The Scary Mason-Dixon Line

African American Writers and the South

Trudier Harris

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780807142561
• eBook ISBN: 9780807142554
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. Harris explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way. Harris considers native-born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works Harris examines date from Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa's poems and Baldwin's play, as well as male and female authors, Harris demonstrates that the writers' preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender.
Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, Harris asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing.
A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line superbly demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity.

1

SUCH A FRIGHTENING MUSICAL FORM
James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie

In 1979, James Baldwin published Just Above My Head, his last novel. While the novel is a conglomerate of many things and indeed could have used some severe editing, it is also the story of a singing quartet of young black men who travel from Harlem to various sites in the South. While they are apprehensive about going south, with all its political and social activist undertakings in the middle of the twentieth century, they nonetheless go. And in that pattern peculiar to black folks traveling in the segregated South, instead of staying in hotels, they stay at the homes of black church folks and other black folks during their travels. Before their departure from Harlem, Baldwin’s narrator, Hall Montana, observes: “Look at a map, and scare yourself half to death. On the northern edge of Virginia, on the Washington border, catty-corner to Maryland, is Richmond, Virginia. Two-thirds across the map is Birmingham, Alabama, surrounded by Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia.”¹ To actually travel those states and along the roads observed on the map “can be far more frightening than the frightening map” (400).

By the time Baldwin published Just Above My Head, he had had extensive experience working for civil rights in the South, and he had written about those experiences. He therefore infuses the novel with his own memories of having frightful experiences in the South. After his first trip, he could not bring himself to move from a “cold-water flat” for five days. He had suffered, he said, from “a kind of retrospective terror which had paralyzed me so long. While in the South I had suppressed my terror well enough, in any case, to function; but when the pressure came off, a kind of wonder of terror overcame me, making me as useless as a snapped rubber band.”² One of his experiences combined mental terror with the possibility of bodily harm. He expresses an

unbelieving shock when I realized that I was being groped by one of the most powerful men in one of the states I visited. He had got himself sweating drunk in order to arrive at this despairing titillation. With his wet eyes staring up at my face, and his wet hands groping for my cock, we were both, abruptly, in history’s ass-pocket. It was very frightening—not the gesture itself, but the abjectness of it, and the assumption of a swift and grim complicity: as my identity was defined by his power, so was my humanity to be placed at the service of his fantasies. … This man, with a phone call, could prevent or provoke a lynching. (No Name, 61, 62)

The articulation of fear of southern territory in Just Above My Head and the memory of personal fear are continuations but not yet culminations of Baldwin’s love/hate relationship with the American South. While I argue that Baldwin presents the South as an engulfing woman, a chimera out to destroy black men in Just Above My Head, there are other ways of looking at this love/hate relationship.³ Whether by maligning the South for producing Gabriel Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) or worrying about missing children in The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), Baldwin is fixated upon including the South in his writings. Whether he deals with lynching and castration, or the disappearance of black bodies, or the peculiar pressures placed on black manhood in the South, Baldwin joins his fellow writers in tunneling through southern history and violence and considering the South a rite of passage for African American writers, and he joins other writers in various confrontations with the South.

For Baldwin, the primary confrontation almost always involves black men encountering white men and invariably entails a psychosexual dimension. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first and best-known novel, Gabriel Grimes, the father in the story, goes from slimy sexuality to transplanting his brand of ugly fundamentalist religion from somewhere in the South to Harlem. The dirty, ugly, restrictive practices of Gabriel’s church are a direct indictment of the South. In his short story “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), Baldwin highlights the lynching of a black man; the lynching serves as a transfer of sexual power from the lynched and castrated black man to a white male who witnessed the scene.⁴ In Another Country (1962), Baldwin asserts that white males in America have difficulty getting erections without imagining violence being done to some black person. And one of Baldwin’s characters in Just Above My Head remarks,

… [Southern white males could use anything] as an excuse for violence, if not murder, or one of them might, simply, go mad, and release his pent-up orgasm—for their balls were aching. … [And then he addresses an imaginary white man] Maybe the difference between us [that is, black men and white men] is that I’ve never been afraid of the prick you, like all men, carry between their legs and I never arranged picnics so that I could cut it off of you before large, cheering crowds. By the way, what did you do with my prick once you’d cut the black thing off and held it in your hands? You couldn’t have bleached it—could you? You couldn’t have cut yours off and sewn mine on? Is it standing on your mantelpiece now, in a glass jar, or did you nail it to the wall? Or did you eat it? How did it taste? Was it nourishing? (397, 398)

While Baldwin depicts violence in the South in all of his works in which the South is even remotely mentioned, he uses Just Above My Head to highlight the physical violence, both imagined and real, that can be done to black men and the psychological violence that other black males suffer as a result of it. While the quartet from Harlem is singing in a small southern town, one of its members, on a trip to the outhouse behind the church, simply disappears. No amount of searching uncovers his whereabouts. No amount of searching locates his body. He just disappears. It is that fear of disappearance on southern territory that informs the notion of a scary Mason-Dixon Line. The fear of castration is tangible and psychologically destructive enough, but imagine the greater fear of actually having a body lost and never finding it, indeed never learning a single fact about how it disappears or where it might have ended up. In that mental space of the possibility for and the knowledge of disappearance is where James Baldwin and many other nonsouthern black writers reside when they think of the South. Your body can be destroyed. You can disappear. You will be lost and not found.

Fear of the disappearance of the black male body permeates Baldwin’s work and is perhaps his greatest fear of the South because the intangible realm of imagination—thinking about disappearing—precedes any actual act of disappearance. Imagination pollutes the very air that Baldwin’s narrator breathes in Just Above My Head. He extends that fear to the physical territory on which the characters travel and then onto the bodies acting out the drama he has imagined, that is, the innocent black boys from the North and the evil white men in the South.

The fear of disappearance is so aligned with southern territory, according to Baldwin’s conception of the South, that it exists independently of evil white men. There is no better example of this in Baldwin’s works than The Evidence of Things Not Seen, his discussion of the disappearances of more than thirty young black people in Atlanta in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this historical moment, imagination and reality combined for Baldwin; of course, everything he had ever thought about the South was true, because it was so clearly verified in the evidence of missing bodies. Though unseen, those bodies testified to the poisoned air reflected on the poisoned map and in turn reflected in the poisoned minds of perpetrators who were so blatantly inhumane and so violently committed to their sinister objectives.

Equally fearful to Baldwin as the black body disappearing is the black body hanging on southern territory. There is no more vivid example than his depiction of the lynching in the flashback in “Going to Meet the Man.” The lynched black man, accused of the age-old crime of impropriety toward a white woman, is the image that fuels racism and repression. The white sheriff in the story who remembers his father taking him to the lynching, castrating, and burning of a black man, conjures up that image to gather the scattered pieces of his manhood when he is confronted with young black demonstrators in an unnamed southern town. By recalling the lynching and imagining that as the “rightful” place for black men who step out of line, Jesse, the sheriff, can collect his nerves sufficiently to confront the demonstrators and his sexuality sufficiently to make love to his wife “like a nigger.”

Lynching black men but desiring the very sexuality that has presumably led to the lynching, Baldwin posits, is the natural position of white men in the South and the natural reason for black men to be fearful of the South. Indeed, it is almost impossible in a Baldwin work to be a black man in the South. The two states are irrevocably oppositional. Yet another way that Baldwin exhibits fear of the South in his work is that of the psychological loss of manhood. While this fear might accompany the physical loss of the ability to do the things usually associated with being a man, such as going where one wants, holding a job, or providing for one’s family, it is the breaking down of the black male mind, of the ability to think of one’s self in a masculine vein, that Baldwin finds most distasteful. This is keenly evident with the characters in Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin’s 1964 play.

Richard Henry, the young black man who has spent a few years out of the South and returned home, is impatient with his preacher father’s ways of dealing with white folks. To Richard, his father Meridian is too much the Uncle Tom, the hat-in-hand, “agree ‘em to death and destruction” image of black manhood that one of Ralph Ellison’s characters recommends in Invisible Man. How can his father stand to interact with whites the way he does, Richard wonders, when Meridian Henry joins Richard in suspecting that Meridian’s wife—Richard’s mother—was probably pushed in the fall down a flight of stairs that led to her death. Richard, loosely based on Emmett Till, refuses to back down when the local white supremacist, Lyle Britten, believes that Richard has behaved inappropriately in front of Lyle’s wife. For Richard, it is a question of whether or not a man can be a man no matter where he is. For Lyle, it is a matter of the only good “niggers” being dead, Uncle Toms, or sexually available to him. Richard therefore acts out Baldwin’s fear when he tries to meet Lyle on a level of equal manhood. Lyle will have none of it and simply shoots Richard to death. Or, given the dynamics of the South, Richard knowingly commits suicide, for a black male cannot claim manhood on southern territory, from Baldwin’s perspective, and live to tell the tale.⁵

In Blues for Mister Charlie, then, Baldwin works through in detail the forces that make him most fearful about the South. For both blacks and whites, that fear may well begin with the threat of sexual interaction or sexual pollution. Richard’s knowledge of how white men in the South read black men, especially those from the North, leads him to confront this fear head-on by bragging, as it is suggested Emmett Till did, about the white women he has known in New York. He shows photographs of them to a couple of his friends when they visit Papa D.’s joint, which leads Papa D., the local Uncle Tom and friend of Lyle Britten, to exclaim: “Where’d you steal those pictures, boy?” and then, “Put them pictures away. I thought you had good sense.”⁶ Papa D.’s response illustrates the generational fear induced in African American males by virtue of living in the South, and it echoes the white sentiment for the possibility of sexual pollution. As Richard observes, “Ain’t that a bitch. He’s scared because I’m carrying around pictures of white girls. That’s the trouble with niggers. They all scared of the man” (27).⁷ Implicit in Papa D.’s comment is the suggestion that Richard should stick to nice black girls, as any black man with “good sense” would do, instead of venturing into dangerous territory.

Sexual pollution, or the threat of “race-mixing,” is constantly on the minds of the white characters as the rationale for keeping blacks repressed. One of Lyle’s neighbors addresses Lyle’s wife with the following observation: “Mrs. Britten, you’re married and all the women in this room are married and I know you’ve seen your husband without no clothes on—but have you seen a nigger without no clothes on? No, I guess you haven’t. Well, he ain’t like a white man, Mrs. Britten. … Mrs. Britten, if you was to be raped by an orangoutang out of the jungle or a stallion, couldn’t do you no worse than a nigger. You wouldn’t be no more good for nobody. I’ve seen it” (50). Myth keeps the white women in place in the scenario that paints black men as ever eager to pounce upon them sexually, and the personal testimony from a trusted acquaintance bolsters the myth. White women, then, in literature as was historically the case with lynching, serve as the impetus to white men keeping black men in their place. Another neighbor comments that “you might be able to scare a black nigger, but you can’t do nothing with a yellow nigger,” to which the preacher responds: “That’s because he’s a mongrel. And a mongrel is the lowest creation in the animal kingdom” (50). Nowhere in these conclusions that white males draw so easily is acknowledgment of how mongrelization occurred in the first place—white men coupling with black women.

While white men such as Lyle want to keep white women from black men, there are no similar restrictions articulated to keep white men from black women. Indeed, the opposite is true. White men are given a certain license to expend their “excess” or “hypersexual” sexual energies with black women, an idea that Baldwin develops here as well as in works such as “Going to Meet the Man.” Lyle comments, in response to a hypothetical situation that his friend Parnell proposes, that any son of his can have sex with an “African princess” if he is in school in Switzerland, “long as he leaves her over there” (59). Lyle is unwavering in his assertion that he can have sex with black women but white women can’t have sex with black men because “men [meaning white men] is different from women—they ain’t as delicate. Man can do a lot of things a woman can’t do” (60). Men have to sow their “wild oats,” Lyle asserts.

Where white men elect to sow their wild oats leads to another consideration in the fear of sexual pollution. This fear is the one that is visible from the position of black women who could be coerced into relationships with white males or simply raped, as well as the fear that arises when black relatives witness the potential for such encounters. Here Baldwin echoes Jean Toomer and anticipates Raymond Andrews in similar white male violations of black female sexuality. Parnell’s rather romantic attraction to Pearl, the daughter of his family’s black maid, is overshadowed by the color and power dynamics that inform that attraction. While he and the young woman, as seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, are fairly innocent, the girl’s mother knows the historical and social context in which this seemingly innocent attraction has been forged. She therefore knows that it can ultimately mean no good for her daughter. It is a testament to Parnell’s latently developed liberalism that he understands and can articulate how Pearl’s mother perceives the situation when she comes upon the two of them kissing:

She didn’t say a word [Parnell tells Jo Britten]. She just looked at me. She just looked at me. I could see what was happening in her mind. She knew that there wasn’t any point in complaining to my mother or my father. It would just make her daughter look bad. She didn’t dare tell her husband. If he tried to do anything, he’d be killed. There wasn’t anything she could do about me. I was just another horny white kid trying to get into a black girl’s pants. She looked at me as though she were wishing with all her heart that she could raise her hand and wipe me off the face of the earth. I’ll never forget that look. I still see it. She walked over to Pearl and I thought she was going to slap her. But she didn’t. She took her by the hand, very sadly, and all she said was, “I’m ready to go now. Come on.” And she took Pearl out of the room. (64)

Pearl’s mother whisks her out of town, and Parnell never sees her again. The mother’s action makes clear her understanding at that precise moment what Parnell only came to understand later: that black women should fear instead of embrace the possibility for sexual interaction across southern racial lines, because all the cards are stacked against the black woman.

Parnell is the character through whom we get additional testimony about the vulnerability of black women. He tells Jo: “A lot of the other kids in school used to drive over to niggertown at night to try and find black women. Sometimes they bought them, sometimes they frightened them, sometimes they raped them. And they were proud of it, they talked about it all the time” (62). Parnell may be different in his feelings about and actions toward Pearl, but he nonetheless gives credence to the reasons black women should fear southern environments.

Juanita, the character to whom Richard, Meridian Henry, Parnell, and Pete (one of the demonstrating students) are all equally attracted—though she reserves her affection for Richard—knows that southern history as well. As a young black student activist during the period in which the play is set, she understands, and is perhaps able to articulate better than Pearl’s mother, what white men can do to black women—with or without their consent. When Richard comments that Juanita has “the same loud voice” she had when they were growing up, she observes that “the reason my voice got so loud so early, was that I started screaming for help right quick” (23). Since black males are essentially powerless in any potential protective role for black women in the South, presumably Juanita’s screaming would have led more to a white male slinking away in embarrassment if he tried to approach her than it would have worked as a seriously effective response to her possible sexual exploitation. The point is that Juanita understands the vulnerability of black women on southern soil, just as Pearl’s mother understood that vulnerability. A sane response to such vulnerability is to fear the potential violator of one’s person. Even Parnell, who is more sympathetic to the black woman’s plight than any other white character in the play, realizes that Pearl is initially afraid of him: “[S]he was scared, scared of me, but much too proud to show it” (63).

Of all the characters who could articulate the reason for that fear, Lyle Britten is the prime candidate. He makes black women vulnerable, and he inspires fear and submission in them. He is able to do so because his white supremacist power is unmatched and unchallenged, a situation that anticipates Rufus Weylin’s interaction with Dana Franklin in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. Though Rufus may initially appreciate Dana, he grows into an understanding of how the system under which he lives grants him the power to do with her mostly as he pleases, which is what Lyle does with the black woman he selects to violate. For Baldwin, then, a bit of the dynamics of slavery creeps into the twentieth century, for Lyle’s legacy is that of a slaveholder. Almost everyone in the black community knows that Lyle has had an affair with ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Such a Frightening Musical Form
• 2 Fear of Manhood in the Wake of Systemic Racism in Ernest J. Gaines’s “Three Men”
• 3 The Irresistible Appeal of Slavery
• 4 Owning the Script, Owning the Self
• 5 10,000 Miles from Dixie and Still in the South
• 6 Fear of Family, Christianity, and the Self
• 7 A Haunting Diary and a Slasher Quilt
• 8 Domesticating Fear
• 9 The Worst Fear Imaginable
• 10 No Fear; or, Autoerotic Creativity
• Notes
• Works Cited/Consulted
• Index