“The Last of the Sweet Home Men”

In some respects, Beloved is a novel that’s ambivalent about freedom: the plantation Sethe escaped from is known as “Sweet Home,” and although Paul D remarks succinctly that “it wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home” (16), it does serve a quasi-nostalgic role in the novel, as its name suggests. As Sethe says, “But it’s where we were. . . . All together. Comes back whether you want it to or not” (16). Its bucolic setting strikes a sharp contrast with the grey, lonely house she now occupies on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Sweet Home is a painfully, tragically, ironically beautiful location, and this beauty makes the “rememory” of it a complicated experience for Sethe, whose life in “freedom” at 124 Bluestone Road, after the first ecstatic twenty-eight days, has been dull, isolated, lonely, and haunted. “Although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. . . . [S]he could not forgive her memory for that” (7). In this novel, memory is an involuntary, almost external force that Sethe must endure. And the fact is, the place she calls “hell,” where her milk was stolen and her back disfigured, which she risked everything to escape from, also represents the last time she was part of an intact family, a small and intimate community. She hasn’t seen her husband since she left, and she’s lost three of her children suddenly and without warning—across the river in “free” Ohio.

Paul D is equally ambivalent about Sweet Home—both a tortured, traumatic memory and something he looks back to with fondness. He remembers a particular tree, under which he and Sixo and Halle and the other Pauls would gather for lunch, and he’s named the tree “Brother.” It’s this tree that he tries to steal one final parting glimpse of before he’s led away in chains, sold to a guy named Brandywine by Schoolteacher after the failed escape attempt (125). Paul D has endured his own novel-worthy odyssey of suffering and wandering in the eighteen years since he and Sethe last saw each other, and in contrast to the chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, sitting in Brother’s shade eating Sixo’s “night-cooked potatoes” (25) looks pretty good.

It’s not just the physical beauty of the place that makes Sweet Home such an ambivalent memory for Sethe and Paul D. They are fully aware that their experience of slavery was not typical. Paul D and the others were known as “Sweet Home Men”: “He grew up thinking that, of all the Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men” (147). Garner, the owner of the plantation and the men and women who worked on it, prided himself on his “progressive” slaveholding ways. He would boast, in language that is blissfully unaware of its own internal contradictions, that “my [N-words] is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every one” (12).

Garner deploying the slavemaster’s favorite dehumanizing epithet while proudly celebrating his slaves’ “manhood” creates dizzying cognitive dissonance, but this contradiction lies at the heart of Sethe and Paul D’s conflicted memories of their past. Garner allows his slaves a remarkable degree of freedom on the plantation, and he seems to view this as an enlightened form of government—he can “trust” his slaves around his wife, for example, because he hasn’t treated them like animals. He allows Halle to undertake the breathtakingly loving project of buying his mother’s freedom after “five years of Sundays,” by renting himself out as a laborer on a neighboring farm. He doesn't “stud” his male slaves, with his own female slaves or those on neighboring plantations. Sethe is allowed to choose her husband from among the five Sweet Home Men, and Halle’s dedication to buying his mother’s freedom has something to do with why she chose him: “A twenty-year-old man so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change was a serious recommendation” (13). Sethe and Halle are allowed to get “married”—in an unofficial capacity, of course, with no legal standing, no formal ceremony, no fancy wedding dress. Baby Suggs points out how lucky Sethe is that all of her children are fathered by the same man; such a quasi-familial arrangement was not unheard of in the slavery era, but it was rare. Sethe has no personal experience with rape or corporal punishment at Sweet Home until Schoolmaster arrives and “his boys” steal her milk.

Paul D and Halle have been conditioned to see themselves as “men,” with a rare degree of self-sufficiency and independence. The men on Garner’s plantation were “encouraged to correct . . . even defy him. To invent ways of doing things; to see what was needed and attack it without permission. To buy a mother, choose a horse or wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to” (147). Literacy in particular was heavily policed among slave populations; a slave who could read would have a much wider range of escape options. But the training in the use of guns is maybe the most remarkable of all—an armed insurrection would have been possible, but we get the impression that Garner made life bearable enough that no one thought to rebel.

So why does Morrison set her novel in such a relatively progressive slavery context? Why not depict the most horrific, tortuous, repressive plantation imaginable?

Slavery operated by systematically degrading the slaves’ manhood and womanhood, conditioning them to accept their lot in life as inevitable. Literacy and access to arms, the ability to choose one’s mate, to raise a family are all constitutive of basic personhood or humanity, and this is what slavery categorically denied. But Morrison’s post-Emancipation former slaves were all conditioned to think of themselves as men and women, to see their participation in the plantation economy as something almost voluntary, in which they were personally invested.

We see how insidious the Garners’ “progressivism” is once Mr. Garner dies, and Mrs. Garner brings in schoolteacher and “his boys” to maintain order on the plantation. Schoolteacher is a “breaker”—his expertise lies in the ability to undo the “damage” done by Garner’s liberal policies, to “break” these slaves’ illusions of their own humanity. The central traumatic vignette of the Sweet Home portion of the novel—Sethe on the floor of the barn, being sexually assaulted by schoolteacher’s mossy-teethed “boys” while he looks on and takes notes in his book with ink Sethe made herself, with Halle stuck in the loft and forced to witness her rape, powerless to do anything to stop it, and later Paul D with the bit in his mouth seeing Halle by the butter churn and feeling mocked by Mister the rooster—entails the three principal characters all learning how limited Garner’s “manhood” actually is. Paul D thinks to himself, over a distance of years, “Was that it? Is that where manhood lay? In the naming done by a whiteman who was supposed to know?” (147). In other words, were they “men” at Sweet Home only because of Garner’s say-so? Or is manhood something more fundamental, an inalienable right? Paul remains pretty positive in his assessment of their relations with Garner: “In their relationship with Garner was true metal: they were believed and trusted, but most of all they were listened to” (147).

But when Paul stands there with the bit in his mouth, about to be sold to a man named Brandywine whom he will soon after try to kill (that manhood and self-assertion flaring up again; he hasn’t been completely “broken”), he learns the profound limitations of what Garner has “granted” them. “[T]hey were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race” (147-48). Garner’s “enlightened” policies are only in effect as long as Garner is alive. Mrs. Garner will sell one of them if she has to, although she feels badly about it. And once schoolteacher arrives on the scene, at her invitation, Sweet Home becomes an entirely different place.

In these pivotal moments—Halle in the loft, Paul D with the bit in his mouth—they both discover that their manhood only exists in so far as it is recognized by the man in power. Even to Garner, they are paradoxically both “men” and “[N-words].” For schoolteacher, only the latter category applies. For Paul, it’s not just the painful indignity of the bit in his mouth, which immobilizes him and reduces him to the state of a speechless animal, who can’t even speak to Halle, crouching at the butter churn nearby—illustrating powerfully that he’s been chattel all along. It’s the roosters: “Walking past the roosters looking at them look at me” (85). Especially the rooster with the painfully ironic name “Mister,” who seems to smile at Paul D, to flaunt his own comparative freedom over this man with the bit in his mouth: “Mister, he looked so . . . free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. . . . Mister was allowed to stay and be what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to stay and be what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead” (86).

We can only surmise that a similar realization—of the profound limits of his freedom, his ability to be a man—is what “breaks” Halle after witnessing his wife treated like a barnyard animal by the “boys.” By “stealing” her milk—the milk intended for her children, now on their way to Ohio—schoolteacher and the boys reduce Sethe to the condition of livestock (we can read Halle’s gravitation toward the butter as an indirect comment on this). They steal her womanhood, just as they steal Paul D’s manhood. For Halle, husband and father, there is no way to act like a husband and father should act in this situation. He can’t stop what’s happening before his eyes, without compromising their escape plan and getting himself and Sethe whipped, sold, separated permanently. He’s confronting the limits of his manhood under slavery, and it breaks him. “Breaking,” once again, is schoolteacher’s stock in trade; he makes it plain to the Sweet Home Men that they are not men anymore.

They feel this as a loss precisely because Garner has conditioned them to think of themselves otherwise. But in fact, their personhood only existed at his whim. This is slavery at its essence.

Notebook Prompt: "Rememory"

When Denver sees Sethe kneeling and praying, with the white dress kneeling next to her, she asks her mother what she was "praying for." When Sethe replies that she "don't pray anymore" but "just talk[s]," Denver asks what she was talking about. Sethe explains, "I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory" (43). After she explains, Denver concludes, "that must mean that nothing ever dies." Sethe agrees: "Nothing ever does" (44).

Reread this passage (pages 43-44), where Sethe explains her concept of "rememory" to Denver. What does this passage have to do with the novel's portrayal of the past and present, memory, haunting, and history? How is this idea of "rememory" reflected in Morrison's narrative style and the novel's structure?

Take 7 minutes to contemplate the relevance of this passage in your Notebook.

Janie's Blues

Jazz music is a useful point of reference for understanding what Ralph Ellison is doing in Invisible Man. Ellison himself was an avid listener of jazz, he modeled his own urbane, debonair persona after Duke Ellington and other jazz musicians, and he described his fictional method of composition as “improvisations on a theme”—many of these improvisations being riffs on Richard Wright’s earlier composition, much as jazz artists cite, build upon, and alter earlier works in the tradition. He was inspired, as an artist, by the way jazz musicians appropriated European musical forms and instruments and made something new out of them, and he saw his own work as doing the same with white writers like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. One of the opening scenes in the novel depicts the narrator enjoying a his favorite dessert (sloe gin poured over vanilla ice cream—a merging of opposites in itself) while listening to Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” fantasizing about being able to play it on five turntables simultaneously, and falling into a visionary reverie (partly inspired by the music, partly by the reefer he accidentally ingests) that initiates some of the novel’s key themes of ambivalence and identity.

If jazz is a useful point of departure for Invisible Man, then blues might be the appropriate musical analog to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie’s narrative engages a number of tropes that are familiar from blues lyrics—love and loss, marital infidelity, jealousy, violence and knife-play, gambling, drinking, desire—and the novel’s complex tone of joy and humor balanced against great tragedy and pain evokes the central aesthetic tension of the blues genre. There’s even a massive flood, which calls to mind a whole host of blues songs dealing with bursting levees and rising lakes overwhelming rural communities (see Bessie Smith’s classic “Back Water Blues” for one example). The most obvious “blues” elements in the novel are its setting (the “muck,” or the Everglades, is reminiscent of the Mississippi Delta in a lot of ways) and its language (blues is among the first forms of original folk music in American cultural history, and maybe the first extended use of dialect as the voice of poetry). Janie as narrator is positioned in a way that is similar to the classic blues dynamic: she’s just returned from a great and trying event, and she’s survived to tell the tale. She’s the quintessential “good woman feeling bad.” She tells her story with poignancy and pain, but also with resiliency and pride and humor. Life has beaten her down when we first meet her, walking back into town in her muddy overalls, but she is walking tall and proud despite her pain. Ralph Ellison describes the appeal of blues music quite evocatively, as artists “fingering the jagged edge” of the pain life has dealt them, but blues music is odd and remarkable because of its ultimately buoyant and life-affirming effects on the listener—the topics the lyrics engage are tragic, but the music works against that tragedy to transcend the pain and make something beautiful and enduring from it. Likewise, as Janie completes her tale of love and loss, her audience, Pheoby, attests to the fact that it has changed her life: “Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied wid mahself no mo’. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this” (192). She is ennobled by bearing witness to Janie’s tale.

Ellison’s protagonist/narrator is in many ways a prototype of a jazz musician: an isolated genius, working hard to forge an individual voice out of the influences and social-cultural detritus of his experience. The jazz audience appreciates the spontaneous, individual expressions of creativity, just as the narrator riffs on his experience at his typewriter, transforming it into the often surreal and individuated vision we contend with in the novel.

Jazz is an urban music—its most significant innovations have taken place in nightclubs and recording studios. Blues, on the other hand, is a rural, colloquial music that only later made the migration into urban settings and popular culture. And even while jazz was in the process of “crossing over” into mainstream respectability in the 1930s and 1940s, country blues was still seen with ambivalence, as a cruder, less sophisticated folk genre. Duke Ellington would lead his big-band orchestra in a tuxedo at the Cotton Club in Harlem, while Leadbelly was recording his gritty songs in prison, accompanied only by himself on guitar. Doesn’t this same dichotomy call to mind a central distinction between Ellison and Hurston’s aesthetics? Ellison deliberately casts his novel in the “high-art” literary domain, and his settings are contemporary, modern, and urban, while Hurston leaves Harlem and goes back into the South for her subject matter, depicting an often gritty, violent community that for many evokes the past rather than the present (a past that many in the Harlem Renaissance wanted to distance themselves from).

While Ellison doesn’t directly write about any jazz musicians in his novel (except for Armstrong’s vinyl cameo), one of Hurston’s main characters, Tea Cake, is himself a blues musician (of the general type that Hurston herself helped Alan Lomax record throughout the South). One of our earliest impressions is of him sitting at the piano in Janie’s house (which, as far as we can tell, Jody had only for decoration), “playing blues and singing, and throwing grins over his shoulder” (103). After his controversial excursion with Janie’s two hundred dollars, Tea Cake heralds his return by singing outside the window. And it’s clear by the description that he’s singing the blues: “After a while there was somebody playing a guitar outside her door. . . . It sounded lovely too. But it was sad to hear it feeling blue like Janie was. Then whoever it was started to sing ‘Ring de bells of mercy. Call de sinner man home.’ Her heart all but smothered her” (120). Tea Cake’s extraordinarily smooth apology begins with a little confessional singing, to smooth the way for his charm. In his description of the wild party he threw with her money, Tea Cake explains how he came to buy the guitar: “Everybody began to holler at the music because the man couldn’t play but three pieces. So Tea Cake took the guitar and played himself. He was glad of the chance because he hadn’t had his hand on a box since he put his in the pawn shop to get some money to hire a car for Janie soon after he met her. He missed his music. He bought the guitar on the spot and paid fifteen dollars cash” (123).

When Janie and Tea Cake arrive on “the muck,” their home becomes the social center of the community, and Tea Cake’s music has a lot to do with it: “The way he would sit in the doorway and play his guitar made people stop and listen and maybe disappoint the jook for the night” (132). The “jook" is a roadside bar where blues music is performed, and where people dance and drink and fight and gamble and generally have a good time. (The term “juke box” derives from the idea that the recorded music on demand would re-create the live experience of a “juke joint” like Hurston describes.) In the context of the general critique of Hurston as perpetuating a “minstrel” dynamic in her novel (see Wright et al., as summarized in the documentary), her description of the jukes on the muck might be an instructive example to consider. At the same time that minstrel shows were experiencing their revival throughout the North and South—where white and black musicians and dancers were performing a popularized hybrid of blues music in blackface to mostly white audiences—the juke joint was a context where black musicians performed for exclusively black audiences. Bessie Smith—one of the most badass figures in American musical history, who was fiercely uncompromising when it came to the terms of her performances (she reputedly once faced down a contingent from the local Ku Klux Klan to ensure that her show would go on)—didn’t play minstrel shows; she played roadside juke joints of the sort Hurston describes so evocatively: “All night . . . the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour” (131).

The allegedly “minstrelesque” dynamics we see in Eatonville also entail black performers and black audiences,  the critique is that white readers are the real audience, and Hurston’s characters are “shucking and jiving” for them. Maybe because white readers “consume” the kind of skits she puts her characters through (Matt Bonner’s mule, Sam and Lige on nature vs. nurture, the “mock-courtship” of the pretty girl in the street), there is this inescapable “black-performing-for-white” dimension to the fiction—as Henry Louis Gates points out in the documentary on Hurston, black fiction, especially in Hurston's time, was written with an idealized white readership in mind. But since we can’t actually listen to Tea Cake’s music, we aren’t his audience in quite the same way: we observe black folk music is being performed in an “authentic” context that stands in stark contrast to the minstrel dynamic that might be troublesome elsewhere in the novel.

Love or hate Tea Cake, he’s no minstrel performer. We see his music in action, a living and breathing part of the life of the culture Hurston represents.

The Poetry of Hurston’s Dialogue

Readers of Their Eyes Were Watching God notice Hurston’s “double-voiced” narrative style right away—the third-person narrator frames the story of Janie returning to Eatonville, alone, in her muddy overalls, which then shifts to Janie telling her story to her friend Pheoby Watson that evening, and then Janie’s spoken narrative to Pheoby is taken over by Hurston’s narrator (which represents more or less what Janie tells Pheoby—although the formal narrative includes all kinds of details she wouldn’t need to tell Pheoby, since Pheoby would have witnessed them herself or known about them, and reflects events Janie wasn't present for, and points of view other than hers). What we’re reading, chapter by chapter, is taken to be a novelistic expansion of the story Janie tells to her friend.

Hurston’s narrative voice is strikingly lyrical and poetic—she does a lot more than merely convey information. The novel opens with a proverbial voice that sets out a putative distinction between the ways men and women view the world: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time” (1). “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget,” the narrator continues. “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (1). There’s a ceremonial formality to the novel’s opening—forget about whether or not these statements about how men and women view reality in entirely different and maybe incompatible ways is true. It sounds incontrovertible, coming from this narrator, largely because of the aphoristic, metaphorical form that these statements take. They sound like proverbial wisdom, as we imagine the quintessential “man” gazing forever at the ships on the horizon. The narrator’s language is figurative and metaphorical (“The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky” [1]; “[T]hey chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish” [2]; “She left the porch pelting her back with unanswered questions” [4]). These examples are all drawn from the first chapter, but this lyrical and metaphor-laden language continues throughout the novel—it’s one of the most distinctive aspect of Hurston’s fictional style, and the thing many of her admirers most enjoy about her work. Her narrator seems to transform ordinary life—even modest, hardscrabble, impoverished life—into something magical and artistically rich. It might be easier and more efficient to merely state that the sun had set, and the twilight was fading; but poetry isn’t concerned with efficiency and simple information, and thus we get the memorable image of the sun leaving its footprints in the sky.

When the narrator quotes the fictional characters, though, the effect can be jarring, as we shift from the lofty, wise musicality of the third-person voice to the speech of the people: “‘What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where dat blue satin dress she left here in?—Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?’” (2). Hurston’s rural Floridian African Americans speak in a manner that is anthropologically accurate—she grew up in this area, indeed in the very town of Eatonville, and she studied the folk cultures of the African American South extensively as an anthropologist. She renders her characters’ speech with phonetic spellings (“dat,” “dem,” “overhalls”) to try and capture their accent and pronunciation, and she also reflects the nonstandard English grammar that follows its own internally consistent rules as a dialect (“Where all dat money”?). It takes some getting used to, for many readers—we need to start seeing the first-person pronoun as “Ah” instead of “I.” It helps to read these passages aloud; I can hear her characters quite clearly when I read, even if I sound silly trying to convey what I hear when I read such passages aloud in class. I also recommend the excellent audiobook, with the late Ruby Dee narrating—she moves easily between the narrator's voice and the characters' voices, and if you're having trouble with the syntax and speech rhythms of the dialogue, her rendering will make it clear for you. (Thanks to Elias, Madeleine, and Sam K. for passing on this recommendation.)

Janie’s story is presented as a frame narrative—she’s telling Pheoby her story—and at first, Hurston allows her to narrate for herself: “Ah ain’t never seen mah papa,” she begins. “And Ah didn’t know ’im if Ah did. Mah mama neither. She was gone from round dere long before Ah wuz big enough tuh know” (9). But the narrator soon intervenes, speaking “for” Janie as she narrates: “It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days” (10). Now, some readers are probably relieved that the entire novel will not be narrated in Janie’s oral dialect; the narrator’s style is more “literate” in the sense that it is written language meant to be read on the page. Hurston’s narrator often sounds like she’s writing, not speaking. Janie’s language is an oral narrative, meant to be listened to. And throughout the novel, there will be this discrepancy between the authorial narrator’s voice, telling Janie’s story on her behalf in a “poetic” prose style, with (mostly) standard English grammar and a comfortably familiar “literary” style, and the speech of the characters within that narrative, who speak in dialect throughout. (Janie, narrating in dialect, presumably renders others’ speech in the same voice as her narration.) 

What do we do with this perceived “distance” between the author and her characters? Is it the case that Hurston herself wants to assert some space between her identity as the author and the characters (and speech styles) she depicts? Does the narrator seem to be a part of this community, or to hover “above” it somewhere, speaking “for” them, like Max speaks for Bigger in court? Is Hurston representing these characters on their own terms, or is she “translating” them for her presumably northern, educated readership? And is something important lost in translation? Does the author condescend to the people she represents in her novel?

We’re touching on one of the enduring debates surrounding this novel (as we’ll see in the documentary Jump at the Sun), and it’s too big a question for me to even try to settle here on this modest blog. But whenever the topic of Hurston’s dialect comes up, I feel compelled to point out the remarkably poetic nature of folk speech as she depicts it. We might be tempted to ascribe all the novel’s lyricism to the authorial narrator, who writes so stirringly about the sun leaving footprints in the sky, and to describe the dialogue as “earthy” and “authentic,” or even “crude,” in contrast. But be careful not to overlook the wonderfully metaphorical speech of these characters. Hurston based her dialogue on careful recording and study of the ways black people actually spoke in the region she’s depicting, so there is a kind of quasi-scholarly “authenticity” to it, but like James Joyce depicting Irish English, Hurston depicts her everyday people as spontaneous poets—not writers of formal poetry, but makers of metaphor and innovative turns of phrase and figurative language in day-to-day situations. My reading is often halted not by confusion about syntax or phonetic spellings of familiar words but by the sheer strangeness and wonder of the way her characters speak. You have to pause and interpret, much as with a poem.

When Janie brushes off the gossips on the porch with the phrase, “If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout them than Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass” (5), I have to stop and turn it around a couple of times in my mind. To hazard a paraphrase, she’s pretty much saying that she doesn’t think about these gossips and haters anyway, so she’s not going to worry about what they think of her. But by connecting her indifference to God’s, she neatly inflects it with a moral judgment, driven home by the familiar image of a “lost ball in de high grass.” The porch-talkers are out of sight and out of mind—to Janie and to God. And I can’t think of a more eloquent symbol for irrelevance than a lost ball that no one’s even searching for anymore. All of this is conveyed with a compact, humorous, and self-affirming one-liner that refutes all the jealousy and scorn without even dignifying it with a reply. It’s poetry. I wish I could talk this way off the top of my head sometimes. I want to remember the line and use it at the next opportunity.

Just as the authorial narrator takes a “proverbial” tone at the start of the novel, sometimes Hurston’s characters speak in phrases that could be proverbs—only I’ve never heard these particular proverbial phrases anywhere but in the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. Like when Janie is explaining why she has to tell her story in such personal detail for Pheoby to really get it—to “give [her] de understandin’ to go ’long wid it”: “Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide” (7). Doesn’t this sound like a phrase that could be a familiar old line, like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or something? But what a nifty way to get at the idea that the individual story needs all its individual details to really communicate its meaning—Janie’s story might bear certain superficial structural resemblances to other stories you’ve heard, just as a raccoon skin would resemble a mink’s, shorn of fur (or is it that the fur will feel the same to the touch, if you can't see the difference?). The story, the details, the value is in the “fur”—and we need to hear out the full story to realize we’ve got a mink, so to speak. The paraphrase sounds clunky in a way that the original doesn’t—Janie’s version is much more eloquent and memorable than mine, even if it requires a few moments of contemplation to “get” it. This is how poetry works: it gives us pause, we turn the phrase and image around in our minds, and then (sometimes) a lightbulb goes off. There’s a compactness and grace—and humor—to Janie’s proverbial phrase that resists paraphrase, just like the best poetry. It says more than it says on the surface.

One of the simplest examples in the first few pages of the novel comes when Janie tells Pheoby that it’s fine with her if Pheoby tells everyone else in town what happened to Janie, even if Janie herself doesn’t intend to “bother wid tellin’ ’em nothin’” (6). As the ideal, sympathetic audience for her narrative—as a friend hearing a friend’s story—Pheoby would be a reliable conduit for Janie’s own point of view: “You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf” (6). At first glance, the image might be a little suggestive (are they kissing?). But clearly “tongue” here is a metonym for speech, for narration, and the idea that a sympathetic listener/reader can convey a story faithfully because of that sympathy is captured beautifully in the image of a “borrowed tongue.” Pheoby will speak for Janie, and Janie has full faith that her friend will represent her accurately and sympathetically—much as Hurston’s narrator speaks for her within this novel.

Examples can be found on just about every page of the novel—and not just in Janie’s speech, either. Hurston’s dialogue is infused throughout with such striking bits of poetry. Maybe some—or even most—of these are a product of Hurston’s anthropological work, as she recorded folk tales and speech styles throughout the American South. And maybe some are phrases she remembers people using when she was a girl in Eatonville. But as you sort through the controversy surrounding Hurston’s depiction of poor, rural, mostly illiterate African American folk culture in the post-Reconstruction South, keep in mind the fact that she renders them as spontaneous poets.

And definitely be on the lookout for the next opportunity to refer to someone as “sitting on their royal diasticutis.”

Notebook prompt: Hurston's narrative voice

NOTEBOOK (5 min.): How would you describe Hurston’s narrative voice / style in the first chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God? Who is telling this story, what seems to be their relation to the people and settings they narrate, and what do you make of the prose style or “voice” of this narrator?

Notebook prompt: "I speak for you"?

NOTEBOOK (5 min): The famous opening line of Invisible Man begins with the word “I” (3), and the novel ends with the word “you” (581). The text we have just read represents the narrator’s act of writing from his “hole,” his effort to make sense of his “above-ground” experience by crafting it into a narrative, “writing it all down.” What “arc” do you see reflected in these opening and closing lines? Have we arrived at somewhere new by the end of this long narrative? How do we get from a gesture of radical alienation and individualism (“I am an invisible man”) to a potentially “universal” claim (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you”)?

"He'll kill your depression, and your dispossession"

Some of the most surreal-seeming, hyperbolic, and symbolically laden details in Invisible Man turn out to be based in the historical reality of American popular culture. The "Dancing Sambo" dolls that Tod Clifton is found hawking on 43rd Street, which the narrator experiences as a personal and political "betrayal," with the mysterious mechanism that makes them dance and shimmy, seemingly on their own power? (The narrator is apparently unfamiliar with the technology of the marionette--one more example of him not seeing who's really pulling the strings!) Ellison isn't making this stuff up. There used to be not quite as many "Dancing Sambo" dolls on eBay as there were "Black Americana Banks," but they have now apparently banned sale of these items as well. They are still easily available on independent antiques web sites.

The packaging boasts that "It works by your magic," and it's pitched as a "magic trick"--so maybe we can forgive the narrator's failure to see the strings at first glance. Can you see what enrages the narrator about Clifton selling such an image, how it represents a "betrayal" of the Brotherhood's ideals? Clifton's dolls sound a bit cheaper--made of tissue paper and cardboard instead of wood--but the idea is the same. And once again, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has some useful background information on the "Sambo" caricature and its origins in the children's book Little Black Sambo, within its overview of the "Picaninny" stereotype.

The Woman Question

When the narrator is abruptly removed from his post in Harlem and relocated downtown to lecture on “the Woman Question,” it tidily reflects the Brotherhood’s compartmentalization of social issues and their “scientific” approach to human life more generally. As I've mentioned in class, in this novel we are glimpsing an era where intersectionality was not part of the discourse, and where progressive politics was defined more by compartmentalization and boundaries. The idea is that the proper location for talking about “the Race Question” is Harlem (and only Harlem), whereas the progressive/bohemian downtown scene (historically a hotbed for anarchism and other radical politics, including feminism and women’s suffrage and later, gay rights) is the proper venue for addressing gender issues (which, naturally, are only a “question” for “women”—men need not worry about gender, apparently). This is in fact the way such issues were compartmentalized in leftist political discourse at the time, as various capital-Q “Questions” to be addressed: the Woman Question, the Race Question, the Labor Question, the Irish Question. There’s an undeniably paternalistic “What are we going to do with these people?” quality to the formulation, with the wise white leaders working their way through a series of “questions” to be “solved.” Race would not be a relevant issue for the downtown crowd, according to the Brotherhood; nor would gender be a matter of concern for the narrator’s Harlem audience. The Brotherhood’s “ideology” neatly subdivides its membership according to the issues that presumably affect each sector of society. And they will take from one and give to the other arbitrarily, as suits the committee’s purposes for the moment.

The joke, of course, is that there’s no indication that the narrator has ever given a moment’s thought to gender equity. What qualifies him to lecture on this subject? The absurdity of his reassignment—and the degree to which the narrator is being treated as a pawn by the organization—is underscored when Brother Jack informs him that his own pamphlet (“On the Woman Question in the United States”) will be the narrator’s source text for his lectures. Just as the white Brother Hambro (who, the narrator notes, has an “almost Lincolnesque face” [503]) has to educate the narrator on the properly scientific approach to racism, it’s no surprise that a dude wrote the book on the Brotherhood’s women’s issues.

Is Ellison also making something of a joke at the expense of feminism here? The Brotherhood’s science is being lampooned, but doesn’t the novel itself treat “the Woman Question” as peripheral, a distraction for the narrator—and the reader—from the real business at hand? Ellison is deeply engaged in the issue of identity formation, and he explores how fundamentally the question of identity for an African American man in the United States is complicated and compromised by the history of racial oppression and the persistence of the stereotypes and segregation that is its legacy. A person’s potential is not defined by their race, Ellison insists, but coming of age in a culture that is obsessed with ideas about race and racial identity makes the process of self-realization bewilderingly complex. Racism renders individuals “invisible”; an individual raised in a racist society must find ways to navigate that culture-wide neurosis not only to survive but to achieve a significant degree of self-determination and an identity that is more than a reflection of others’ projections, fears, anxieties, and fantasies. Ellison and his protagonist aren’t obsessed with race by choice—the narrator would rather not “always talk in terms of race,” as Jack  puts it, but, as he responds, “What other terms do you know?” (292). The pathological obsession with color and its social significance is the condition that the narrator is born into; he merely reflects the prevailing anxieties of his time and place. The challenge is to try and somehow fashion an individual identity that isn’t shaped only by this aspect of his race-obsessed culture.

Gender is not as much of a concern for Ellison. The narrator’s “invisibility” is a result of his racial identity—the fact that he’s always subjected to others’ perceptions and expectations based on his appearance as a black man—but not, apparently, his gender identity. The novel is populated almost entirely by men, with women relegated to peripheral, supporting roles: there’s Mary, the maternal/race-conscious cultivator of new leaders for “the people” whom the narrator abandons at the Brotherhood’s request; there’s a fleeting reference to the narrator’s own mother; there are Trueblood’s poor wife and daughter, who are the subject of his harrowing tale but never speak themselves; there are the prostitutes at the Golden Day; there’s Emma, the unnervingly forthright Brotherhood member who worries whether the narrator is “not dark enough” for his prescribed role; there are the unhappily married Brotherhood women who attend the narrator’s feminist lectures mainly in the interests of racially charged sexual conquest; there’s Sybil, who frustrates the narrator’s efforts to sabotage the Brotherhood by insisting on casting him in her racially charged fantasies; there’s the breathless young women in the Harlem district who swoon over Tod Clifton and faint melodramatically at the news of his death. All of the important, consequential characters in the novel are men. The male-centric focus is reflected in the title (the story of an invisible man) and the quasi-communist organization (the Brotherhood), in which women all play subordinate, non-leadership roles.

This peculiar imbalance is reflected and foreshadowed in the Battle Royal scene: a group of black boys are compelled to fight one another for the entertainment of the town’s powerful white men. The only female on hand is the “magnificent blonde—stark naked” (19) in the middle of the ring: grotesquely painted with makeup in a parody of sexual allure (and with “an American flag tattooed upon her belly”), she exists solely as a sexual object, and her presence is calculated to confuse and shame the boys (which invests her sexuality with an added racial dimension—Jim Crow’s tortured racial and sexual politics acted out on stage before an audience of bigots). She dances and displays her body for the entertainment of the rowdy crowd, but the white men’s amusement seems equally born out of a delight at seeing the boys’ public shame and terror (“Some threatened us if we looked and others if we did not” [19-20]). When they are finished with this portion of the entertainment, the woman is literally manhandled as she crowd-surfs her way out of the room. This scene could be establishing some parallels between the position of the black boys and the sexualized dancer: they are both being used by the embodiments of the white power structure in this surreal scenario. The fact that the woman is not all that into her work is clear: she wears a grotesque “abstract mask” of makeup (19); her dancing is described as “[flinging] herself about with a detached expression on her face” (20), which calls to mind the narrator’s description of the Dancing Sambo doll later in the narrative. And as she’s “raised . . . from the floor, and tossed . . . as college boys are tossed at a hazing,” the narrator glimpses “the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror” (20). There are suggestive connections to be pursued here: the white woman’s role in the allegory of the Jim Crow South is maybe analogous to the roles of the black young men. This woman’s role in this scene—and her role in her world, her ability to construct an identity for herself, to somehow be more than what her physical appearance seems to signify—is every bit as constrained by gender and sexuality as the narrator’s is by race. But she’s never heard from again—like all the women in this novel, she disappears offstage quickly, and “the Woman Question” is never explored by the author.

Ellison is depicting a man’s world, where race is a divisive and perpetually complicating factor, but where women exist mainly as a complication, a temptation, an unwelcome intrusion into the affairs of men of the world (“Why did they have to mix their women into everything? Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically” [418]). Even Mary’s maternalistic encouragement for the narrator to become a “race leader” is met with impatience and annoyance, while Jack’s less idealistic recruitment (greased with a paycheck, of course) is given immediate consideration. Would it be going too far to suggest that the women in this novel are “invisible” to the narrator in much the same way he discovers he is “invisible” to others? Obviously, no novel can explore all aspects of any situation, and Ellison’s aims in this novel are momentously ambitious—to explore how racism complicates a black man’s identity formation. But is it unfair to complain about the persistently one-dimensional vapidity of his female characters? Could the novel’s interrogation of racial identity have been made more complex and compelling if it had explored gender as a part of this same dynamic? Maybe the Woman Question is just as relevant in Harlem as the Race Question is downtown. Maybe both neighborhoods need to be thinking about both Questions simultaneously.

“A Piece of Early Americana”

Chapter 15 of Invisible Man opens with the narrator being rudely awakened by the clanging of pipes in Mary’s apartment. In a rage to try to get the “ignorant fool” doing the banging to knock it off, the narrator looks around for something to bang back with. He spots something on the floor that, incredibly, he’s never noticed before: “the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro, whose white eyes stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest. It was a bank, a piece of early Americana, the kind of bank which, if a coin is placed in the hand and a lever pressed upon the back, will raise its arm and flip the coin into a grinning mouth” (319). The narrator has never seen this particular bank in this particular spot before (in the room he’s occupied for months now!), but he’s clearly familiar with the genre. He casually identifies it, with a trace of bitter irony, as a “piece of early Americana” and implores his reader, too, to recognize this “kind of bank.” It’s a type, and he assumes his reader has seen them before.

The narrator is shocked and confused that Mary Rambo would keep such a “self-mocking image” (319) in her home (even if it’s somehow been invisible to him up to now), but such items were a fairly commonplace category of bric-a-brac decorating respectable, middle-class (white) homes throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To our eyes, they are a jarring reminder of how commonplace and generally unquestioned such poisonous racial stereotypes used to be (although we can see a direct descendant in the grinning caricature of a Native American, “Chief Wahoo,” seen until very recently on the [former] Cleveland Indians’ hats and uniforms). It’s a powerful symbol for Ellison to deploy at this point in the novel, where the narrator feels like he’s about to become visible as a spokesman for Brother Jack’s organization. The bank doesn’t represent who or what the narrator is—it’s a stark, visible embodiment of a racist caricature being imposed on him and anyone who looks like him. Can we doubt that having such items on mantles and shelves in white homes contributed in no small way to the perpetuation of racism?

There’s still a market for these things, apparently—a subcategory of the antique market. Until recently, eBay abounded with "black Americana" items, with various euphemisms for the bank Ellison is citing in the novel. I found the following image among a dozen or so “Jolly N****r Banks” (yes, this was their common commercial name, although euphemisms and abbreviation abound online, to get around policies about racist language) recently available for auction on eBay, before they apparently removed this stuff from the site:

While eBay is no longer in the business of auctioning racist antiques, the interested consumer can still find such items through multiple online auctions and sellers: just Google "black Americana coin bank" and see what comes up. According to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, the more extremely racist the caricature, the higher price such “Americana” will fetch. I’ll point you to the Jim Crow Museum’s website as a valuable resource on this shameful corner of early American popular culture—see especially the section on “Caricatures and Stereotypes,” for a detailed taxonomy of the range of recurring images and stock characters. The museum’s motto is “Using Objects of Intolerance to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice,” and while the images contained on the site inspire unease (as does the casual preponderance of the N-word as part of daily commercial discourse), this is a crucial part of American cultural history that must be preserved in order to understand why racism has endured so strongly in this country. The dehumanization, infantilization, demonization, and marginalization of black people was taking place in the realm of everyday objects—children’s toys, games, piggy banks, and food products. When the narrator of Invisible Man talks about how people never actually see him because of the accumulation of crap in their own minds, these sorts of things, by virtue of their commonplace everydayness, have played a big role in distorting their vision.

Group Discussion Prompt (September 9 and 10)

 In chapter 9, the narrator is feeling optimistic and confident as he goes to his meeting with Mr. Emerson, one of the "important people" to whom Dr. Bledsoe has written a letter on his behalf. He meets with the younger Mr. Emerson, the "important" guy's son, and the meeting does not go as the narrator had hoped. By the end of the chapter, the narrator is vowing to kill Bledsoe as an act of revenge.

Discuss your impressions of the younger Mr. Emerson in your group: What do you make of this guy? What does the narrator make of him? In the end, do you see him as an ally of the narrator, or an antagonist/obstacle to his development? Does Emerson's intervention advance the narrator's development of critical consciousness at all?

“A Revelation or a More Efficient Blinding?”

The anonymous narrator of Invisible Man never specifies the state he grows up in—all we know is that it’s deep in the Jim Crow South—and he never names “the state college for Negroes” to which he wins a scholarship. Ellison himself grew up in racially segregated Oklahoma City and attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, a historically black college that was founded by the famous educator and former slave Booker T. Washington. As I mentioned in class, the young narrator models his graduation speech closely on Washington’s ideas of pragmatism and accommodationism. The narrator tells us that he “visualized [himself] as a potential Booker T. Washington” in those “pre-invisible days” (18), and he quotes “the great leader and educator” at the start of his speech: “‘To those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the southern white man, who is his next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded’” (30).

Ellison undermines Washington’s message of “humility as the essence of progress” considerably, by having the narrator endure humilation and degradation in the battle royal leading up to his speech, and even during the speech itself. His “fervor” as he quotes Washington prevents him from noticing “that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me” (30). Washington’s faith in the essential goodness and generosity of southern whites is treated with irony throughout this chapter, as the narrator’s humility spills over into humiliation.

The “progress” with which his humility is rewarded, at the conclusion of this harrowing, nightmarish episode, takes the form of a scholarship to a school that resembles Washington’s Tuskegee in a number of general—and specific—respects. The most specific, perhaps, comes in the form of a statue the narrator describes near the start of chapter 2: "[I]n my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave” (36). Readers may note a conspicuous resemblance to a famous statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee:

The sculptor’s intent is easy to read, and indeed the gesture is “breathtaking”: education is freedom, knowledge is power. The promise of Emancipation depends on the education and literacy of the newly freed population of the South. Washington is justly revered to this day as an eloquent spokesman for the liberational potential of education, and his own life story is a powerful testament to his ideas. The sculpture’s inscription captures these ideals beautifully (although what the narrator means by the “cold Father symbol” is evident, too):

But just as the narrator’s laughing grandfather undermines his pride in his “triumph” at the battle royal in his unnerving dream (thereby undermining the narrator’s naïve faith in the Washingtonian principles he so earnestly espouses before an audience that seems anything but “friendly”), here again Ellison’s underground narrator throws a wrench of irony into this apparently straightforwardly allegorical statue: “I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly into place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk” (36). I love how this simple insight complicates the straightforward interpretation of the statue’s meaning: indeed, we can see it either as a veil being raised or lowered. And look again: the eyes do appear empty, dead, smeared with weathering and (it’s easy to imagine) birdcrap. (Bronze is not the ideal medium for capturing the spark of life in a human eyeball.) 

And it’s not as if the narrator’s education will simply either enlighten him or leave him as he was (we can agree that he sure needs some veils raised at this point in his life). Ellison suggests, provocatively, that education can have a blinding effect. What do you see, in chapter 2, as the narrator-as-collegian serves as a chauffeur (just like Bigger Thomas!), driving a rich white philanthropist around and trying to show him only the face of the college and the “community” that the higher-ups have approved for public consumption? Does he seem enlightened, or blinded? Is the veil being lifted, or lowered into place?

“What His Life Meant”

The problem of meaning is at the core of Bigger Thomas’s story. In his account of the novel’s origins, Wright repeatedly invokes the idea that Bigger’s life means something much . . . well, bigger—it resonates or signifies beyond the small number of individual lives that are affected by his actions: “I had spent years learning about Bigger, what had made him, what he meant; so, when the time came for writing, what had made him and what he meant constituted my plot” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 454). Max’s entire “defense” of Bigger in the courtroom has almost nothing to do with questions of guilt or innocence. Instead, he concerns himself with trying to bring a fuller picture of Bigger’s existence into the official record. According to Max’s argument, “Multiply Bigger Thomas twelve million times . . . and you have the psychology of the Negro people” (397). The court would like to simply extinguish him as a one-dimensional “black rapist and monster,” but Max (more or less Wright’s mouthpiece in Book 3) insists that America ignores this “monster” it has created at its peril. He is our “native son,” and we should attend to the warning he represents.

The idea that an individual life has meaning can be understood in a range of ways, from the metaphysical (the capital M-and-L Meaning of Life—some deeper, spiritual, cosmic significance) to the more mundane (one wants to play a meaningful role in one’s community or family, to do work that brings deeper satisfaction, and so on). Bigger suffers from an absence of meaning at all levels. He chafes against the realization that he does not have  a “wider choice of action” (12). He feels forced to accept the job as a chauffeur for the Daltons (“he felt they had tricked him into a cheap surrender” [12]) and complains that he “can’t get used to” the ways that poverty and racism make everyday life “like living in jail” (20). Wright makes clear that Bigger has to tightly regulate his own consciousness to keep the incipient sense of meaninglessness at bay: “He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. . . . He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else” (10). It’s not quite right to say that he views his life as “meaningless”: he’s overwhelmed with a sense of futility, emasculation, and entrapment, but he senses, ironically, that in this very absence of meaning or purpose lies the “meaning” of his life. Meaninglessness is his meaning. He feels like the butt of some cosmic joke, and everywhere he looks, he is taunted by all the things white people can do that he can’t.

            So when he kills Mary—even though the act is accidental—he redefines it as an intentional rebellion against all the forces the universe has stacked against him. It becomes, retrospectively, the kind of “symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule” (14) that the aborted robbery of Blum’s was supposed to be: “The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of them, like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score” (164); “In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with their blind eyes” (239). He invests an absurd and horrible accident with meaning.

But a crucial aspect of meaning is that it must be understood and acknowledged by others—the meaning that Bigger privately constructs needs traction in the outside world. And he quickly learns that the media, the police, and the court will ultimately be the ones who define his act of would-be symbolic rebellion: he will be seen and depicted as yet another “black beast rapist and murderer,” a statistic, a stereotype. Bigger experiences meaning as a private, internal sensation of freedom and control—“never had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder and flight” (239)—but the cold, naturalist gaze of the narrative allows us to see how fleeting and illusory, how undermined by irony, this sensation proves to be. Meaning is not a feeling; it is a transaction. Words have meaning because they are part of a living language, and my statements only make sense to the extent that I can frame them in words that have a publicly shared meaning. For a life to be meaningful, it must be communicated.

Bigger Thomas is an enigma for everyone in the novel: his mother wonders aloud what makes him act like he does (7); his friends see him as a moody, mercurial guy who pulls a knife on you one day and buys you a drink the next; the Daltons and their housekeeper see him as “just a quiet colored boy,” shy and deferential; and Jan and Mary see him as an exotic ticket to South Side nightlife who, for some reason, won’t quite warm to their overtures of friendship. No one seems to understand him. He’s even an enigma to himself. In a very real sense, the reader “knows” him better than anyone else in his life; Wright makes sure that we understand the complex psychological dynamics whereby perpetual fear underlies his tough external persona. As his comments in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” indicate, the author wants to ensure that the reader understands “what his life meant,” even if no one else does.

Communication is a problem for Bigger. He is not a man of words, and he often views the act of speaking, of trying to give shape to his private experience in language, to be inherently futile. But upon his arrest, when his doom is all but spelled out for him, he feels a powerful urge to account for himself, to speak—to confess, not as a matter of guilt and conscience, but as a matter of self-expression. The police already have amassed a staggering amount of evidence against him, and for the state’s attorney, the confession is a mere technicality—the final nail in a slam-dunk prosecution: “Confess it all and get it over with,” Buckley tells him (308). Bigger is no longer riding the wave of euphoric meaning surrounding his rebellious actions. He feels a strong desire toward a more commonplace—and real—form of meaning. He wants to explain himself, but he doubts whether it is possible to do so: “He knew . . . that he could never tell why he had killed. It was not that he did not really want to tell, but the telling of it would have involved an explanation of his entire life. . . . His crimes were known, but what he had felt before he committed them would never be known. He would have gladly admitted his guilt if he had thought that in doing so he could have also given in the same breath a sense of the deep, choking hate that had been his life. . . . The impulsion to try to tell was as deep as had been the urge to kill” (308). The reader has a pretty good sense of what Bigger is referring to: Wright narrates, in the grisly climax to Book 1, not only Bigger’s atrocious actions but, crucially, the feelings that accompany them. We are the only “witnesses” to his “crime”; we understand, to the extent that such understanding is possible through the reading of a fictional narrative, “what he had felt.” “Bigger wanted to tell how he felt when Jan had held his hand; how Mary had made him feel when she asked him about how Negroes lived. . . . But there were no words for him” (309). Buckley will never grasp the connection between Jan shaking his hand and Bigger smothering Mary, but we do. And now we witness the pain of Bigger not being able to express that connection—of the meaning of his crime being completely misconstrued by those in charge of determining his guilt or innocence.

Bigger does confess, despite the nagging sense of futility. “He traced his every action. He paused at each question Buckley asked and wondered how he could link up his bare actions with what he had felt; but his words came out flat and dull” (309). When his confession is finished, he feels “more lost and undone than when he was captured” (309). He has attempted to express himself, to make himself visible, to give his actions meaning (not to “justify” but to explain), and he has failed. Bigger sits in silence as Buckley and his assistant congratulate each other on a job well done: “That was not as hard as I thought it would be.” “He came through like a clock.” “Just a scared colored boy from Mississippi” (310). Maybe the saddest, most forlorn moment in the book is Bigger sitting there in silence, feeling “forgotten” by the officials who’ve gotten what they wanted from him: “Bigger felt so empty and beaten that he slid to the floor. . . . He was alone, profoundly, inescapably. He rolled on the floor and sobbed, wondering what it was that had hold of him, why he was here” (310). The solitude he feels here is existential—profound, inescapable solitude—and it comes from a failure to express himself, to communicate the meaning of his life. He confesses the actions but cannot convey their meaning.

This is where Max comes in, and why his role in the novel is so crucial. He gets Bigger to talk openly and honestly. “I want you to tell me all about yourself” (345), he says. Bigger hesitates, but then, “looking straight into Max’s eyes” (346), he slowly comes out of his shell. “His talking to Max had evoked again in him that urge to talk, to tell, to try to make his feelings known” (348). He details not only his damning actions but the full picture, his reflexive “hatred” for Mary and the way she was making him feel (“like a dog. I was so mad I wanted to cry” [350]). “He knew that his actions did not seem logical and he gave up trying to explain them logically. He reverted to his feelings as a guide in answering Max” (350). The prosecution will supply its own explanatory logic to account for Bigger’s crime—just plug it in to the ready-made stereotype about black men’s uncontrollable lust for white women; cast Bigger as a sexual predator. The script, as it were, precedes him. But Bigger’s emotional, subjective logic leads Max to understand, and indeed, Max’s “representation” of Bigger in court hews remarkably close to Wright’s narrative of the incident. (At times it almost seems like Max has read Book 1 of Native Son. . . .)

Bigger speaks to Max “as he had never spoken to anyone in his life; not even to himself,” and the experience is an enormous relief to him (359). The “burden” Bigger feels lifted here, I think, is the burden of being misunderstood, invisible, forced to live out a stereotype. The question of justice at this point in the novel has nothing to do with Bigger’s culpability but with whether his life will have meaning. And this depends upon his ability to communicate—with a listener (or reader?) who can understand.