Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel

Conclusion

Conclusion Abandoning the Black Hero has investigated the question of why and to what effect did nearly every significant black novelist of the mid-twentieth century “abandon the black hero” in favor of white protagonists, if only momentarily. I have argued that the authors’ sympathetic treatment of their white protagonists indicates neither a disavowal of blackness, nor a naïve assimilationist desire, but a bid for authorial racial privacy in a public sphere structured by the color line. Many black writers resented that “Negro literature” had become synonymous with racial protest, to the exclusion of other experiences, interests, and perspectives. The writers under study here experienced this delimited space of enunciation as yet another incarnation of Jim Crow, remanding black writers to the margins of public discourse as suffering, injured others. In response, the white-life authors refashioned themselves as subjects, rather than objects, of sympathy, a shift that opened up greater aesthetic freedom as well as new horizons of moral and critical authority. The authors’ sympathetic treatment of their white subjects in no way required them to forego critical engagement, however. These works are not “passing.” In every case, they unsettle hegemonic understandings of whiteness in general, and white heteropatriarchy in particular, to show how the normative ideals that underwrite white manhood, and white privacy more generally, also injure whites themselves. In a powerful discursive inversion, the authors depict whites, rather than blacks, as bound, even enslaved and imprisoned, by mainstream ideals and traditions . The white-life novels suggest that it could be otherwise; they hold conclusion / 203 out the possibility that the “father’s house,” the archetypal scene of hegemonic privacy and the “law of the father,” could in fact become a space of social transformation. This trope is a reminder that the white-life novel’s concerns frequently overlap with the concerns of novels centered on black life. For example, the one major black writer of this moment who did not author a whitelife novel, Ralph Ellison, also drew on sympathy and privacy in his efforts to evade the restrictions inherent in the label “Negro writer.” Invisible Man concludes with his narrator’s query, “[W]ho knows, but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581). This sympathetic gesture challenges his white reader to do much more than feel his pain; the narrator dares his reader to recognize that they are coinheritors of the same national principles, the same national icons (“Ford, Edison, and Franklin ” [7]), even the same Western traditions—recall that in the prologue the narrator descends “like Dante” into Louis Armstrong’s music, and then hears “an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco” (9). Before the narrator can create this border-crossing, cosmopolitan enunciative space, however, with its concomitant epistemological and moral authority, the narrator had to first locate a space of racial privacy. He makes a “room of his own,” as it were, out of a “hole in the ground” (6). He is initially chased into the hole by racist white vigilantes, but he then claims it as a surrogate domestic space. It is in this “shut-off and forgotten” basement in a whites-only building—located, not coincidentally , in a “border area” near, rather than in, Harlem—that he is able to withdraw from public life and for the first time develop an authentic selfrelation . When he aspired to public life as a race man, his relation to himself had been distorted by his willingness to assume hegemonic versions of blackness—as an entertainer, as a conservative and then communist Booker T. Washington, and even as a “big black bruiser” (522). Once he withdraws from the external determination of racialized publicity, he develops the self-confidence and ingenuity to “solve the problem” (7)—if not the Negro problem, at least that of achieving true self-consciousness and intellectual autonomy. The space of privacy, however, is strikingly dreamlike, at times almost hallucinatory. Not only is the prologue marked by references to nightmare visions and “the spell of the reefer,” but the narrator also claims to have wired his room with 1,369 light bulbs (8). “When I finish all four walls,” he says, “then I’ll start on the floor” (7). The surreality of his hole underscores how elusive, nearly impossible, privacy is for an African American in the mid-twentieth century. 204 / conclusion Even so, Ellison and his white-life novel contemporaries “speak...