Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta

CHAPTER 2. Charles Fuller's Southern Specter

chapter 2 Charles Fuller’s Southern Specter William Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), provides a visionary treatment of race, region, masculinity, and the military as well as intricate and detailed portraits of the soldier, which make it a compelling counterpoint for a reading of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play (1981). I want to draw on it to help my critical effort of bringing into relief ideologies of black southern masculinity generated in the military in the first decades of the twentieth century. In their institutionalization and nationalization in the military, I contend, such ideologies extended and recast the pathological portraits of black masculinity in the South produced in the late nineteenth century that I discuss in chapter 1. As Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay begins, the military and the impact of its hier73 archy on masculinity are the main concerns. Set in Georgia after the end of World War I, Soldiers’ Pay foregrounds complex portraits of three soldiers— Donald Mahon, Joe Gilligan, and Julian Lowe—that mediate and ground characterizations of such women as Cecily Saunders and Margaret Powers. The impact of postwar angst on southern subjectivity is a larger theme. Faulkner’s literary style, characterized by such techniques as stream of consciousness , had not coalesced at the time of this novel’s publication, and Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, had not emerged as the touchstone southern setting it would later become for him in his fiction. In retrospect, however, it is clear that Faulkner’s grounding of a theme of postwar angst in southern geography—a theme that emerged as a primary concern of the modernist era—is just one of the qualities that made this novel more visionary , and even cutting edge, for its time than his early critics were able to recognize. Train rides that symbolically punctuate the beginning and end accentuate and center the novel’s southern setting. The novel’s structure is mainly linear, however. Lowe’s extraneous placement in San Francisco, California, along with his epistolary and otherwise absent voice and body in the later chapters, further brings the South into relief as the primary setting in the novel while providing a pointed contrast with Mahon’s present but wounded body and virtually absent voice. The military’s hierarchy feeds Lowe’s and Gilligan’s feelings of inadequacy as men. They associate Mahon’s rank with maintaining racial privilege within the South’s conventional social order, garnering favors with women, and being respected as a gentleman. Yet a plane crash has in effect neutralized the masculine virility that Mahon’s eagle’s wings symbolize. Fading from the first time that he makes an appearance in the novel, Mahon has been falsely reported as dead to his family and community. Once he returns to them, disfigured by his scar and going blind, he is virtually helpless , a ghost of his former self who speaks his name “like a parrot” (30).1 Faulkner liberally evokes the image of the eye, precisely describing how all the characters look, stare, or gaze. Eyes clearly function as the window to the soul, are necessary and indispensable for understanding what characters truly think and feel, and draw attention to Mahon’s disabling blindness. Moreover, Faulkner establishes parallels between the military’s hierarchy and the South’s racial social order. The black porter on the train further helps to mark the South as a place in the novel—as well as its racial economy—through his language and voice. Soldiers’ Pay reveals a por74 Chapter 2 trait of the segregated racial landscape of the nation in the postwar period and demonstrates the acceptance of the South’s social conventions in the North. This is a social hierarchy in which Gilligan desires more privilege. In Faulkner’s novel, the alienation of blacks from American democracy is patently clear. To whatever degree that the raced, classed, and gendered ideology of the southern gentleman which had emerged in the antebellum era was attainable across the range of male subjects classed as white in the South, it wholly rejected and alienated black men. In some ways, this classic and coveted notion of the southern gentleman was contingent on the obverse of a degraded, disfranchised, and subjected black masculinity in the region. As the previous chapter suggests, that ideology nevertheless shaped the class and cultural ambitions of some elite black men, even if it was premised on their very exclusion. The desire...