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

CHAPTER 3. Ralph Ellison's Rural Geography

chapter 3 Ralph Ellison’s Rural Geography Geography is the most prominent structuring device in Nella Larsen’s 1928 novella Quicksand, in which experiences on a journey across a range of settings , including two sojourns in the South, are all pivotal and fateful in the development of the tragic mulatta protagonist, Helga Crane. Larsen’s emphasis on the rural South as a context for Helga’s decline evokes the region’s history of antipathy for racial intermixture and reveals geography’s organic impact in developing the trope of the tragic mulatto in African American literary history. Helga’s impulsive marriage to the bombastic Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green takes her to a figurative hell in Alabama, where she descends into misery, disillusionment, and, as the novel’s title implies, death. The minister, as Helga sees him, is a “fattish” and “rattish yellow man,” curious 118 animal imagery that implies her view of him as pestilential and beneath what is human; furthermore, he disgusts her because he smacks his food while eating, has fingernails that are always rimmed with black, reeks of sweat, and never washes or changes his clothes.1 The minister’s long title and very name illustrate his verbiage and mark him as an emblem of the rural geography to which they retreat to work: ministering his flock. Like his name, which invokes the bitter irony Helga encounters in a landscape where she is unhappy, this language recalls pastoral imagery. The awkward name also signals his remove from Helga and their lack of intimacy. By the novella’s end, she is pregnant with her fifth child almost immediately after birthing her fourth, which implies his unrelenting demand for sex. There is nothing good or pure about him, in the sense of what we might expect from a minister, and even his church, because it was formerly a stable, smells of manure. Their home and children become dirty and unkempt as a result of her frustrations, mirroring the filth of his body. While none of Helga’s relationships is satisfying, including encounters with James Vayle, Robert Anderson, and Axel Olsen, Green is a gross and vulgar contradiction to the previous men in her life and proves to be most inimical and injurious to her physical and psychological well-being.2 In Quicksand, one of the main thematic concerns is how Helga’s interracial body and style constitute her otherness in various geographies. Her body becomes flamboyantly excessive in Denmark, where her doting relatives pressure her to wear garish fashions and the artist Axel Olsen, who remarks that she has the soul of a prostitute, captures her image in an un- flattering painting. These dimensions of the novella recall the historical constitution of black female bodies—from Sara Baartman (“The Hottentot Venus”) to Josephine Baker—as excessively sexual in Europe. We need to recognize, however, that Quicksand also intricately relates geography to the construction of the black masculine body. Larsen’s Quicksand constructs a hierarchy of masculinity based on geography and associates an abject and undesirable form of black masculinity with the rural South. Its logic attests to the historical association of the black male body in the South with ideologies of a perverse and excessive sexuality, and to the even deeper and more complex racial and sexual pathologies that have frequently been attached to black male bodies in rural contexts. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which I briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, reigns as one of the most notorious examples in U.S. history of the Ralph Ellison’s Rural Geography 119 unethical use of medicine in the systematic and arguably genocidal annihilation of black male bodies in the rural South. Syphilis is a disease, primarily transmitted through close sexual contact, whose symptoms emerge in several stages, are highly variable, and, in the final stages, after a latent period, can severely affect the neurological and cardiovascular systems. The Tuskegee Study, which was governmentally sponsored under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service, involved researchers’ observation of the effects of syphilis by monitoring a group of poor and largely illiterate black men in the Macon County, Alabama, vicinity who were mainly sharecroppers . Participants reported annually for physical examinations and blood tests in exchange for small forms of compensation, such as free lunches and transportation, and were unaware of the nature of the experiment. Most unsettling perhaps is that even after penicillin therapy was identified in...