Our Living Manhood

Literature, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology

Rolland Murray

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780812239720
  9780812239720
• eBook ISBN:
  9781512809565
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

When Eldridge Cleaver wrote in 1965 that black men "shall have our manhood or the earth will be leveled by our attempt to gain it, " he voiced a central strain of Black Power movement rhetoric. In print, as well as on stage and screen, Black Power advocates equated masculinity with their political radicalism and potency. While many observers have criticized the misogyny in this preoccupation, few have noted the challenges to it within the period in the works of authors such as James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, and John Oliver Killens. These and other writers tested the link between masculinity and radical politics. By recovering their voices, Rolland Murray demonstrates that the movement's gender ideals were questioned more fully than scholars have acknowledged. He also examines how the Black Power era's contentious gender politics continue to play a role in contemporary African American culture and scholarship.Murray analyzes the ways in which notions of masculinity were interwoven with essential movement philosophies regarding revolutionary violence, charismatic leadership, radical rhetoric, and black sexuality. Striving to forge a more nuanced account of how masculinist discourse contributed to the movement's overall agenda, he frames masculinity both as a linchpin of the seductive politics of Black Power and as a focal point of dissent by black male authors.

Chapter 1

My Father’s Many Mansions: James Baldwin and the Architecture of Masculine Authority

The dramatic aesthetic and political shift that commentators have noted in James Baldwin’s work after 1964 is inseparable from his negotiations with Black Power ideology. Essayist Julius Lester offers one version of this argument when he claims that in the later Baldwin “a black vision of the world” slowly “gained precedence over a humanistic one.”¹ These scholars do not make such remarks to criticize the writer’s celebration of blackness but rather to vilify his complicity in the radicalism of the late 1960s. Having surrendered to the dogmatism of Black Power, critics charge, Baldwin lost his individualistic bent and consequently his ability to serve as a voice of opposition against what David Van Leer terms the Black Power movement’s “rhetorical excesses.”² Though not wholly inaccurate, these commentators tend to occlude and minimize the profound criticisms that Baldwin leveled at the Nation of Islam, an organization that was central to shaping Black Power ideology. Moreover, Baldwin’s capitulation to the movement’s philosophy was neither as straightforward nor as total as existing accounts suggest. Because critics have assumed Baldwin’s alliance with the movement, neither his skepticism regarding nationalism nor his ambiguous ties to radical organizations such as the Black Panthers have been sufficiently examined.³

In reconsidering Baldwin’s relationship to the NOI, this chapter submits that their conflict was a founding instance in the volatile exchanges that transpired between black male writers and Black Power ideologies. To read his encounter with the NOI as a commentary on Black Power politics is admittedly somewhat anachronistic, for his critique of the NOI was first published in 1962 and the popularization of Black Power began in 1966. Nevertheless, it is also clear that the rumblings of what became the Black Power movement were first played out in the growing national popularity of the NOI in the early sixties. Therefore, in this chapter I break with the conventional understanding of Baldwin’s encounter with the NOI as primarily an outgrowth of his civil rights activism. Instead, I reposition this encounter as part of a liminal period in black political history wherein he and black America stood uncertainly between the old civil rights order and the new Black Power radicalism.

The tension between Baldwin and the NOI began in part because they shared a belief that emancipation from a legacy of white supremacy could be achieved by fundamentally transforming the ideologies that endowed black subjects with coherent identities. Both posited speculary representations of black selfhood that could be identified with, internalized, and made manifest in the lived reality of black constituents. And it was in part through the realization of these representations that Baldwin and the NOI suggested that freedom existed. But though Baldwin and the NOI shared the belief that a transformation of black selfhood was essential to the quest for freedom, they disagreed over the form this subjectivity should take. Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” an essay documenting his 1961 meeting with NOI leader Elijah Muhammad, identifies the source of the tension between himself and Muhammad as a dispute over the shape of liberated being: “Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and it seemed to him I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself. . . . I suppose that I would like to become myself, whatever that may mean, but I knew that Elijah’s meaning and mine were not the same.”⁴ He goes on to represent Muhammad and his followers as a group that viewed the subject’s liberty as necessarily dependent upon a redemptive patriarchal ideology. As Baldwin casts NOI ideology, it operated under the premise that by surrendering the self to Muhammad’s paternal authority, converts could be liberated from a legacy of white American tyranny. In his counter to the NOI’s patriarchal model of liberation, Baldwin proposes that black subjects embrace a form of subjectivity that creates freedom by dismantling received patriarchal ideologies—indeed, a mode of selfhood that facilitates liberation through its skeptical treatment of racial, national, and gender ideologies more broadly. Baldwin subtly outlines the political limitations of the group’s brand of patriarchal politics and traces the shape that a more effective form of liberated being might take. By exploring the contours of the disagreement between Baldwin and the NOI, I agree that his criticism of the organization pivoted on his suspicions that patriarchal ideology debilitates rather than liberates black subjects.

To assert that Baldwin criticized the NOI’s patriarchal politics is not to claim that he did not himself construct masculinist models of emancipation. Baldwin’s writings prior to 1964 are characterized by a critical tracing of the pernicious effects of patriarchal social arrangements on the one hand and a tendency to privilege masculine subjectivity as the locus of emancipation on the other. The distinction between the two strains of discourse is crucial to mapping the shifting grounds of gender ideology in Baldwin’s work. During this period, he was generally critical of social arrangements that were patriarchal or clearly organized around the authority of the father, his prohibitive laws, his male lineage, and his control over the sexuality of women.⁵ Alternately, Baldwin was more ambiguous in his criticism of masculinist social formulations, the conglomeration of discourses and habits that link the particular anatomy of the male body to distinct activities and forms of authority.⁶ Which is to say that Baldwin was not entirely consistent in making challenges to ideologies that presumed that men could claim certain rights, privileges, and authority because of the bodies they inhabited. Even as Baldwin raised critical questions about the NOI’s patriarchal politics, certain strains of his social philosophy conflated the quest for black freedom with the fashioning of black masculinity. Moreover, the very instability of Baldwin’s political alliances speaks to the ways in which nationalism itself always coexisted with alternate ideologies that threatened to undo its preachments. Both Malcolm X’s split with the NOI in 1965 and the Black Panthers’ repudiation of patriarchal nationalism were symptomatic of the ways that competing ideologies often disrupted the consolidation of paternal authority at the very moment in which it was being enunciated.

Whereas the first half of this chapter examines the nature of Baldwin’s ideological clash with Elijah Muhammad and the NOI, the second half reexamines his increasing investment in masculinist and patriarchal politics during the late sixties and early seventies. This evolution in his gender politics was part of Baldwin’s broader embrace of Black Power in the same period. His aesthetic and political shift was bolstered by the repression of his suspicions about the limits of patriarchal and masculinist ideology. Marked by the younger generation of Black Power advocates as what he calls a “doubtful quantity,” Baldwin sought to remedy his political alienation by affirming the centrality of masculinist social structures in forging a radical political agenda.⁷ Nevertheless, as his biographers cursorily intimate, Baldwin was quite conflicted privately about his alliance with Black Power radicals. What these biographical accounts inadequately address is that his fiction offered an acute critical assessment of the very solidarity with black radicals that he promoted elsewhere. His 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone tells the story of a gay African American actor who is nearly destroyed by his unquestioning allegiance and love for a young black radical. My reading of this novel significantly revises the more common critical view that Baldwin was wholly compliant with the exigencies of Black Power. Whether in the nascent stages of Power advocacy or at the height of the movement, gender ideologies were crucial in the articulation of both Baldwin’s dissent from patriarchal nationalism and his conflicted solidarity with Black Power radicals.

Baldwin and the Changing Politics of a Nation

In the summer of 1961, when Baldwin met Elijah Muhammad, the author was in a state of profound political uncertainty. Vexed by what he understood as the declining relevance of the civil rights movement yet unable to accept the nationalist ideology of the NOI, Baldwin seemed to have no political foundation on which to stand. Contributing to his anxieties was the reality that the black polity was undergoing a political shift that granted the nationalist ideology of the NOI unprecedented public attention and legitimacy.⁸ Teetering on shifting political ground, Baldwin struggled to forestall black investment in the nationalist ideology of the NOI and posited his own model of liberated subjectivity.

Baldwin’s essay examining the NOI meeting, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” created a national sensation that thrust him into the public sphere in a manner that forever changed him. Earning record sales for the New Yorker, the piece was so popular that publishers scrambled to put together a book version only two months after its magazine printing.⁹ Renamed “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind” and accompanied by a brief introductory letter, the essay became the centerpiece of the bestseller The Fire Next Time. The public appeal of the book version only consolidated Baldwin’s status as a national spokesman on racial politics. As biographer James Campbell argues, in the five years after the essay was first published, “Baldwin’s life consists largely of outer events, forming a story that can be told only by making constant reference to the public record.”¹⁰ Through an exhausting regimen of college circuit tours, platform speeches, television appearances, and radio interviews, Baldwin took on a burden that he had tried diligently to avoid in his early career; he had become a “Negro Leader.”¹¹

What may account for the sensational appeal of “Down at the Cross” is the manner in which the essay allowed the public to explore its anxieties about the changing character of black politics. Critical reception ranged from the conservative admonition that the essay contains a “kind of pride that produces [black] separatism and nationalism” to the humanist assertion that “Baldwin pleads for a larger truth than the Black Muslims.”¹² Read by contemporaries as both Baldwin’s affirmation of King’s nonviolent protest and an indication of the author’s conversion to black nationalism, the essay became “a convenient lightning rod” for the political instability of the black polity.¹³

The fact that “Down at the Cross” could be interpreted so disparately was also a function of Baldwin’s own political ambivalence. In an interview the same year as the NOI meeting, Baldwin simultaneously registered his commitment to the civil rights movement and its declining influence. “I am devoted to King and I worked with CORE and tried to raise money for the Freedom Riders. . . . Yet at the same time in talking to very different people, somewhat older and also talking to ex sit-in students who said, ‘No, I simply can’t take it any more . . .’ I don’t know. Let me put it another way. King’s influence in the South is slight and the North doesn’t talk about the South.”¹⁴ As Baldwin presents it, by 1961 the civil rights movement and its supporters were experiencing growing frustration.¹⁵ With a core of discontented southern activists and a political program unable to respond to the exigencies of black urban discontent, the future of a movement grounded in nonviolent protest seemed tenuous. If Baldwin’s remarks can be understood as an illustration of his mindset around the time of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, he approached the black nationalists with a sense that the civil rights platform he supported was becoming an anachronism. In the same interview Baldwin is equally convinced that the NOI’s advocacy of racial separatism and black moral superiority captures the imagination of the black public more readily. Responding to the interviewer’s claim that it is “much more easy for a . . . Muslim speaker to win followers than Martin Luther King,” Baldwin accedes that it is “much easier, obviously.”¹⁶ Vacillating between his sense that the civil rights movement’s politics were becoming outmoded on the one hand and his sense that the NOI more accurately addressed black discontent on the other, Baldwin performed the very ambivalence that he attributed to black America.

In My Father’s House: Subjectivity and Patriarchal Authority

The ambiguities of Baldwin’s professed political allegiances extended into his engagement with nationalist gender ideologies. Central to understanding the uneven deployment of gender in Baldwin’s analysis of the NOI are the multiple ways that Baldwin manipulates the myths that consolidate patriarchal authority. His evocations of fathers are significant not, as scholar Michel Fabre argues in another context, because Baldwin was engaged in a “therapeutic” search for a spiritual father, but rather because authority and power were constituted through patriarchy in the NOI, in his stepfather’s tragic life, and in the church of his youth.¹⁷ Situated between the organization’s nationalist agenda and Baldwin’s public and private anxieties, paternal myth functions as the ideological framework through which Baldwin can represent, inhabit, and interrogate the logic of black nationalism.

From the beginning of Baldwin’s career, the biography of his stepfather was a fixture in the author’s essays and fiction.¹⁸ David Baldwin, an itinerant laborer, minister, and father of nine children, led a harsh life in which he often found it difficult to find the means of subsistence for his family.¹⁹ A man who his son claims was “indescribably cruel in his personal life” and “the most bitter man I have ever met,” the elder Baldwin embodied in his son’s imagination the pernicious effects of internalizing white supremacist ideology.²⁰ According to Baldwin, his father’s failing lay not so much in a straightforward acceptance of white domination but in the subtle ways that his religious views reproduced the destructive logic of racial subjection. Baldwin claims that his father “was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart he believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons he became so holy” (18). This commentary casts David Baldwin as a symbol of the perils of internalized racism, but equally important is the claim that David’s unyielding faith was a meager defense against an ingrained belief that he was black and therefore inferior.

Baldwin develops the latter point further in his depiction of a clash with his father. Bewildered by a crisis of faith at a time when he was also being heralded as one of Harlem’s most prodigious young preachers, Baldwin sought to test the boundaries of church doctrine and the authority of his father. In an act of defiance, he invited a Jewish friend to visit him at his father’s decidedly Christian house. His father responded by slapping Baldwin “across the face with his great palm, and in that moment everything flooded back all the hatred and the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me, and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing. I wondered if I was expected to be glad that a friend of mine was to be tormented forever in hell. . . . The battle between us was in the open, but that was all right; it was almost a relief. A more deadly struggle had begun” (51). The violent prohibition of Baldwin’s father certainly illustrates the latter’s tyrannical authority, but this authority is also inseparable from the father’s faith in a crippling ideology. Through its hierarchical and exclusionary logic, David Baldwin’s religion reproduces the very racial categories from which it pretends to extricate its believers. He enacts a mere reversal in which the nonblack and the non-Christian must be degraded in order to establish the supremacy of black Christians. The father’s prohibition thereby confirms for Baldwin that nothing has changed and that neither he nor his father has been freed from white supremacy through his faith.

Baldwin’s violation of paternal authority and the punitive blow that this defiance brings forth mirror and prefigure his conflict with the ideology of the black Pentecostal churches he encountered in Harlem. That is, by tying the father’s prohibitive authority to the larger ideology of the church, Baldwin conflates public dogma and private tyranny. In a passage evocatively juxtaposed to his conflict with his father, Baldwin criticizes the church’s ideological failing. “It probably occurred to me around this time that the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live. . . . In the same way that we, for white people, were the descendants of Ham, and were cursed forever, white people were, for us, the descendants of Cain. And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted, and in the end hated almost all strangers and despised ourselves” (54–55). Baldwin shrewdly sketches the ideological function of his Pentecostal church’s theology. He suggests that his church creates a speculary fiction about black racial superiority that inverts the hierarchy of white supremacy yet never escapes its racial dichotomies. His church’s dogma ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Our Black Nations Reconsidered
• 1. My Father’s Many Mansions: James Baldwin and the Architecture of Masculine Authority
• 2. The Clumsy Trap of Manhood: Revolutionary Nationalism, John Edgar Wideman, and Remembrance
• 3. Dark Intimacies: Sex, Nationalism, and Forgetting
• 4. How the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism and Performativity
• Conclusion: Masculine Legacies
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments