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

Chapter 3. White Masks and Queer Prisons

3 / White Masks and Queer Prisons In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race. —james baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name James Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), has long been established as a foundational work in modern gay literary history. It has only been within the last fifteen years, however, that the novel has been brought out of African American literary history’s closet, so to speak, where it languished as apparently irrelevant to the tradition and to Baldwin ’s status as a powerful chronicler of black American experience. Critics such as Marlon Ross continue to remind us that not only are questions of sexuality always of uppermost concern in Baldwin’s work, but they are also inextricably related to his analyses of American racial attitudes .1 Baldwin repeated in one context after another his belief that “the sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined. . . . If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality” (“Go the Way Your Blood Beats” 178). Renewed attention to Giovanni’s Room’s subtle exploration of this thesis has belatedly granted the work a somewhat privileged position among scholars of black queer literature. Dwight McBride’s assessment of the novel is worth quoting at length because it provides a sense of the remarkable breadth of “work” that the text now performs: As a novel with no African American characters, written by an African American, gay writer, Giovanni’s Room itself challenges dominant understandings of what constitutes African American literature, the work that proceeds under the rubric of African white masks and queer prisons / 87 American literary criticism, and the forms of analysis that would come to have congress under the institutional formation of African American studies. Given the novel’s unusual status, it seems to me somewhat prophetic in its call for a criticism, a way of thinking, a critical sensibility that would not arrive on the scene until many years after its publication in 1956. In this regard, Baldwin’s novel perhaps represents one of the early direct calls for a more textured conceptualization of the kind of complex formulations necessary in artistic production, criticism, and discourse to truly address anything that approximates the richness and complexity of that most politically essential and politically irksome appellation, “the African American community.” (53) I would argue that, to a large extent, McBride’s claims for Giovanni’s Room could be applied to all of the postwar white-life novels under study here, but especially to two other seldom-discussed “queer” white-life novels from this era, Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947), and Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone (1952). These three works have not previously been read in tandem, largely because of significant differences in style and setting, as well as questions of sexual self-identification on the part of the authors and protagonists, issues that I take up in detail below. I propose reading these novels as a constellation in order to effect a mutual illumination; their juxtaposition casts into relief a series of heretofore unrecognized points of overlap, brings to light underplayed dimensions of the individual works, and clarifies our sense of the conditions and strategies of black queer novelistic discourse at this moment. All three of these novels are centered on individuals whose relation to hegemonic notions of privacy is deeply problematic. They each aspire to privacy in one form or another, but their gender and sexual deviance seem to render this impossible. Accordingly, their desire for privacy takes shape as an abiding concern with the content of modern American manhood. Along the way, they offer a powerful interrogation of the norms that structure white heteropatriarchy, an ideology manifested in social relations through what Marlon Ross has called homoraciality . Homoraciality is a term that Ross deploys to revise Eve Sedgwick’s influential notion of homosociality, “indicating how in United States culture homosociality historically relies on the systematic exclusion of black men, as well as the central targeting of women as sexual objects and homosexual men as scapegoats” (Manning the Race 11). Motley’s, Himes’s, and Baldwin’s narratives are all drawn at least partly from 88 / white masks and...