South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature

TWELVE: Ugly Legacies of the Harlem Renaissance and Earlier: Soul Food and New Negroes

Twelve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ugly Legacies of the Harlem Renaissance and Earlier Soul Food and New Negroes A Soul Food is a movie much praised by a variety of viewers, especially African Americans . When it was released in 1997, I discovered that my reaction to it was strikingly unlike that of many of my African American friends and colleagues. They countered my objections with the admonition that I should celebrate Soul Food for the wonderful ritual of family interaction that it preserves, as well as for its diversity in presentation of African American images. That diversity includes the working class, the middle class, a creative artist, an entrepreneur, a devoted black husband and father, and a precocious black kid who just happens to be male all of which are presumably progressions from earlier monolithic screen depictions of blacks. While I can understand the points my friends and colleagues make, I also saw other things in the movie, things, surprisingly, that some of them almost totally ignored. In its presentation of the women, but especially in its depiction of the men, the movie is a throwback to stereotypical images that populated literary, stage, and visual media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance. From the domineering grandmother figure to the angry young black man, Soul Food posits black life as a window for voyeurs, whether they want to see intrafamilial anger and violence, black female undercutting of black males, or black males who cannot control their sexual appetites. Soul Food and New Negroes . . . 197 First and foremost is the problematic image of the mother/grandmother . Strong and domineering, she fits easily the paradigm of the book project that I completed in 2001. Titled Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, the project centers upon black female characters, whose origins lie in slavery and Reconstruction , that have pervaded visual media and African American literature throughout its history. As Donald Bogle documents in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (1994), America was in love with the likes of Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers as they were cast in such stalwart films as Gone with the Wind. These large, bossy black women became the stereotypical norm for the representation of black female character. The height of that particular representation in literature is Lorraine Hansberry’s Mama Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959); the stage production featuring full-figured, full-bosomed Claudia McNeil echoed the size-type of African American women that had previously appeared on stage as well as in the movies. From Charles Chesnutt’s Mammy Jane Letlow in The Marrow of Tradition (1901), to Zora Neale Hurston’s Nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), to Mama Lena, to the two elderly women in Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson before Dying (1993), a dominant strand of black female representation is that of the strong black woman who manages everybody’s life. Stage and movie images portray black women as prominently in these roles as does the literature. Another recent movie counterpart and representative sister to the grandmother in Soul Food is the woman who plays Martin Lawrence’s mother in Nothing to Lose.1 She smacks him upside the head when he comes in at two o’clock in the morning although he is old enough to be married and have two children and she similarly slaps his white friend, played by Tim Robbins, for being out with Lawrence’s character. The creators of such women characters and their families whether on stage, in the movies, or in literature ignore the prices these women pay for their management of the lives of their families, effects that include emotional isolation, the absence of peers, an unquestioning immersion 198 . . . Soul Food and New Negroes in fundamentalist religious practices, and an implicit self-destructive tendency. The grandmother in Soul Food is no exception. She gives all to her family indeed, she maintains in a conversation with her three daughters that “you do what you have to do to stay strong, to save the family” and they in turn keep taking until she is dead. Viewers do not focus overly long on the fact that she dies of diabetes, which is one of the primary killers of black people and which is assuredly caused by the very soul food touted as keeping the family together through its forty-year ritual of Sunday dinners (and...