Looking for Leroy

Illegible Black Masculinities

Mark Anthony Neal

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814760604
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.

1
A Foot Deep in the Culture

The Thug Knowledge(s) of A Man Called Hawk

In the fall of 1985 the television series Spenser for Hire debuted on the ABC network. The main character of the hour-long drama, an urbane Boston-based private detective named Spenser, was based on a character featured in a series of novels authored by Robert Parker. Spenser was portrayed by the actor Robert Urich as an upscale version of Dan Tanna, a character Urich played in the late 1970s series Vegas. At the height of the popularity of Parker’s Spenser novels in the late 1980s, much was made of how much Parker’s identity informed that of Spenser. As one writer described it, both Spenser and Parker wear “polished loafers with tassels, blue denims with an open-neck shirt and expensive sport jacket.” Parker and his character Spenser embodied “business casual” well before such a term existed, and in the mid-1980s such a style gave Spenser an air of sophistication rarely associated with those in his profession. That Parker and Spenser were so closely linked rendered the character of Spenser believable.

In both the novels and the television series, Spenser often collaborated with a black “enforcer” simply known as Hawk. As described by Parker, “Hawk has the same skills and inclinations, but he grew up in another way with a different set of pressures.”¹ Whatever sensibilities that Hawk might have shared with Spenser and however progressive Parker imagined the character to be, the reality was that Hawk was all too familiar to audiences who had grown comfortable with seeing a big black bald man, clad in black leather, with a big black gun—a performance that has historically been known as that of the “bad (black) man.” In his book Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life, the historian William L. Van Deburg discusses the “bad (black) man” in the context of what he calls “black social bandits.” According to Van Deburg, these figures, as constructed by post–Civil War writers, were often “Quirky, quixotic, and prone to appropriating white-owned status symbols as partial compensation for past indignities,” and were “wedded to the cause of group freedom and saw nothing wrong with extralegal means to balance the scales of justice.” “Typically more extroverted and colorful than the average individual,” Van Deburg notes, these “outlaws of American folk history won wide acceptance as risk-taking representatives of an unjustly demeaned race.”² As a dual product of Robert Parker’s imagination and the American psyche, Hawk seemingly did little to disturb long-held popular beliefs about adult black masculinity.

According to Avery Brooks, the actor who brought Hawk to life on the small screen, “I’ve been asked many times whether I was exactly like the Hawk character.”³ Brooks, who has portrayed figures as diverse as Othello, Malcolm X, and Paul Robeson, is a classically trained actor who, in 1976, earned the first MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in theater granted to an African American at Rutgers University. At the time that Brooks accepted the role of Hawk, he was a tenured professor of theater at the university. None of Brooks’s accomplishments were apparent to those fans (many of them white) who approached Brooks and, as he describes it, “think that I actually carry a gun, and that probably I was standing on a street corner somewhere and these producers saw me and asked me if I wanted to come on television.”⁴ In many ways Avery Brooks is as illegible—unbelievable—to mainstream audiences as Hawk is believable to those same audiences.

When I watched Spenser for Hire in the mid-1980s, Hawk was absolutely believable and riveting for me as a twenty-year-old who imagined living a life of the mind while trying to negotiate the demands of the social spaces I called home. Hawk seemed to exist somewhere in between Amiri Baraka’s Blues People and the vestibules where my boyhood friends were selling crack-cocaine and weed. At the time Hawk embodied what some dismissively call “street smarts,” though Hawk immediately struck me as a character who was highly literate. In his book Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, Vershawn Ashanti Young writes, “literacy is not chiefly about matching pronouns with the right antecedents or comprehending why Willie and Janet went up the hill. Literacy is first and foremost a racial performance.”⁵ As such, it was a performance that I found quite alluring, as much because of the seamlessness with which Hawk navigated very disparate social and cultural spaces, as because of the intellectual gravitas that the character conveyed—a gravitas that was perhaps more disarming than his bold physical presence.

Conjuring Black Male Genius

Fuck being a thug—in my mind Hawk was damned erudite: a combination of John Shaft’s street savvy, W. E. B. Du Bois’s scholarly acumen, Billy Eckstine’s modernist cool, Huey Newton’s politicized eroticism, Cecil Taylor’s improvisational instincts, and Tea Cake’s mysticism—in other words, a cat who had to be conjured out of the wellspring of black masculine genius, both real and imagined. The novelist Martha Southgate, for instance, notes how “Brooks’s intelligence and eagerness have … taken Hawk beyond what his creator imagined for him.”⁶ In an interview with the journalist and author Jill Nelson, Brooks says of his character, “Hawk lives somewhere, for me, between fiction and reality. That is to say that Robert Parker imagined this black man, this character,” but “I don’t imagine black people, … I happen to be one, and I have studied and lived and loved them all my life.”⁷ Brooks’s comments highlight how the sliver of agency he was given to shape the character had the potential to produce a character who could be read as transformative, though illegible, in relation to those black male characters who existed in mainstream television up to that point. Not surprisingly, Brooks’s creative agency challenged the professional writers—many of them white—who were charged with creating a spin-off of Spenser for Hire, called A Man Called Hawk. Brooks had transformed Hawk into a distinct intellectual property that the writers were neither prepared nor inclined to create in the first place.

Brooks incredulously recalls being asked by producers who Hawk really was—this some three years into the series Spenser for Hire. It was this real lack of imagination on the part of the producers and writers that gave Brooks the opportunity to “do something that allows me to go back home and be cool with the people I know.”⁸ Amidst his struggles with the writers, Brooks famously said that “if we get just one of these [episodes] on the air, it’s too late…. All they have to do is show it one time.”⁹ Brooks’s point was that if his vision for Hawk was ever seen by the public, even once, it would have an impact on how mainstream society might view black culture and black men in particular. And indeed, because he did get thirteen episodes of A Man Called Hawk on the air, I can now grapple with the constructs of black masculinity in mainstream popular culture.

In order to establish a narrative grounding for A Man Called Hawk, the writers were seemingly obsessed with providing a believable backstory for the character of Hawk. Set in Hawk’s hometown of Washington, DC, the early episodes of the series all provide ample references to the character’s past as a professional boxer, gifted child (“curiosity surrounded you like a landscape”), and special operations officer during the Vietnam War. The latter factor was used to create tension between Hawk and various law enforcement officers—notably Charles S. Dutton in the role of Hodges—who consistently are amazed at Hawk’s connections to the intelligence community in Washington. There are echoes of Sam Greenlee’s novel and later film, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, in Hawk’s relationship with the intelligence community—trained by the government, but functioning independently on his own terms as the fall of the Soviet bloc looms in the 1980s.

The writers also felt the need to domesticate the character, not surprising given the historic construction of the “bad man” as a figure who thrived on independence and actively resisted control. As such the attempts to domesticate Hawk—conscious or not—can be read as attempts to limit the narrative agency of the character and by extension, the creative agency of the actor Avery Brooks. Ronald A. T. Judy’s work on the construction of antebellum and postbellum black masculinity is useful here, as Judy argues that in contrast to the aforementioned “bad man” of postbellum folklore and popular culture, the so-called bad nigger of the antebellum period represented a more ominous and politicized figure. According to Judy, “For slaves, bad nigger indicated an individual who, in challenging the laws of slavery, refused to be a nigger thing. A bad nigger, then, is an oxymoron: rebellious property. In rebellion, the bad nigger exhibits an autonomous will, which a nigger as commodity-thing is not allowed to exhibit…. The bad nigger marks the limits of the law of allowance by transgressing it.”¹⁰ I’d like to suggest that in the distinction between the “bad man” and the “bad nigger” there also lies a distinction between the writers’ intention for the character of Hawk and Brooks’s intention for the character—“bad nigger” as metaphor, perhaps, for Brooks’s own relationship with the writers.

The genius of Brooks’s performance as Hawk is the collapse of meaningful distinctions (for Brooks and knowledgeable readers) between the “bad man” and the “bad nigger.” As Judy writes, the “bad man possesses a knowledge of self…. This knowledge is of political significance, in that it is the basis for a type of morality, or self-government, which then forms the basis for community self-determination.”¹¹ I cite the above passage to make the claim—implicit throughout my discussion of A Man Called Hawk—that the character of Hawk represented an embodied knowledge that exists beyond simple references to street smarts or in celebration of his ability to seamlessly navigate the challenges of urban terrain. More concretely, I am arguing that despite Hawk’s thuggish exterior, the character is representative of a rather sophisticated intellectual sensibility that is motivated by the historical difficulties faced by black men desiring to remain politically and culturally relevant—legible—to the black communities that produced them while openly confronting their limited and limiting legibility outside those communities.

In that Hawk is a character whose very power is derived from the perception that he is marginal to everyday mainstream life, the writers were also charged to define Hawk’s vocation, beyond the obvious Robin Hood / vigilante quality of his interactions with community members and law enforcement. Speaking directly to the issue of legibility that challenged the writers and producers of the series, virtually all thirteen episodes of the series feature a moment where characters publicly question Hawk’s identity, often to witty acerbic retorts from Hawk. As a narrative device, the scenes allowed the writers to build upon Hawk’s backstory and coalesce disparate identity traits for a figure who lacked depth of character in earlier incarnations. In an early episode, “A Time and Place,” in which Hawk is mistakenly accused of murdering a police officer, the officer investigating the case delves into Hawk’s past and notes his regular shuttle flights between Washington, DC, and Boston (where Spenser for Hire was set) and his legal possession of a gun, to which Hawk responds, “so I carry a big gun, fly on airplanes,” dismissing the line of questioning as irrelevant to the flimsy charges he was being held on. In this instance, Hawk arouses suspicion because of his mobility—his cosmopolitanism, if you will. As a black man who travels regularly and carries a weapon, he must be engaged in nefarious and illicit criminal activity.

The exchange with the investigator, perfectly pitched to ongoing anxieties that Hawk exists beyond the law and thus beyond logic, is one of many such narrative exchanges calculated to force audiences to think beyond the standard tropes of the character, including the perception that since he is an enforcer/protector for hire, many of Hawk’s activities are motivated by financial gain, as evidenced by his luxury car and expensive wardrobe. The episode “Poison” directly addresses the perception of Hawk’s “for-hire” status, as the character investigates the drug overdose of an African diplomat’s daughter. Attending a diplomatic gathering with a friend, Hawk is asked, “What do you do, Mr. Hawk?” to which he responds, “I don’t.” The comment was a dismissive response to a character whose initial query was intended to comment on the supposed oddness of Hawk’s presence at a high-level diplomatic event, but also underscores the perception that Hawk’s attendance at the event is predicated by his for-hire status, as a bodyguard, perhaps. Later in the episode, when the diplomat assures Hawk that should he investigate the death of the diplomat’s daughter, he will be paid handsomely, Hawk responds, “Money is never a problem for me.” In the episode “Life after Death,” in which Hawk assists a young black girl portrayed by Tatiana Ali, Hawk rejects the girl’s attempts to pay him for his services (she offered about thirty dollars), admitting, “I did this for someone I was too late to help. Sometimes we’re asked to heal others and we end up healing ourselves.” Hawk’s responses are critically important to the core values of the character, because they undermine perceptions that exceptional black men are largely motivated by the financial gain attached to their labor as opposed to some sense of loyalty, the pleasure derived from such labor, or the duty associated with those who labor at the behest of those who often can’t help themselves. Registering in a much lower frequency in Hawk’s responses is the connection between his own humanity and the historical association of black laborers as commodities, especially when black laborers derive little, if any, of the financial benefits from their labor, as was the case during chattel slavery and the sharecropping era. Recalling the theorist Judy again, Hawk refuses to be a “nigger-thing.”

Though audiences never see Hawk’s place of residence, he is often shown in public settings that suggest his connection to a community. Frequently throughout the series Hawk visits Mr. Henry’s, a local jazz club where Hawk enjoys performances, meets with a notable black civil rights attorney, and even composes a song with the jazz guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly. Located in the Capitol Hill district, Mr. Henry’s has its own significant cultural history in that it was the place where the musician Roberta Flack got her start as a professional performer, as did her longtime collaborator, the late Donny Hathaway. In line with its role as a pub, Mr. Henry’s is another iteration of the black public sphere and highlights Hawk’s fluidity among many publics. In various episodes of the series, notably “Never My Love” (episode 9) and “Beautiful Are the Stars” (episode 12), Hawk is directly engaged in work at the behest of community members, many of whom have known the character since his youth. In the episode “Choice of Chance,” in which Hawk is drawn into the lives of a family left unprotected by a failed witness protection program, Hawk responds to the query “Who you supposed to be?” with the quip “I never ’spose, I am.” The simple exchange is just a reminder of the integrity that Avery Brooks intended for the character, a character who was ethical and principled. Illuminating these investments, Brooks told Essence Magazine, “I grew up in the context of a Black community where ideas such as dignity and integrity and proper behavior still existed. I thought that this was the way the whole world was, and I will insist that, ultimately, that’s the way it still is.”¹²

The link between Hawk and the community is a character simply known as the Old Man. Portrayed by the late Moses Gunn, the Old Man serves as a mentor to Hawk as well as an interlocutor of sorts; virtually all of Hawk’s interactions with the Old Man are cerebral in nature, with the duo playing chess and debating various philosophical tenets. The interactions between Hawk and the Old Man often take place in a study or personal library, filled with various African and African American artifacts. According to Brooks, the relationship between Hawk and the Old Man was intended to be read as part of Hawk’s subconscious, though writers scoffed at the idea. “You can’t talk about African people without talking about the spiritual dimension,” Brooks told the journalist David Mills, adding, “And this place that Hawk went—because you never saw a building or anything—he was just in this place.” Producers eventually created scenes where Hawk and the Old Man are seen in public venues like a bookstore and art museum, though Brooks protested, “That’s not the idea, baby! … We’re talking about mythology, contemporary mythology. Just like Superboy, the Lone Ranger, all of that see?”¹³ Nevertheless, the Old Man clearly exists as an extension of Hawk’s intellectual and spiritual identity—community members, for instance, usually can contact Hawk only through the Old Man, and Hawk frequently works on behalf of those who have long-established ties with the Old Man. In addition, the Old Man often informs Hawk of impending danger, providing counsel (“You are the hunter, not the hunted—the hawk, not the sparrow”).¹⁴ In one telling scene, Hawk is disturbed that the Old Man doesn’t seem to know what is bothering him (as if part of his own subconscious had been separated from him), to which the Old Man responds, “You give me too much credit.”¹⁵

Throughout the series Hawk’s interactions with children humanize his character, highlighting his tenderness, compassion, and patience. Such is the case with the episode “The Divided Child,” in which Hawk comes into the lives of a businessman and his family who are being targeted by South American militia. As the narrative unfolds, audiences are made privy to the fact that the businessman established communications links for a South American government during the midst of a brutal civil war. Before leaving the country, the man and his wife adopted a young boy whose parents had purportedly been killed in the civil war. Hawk is hired by the family, primarily to provide safe haven for the child. Hawk’s use of Spanish and other gestures to communicate with the child creates yet another vantage point from which to read the complexity of Hawk. Accordingly, it is also in the context of Hawk’s em...