Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Christopher Freeburg

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813940328
• eBook ISBN: 9780813940335
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Afroamerikanische Studien

Christopher Freeburg's  Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life offers a crucial new reading of a neglected aspect of African American literature and art across the long twentieth century. Rejecting the idea that the most dehumanizing of black experiences, such as lynching or other racial violence, have completely robbed victims of their personhood, Freeburg rethinks what it means to be a person in the works of black artists. This book advances the idea that individual persons always retain the ability to withhold, express, or change their ideas, and this concept has profound implications for long-held assumptions about the relationship between black interior life and black collective political interests.

Examining an array of seminal black texts—from Ida B. Wells's antilynching pamphlets to works by Richard Wright, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison—Freeburg demonstrates that the personhood represented by these writers unsettles rather than automatically strengthens black subjects' relationships to political movements such as racial uplift, civil rights, and black nationalism. He shows how black artists illuminate the challenges of racial collectivity while stressing the vital stakes of individual personhood. In his challenge to current African Americanist criticism, Freeburg makes a striking contribution to our understanding of African American literature and culture.

1 / The Violence Inside

Of thy neighbor thou has made a thing.

—JOSIAH ROYCE, THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY

Abraham Lincoln could never deny the ghastly horror of mob law after he witnessed dead men hanging “from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers . . . to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.”¹ Dead black multitudes, suspended from trees, dismembered and lifeless, multiplied in the decades after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Violence against blacks in the South, rivaling the atrocities in landmark antebellum books such as American Slavery as It Is (1837), advanced decades later in the era of black freedom. The promises of individual rights and privileges unraveled in violent crisis when white southerners realized that no one would stop them from robbing black people of the social equality they appeared historically poised to claim. James Weldon Johnson reflected on this tragic reality for black people in verse, asking: “Rising or falling? Men or things?”²

In the face of actual horrific social conditions and an onslaught of racist media, black writers from Charles Chesnutt to Ida B. Wells sought to reveal blacks’ moral dignity, rationality, and readiness for social equality in the face of white supremacist abuses.³ To this effort, the growing currency of psychology also encouraged black writers to deepen their characters’ or personae’s sense of interiority in order to showcase the humanistic virtues of the Negro. While black people know what whites think of them, Johnson writes, the actual thought of “the Negro” remains foreign to whites. The psychologist and philosopher William James, for instance, emphasized the significance of knowing another group’s internal life in resolving social conflict, writing that it is a grave problem for half the country to “remain entirely blind to the internal significance of the internal lives of the other half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to miss the moral virtue and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.”⁴ Surfing this modern zeitgeist, Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) purported to capture “the inner life of the Negro in America.”⁵

When Johnson used the phrase “inner life” in the preface of Autobiography, he suggested the collective experience of the “Negro,” but after the novel’s grim portrayal of lynching, the reader also sees that Johnson ties getting inside a black person’s “sphinx” to the protagonist’s individual experiences of psychological torment. Through his protagonist’s in-depth rumination, Johnson disputed blacks’ beastly simplicity promoted by Thomas Dixon’s popular Klan literatures. But as Johnson expounded an individualized black interiority, he also created a protagonist that has more ownership in his thinking, choices, and fate—a sense that he can make more out of his own present and future. Does Johnson’s “ex-colored man” project the kind of black heroism promoted in landmark volumes like A New Negro for a New Century (1900)?⁶ The black people showcased in A New Negro are celebrated for “Negro” achievements across fields in order to demonstrate black peoples’ overall readiness for citizenship. Johnson’s protagonist does show fluctuations and anxieties of one’s mind, which was by itself progressive, demonstrating psychological complexities in the black subject. Yet, I submit, as the reader sees Johnson’s ex-colored man’s deliberations as his own, tone of difference, me/not me, the more his character reveals what Anna Julia Cooper promotes: blacks are “many men of many minds.”⁷ Writings about black people, as Johnson and Cooper suggested, need to adequately portray the varieties of ways that black subjects struggle to make sense of their lives.

By affirming an “inner life” or getting inside “the sphinx” for the race, Johnson and other black writers also made available the undeniable distinctiveness of individuals. The fact that black people suffer from racist social hierarchy is general, but precisely how one struggles, contests, and falls victim to this suffering is inherently unique. “The sphinx” of “the Negro” redoubles as the personal form, the “inner life” of the individual. I submit that while the historical stage of racial uplift gives visibility to thinking suffering, the conventions of uplift cannot give full clarity to messiness, mystery, and uncertainty of black subjects’ desires and interests as well as how they will practice them. There is something profoundly alienating in realizing the difference between self and other, individual and group. By focusing on personal life and interest in these texts, I raise the personal form that challenges the prescripts of what one knows or can guarantee about social and political affiliations based on race.⁸

In this vein, Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Anna Julia Cooper’s essay “What Are We Worth?” from A Voice from the South (1892), and Ida B. Wells’s pamphlet Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900) portray the stakes of personhood through episodes of social conflict—and in doing so, these texts provoke questions about the alignment between innermost thoughts, individual choices, and collective racial politics. Brutal social relations between blacks and whites in the 1890s should be looked at as scenes of violence where the significance of what it means to be a person comes squarely into view. These moments define the personal form. I advance that Chesnutt’s, Wells’s, and Cooper’s writings disclose the personal form by repeatedly emphasizing that being a person contains a sense of innate value that one must realize, by showing that each person should ask and come up with their own answers to such questions as What makes life meaningful? How can I make a contribution to society? Is there a cause for which I am willing to die? The brutal conditions that black people faced at the turn of century, which brought about discourses of racial uplift, also encouraged these ontological and social questions; and while the very call to answer them maybe unifying, racially, politically, or otherwise, the answers themselves—how they’re conceived, grasped, repressed—indubitably demonstrate uniqueness and difference between persons, which demands that we move beyond racial politics to fully discern them.

Anna Julia Cooper and Value

“What Are We Worth?” is the title of a largely overlooked essay in Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892). From manufactured goods and services to an artist’s words, Cooper crafted a number of anecdotes and scenes about contributions people make to society. Nearly all the examples of what Cooper called “our raw material” correspond to her own affirmations about how to define and create human value (223). “What Are We Worth?” is also a part of Cooper’s activist writings at the dawn of the twentieth century that include arguments for educating black women, eradicating racism and imperialism, and challenging racist practices within white women’s organizations.⁹ The essay is wildly different from her more direct expressions of antiracism and advocacy on behalf of women. Given Cooper’s variety of ideas and group commitments, initially, it is not clear to whom the “we” in “What Are We Worth?” refers. Even though Cooper began the essay with concerns about how whites think of blacks and what blacks think of themselves, the “we” captures overlapping or opposing identities throughout the essay: the “we” could be “blacks” “black women,” “Americans,” and “the universally human,” which can be understood as different groups or different faces of a single one. This abstraction of “we” turns community and nationality into a question in some parts of the essay, while it clearly means black people in other places. This purposeful ambiguity strikes at the heart of the essay, since how an individual chooses what to belong to and contribute to is fundamental to what the essay implies about one’s personal beliefs and commitments.

Before Cooper addressed what one can think and do as an individual, she discussed different ideas about how to create human value. The question “what are we worth?” allowed Cooper to demonstrate how she determined a person’s worth, worthlessness, humanity, and inhumanity at a number of related indexes—from the individual to the national. In order to do this, Cooper embraced the language of capitalist production and scientific objectivity, abandoning popular progressive notions of sentiment. Her starting point for examining worth begins, paradoxically, with white notions of black worthlessness—where scholars have recognized the social, psychological, and economic abuses of white supremacy.¹⁰ For Cooper, however, countering whites’ racist praxis with evidence for why blacks are valuable is not where the essay ends. By essay’s end, Cooper has fashioned a material self that shrugs off correlations between racial identity and political interest in favor of a discourse rooted in the importance of individual choices and personal desire.

Critics have been suspicious of this universal rhetoric, suggesting that Cooper’s use of abstract individualism actually masks the racial uplift ideologies she supports.¹¹ New Negro rhetoric, pushed by key political figures such as Booker T. Washington, advocated to whites in power that blacks, especially in the middle classes, were fit for citizenship and social equality. Cooper relied on racial uplift discourse by championing blacks’ successes and aptitude for progress. Her insistence on what creates material value in persons addresses whites’ racist ideas about blacks, but Cooper also recasts personal identity in ways that stretch beyond the horizons of racial politics. Cooper emphasizes one’s innate capacity to think, feel, and choose for one’s self in whatever social conditions he or she lives. Her anecdotes and scenarios focus on the fact of being a person and how persons express themselves in contentious and horrific conditions. Cooper expands labor to whatever individuals take pride in doing, and doing it well establishes a contribution one can value however one chooses. In this way, Cooper made unthinkable alternative views thinkable when she expressed what it means to live by making a contribution. In fact, her efforts to look deeper into the person do not aim to prove that blacks have interiority; instead, Cooper pointed to a sense of what activities and realizations help establish one’s value, and that reflexively, achieving value in the way she defines it, clarifies what is important about being a person.¹²

While it is true that Cooper did not advance self-serving notions of personhood, she believed one’s individual spiritual choices are critical in defining one’s worth for oneself.¹³ “What Are We Worth?” unveils the ontological grounds that underscore one’s convictions and new feelings of self-transformation. Any newness or transfigurations that open up better self-relations, however, require loss, erasure, and even negation if the new self-relation is to actually be newly thought and possible. Therefore, in advocating that readers look deeper into themselves and others, Cooper correlated the unsettling risk of introspection, which shapes one relation to his or her own labor, with one’s material value, and to fashioning one’s identity. Yet this way of viewing one’s person unravels any cohesive futures, whether in support of or in conflict with collective notions of racial transformation. Unlike some of her contemporary “race men,” Cooper’s personal focus refigures social attachments and prerogatives based on one’s current persona, which emerges from but may certainly be at odds with instrumental notions of black progress.¹⁴

“What Are We Worth?” begins with a question and answer, by revered abolitionist and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher. The moment this essay was published stings because whites in the North had abandoned their avid support of blacks. Beecher’s comments are an example of a pertinent distinction that historians have made numerous times: abolitionists and even supporters of black political equality after emancipation did not necessarily think blacks were, in fact, equal or had made significant contributions to modern society.¹⁵ Cooper began her essay with an appraisal of blacks’ worth and contribution: Were Africa and the Africans to sink tomorrow, how much poorer would the world be? A little less gold and ivory, a little less coffee, a considerable ripple, perhaps, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans would come together—that is all; not a poem, not an invention, not a piece of art would be missed from the world (228). Beecher suggested that blacks are worth nothing in terms of modern civilizations’ ideals of racial accomplishment. His work exemplifies a racially inflected view of modern progress that keeps science and art in focus, which Cooper thought was a necessary point of departure if, truly, “we” are going to see “ourselves as others see us” (226). Another reason why Cooper attributed significance to Beecher’s remarks is that they depict modern achievement as intellectual capital and tradable commodities.

In the decades before the turn of the twentieth century, many scholars and writers equated scientific advancement and economic production with modern progress. A new phase in history, observed in Henry Adams’s Education (1919), is “capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical.”¹⁶ In “What Are We Worth” Cooper reimagined what it means to know one’s self in these historical currents of proclaimed harmony of machine, man, and market forces, which makes beginning with Beecher’s brooding presence pertinent. Moreover, Cooper emphasized concepts like objectivity and standardization to rethink what it means to have “equal chances” for all people (253). For Cooper, having one true standard for assessing human value means something challenging but straightforward: “individuals, nations, and races” need to be judged by the same standard (229). According to Cooper, the only way to get to this objective equality is to practice cold and critical assessment. This cool, businesslike lens reaffirms the emergent ideal of being scientific and objective, which means finding the most accurate and equable way of discerning truth and fairness based on newly discovered facts.

Even though biologists’ and sociologists’ discoveries about blacks were often used to confirm black racial inferiority or blacks’ predisposition for pathological behavior, Cooper committed to scientific objectivity—it becomes an instrument for her to make the language of manufacturing, technology, and science work on behalf of black social equality;¹⁷ this is her version of what W. E. B. Du Bois calls “second sight.”¹⁸ For Du Bois, second sight is a gift that, upon its use, both senses of sight can dialectically merge and lead to black progress. Du Bois discussed this “way of seeing” in grand historical terms: “The history of the American Negro” he wrote, “is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”¹⁹ While both Cooper and Du Bois believed in blacks ascertaining a new self and historical consciousness, Cooper’s language differs from Du Bois’s by making objectivity and the economic value of people central to her thinking. The question for Cooper, more importantly, is what does she see in mechanistic labor and scientific objectivity that will counter Beecher’s racist remarks or what influential whites think of blacks?

Cooper legitimated her objectivity by insisting that “sentiment” also must be ruled out in order to “study our subject as the world finally reckons it”; and what she meant by world is the “the cool, practical, business-like world” (232). Cooper’s antisentiment stems from her belief that “race prejudice in this country is mere sentiment governed by the association of ideas” (231). She suggested further that the unruliness of race prejudice obscures otherwise fruitful solutions to racialized social inequality. Chesnutt echoed this connection between emotion and the disruptive power of racism when he professes: “Race prejudice is the devil unchained.”²⁰ Chesnutt conveyed one’s exposure to volatility. Cooper ditched sentiment or objectivity to lure readers into believing in quantifiable solutions, to empower them to look deeper without the intractability of sentiment. Thus sentiment plays the role of the obstacle keeping people from looking “deeper” into one another with clarity and certainty (231). Cooper equated sentiment with superficial thinking, and she equated the purely mathematical with in-depth inquiry (229). If race prejudice dehumanizes, then objectivity creates the occasion for in-depth humanizing of blacks, a way to establish their indubitable human value.

What is more, Cooper explored the meaning of human value by seeing people as commodities. This viewpoint has to do with neither the faithful dedication of black workers, unionism, nor anti-unionism that preoccupied black labor concerns at the turn of century.²¹ Cooper’s contemplation here is far more rhetorical and figurative than it is historical and sociological. Imagining all people as commodities with ascertainable value, she asked: how do we assess our market value? Cooper imagined an abstract individual, an ideal. To her own question, she answered: “Men are not unlike watches” (233). She added: “settle the relative value of your raw material, and next you want to calculate how much this value has been enhanced by labor, the delicacy and fineness, the honesty and thoroughness of the workmanship” (233). With her dismissal of sentiment in favor of objectively viewing people as commodities, Cooper completed a stunning reversal from the most celebrated progressive writing, from abolitionists’ renderings of auction blocks to antilynching pamphlets.

Why did Cooper take up terms so intimately linked to the dehumanization of African Americans? It is not as if in her other writings Cooper did not directly and indirectly respond to the unfair labor conditions, sharecropping, and convict leasing that blacks were forced to undergo. Yet, in comparing men to watches, Cooper appears to have reduced people to mechanical products, a move that clearly breaks with the radical arguments against racism and the violent forces of degradation made by her political antecedents. Cooper was cleverer than she sounds here; her focus was not on the product itself but on what product-making labor can say about how to create human value. She emphasized raw materials, the quality of parts, and patience and dedication of the person assembling the product. Cooper deployed the language of labor, science, and business in an effort to rethink human value and renew discussions of equitable social interaction as well ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Black Aesthetics and the Personal
• 1 The Violence Inside
• 2 The Beast within the City
• 3 Blues No More
• Interlude: The Afro Samurai’s Symptom
• 4 Past the Chokecherry Tree
• Epilogue: Nina Simone’s Script
• Notes
• Index