack of division
between the feminine domestic order, and the outer-world of masculine space. Under the
precepts of the time, according to Rutherford, the male child cannot take his rightful
place in the world of masculine heterosexuality unless the child travels outside of the

feminine conﬁnes of domesticity. The issue of the mother’s race, as I argued earlier,

230

further problematizes the mother/child bond as the “white” child seeks masculinity in the
absent white father. The maternal bond, under Victorian era codes of an racial and
gendered space, thus, had to be broken in order for the male child to recognize himself as
masculine. Thus, the idealized domestic bond of the narrator and his mother is abruptly
disrupted when the narrator encounters the rough, homosocial world outside of his
mother’s space.

According to Eve Sedgwick in Epistemplogy of the Closet “Enduringly since at
least the turn of the century, there have presided two contradictory tropes of gender
through which same-sex desire could be understood” (87). The ﬁrst trope has to do with
the cultural attributes attached to gender. As Sedgwick, Rutherford, and Lane point out
the late Victorian era thinking on gender differences designated restrictive spheres for
men and women and a concerted detachment to the domesticating inﬂuence of women.
An attachment to the “arts,” for example, was rigorously replaced with an emphasis on
“manly” pursuits, such as outdoors life, and the rugged activities of sports and games. By
presenting his fondness for music and the domesticating inﬂuence of his mother, the
narrator appears to “suggest” the reasons for his later male attachments. “Often when
playing I could not keep the tears which formed in my eyes from rolling down my
cheeks.”

Sometimes at the end or even in the midst of a composition, as big
a boy as I was, I would jump from the piano, and throw myself
sobbing into my mother’s arms. She, by her caresses and often her

tears, only encouraged these ﬁts of sentimental hysteria. (18)

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As George Chauncey points out, the identiﬁcation with female gendered behavior in the
middle-class male gradually turned to a new deﬁnition of themselves “on the basis of
their difference from women.” Furthermore, terms such as “sissy, pussy-foot, and other
gender-based terms of derision became increasingly prominent in late-nineteenth-century
American culture, as men began to deﬁne themselves in opposition to all that was ‘soft’
and womanlike” (114-115). The ex-colored man, writing from a distance (and as a
“white” male) is aware of the possible sexual implications of the passage, and blames his
(black) mother. “Of course, to counteract this tendency to temperamental excesses I
should have been out playing ball or in swimming with other boys of my age; but my
mother [my emphasis] didn’t know that” (18-19). Curiously, the text alternates passages
suggestive of sexual difference with narrative prescriptions of strained heterosexual
conformity, and in this case, the narrator returns to “Red.”

The second trope of gender, continues Sedgwick, concerns the adherence to the
inescapable binaries of sexuality that a subject must be male or female. Confronted with
the facts of homosexuality, turn-of-the-century scientiﬁc experts “discovered” the
“invert” or “third sex”, in other words, male inverts were women trapped in male bodies
and vice versa (which handily explained same — sex desire) a trope, explains Sedgwick
that has “remained a ﬁxture of modem discourse of same-sex desire.” Sent to the rough
and tumble world of school-boys, the narrator meets his ﬁrst male friend: “He was a big
awkward boy with a face full of freckles and a head full of very red hair.” The new friend
is older (“He was perhaps fourteen years of age. . . .”), and the narrator names him “Red

Hea .”

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I had been quick enough to see that a big, strong boy was a friend to be

desired at a public school; and, perhaps, in spite of his dullness, ‘Red

head’ had been able to discern that I could be of service to him. At any

rate there was a simultaneous mutual attraction. (7)
After the narrator learns his “real” racial designation in school when a teacher labels him
as one of the “others,” the narrator is consoled by “Red” who offers to carry his books:
“Le’ me carry your books.’ I gave him my strap without being ableto answer” (11). I
would argue that the “naming” of his true racial category further establishes the “loss” of
whiteness, and the irrevocable loss of masculinity that is suggested by “the big strong
boy” who carries his books home. Moreover, the racial difference of existing neither
white nor black, instigates his search for gender difference (neither male nor female) that
the narrator implies. “I rushed up into my own little room, shut the door, and went
quickly to where my looking-glass hung on the wall. For an instant I was afraid to look,
but when I did, I looked long and earnestly.”

I was accustomed to hear remarks about my beauty; but now, for

the ﬁrst time, I became conscious of it and recognized it. I noticed

the ivory whiteness of my skin, the beauty of my mouth, the size

and liquid darkness of my eyes, and how the long, black lashes

that ﬁinged and shaded them produced an effect that was strangely

fascinating even to me. (11)
The intriguingly ambiguous language of the passage makes it unclear what exactly the

narrator remembers searching for in his face, especially when one recalls the thousands

233

of nineteenth century treatises on the existence of the “rnulatto”as a race in-between.
Accordingly, the same type of scientiﬁc thinking was applied to those who apparently
had male bodies, but female brains, or as they were termed “inverts.” In this instance, the
narrator “sees” the mother and her “race” as one and the same (and here Johnson uses the
familiar physical description for the tragic mulatta), and the narrator carries the restless
mark of race and gender inversion through out the text. But it is with the wealthy, older
white male (“my millionaire”) that combines the narrator’s equation of masculinity with
the properties of whiteness ﬁrst awakened in him by his absent white father.
I Was Born the Night I Met You
Passing as a “black” ragtime pianist in a Harlem cabaret, the narrator soon meets

“a ﬁiend who was the means by which I escaped from this lower world.”

Among the other white ‘slummers’ there came into the ‘Club’ one

night a clean-cut, slender, but athletic-looking man, who would have

been taken for a youth had it not been for the tinge of gray about his

temples. He was clean-shaven and had regular features, and all of his

movements bore the indeﬁnable but unmistakable stamp of culture.

He spoke to no one, but sat languidly pufﬁng cigarettes and sipping a

glass of beer. He was the center of a great deal of attention. . . . (84)
The “mysterious millionaire” soon invites the narrator to play at his home, and the
narrator is quick to note that the “millionaire” pays generously for his “strange” requests,
but a “bond” grows between them (although the exchange of money suggests a different

type of relationship), and the narrator remembers: “There at length grew between us a

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familiar and warm relationship, and I am sure he had a decided personal liking for me.
On my part, I looked upon him at that time as about all a man could wish to be” (88). The
narrator becomes involved in a ﬁght between a white woman and her black lover, (“I say,
without any egotistic pride, that among my admirers were several of the best-looking
women who frequented the place. . . .”), and runs in terror when the woman is shot dead
by her jealous lover. He is rescued, fortuitously, by the “millionaire:” “But of course you
don’t want to be mixed up in such an affair. I decided last night that I’d go to Europe
tomorrow. I think I’ll take you along instead of Walter. . . .It was settled that I should go
to his apartments for the rest of the night and sail with him in the morning” (90-91).

Thus, the narrator is rescued not only from his voluntary “blackness,” but also
from the apparent dangers of enforced heterosexual behavior from which the narrator
literally runs. Moreover, the narrator describes the woman’s gun-shot wound in imagery
that suggests the menstruating vagina with all of the myths about female sexuality, and
women as the source of sexual disease: “still I could see that beautiful white throat with
the ugly wound [my emphasis]. The jet of blood pulsing from it had placed an indelible
red stain on my memory” (91). The “ugly wound” Spurting blood is also suggestive of an
earlier wound from a woman: the school teacher who revealed his “true” identity. It is the
woman who becomes the source of his early “racial dis-ease” which instigates the
narrator’s masculine identity crises. “Perhaps it had to be done, but I have never forgiven
the woman who did it so cruelly. It may be that she never knew that she gave me a
sword-thrust that day in school which was years in healing” (12). As with the white

woman in the “Club,” who, the narrator states, was “using me only to excite the jealousy

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of her companion,” the narrator remembers his ﬁrst love who did not take his devotion
“seriously.”ln addition, there is also the specter of the contagion of the black mother
(another example of feminine deceit) who “taints” him, not only with her “race,” but also
with her feminine inﬂuence that ultimately contributes to his gender anxiety.

James Weldon Johnson ﬁrst published The Autobiomphy of An Ex-Colored Man
in 1912 as an anonymous work, and the novel (and it is a work of ﬁction) is not the
autobiography of Johnson, but may have been suggested by the life of a college
acquaintance. Johnson’s novel also situates itself as a signiﬁcant bridge between the
works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Harlem Renaissance
novels of Nella Larsen and Claude McKay in that he elaborates (and reverses), for
example, Dunbar’s dire warnings about the dangers of city life. Unlike Dunbar and
Chesnutt, however, the sophisticated Johnson was not conﬂicted by color and class, and
was an early proponent of the unique cultural contributions the African American masses
had to offer at a time when Johnson’s own peers advocated an assimilation of European
cultural forms. Furthermore, by creating a racially indeterminate ﬁgure, like those of
Chesnutt’s, Johnson more accurately portrayed the complications of racial and gender
passing on the black subject in psychological terms ﬁirther explored by Larsen’s
Quicksand (1928), and especially Peresjpg (1929). I would argue, however, that the
novel’s signiﬁcance was its daring in enfolding the masking of race with that of male
sexuality that signiﬁes on Laurence’s The Spprt of the Gods, although Johnson ( perhaps
deliberately or not) clearly suggests homosexuality - like the ex-colored man’s racial

decision to leave the “race” — is an act of racial treason. In many ways, the question of

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black male sexuality in The Autobiography anticipates the politically enforced
heterosexism of the black nationalist groups of the 19603 where homosexuality was
declared alien to the black nationalist agenda, and an insidious sign of Eurocentric
assimilation. However, the peripatetic novel is clearly inﬂuenced by Johnson’s varied
career as a ﬁxture in the formation of African American popular culture as a lyricist, with
his musician brother Rosamond and Bob Cole, of popular black dialect-laden songs for
black entertainers such as Williams and Walker“. Although Johnson was the epitome of
a “race” man, as an organizer for the NAACP, and later as head, nevertheless, “He spent
a good deal of time among the black and white theater people and bohemians of [New
York’s] Fifty-Third Street district. . . .” (xi). In his own travels between spheres of blue-
vein respectability, and the urban “jook-joints” frequented by the black masses, Johnson,
no doubt, witnessed the (unspoken) sexual variety in black male populations that I
discuss later.
Sambo Misbehaves: The Bad Nigger

The ﬁgure of the “bad nigger” also suggested a turning point in evaluating black
masculinity as an opposing construction to the effete, intellectualized constructions of the
black bourgeois and black elite classes that comes to full fruition in the works of the
younger artists of the Harlem Renaissance who, in some cases, turned the black working
class male into a sexual fetish. Thomas H. Wirth notes that “The ﬁrst part of the

twentieth century was a period in which working-class men were celebrated as paragons

 

2' Unlike his fellow poet, Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson was not bothered by the continued use of “darky
dialect” songs as entertainment for white audiences. When Dunbar quit as the lyricist for the Williams
Walker show “The Cannibal King” (1900), Johnson happily ﬁnished the show’s libretto.

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of masculinity, as opposed to men of the middle and upper classes, who many observers
believed had become ‘overcivilized’ and ‘soft.’ In the popular mind, it was middle- and
upper-class men who were primarily associated with homosexual activity” (52).
Although the sexual theories of Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud were little known to a
' majority of Americans, many educated black men “knew” about the subject of
homosexuality, and “knew” enough to hide it at a time when black male heterosexuality
had to be careﬁrlly circumscribed. Moreover, access to the existence of sexual difference
was not limited by class, or the (often) difficult access to erudite German medical tomes.
Working class blacks knew (and sang) about “bull-dagging women,” and “sissy-men” as
part of the war between the sexes, and the ribald songs and jests may have functioned as
“whistling in the dar ” in order to warn and ward off any potential acts of black sexual
deviancy, although there is a sense in the folk vernacular that such sexually confused
characters really did not exist in black working-class communities, and all they really
needed was a good old heterosexual “fuck” to cure them. But for many blacks, male
homosexuality was thought to be one of the worse components of white cultural
assimilation which made charging the light-skinned elites as “sissy men” that more
satisfying. It was an accusation that troubled many open and closeted gay male artists of
the Harlem Renaissance.

The dark-skinned (and closeted) Wallace Thurman used the light-skinned male to
openly challenge the class and color values of Harlem elites by associating masculine
light-skin with as a “defect” of black masculine authenticity in The Blaker the Ber_ry.

The novel traces the moral descent of the light-skinned Alva who shares a small, Harlem

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apartment (and a bed) with his friend Braxton. Thurman describes Alva that hints at
something “other” in Alva which Thurman “hides” in Alva’s “oriental”
appearance.“Alva’s mother had been an American mulatto, his father a Filipino.”
Alva himself was small in stature as his father had been, small and well
developed with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and ﬁrm, well-modeled
limbs. His face was oval-shaped and his features more oriental than
Negroid. His skin was neither yellow nor brown but something in
between, something warm, arresting. . . .(103)
The “something in between,” Thurman hints, is Alva’s inherent sexual deviance which
Thurman links with the racist assumptions and myths about the Asian. Emma Lou, the
color-struck heroine is attracted to Alva because he is the color that intraracial color
attitudes have taught her to value in a male partner. From this perspective, Thurman
questions the class attributes signiﬁed by light-skin, unknown to the color and class
conscious Emma Lou, Alva works as a presser in a costume house.
He was her ideal. He looked like a college person. He dressed well.
His skin was such a warm and different color, and she had been
tantalized by the mysterious slant and deepness of his oriental - like
eyes. (124)
Thus, Thurman’s portrait of Alva hints at the “feminine” qualities of Alva who cold-
cremes his face at night, works in a traditional “female” occupation, and shares his room

with his close ﬁiend Braxton.

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Braxton considers himself “a golden brown replica of Rudolph Valentino. Every
picture he could ﬁnd of the late lamented cinema sheik he pasted either on the wall or on
some of his belongings.” Here Thurman signiﬁes on the contemporary myth believed by
heterosexual men about the actor’s lack of masculinity and the rumors, that in fact,
Valentino was a closeted homosexual. For Thurman’s contemporary readers, the
suggestion that Braxton considers himself a replica of the actor is highly suggestive of
the sexual connotations Braxton’s passion indicates. Furthermore, to underscore the point
of Braxton’s obsession, is Alva’s reaction: “The only reason that likenesses of his idol
did not decorate all the wall space was because Alva objected to this ﬂapperish ritual”
(161).

In the character of Braxton, Thurman intimates a lack of moral ﬁrmness in the
light-skinned elite. Braxton, it appears, comes from an elite Boston family who have sent
him off to be a “credit to the race” at Columbia. But Braxton has lied to them about
attending school, and has squandered their money on pleasure. Unemployed, and cut off
ﬁnancially, Alva argues with his roommate “that one either worked or hustled. But as
Alva had explained to Emma Lou, Braxton wouldn’t work, and as a hustler he was a
distinct failure.”

No matter what his condition, Braxton would not work. He
seemed to believe that because he was handsome, and because

he was Braxton, he shouldn’t have to work. He graced the world
with his presence. Therefore, it should pay him. “A thing of beauty

is a joy forever,”. . . .(161)

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Braxton soon frnds a ﬁnancial “sponsor” in the unsophisticated Anise — “She was a
simple-minded over-sexed little thing from a small town in Central Virginia, new to
Harlem. . . .” — who eagerly begins “slipping Braxton spare change to live on.”

But Braxton soon loses Anise, as she gets “wise” to his duplicity in spreading
himself to others.

Because Anise was so madly in love with him, he imagined that

all other women should do as she had done, and how much more

delightful and proﬁtable it would be to have two or three Anises

instead of one. So he began a crusade, spending much of Anise’s

money for campaign funds. (168)
Alva, disgusted at Braxton’s inability to “hustle” women, ﬁnally throws Braxton out:
“You’re the most no-count nigger I know. If you can’t do anything else, why in the hell
don’t you get a job? I don’t see you working,” Braxton would answer. “And you don’t
see me starving, either,” would be the come-back’” (169). Both men live off the earnings
of black women by preying on the susceptibilities of color-struck, dark-skinned women ,
but it is Alva who is more “successful” at the “game” as he juggles Emma Lou and
Geraldine who becomes pregnant.

Alva and Geraldine’s baby is a disappointment to both parents as the child is
sickly. “It had a shrunken left arm and a deformed left foot,” which suggests that
Thurman uses the child as a symbol of Alva’s inherent moral instability.

Alva declared that it looked like an idiot. Geraldine had a struggle with

herself, trying to keep from smothering it. She couldn’t see why such a

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monstrosity should live. . . .At any rate, she had lost her respect for Alva.
There was no denying to her that had she mated with some one else, she
might have given birth to a normal child. (192)
The child fails to thrive and is “assuredly an idiot.” And Geraldine is left with the child
' as Alva refuses to stay home with Geraldine and their child. “He hated that silent, staring
idiot infant of his, and he had begun to hate its mother.”
Geraldine felt that she could have stood its shriveled arm and deformed
foot had it not been for its insanely large and vacant eyes, which seemed
never to close, and for the thick grinning lips, which always remained
half open and through which came no translatable sounds. (192)
Thurman’s description of the child eerily recalls the image of Sambo and his African
“gibberish” with its “thick grinning lips, through which came no translatable sounds.” Is
Thurman suggesting a reversal of colorist values whose longevity reveals a “deformity”
in the black community? The deformity of the child’s limbs recalls the Spanish deﬁnition
of a “zam ” as “a person who is bowlegged or knockkneed’ (Boskin 38). Equally
compelling is another deﬁnition of the Sambo. When we consider the fact that the term
“Sambo” also denoted a racial cross between a mulatto and a “negro” in the early
rankings of color by European racist logic, Thurman’s revision of the Sambo becomes
pertinent here.
But it is the last we see of Alva that makes Thurman’s intentions of linking skin
color and black masculinity strikingly clear as a disillusioned Emma Lou sees Alva for

the last time. “She saw the usual and expected sight: Alva, face a death mask, sitting on

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the bed embracing an effeminate boy whom she knew as Bobbie, and who drew hurriedly
away from Alva as he saw her. There were four other boys in the room, all in varied
states of drunkenness — all laughing boisterously at some obscene witticism.” Emma Lou
is disgusted as Alva pulls the boy back down on the bed: “Now stay there till I tell you to
get up.”and snarls at Emma Lou “If you don’t like it —“ ”Tears came into her eyes, and
for a moment it seemed as if all her rationalization would go for naught.”

Then once more she saw Alva, not as he had been, but as

he was now, a drunken, drooling libertine, struggling to

keep the embarrassed Bobbie in a vile embrace. (220-221)

The Burden of Racial Representation: The “Gay” Harlem Renaissance

In “Black 13, Black Ain’t: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities,” black, gay
ﬁlm-maker, Isaac Julien recalls how the estate of Harlem Renaissance icon Langston
Hughes effectively silenced his visual meditation Looking for Langston (1988) on “black
gay desire in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.” The Hughes’ Estate, apprized of
the “sexual” nature of Julien’s project refused to grant permission of “two archival
sequences of Langston Hughes reciting his poetry.” During the ﬁlm’s New York premier,
the ﬁlm-maker was forced to explain to the audience that the “silencing” of Hughes’
voice was due to “copyright” entanglements.

But, as Julien points out, the truth about the copyright injunction was more about

protecting Hughes’ reputation as a black heterosexual icon, and the “silencing” of black

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gay artists in general. The Estate’s “wish to censor lay elsewhere: it objected to Julien’s
association of Hughes with homoeroticism” (259). “For many,” writes Essex Hemphill,
Hughes is a ‘sacred icon,’ an icon saddled with what Julien astutely refers to as ‘the
burden of representation,’ a burden that effectively obscured questions of Hughes’s
sexual identity until Julien chose to gently undress him, or, more appropriately, ease him
out of his closet” (174). Although Julien states that “Langston Hughes’s queemess was a
widely kept secret” — and deﬁnitive proof of Hughes’ sexuality has of this late date not
come to light, the point is that the suggestion (no matter how ephemeral) argues J ulien
“trespassed across the essentialist battle lines of blackness” (259). Although according to
his biographer Arnold Rampersad, “No one could offer the name of a man who had been
involved with Hughes, or recall an incident, even at secondhand, involving Langston’s
presumed homosexuality.”

In his lifetime, he was never called upon to assert or deny that

he was a homosexual, but it is clear that — whatever the truth —

he did not want to be considered gay. Whether this attitude

derived from a personal aversion to homosexuality, or only

from shame or fear, is impossible to say. (337)
However, part of the “open secret” about Hughes’ sexuality was his open and
demonstrable sexual fascination for the darkest, dark-skinned young men he came across.
But what was more important for Hughes was “the preservation of his position as the

most admired and beloved poet of his race. That position,” observes Rarnpersad, “which

244

he saw as a moral trust, and which intimately connected his deepest emotional needs to
his function as an artist, may have meant too much for him to risk it for illicit sex” (336)
What is known for certain is that several young black Harlem artists chaffed at the

sexually reticent prohibitions expected from the older guard who held the whip-hand over
which new artists would get ﬁrnding ﬁom inﬂuential white patrons and publishers. The
relaxation of Victorian attitudes about sex during the Jazz Age also affected the younger
black artists eager to make a name for themselves in Harlem. Many of the younger black
artists like Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce
Nugent, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman, “moved in a social matrix in which the
existence of extramarital sexual relationships of all kinds - homosexual and heterosexual
—- was taken for granted. The matrix was deﬁned by sophisticated, ‘modern’ attitudes and
a general rejection of conventional sexual mores, not by sexual orientation.”

Both extramarital dalliances and same-sex interests were effectively

‘open secrets’ — acceptable in private, gossiped about, but not publically

acknowledged. Embedded within the matrix, and inseparable ﬁom it,

was a network of ﬁiendships among men who were sexually drawn to

other men. (W irth 21)
Although (with the notable exception of Nugent) many black male artists of the period
“hid” their sexuality from “outsiders” by maintaining heterosexual facades. What was

99

clear among the small black literary “crow , was that a man’s sexuality could be
“winked” at as long as the issue did not reﬂect on “the race.” Thus, the black literary set

could exchange amused gossip about the Cullen/Du Bois marriage while pretending that

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the marriage’s failure was due to Yolanda Du Bois’ sexual inexperience. As Arnold
Rarnpersad notes, among other male Harlem notables of the 1920's, Thurman, and
McKay could also point to a heterosexual marriage somewhere in their past (even the
openly gay Richard Bruce Nugent remained married in name only for seventeen years),
but Hughes, whose sexuality could never be deﬁnitively pinned down never chose the
cover of heterosexuality. My point here is not to dwell on Hughes’ sexuality (or lack of
it), but to emphasize the literary strategies of gay authors, like Thurman and McKay, who
were forced to compromise their own artistic impulses, and sexuality with the “burden of
representation” dictated by the “openly” gay Alain Locke, and the sexually prudish W. E.
B. Du Bois”.

Positioned directly against W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Criteria of Negro Art” in which Du
Bois states forcefully his own guiding principles for black representation (“Thus, all Art
is propaganda and ever must be. . .”), Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” set the agenda for many of the younger black members of the Harlem
Renaissance by attacking the “Nordic” values of the black middle-class who failed to see
“the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather
not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian
patterns” (27). Although Hughes pleads for a recognition for a recognition of the value

represented by a speciﬁc African American cultural creativity that owes nothing to

 

’2 Du Bois ﬁred Augustus Granville Dill, the business manager of the NAACP house organ Qrisie, when
the arrest of the openly gay Dill became public. Dill had been caught in a public restroom in 1928
engaging in “homosexual activity.” Du Bois later regretted ﬁring Dill, no doubt due to the fact that Dill
was not a prominent black creative artists, and was, thus, exempt from the “burden of representation.”

246

European cultural inﬂuences, the point must be stressed, that this cultural response comes
directly from the black rural and urban working classes. The “Niggerati,” as they termed
themselves, famously celebrated their break with the older guardians of black
respectability with the one issue journal Fire! !: Devoted to Younger Neggo Artists in
1926, much to the dismay of Du Bois and Alain Locke who were no doubt relieved when
another issue failed to appear. However, the disapproval of the watch-guards of “black
respectability,” were forced to face the fact that Aﬁican American writing about the
circumspect lives of the light-skinned elite was a dead issue.

Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem according to Wayne F. Cooper,

 

“has often been called the ﬁrst Afro-American ‘best seller’. . . Not until Richard Wright’s
Native Son in 1940 did another Afro-American novel enjoy such popular success”
m ix-x). Posited in some literary circles as more “authentic” than Carl Van
Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926) which Du Bois loathed, the new novel ﬁom one of the
bright lights of the younger Harlem literary set “sparked even more critical commentary.”
David Levering Lewis assess: “If anyone was an expert on primitivism in the spring of
1928 it was the author of Home to Harlem, the novel that, said the Igtt_ler;, ‘out—niggered
Mr. Van Vechten’” (224). “Moreover,” explains Lewis, “one aspect of McKay’s novel
that rankled many readers deeply was too invidious for frank discussion.”

All Renaissance writers were preoccupied with color, but McKay,

to the acute distress of Harlem’s elite, was not merely obsessed

with ‘chocolate, chestnut, coffee, ebony, cream, yellow’ complexions,

his novel (as became the quasi-Garveyite he once was) embraced

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antimulatto sentiments. (227)
The Jamaican born, dark-skinned Marxist writer “sinned” against the dictates of the black
literary elite by setting his novel among the black working class world of dock workers,
Pullman waiters and cooks, domestic workers, prostitutes, pimps and sweetrnen who
were supported by an assortment of older black women. Signiﬁcantly, McKay’s
characters (except for the effete Haitian Ray) all speak in the soft, easy-going African
American vernacular redolent of their rural Southern roots, and the protagonist was not
only dark-skinned, but clearly had no aspirations higher than picking up the next woman
and a pair of dice. “No graduates of Harvard and Howard discourse on literature at the
Dark Tower,” black middle-class critics charged, “ there are no easily recognized
imitations of Du Bois, Jessie F auset, or James Weldon Johnson — and no whites at all”
(Lewis 226). Furthermore, the open enjoyment of casual sexual relations appalled many
black literary elites who encouraged black artists to counter prevailing stereotypes of
black sexuality. McKay (like other black writers) were also saddled with the “burden of
representation,”and like his fellow gay artists, McKay was expected to place his “race”
before his own ambivalent sexuality.
The Black Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: Home to Harlem

Among the casual sexual relationships in Home to Harlem the homoerotic

 

connection between the boisterous, uneducated Jake and the shy, educated Haitian
scholar Ray is conspicuous because McKay implies a type of coded male bonding that
“hides” and enfolds itself within a narrative structure that contravenes the “cult of

respectability.” Following the agenda set forth in Langston Hughes’ salvo against

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middle-class propriety — “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain” — McKay set his
novel among the black working poor, and those who made their living the best way they
could, often on the margins of the respectability and the law. The novel’s world is
predominantly male, and celebrates the black male unencumbered by the over-educated
elitism of many gay and straight American men.“They were largely uneducated. They
lived in boarding houses. . .Their places of entertainment were cabarets, night clubs,
saloons, pool halls, gambling dens, buffet ﬂats, and houses of prostitution” (ﬂppre xxi-
xxii). Adds Wayne F. Cooper: “There were no black families either (except in the distant
rural past), no really permanent relationships, and no overweening worldly ambitions”
(241). McKay’s masculine world is indicative of what George Chauncey terms “the
bachelor subculture,” a cultural ethos whose characteristics appealed to many working
class men, and closeted gay males.”The dominant working-class ideology,” Chauncey
argues, “made the ability and willingness to undertake the responsibility of supporting a
family two of the deﬁning characteristics of both manliness and male ‘respectability.’
But many of the men of the bachelor subculture, either because their
irregular and poorly paid work made supporting a family difficult or
because they had deliberately chosen to avoid such family encumbrances,
forged an alternative deﬁnition of manliness that was predicated on a
rejection of family obligations. (79)
Faced with racial segregation, employment opportunities for the masses of young, black
males newly arrived in Harlem were perilous at best, a fact which made supporting a

family according to black middle-class dictates doubly difﬁcult. However, for black male

249

gays, the bachelor subculture — as long as one stayed within the boundaries — was a
perfect cover for those whose heterosexuality was in question.

By taking up the cause of the black masses, McKay and other black gay males
were able to subsume their sexual ambiguity under the cover of celebrating the cultural
products of the black working classes. Like their white peers, black gays also embraced
the new manliness embodied in the culture of physical labor and male sociability.

Home’s hero, Jake Brown, in many ways captures the spirit of Jack Johnson as he moves

 

through the night-life of Harlem after his war-time service with his pal Zeddy. But the
ghost of the good-natured, grinning Sambo hovers in McKay’s signiﬁcation of the ﬁgure
as central to the make-up of Jake. Jake becomes a familiar customer to Harlem’s
brothels, one of McKay’s settings where men can establish their masculinity under cover
of highly ritualized practices, such as, states George Chauncey “through the custom of
treating one’s fellows to rounds of drinks,” which Jake and his buddies do in a variety of
night-clubs, buffet ﬂats and brothels where they also indulge in gambling and making
easy sexual conquests. Signiﬁcantly, McKay’s novel stresses the deliberate lack of
emotional ties where heterosexual sexual contacts were involved.

Sexual prowess with women was another important sign of

manliness, but such prowess was signiﬁcant not only as an

indication of a man’s ability to dominate women but also

as evidence of his relative virility compared to other men’s;

manliness in this world was conﬁrmed by other men and in

relation to other men, not by women. (80)

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Although the unrepentant bachelor could perform compulsory heterosexual acts,
nevertheless, even semi-permanent relationships with women were considered unmanly.
In a world where sex was a commodity of mutual exchange, to be a “kept man” signaled
a loss of independence and manly virility. For many men, the loss of domination (even in
semi-domestic relationships between men and women) “feminized” them according to
the boundaries that governed gender roles.

Zeddy, Jake’s buddy ﬁ'om the docks, ﬁnds that he cannot compete with the sexual
allure of Jake as they ﬂoat through the night-spots of Harlem: “ Jake was a high favorite
wherever he went. There was something so naturally beautiﬁrl about his presence that
everybody liked and desired him. Buddies, on the slightest provocation, were ready to
ﬁght for him, and the girls liked to make an argument around him” (103). Zeddy envies
the easy-going ways Jake has with women: “If only I could get those kinda gals that falls
foh Jake.”

Zeddy did not seem to possess any of that magic that charms

and holds women for a long time. All his attempts at home-making

had failed. The women left him when he could not furnish the

cash to meet the bills. They never saw his wages. For it was

gobbled up by his voracious passion for poker and crap games. (56)
Zeddy soon attracts Gin-head Susy who moves him into her apartment as her exclusive
“sweetrnan.” But Zeddy ﬁnds there are “strings to Susy’s largesse. . . Susy was jealous
of him in the proprietary sense. She believed in free love all right, but not for the man she

possessed and supported” (82).

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About her general way of handling things Susy brooked no criticism

from Zeddy. She had bargained with him in the interest of necessity

and of rivalry and she paid and paid fully, but grimly. She was proud

to have a man to boss about in an intimate, casual way. (84)
On the other hand, propositioned by Rose to be her sweetrnan, (“If you’ll be mah man
always, you won’t have to work.”) the independent Jake responds: “Me? I’ve never been
a sweetrnan yet. Never lived off no womens and never will. I always works” (40). To
restore his own sense of masculinity, Zeddy deﬁes Susy and joins Jake and their circle of
male friends for a night on the town. “Zeddy discovered that in his own circles in Harlem
he had become something of a joke. It was known that he had become something of a
joke. It was known that he was living sweet’ (87). Later at a Harlem cabaret, Zeddy
engages in the male ritual (identiﬁed by George Chauncey) of buying a round of drinks:
“Zeddy was determined to go the limit of independence, to show the boys that he was a
cocky sweetrnan and no skirt-man. Plenty of money. He was treating” (90).

As George Chauncey notes: “Harlem’s gay world was perhaps the most complex in

the city because segregation forced such a wide range of people to live side by side. . .”

Many of those locales attracted prostitutes, gamblers, and other

‘disreputable’ folk who participated in what they called the ‘sporting

life’ or simply ‘the life.’ Lesbians and gay men were ‘in the life’

as well, and they mixed easily with the other guests at many such

gatherings. (248)

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Thus, sexual variety was not unknown to the black community of working folks who
often made sexual difference a theme of the blues, a cultural expression the black elite
loathed. McKay is explicit in detailing the relative tolerance for gay identiﬁed men as
part of the circle of “normal” men with the curious character Billy Biasse who runs an
illegal gambling den, and is, thus, doubly in “the life.” Nicknamed Billy the Wolf, Biasse
teases Zeddy about his dependance on a woman: “Billy boasted that he had no time for
women. Black women, or the whole diversiﬁed world of the sex were all the same to
him” (88). Later Zeddy and Jake come upon Biasse at another Harlem club with a “date”.

Billy Biasse was there at a neighboring table with a longshoreman
and a straw-colored boy who was a striking advertisement of the
Ambrozine Palace of Beauty. The boy was made up with high-brown
powder, his eyebrows were elongated and blackened up, his lips
streaked with the dark rouge so popular in Harlem, and his carefully -
straightened hair lay plastered and glossy under Madam Walker’s
absinthe-colored salve ‘for milady of fashion and color.’ (91)
“Wolves,” explains Chauncey, “occupied an ambiguous position in the sexual culture of
the early twentieth century. They abided by the conventions of masculinity and yet
exhibited a decided preference for male sexual partners.”
But the fact that neither they nor their peers regarded them as queer,
even if they sometimes regarded them as different from other ‘normal’
men, highlights the degree to which gender status superseded

homosexual interest as the basis of sexual classiﬁcation in working-

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class culture. (87)

For those in the know, Biasse was typical of males in “the life.” Easily traveling between
the “sporting life” of male gamblers, and the world of gay masculinity, Biasse as a
“male” wolf is welcomed among the black working class drinking establishments
catering to working class men who gathered in masculine and class based camaraderie far
beyond the moralizing eyes of the elite black churches, and the class and color conscious
black middle-class. Moreover, Biasse, as a wolf, is one who penetrates, but does not get
penetrated, a condition that proclaims his masculinity in the phallocentric world of men.
Hence, Biasse is able to distance his homosexuality from the young man who clearly ﬁts
the stereotype of effeminacy many heterosexual men, and strait-laced middle-class
blacks came to identify as the typical “sexual degenerate.”As Chauney (and the closeted
nature of Hughes, Thurman, and McKay demonstrate) male homosexuality in the black
middle-class was barely tolerated as long as public ﬁgures played by the rules of public
gender conformity.

Although several Harlem literary elites were angered by McKay’s open
antagonism to the cult of respectability, his portraits of the casual sexual mores of the
black masses, and their tolerance for sexual variation, a smaller number who recognized
McKay’s “wolves” and “punks” no doubt satisﬁed themselves that at least the sexual
licence in Home to Harlem was safely located in the black lower and working classes.
However, the anger of many Harlem cultural leaders was more than likely directed
toward the homoerotic sub-textual relationship between the working-class Jake and the

educated Haitian exile Ray (modeled after McKay). In a letter to William Aspenwall

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Bradley, about Home to Harlem, McKay wrote his ﬁiend that “Ray gives me a chance to
let myself go a little” (C00per 235). “Ray. . .reads Alphonse Daudet in the original
between dining car chores, sleeps with books rather than women, yet is ambivalent both
about formal learning and about proletarian naturalness” (Lewis 228).

He remembered when little Hayti was ﬂoundering uncontrolled,

how proud he was to be the son of a free nation. He used to feel

condescendingly sorry for those poor African natives; superior to

ten millions of suppressed Yankee ‘coons.’ Now he was just one of

them and he hated them for being one of them. . . .(155)
But Ray is also ambivalent about his feelings for the good-natured Jake who he meets
when both are employed (Jake as third cook, and Ray as waiter)on the railroad.. Jake is
immediately impressed by Ray’s learning as Howard student Ray gives him an
impromptu history lesson on Haitian history. Jake is appalled that Ray would waste his
learning in such a demeaning job:“Then what in the name of mah holy rabbit foot youse
doing on this heah white man’s chuh-chuh? It ain’t no place foh no student. It seems to
me you’ place down there sounds a whole lot better. . . .This heah work is all right for
me, but for a chappie like you. . . .” (137-138). As David Levering Lewis maintains —
“Ray symbolizes more than the obvious ‘other side’ of McKay. He is one of Nordic
civilization’s mental outpatients — the side that pits the black man’s brain against his
loins and makes a shambles of both” (228). Lewis observation is apt, as McKay like his
fellow semi-closeted gay peers struggled to balance their own personal identity with

representing the black masses.

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~HL

The world of railroad workers was one that McKay knew well as a recent

Jamaican immigrant and budding young writer. As Wayne F. Cooper explains:

The railroad seemed made to order for him. His brief encounters

with diners, the constant travel, and his adventures with fellow

railway men in the various cities along their route — all provided

the challenge, variety, and adventure that suited McKay’s

temperament. (85)
It was also a life that most likely suited McKay’s pursuit of male lovers, and material for
the poetry and ﬁction that would come later. However, it is Home to Harlem that most
captures the world of men McKay remembered in later years with fondness. One of the
hazards of working on the railroads was ﬁnding a place to sleep in heavily segregated
cities. Often, enterprising black landlords would open up boarding houses catering to the
hundreds of weary rail workers searching for a place to sleep-off last night’s hangover.
Jake and Ray ﬁnd such a place in Pittsburgh where the men are crowded in dank, bed-
bug infested rooms. Unable to sleep, both join another man for a night at a local speak-
easy:

The little place was something of a barrelhouse speak-easy,

crowded with black steel—workers in overalls and railroad men,

and foggy with smoke. They were all drinking hard liquor and

playing cards.(148)
After returning to the boardinghouse, Jake falls asleep happily under the inﬂuence of

cocaine (a drug McKay admitted he tried more than once) obtained ﬁ'om the resident

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drug pusher: “Jake took a few of the little white packets from Happy and gave him some
money. ‘Guess I might need them some day. You never know.’

Ray ﬁnds he cannot sleep, and casts his eyes over the other men he is forced to
share a night’s lodging: “These men claimed kinship with him. They were black like him.
Man and nature had put them in the same race.”

He ought to love them and feel them (if they felt anything). He ought

to if he had a shred of social morality in him. They were all chain-ganged

together and he was counted as one link. Yet he loathed every soul in

that great barrack-room, except Jake. Race. . . . Why should he have and

love a race? (153)
The passage succinctly suggests the dilemma faced by many black gay men who were
forced to exchange allegiance to self with the “burden” of racial representation. However,
McKay problematizes questions of artistic individuality, artistic representation with
human sexuality as he responds to the physicality of Jake.

Ray looked up at Jake, stretched at full length on his side, his cheek in

his right hand, sleeping peacefully, like a tired boy after hard playing,

so happy and sweet and handsome. (157)
Ray reaches into the sleeping Jake’s pocket for the packets of cocaine and swallows the
contents like headache powders.

Ray has a cocaine induced homoerotic fantasy that leaves no doubt about McKay’s

covert narrative purpose. According to his biographer Wayne F. Cooper, McKay

recounted the early literary inﬂuences on his writing career introduced to him by the

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older, openly homosexual Walter Jekyll who ﬂed England for the sunnier climes of the
Caribbean. “Among the famous authors he listed as having read and discussed with
Jekyll, he signiﬁcantly grouped together Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, and Walt
Whitman.”

For those in 1918 who were possessed by ‘the love that dared not

speak its name,’ the stringing together of the names Wilde,

Carpenter, and Whitman would have left no doubt about McKay’s

meaning. It was there, so to speak, written between the lines. (31)
Also “between the lines” was one of McKay’s most open, and poetic descriptions of male
homosexual desire as the cocaine unleashes the palpable desire Ray has for the sleeping
Jake. “Now he was a young shining chief in a marble palace; slim, naked negresses
dancing for his pleasure; courtiers reclining on cushions soft like passionate kisses;
gleaming-skinned black boys bearing goblets of wine and obedient eunuchs waiting in
the offing. . . . Taboos and terrors and penalties were transformed into new pagan
delights, orgies of Orient-blue carnival, of rare ﬂowers and red fruits, cherubs and
seraphs and fetishes and phalli and all the most-high Gods. . . .”

A thousand pins were pricking Ray’s ﬂesh and he was shouting

for Jake, but his voice was so faint he could not hear himself. Jake

had him in his arms... .(158)
Signiﬁcantly, the episode between the two men passes without notice, however, there

remains an unspoken bond between them.

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Later in the novel, in keeping with George Chauncey’s theory of bachelor culture,

Jake leads Ray to a brothel where he introduces Ray to the Madam: “Mah friend’s just
keeping me company. . . .He ain’t regular — you get me?” But surrounded by the open
sexuality between “real” men and the ﬂashy women, Ray feels “different,” more so than
a Billy Biasse.

Ray felt alone and a little sorry for himself. Now that he was there, he

would like to be touched by the spirit of that atmosphere and, like Jake,

fall naturally into its rhythm. He also envied Jake. Just for this night

only he would like to be like him. . . . (194)
As a member of the black middle-class, McKay suggests, Ray feels the need to cloak his
desire by wishing away his sexual difference. In many ways, Ray can be read as
McKay’s criticism of the light-skinned elite who tried vainly to “wish” away their
blackness by covering it up with European civilization. Ray, trying to be like the
masculine Jake, approaches one of the young prostitutes: “Tickling, enticing syncopation.
Ray felt that he ought to dance to it. But some strange thing seemed to hold him back
from taking the girl in his arms” (195). Joined by another girl, Ray tries again to join the
ranks of male heterosexual behavior: “The round face of the ﬁrst girl, the carnal
sympathy of her full, tinted mouth, touched Ray. But something was between them. . . .”
(196). The “something” is hinted at, by McKay, in the music designed to stir sexual
passion in the male customers, but for Ray the music stirs a “different” passion which he
dares not name.

Far, far away from music-hall syncopation and jazz, he was lost

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in some sensual dream of his own. No tortures, banal shrieks and

agonies. . . . The notes were naked acute alert. Like black youth

burning naked in the bush. Love in the deep heart of the jungle. . . .

Simple-clear and quivering. Like a primitive dance of war or

of love. . . the marshaling of spears or the sacred frenzy of a

phallic celebration. (197)
But Ray is not a “wolf,”and McKay hints that Ray’s sexual reticence, is in fact, the curse
of the overly educated black middle-class who deny themselves the sexual expression
enjoyed by those in the working-class with nothing to lose. For many gay black men of
the Harlem Renaissance, especially ones who were so invested in public propriety like
Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman (and perhaps Langston Hughes), the “burden of
representation” weighed heavier than the “burden” of public exposure.

The very notion of an ideal face of a black masculinity is a notion inherently
problematic because of the historic realities of slavery. Black men were ﬁrst of all
considered non-human -— subject to the control of other men who would not, and could
not meet them on equal grounds. Second, under the economics of chattel slavery, total
control of the black male centered, not only on their physical capacities, but also on their
reproductive functions used to create and support the wealth of white men. Hence, what
was ﬁrst viewed as a productive instrument of slavery was turned into the fear and desire
for the black male phallus after white males lost their legal rights to control its ﬁmction,
and ﬁnally to ritually to erase or obliterate it as a competitor. But as Henry Louis Gates

points out: “When we recall that early Harlequin ﬁgures wore a phallus, the connections

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between him and Western representations of the Aﬁican are even stronger” (51). Thus,
we can consider Sambo the castrated Harlequin. Post-Reconstruction images of the black
male were thus divided between the manner in which the desire and loathing of the black
male’s sexuality would be interwoven in American mainstream culture.

The more lenient portrait of black masculinity, by necessity, became an
emasculated ﬁgure in the pages of plantation fantasy, an image ready-made for an early
twentieth century commodiﬁcation of a “safe” intimacy of male blackness in the pastoral
renditions of black males, and the dialect poetry of Dunbar. American popular culture is
where these two images — the emasculated black “tmcle” and the vicious black brute —
met and competed in mainstream culture as the face of black manhood. Thus, black
creative artists were forced to confront the conceptions of black masculinity in the
neutered ﬁgure of the Sambo, on the one hand, and the hypersexual black brute on the
other. Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt were forced to mask and conceal
their positive images of black manhood within the familiar tropes of the white racial
fantasies of black emasculation in the “plantation tradition” in order to reach commercial
success, although Dunbar bitterly challenged the association of masculinity with skin
color.

The superiority of light-skinned, respectable masculinity, however, directly
inﬂuenced the class and color perspectives of male sexuality in the works of the younger
members of the Harlem Renaissance. Connecting with the zeitgeist emblematic of the
post World War I era, works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman,

and Claude McKay artistically challenged the over-determined lack of sexuality of the

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black male by slyly shifting the terms of an authentic black masculinity by shifting its
values to the black working classes. In doing so, their works restore the missing phallus
of Harlequin by locating an authentic black masculinity in class terms — the descendants
of Sambo/Harlequin. Mc Kay’s Home to Harlem directly revises and signiﬁes on the sub-
textual sexual themes in The Autobiogr_aphy of An Ex—Colored Man which continue in
Richard Wright’s essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” (1937) and his 1940 best-seller
Native Son which irrevocably locates the “burden of representation” in the black
masculinity of a darker-skinned working and “under-classes” of urban America. By the
late 19603 and early 1970s, black manhood becomes inextricably tied to a black
nationalist agenda that continued to challenge the elitism of class and color in shaping a
face of black masculinity. Coming to terms with a culturally authentic face of black
masculinity suggests the continuing implications of the ﬁgure of Sambo, but a Sambo
reconnected with the symbol of black male potency. He did not die in the 19603 as

argued by Joseph Boskin, but lives on as a ﬁgure of contestation.

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Conclusion: Beyond the Color-Line

When I began to think about this project, I realized that the idea of coming to terms
with color and class bias reﬂected a postmodern crisis in the state of black America.
There are several reasons why I chose pOpular culture to foreground my study simply
because Aﬁican American popular culture is a perfect site to exam the fault-lines in the
construction of an Aﬁican American unity. First of all, the need for political unity was a
necessary means for survival - even if the story about a black unity based on race and the
experience of slavery was never really true. But popular culture does allow for a close
critique of black-on-black differences we rarely want to address because of the political
investment in showing a united ﬁ'ont in the face of racial hostility. The situation of
Clarence Thomas is a case in point. The debates in the black community over Thomas
vividly revealed the chasms in the Aﬁican American community over class and gender
where, on the one hand, Anita Hill was demonized as a racial traitor in questioning
Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court, and on the other hand, as not recognizing the
fact that black authenticity was properly a black male prerogative. It was only much later
that Thomas’ black authenticity was questioned when the “distraction” of black female
gender was excised. The point is that we too often fail to see the dangers in essentializing
blackness by dismissing the ways in which we use it in the construction of gender. The
later attacks on Thomas pointed out that he was not “black enough,” as he embraced the
political ideas inimical to the political fortunes and welfare of black people as a group.
But the attacks on Thomas’ black authenticity (and the current attacks on Condoleeza

Rice) are not new arguments, for the simple fact that antagonisms over class elitism, and

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class privilege between blacks are as old as plantation slavery — that both Thomas and
Hill share the deep, dark coloring associated with the less privileged “folk”only indicates
the complicated nature of colorism.

At bottom, the activity of creating a distinct Aﬁican American cultural authenticity
is one of class warfare as I have demonstrated earlier. Thus, the current intraracial clamor
over hip-hop and gangsta’ rap, is the same one waged during the Harlem Renaissance
between the assimilationists and those who argued for the folk culture emanating from
the working and lower-classes for the rights to claim “cultural authenticity.” Now the
ﬁght is between the Civil Rights generation and the hip-hop generation as the recent
series of “scoldings” by comedian Bill Cosby has indicated. Cosby’s “ill-timing” — the
celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1954 Brown decision — to attack the black
working and lower -- classes for their embarrassing-to-the-race dysfunctional practices
generated a plethora of responses from the elite portion of the African American
community.

Some responders agreed with Cosby’s argument that the working and lower-
classes “failed to hold up their end of the bargain,” while other commentators strenuously
disagreed with what they considered an ahistorical attack. But it was Cosby’s perceived
attack on the cultural hi-jacking by hip-hop of black cultural authenticity that received
probably the most attention from the commrmity who proﬁted from the genre’s
commodiﬁcation. Ironically, the entire debate (and I include the unﬁnished confrontation
of the Harlem Renaissance with “low” culture) recalls Matthew Arnold’s dicta from

Culture and Anarchy (1869). Using Arnold’s distinctions, the Barbarians easily equate to

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the black elite gatekeepers of the state of African American political and cultural
representation; the black middle-class (Arnold’s Philistines); and the Populace: “that vast
portion. . . . of the working class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-
hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert. .
. .[a] heaven-bom privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by
marching where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes. . . . That these are
not “ﬁxed” class identities accounts for the variety of responses to Cosby across class
lines. Many of the objections to Cosby’s accusations against the lower-classes were from
black academics with working-class backgrounds, whether the impulse for their
opposition came ﬁ'om class guilt, or the fact that they are in Arnold’s terms class aliens,
points to the continued issue of intraracial class tensions.

In a cogent editorial from the on-line journal The Black Commentator observed
that many recipients of the civil Rights struggle for integration barely upheld their end of
the bargain for class inclusion: “Many among the Black “striving” classes ridiculed the
victims of Cointelpro and other state gangsterism, believing that fulﬁllment of their own
pent-up aspirations-now within the realm of possibility thanks to a movement in which
they may not have participated in any way — was the prize for which so many others
died.”

For them, “movement” meant individual, or class, upward mobility.
“The Race” would be uplifted by their shining example, a more
achievable goal than jobs and justice for the masses of Black folks.

the innocent poor applauded each individual advancement of these

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representatives of “The Race” -— as they had always done, not
understanding that the group contract had been broken.
As blacks who came of age in during the Civil Rights Movement began a nostalgia
fueled trip down memory lane about the good-old days, and slapped each other on the
backs about the increase of the black middle and upper-classes, something more
disturbing was happening between the blacks who beneﬁtted from the push for
integration, and a hip-hop generation left behind in an ever-increasing number of societal
“problems”that are hopelessly interconnected like a black rendition of the nursery rhyme
“This is the House That Jack Built, Ya’ll.”A crumbling inner-city physical infrastructure,
a “politically mysterious”crack-cocaine epidemic, the rise of gang culture, an HIV-AIDS
crisis over-whelming an inadequate health-care system, and a steady erosion of an
industrial job market all contributed to a crisis in the black community that has both sides
accusing the other of being sell-outs, wannabes, lazy welfare cheats, ad inﬁnitum.
“Naturally, a horriﬁc cycle of social disintegration was set in motion in Black
communities, nationwide.”The shouting, name-calling, and bitter recriminations from
both sides were so strident, that no one bothered to listen — or, as The Black
Commentator suggests, the new black elite were too intent on celebrating “good times,”
while a younger (and darker-skinned) generation fed the expanding prison-industrial-
complex, or kept black funeral homes busy. Against a back-drop of a reinvigorated racial
conservatism in American domestic policy and the reign of terror against inner city
youth: “one would not know it from the popular Black music of the late Seventies,

inspired by the rising fortunes of Black businessperson - musicians, producers and media

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owners.” But an entire generation who saw a major portion of the black elite on
television “actin’out,” “threw the black elite’s world into confusion.”

Hip H0p was invented, thanks to newly available, cheap technology.

The social divide that the Black elite had welcomed as the terms of

conditional acceptance into the larger society, was ﬁnally answered

by a mass Black youth cultural response: fuck you and your bougie

music, too.
But hip-hop, as it became more visible, drew critics for its unabashed genderized
colorism (a tendency they shared with the Civil Rights generation) and the genre’s
violent misogyny. “An ampliﬁed and exaggerated masculinity,” pointed out Paul Gilroy
in 1993 about hip-hop, has become the boastful centerpiece of a culture of compensation
that self-consciously salves the misery of the disempowered and subordinated” (85). But
what happens when the images and rhetoric of disempowerrnent posits misogyny and
excessive consumption of empty status symbols as “cultural authenticity?” As hip-hop
steadily increases a pool of young, black instant millionaires, the form will continue to
struggle with its own issues of economic class differences as it slowly devolves under the
same type of material excess (and lack of cultural authenticity) they accused a previous
generation of exchanging for black unity.

Black Middle-Class Gains, Black Middle-Class Guilt
As quiet as its kept, some successful African Americans who have achieved the

goals that their parents worked for have nostalgically looked to the past of racial

segregation as a healthy period of black communal responsibility that seemed to end with

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the gains of equal opportunity. Cornel West recalls: “We had a much deeper sense of
community in ‘67 than we do in ‘97.”

This is important to say not in a nostalgic way, because it’s not

as if ‘67 was a time in which things were so good. Materially

speaking, they were much worse. But culturally speaking, in

terms of social connection, they were much better.
This is not to say that anyone longs for the days of racial brutality, and legal segregation,
but as Henry Louis Gates muses in The Two Nations of Black America: “I sometimes
wonder if all of us were ever meant to reach the promised land. Today there is a gap
between the black middle and the black lower classes as wide as that between the black
and white races. Our stories are narratives of ascent. But narratives of ascent are also
narratives of alienation.” As I have charted, since the post-Reconstruction period the
black middle—class has always believed in the theory of racial up-lift even while
distancing themselves from those they sought to up—lift. Under segregation, before the
middle-classes were able to cross over into white suburbia, examples of black middle-
class success were readily available as economic classes were forced to live side-by-side.
As Karen Grigsby Bates points out “most integrating blacks were people setting off into
white neighborhoods like westward pioneers on prarie schooners. We were going with
ﬁrm purpose and a deﬁnite list of wants: better houses, better schools, less crime. If
getting those things meant living next to white people, so be it, but living next to white
people, per se, was not why we went.” Currently, many of the children and grandchildren

of those who participated in the heady days of the Movement, wonder if they have traded

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a cultural authenticity and sense of historic black community for white symbols of
success. 1
Although prosperous blacks of the middle and upper-classes emphatically do not

wish to relieve their alienation by moving back to crumbling, crime-ridden ghettos in an
ill-advised move to “prove” their blackness, instead they have reached back to the class
group behaviors instituted by older generations of well-off blacks. Grigsby-Bates
recounts a dilemma many upper-class black families with children now face: “A whole
raft of us - black, gifted, ambitious — did what the architects of the civil rights movement
would have wished. We married, usually to people who had had experiences much like
our own, and had children.”

And then we began to notice that our kids weren’t, well, as black as

we had been. Whether we’d grown up in the ‘hood or had integrated

suburbs, we had been grounded, if not in black neighborhoods, then

by the black churches to which most of us returned every Sunday.
Grigsby-Bates and other parents who feared that their children lacked a sense of cultural
authenticity (in other words, they were becoming too white) reinvigorated old, elite
organizations such as the venerable Jack and Jill, a club for the children of prominent,
elite blacks founded in Philadelphia in 1938. The irony with organizations like Jack and
Jill, an organization whose goals were to acquaint black children with the cultural outlets
that were barred to them because of race, is the fact that the organization continues to

enforce intraracial color and class attitudes.

269

As Grigsby-Bates admits, Jack and Jill was so elitist “to the point that admitting to
membership was considered certiﬁably counterrevolutionary in the late ‘603 and early
‘703. Now it’s viewed as just another tool, another safeguard, to keep black children with
more and more options outside the black community culturally grounded”? What has
happened, however, is that the children of the upper-middle classes only associate with
other black children with similar class backgrounds while learning about the great icons
of the race who succeeded through individual achievement, and not through the largesse
of the federal government. Many parents argue that the club allows their children to be
surrounded by “as many high-achieving kids as possible,” and that not all blacks are like
the ones they only see on television. But the organization takes great pains to instill in
their children that they are decidedly not like them. Furthermore, black parents were
equally alarmed by the other “beneﬁt” of integration: interracial dating. According to
Lawrence Otis Graham, the new interest in Jack and Jill can also be traced to the fears
that black children of the elite will not have a chance to meet “our kind of people.”

The organization’s membership continues to be “by invitation only” — only current
members can propose ﬁrture candidates for admission — which ensures that the
membership of Jack and Jill retains the same skin-color strictures that were adhered to at
its inception in 1938 (although membership rules appeared to “loosen” sometime in the
19703 to allow the children of notable celebrities). Although ostensibly a pro-black
group, color differences continue to be checked at the door; even within the group,

members (especially young girls) who were not light enough, or did not have the

 

2’ The daughters of Malcolm X were also members of the exclusive organization.

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straightest hair, or the “right” features were stigmatized. Membership is also based on
“wealth” and professional attainments, and some memberships were denied because as
one member remembers of one applicant: “because we all kind of knew that the family
didn’t have the kind of money to support the activities, dues, and social demands”
(Graham 33). Although publically the organization touts their charitable work to the
“unfortunate” members of the race, they rarely come into contact with the inner city, and
signiﬁcantly, the organization also fails to provide the types of cultural activities
organized for the children of the privileged which brings into question the sincerity of the
black upper-classes in bridging the class and color gaps in black America. As Henry
Louis Gates and his pool of the best minds of the new Talented Tenth have surmised,
there are no easy solutions: “Today, like second-generation immigrants, we look back at
the old country with both a sense of regret and some ambivalence.”
The New/Old Colorism: Racial Diversity in Whiteface

In her insightfully argued legal article “Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color,
legal analyst Trina Brown meticulously attempts to sort out the confusion between what
we know as “race, and our perceptions of visible differences within “race.” “People often
confuse skin color and race because skin color is used to assign people to racial
categories. With colorism, skin color does not serve as an indicator of race. Rather, it is
the social meaning [my emphasis] afforded skin color itself that results in different
treatment” (1498). Aunt Hagar ’s Garden is an attempt to focus on the “social meanings”
that differences in skin color and phenotype have for African Americans at the end of the

twentieth-century. The social meanings of colorism, as I have argued, can be divided into

271

two broad social realities for Aﬁican Americans: gender and class. The inevitable result
of the complex intersectionalities of color, class, and gender are reﬂected in the cultural
products created by African Americans. However, the right to cultural representation has
historically been the right to deﬁne a cultural black authenticity which makes the issue of
race and skin color highly problematic. How does one deﬁne “blackness”—- is it
identiﬁable “race,”or is it culture? 13 “blackness” deﬁned by racial or class afﬁnity? Can
one look “white,” and still be culturally black? Does economic class matter? These are
extremely demanding and burdensome questions that began this study for which there are
no easy, hard-and-fast solutions as the issues of class and colorism enter a new century.
As a readily identiﬁable political minority group in a color and race conscious
America, African Americans have been concerned with numbers. In America group
numbers translate to political power, and some black leaders have looked with alarm at
every census and demographic movement that indicates which broadly identiﬁable racial
group is gaining, or losing in the Minority Sweepstakes Bowl - and Aﬁican Americans
were losing numbers (according to the last count) to an increase in the Hispanic
population. Never mind the fact that the category “Hispanic” is a suspect term in itself, or
that the broad category also includes identiﬁable people of African descent who happen
to speak Spanish or Portuguese, what matters to African Americans who care is the
perception that African Americans as a political group are rapidly losing ground. Several
blacks point nervously to a notion subscribed to by a munber of blacks and whites that
vision a future where every distinction of “biological race” is erased in an illogical

presupposition that a population of “brown” people will necessarily eliminate skin color

272

hierarchies. This line of thought fuels what some blacks consider the most alarming
current trend in racial categorization. The Multiracial Category Movement (one of
several movements) is a movement that many blacks feel began with the resentment of
white mothers who were “forced” to identify their children as black. As Trina Jones
explains:

The Multiracial Category Movement (MCM) originated in the 19803

when parents of biracial children began to challenge identiﬁcation

criteria on school data forms. By the 19903, multiracial category

advocates had shifted most of their energy to a campaign to secure

the addition of a multiracial category on decennial census forms for

the year 2000. (1522)
“Their efforts,” continues Jones, “were ultimately unsuccessful.” But not through lack of
trying; the most visible advocate of the movement (although his connection may not be a
formal one) is the professional, charismatic golfer Tiger Woods. Woods is the perfect
example of the contradictions of colorism and the confusion of the social meanings of
blackness. Woods (a light-brown skin man with curly black hair) throughout his public
career has insisted on his non-blackness — evidenced by his Filipino mother and his
visibly Aﬁ'ican American father. However, at the beginning of his career, Woods
apparently did not mind the novelty of his race factored into the equally novel idea of a
“black” golﬁng prodigy.

As I have argued earlier in this study, Woods’ racial equivocations are

disingenuous at best because his color has different social meanings to whites and blacks.

273

On the one hand, Woods appears to be of one mind with the MCM agenda in challenging
the one-drop-rule, if whites have tacitly “agreed” to his racial designation, blacks have
adamantly refused to acknowledge his complicated “explanation” of his blood-line. The
MCM claim is that multiracial individuals, like Woods, should be able to “self-
identify,”and “to acknowledge all aspects of their racial heritages.” The gist of their
argument may be a recognition of the ﬂuidity of “race,” or even that “race” as a category
should not matter, but again, underneath their argument is the implication that “race”
does matter — especially when we consider the social meanings of what the term
blackness continues to imply. Special categories according to skin color, unfortunately,
will most likely result in the type of racial stratiﬁcation of values typical in the Caribbean
which will only serve to exacerbate already existing intraracial tensions about the values
of skin color. Clearly, the agenda of the Multiracial Category Movement is not a new
one, or one speciﬁc to the United States. As Trina Jones argues, we continue to hold onto
the social meanings of “race” even when we know it to be a constructed value, and this
holds true for color and class bias in the Aﬁican American community as well.
Regardless, of the well meaning position of organizations like the MCM, racism, and to a
large extent, colorism will not disappear by pouring old wine into new bottles as the
continued preference for “racially ambiguous” bodies in mainstream popular culture—
especially those of women — ﬁt neatly into the age-old tradition of gender colorism in the
visual products controlled by African American men. To paraphrase Deborah E.
McDowell, colorism still remains “the changing same” whatever incarnation it appears

in.

274

That’s Miss Tragedy to You!

In Chapter Two, my hope was to articulate some of the issues that black women
have historically faced with class, and skin color. In her impassioned essay, “If The
Present Looks Like The Past, What Does The Future Look Like? presented as a letter to
an unidentiﬁed woman, Alice Walker painﬁrlly recounts the separation colorism has on
black sisterhood: “You may recall that were speaking of the hostility many black black
women feel toward light-skinned black women, and you said, ‘Well, I’m light. It’s not
my fault. And I’m not going to apologize for it”’(290). But in the last few years, there
have been notable mea culpas in popular literature from biracial women who have been
silent about the pain the issue has for them. In her autobiography Blgk, White, and
Jewish: Autobiomphy of A Shifting Self, Walker’s daughter, Rebecca explains the
problems, confusions in having to pick “my people.” Walker’s book is a perfect example
of a “shifting self” that ﬁnds a “racialized body” forced by multiple signiﬁers of race and
culture, and in many ways, Walker’s autobiography answers her mother’s letter.

Walker writes of a series of questions from her darker-skinned lover about “what it

’9 6‘

feels like to have white inside of me. Are you aware that there is white in you and does

that whiteness feel different from blackness? What is it like to have thin curly hair and

lighter skin, what does it feel like?” Basically, Walker is asked the same question W. E.

B. Du Bois asked at the turn of the century - how does one reconcile “his two-ness?”
Well, I say. The only time I “feel white” is when black folks point

out something in me that they don’t want to own in themselves, and

so label “white.” My tendency to psychoanalyze, for example, or my

275

greater tolerance for cold. My hard-eamed sense of entitlement is

another example, or my insistence on physical beauty wherever I

live, which, ironically, comes from the black side of my family tree.
But Walker, who clearly understands the pain of black women who have been made to
feel the “lack” according to cultural standards of beauty dictated by a patriarchal
heterosexist mainstream, “feels white” as a negative “lack” of visible blackness.

I also “feel white” when I compare myself physically to darker people

and ﬁnd myself lacking. I most experience whiteness then, as a lack

of some attribute or another. A lack of a certain kind of thickness, of a

particular full, round, “womanly” shape that I ﬁnd beautiﬁrl and associate

with abundance. A lack of color, of the richness, depth, and luminosity

that I see in skin darker than my own. (305)
Carol Camper, a biracial adoptee, had no idea of her “racial identity” as a child. “I didn’t
know my race at all. I was not informed by my parents that I was Black.”Camper
experienced the social meanings of race when she ﬁrst heard the term “Nigger” and the
question, “What are you?” “On some level I could see why I was called ‘nigger’ but there
was still no discussion, no explaining, only urges to ignore the nasty words” (xvi). By the
eighth grade, she got her ﬁrst lesson in the touchy subject of intraracial colorism: “In
grade eight my discussions with apparently-White Gayle about what her ﬁrll lips and
broad nose could mean, led to her grandmother’s instruction to slap my face the next

time I dared to say such a thing” (xvii). Carnper’s experience points to another example

276

of intraracial colorism where the biracial woman is either denied a “racial” identity, or
makes a conscious political decision to be designated as “women of color.”

Biracial women aware of the meaning of race and gender routinely reject their
objectiﬁcation as a means of saying “sorry.” Recounting her experiences “with a Black
American boyﬁiend,” Camper writes: I seemed to be prized by him and his ﬁiends
because of my ‘Red’ coloring. My light skin, freckles, green eyes and looser hair meant
that I was sought after, exoticized.” A later politicized Camper realized “that to
commodify myself as exotic meant incredible loss. Loss of self, family, community and
spirit. I began working to reject the hierarchy of colorism” (xx). Lisa Jones, not only
rejects intraracial colorism, but the implications of “hidden” white racism when
inquiring whites cannot fathom why she chooses to be “black” instead of “interracial” or
“white.” “The implication,” Jones points out, “being that choosing black was somehow a
settlement, a compromise following a personal identity crisis, and not a much larger
cultural-historical calling or even just sheer love, romance, and respect for blackness (in
all its permutations). . . .” As Jones wryly observes:”White women in particular have
trouble seeing my black identity as anything other than a rebuff of my mother. Deep
down I wonder if what they have difficulty picturing is this: not that I could reject, in
their minds, my own mother, but that I have no desire to be them”(3l). As the child of a
white mother and a black father, Jones argues that her embrace of blackness in no way
means a denial of her white ancestry, and refuses to be anyone’s “Frankenmulatta.” But
even the choice to be black raises questions about an essentialism, and about culture. As

biracial women their choice to be black suggests that “blackness” can be taken off and on

277

like a suit of clothes — the essence of passing - by adopting an agreed upon meaning of
vernacular and cultural styles as authentically black.

As we enter the twenty-ﬁrst century, “everything old is new again” as the black
community faces a host of what many believe to be are external problems. But many of
these problems also affect the work we must do inside the community as many black
intellectuals have tried to point out. How can we reconcile the continued color and class
bias in black cultural representations when it “sells” in a global market-place that markets
our own issues as “diversity”? How do we, as black folks, create an agenda that severely
calls out our own internalized complicity with racism? Especially when we missed the
boat on recognizing the intersectionalities of gender, class, and sexual oppression as
internalized practices replicated in our cultural products and social practices. The late
ﬁlmmaker Marlon Riggs, recognizing the multiplicity of blackness, characterized its
essence as “a sizzling gum ,” an apt metaphor for releasing the essentialist drinking
around a black cultural authenticity. Perhaps, as bell hooks suggests, we need to
formulate and practice a critical “postmodern blackness” that “alters and informs.”

Such a critique allows us to afﬁrm multiple black identities, varied
black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms
of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in
ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. (1990, 28)
We should also keep in mind Paul Gilroy’s counsel that we opt “to embrace the

fragmentation of self (doubling and splitting) which modernity seems to promote” (188).

278

A postmodern blackness, I would suggest, is at least a way to see blackness as a mosaic,
and to be wary of cooption by the very sources that continue to impede us as a people.
We need to practice what we preach in our everyday lives instead of investing in empty
slogans while we continue to commodify the harmful practices — such as homophobia,
misogyny, and class and colorist attitudes — that line deeper pockets of those whose

interests are not our own.

279

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