Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus

2. Beneath the Skin: George Schuyler and the Fantasy of Race

CHAPTER TWO Beneath the Skin George Schuyler and the Fantasy of Race After the Flame Rendered in vivid color language by a writer who aspired to be post-racial and post-black, Jean Toomer’s “Portrait in Georgia” posits the flame of lynching as the consummating fire of sexual desire. The romantic description of the “white” woman—at once standing across a chasm and in intimate distance from a lyric poem’s exegesis on the beauty of the beloved—suggests that the oppressive forces of racial differentiation structure the ability to look. The narrator can neither see beauty nor fantasize about touching it outside of the consequences of the racialized gaze; violent regulation simultaneously creates the desire to look and hinders the ability to touch: Hair—braided chestnut, Coiled like a lyncher’s rope, Eyes—fagots, Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath—the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash Of black flesh after flame. (27) The woman’s hair and eyes are the common weapons of lynching—fire and the noose—while her lips and body are lacerations and embers, the afterimage of that violence. The “after” of the final line is, as Jack Murnighan, editor of The Naughty Bits, an anthology of sex scenes in literature, has said, a one-word sex scene, the most common in the canon, just as “fade to black” is the most common sex scene in all of cinema (Murnighan 2001, 2). In 59 60 Blood at the Root “Portrait in Georgia,” the more intimate the corporeal appendage, the closer the poem comes to actuating violence; ultimately, it concludes by racially categorizing the woman. The placement of that word—white—is notably scrambled. Brown and red chronologically precede the lynching, but whiteness is created in its aftermath; the rituals of mob violence create and naturalize racial categories. As Walter Benn Michaels writes, “black flesh is burned in order to make a white body. What begins as a narrative of the attempt to preserve racial difference turns out to be a narrative of the origins of racial difference” (Benn Michaels 1995, 62). Dwelling in and contesting the language of difference, the poem’s five descriptions begin with the most immediately visual. Hair and eyes, gazed at from a distance, pose a limited threat of taboo crossing. They are, as Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle attests, the organs of fantasy. Coloring both the poet’s dreams and the racist’s fixations, the eyes and hair are obsessively categorized; their color is so immediately visible and quantifiable that the presumptive absence of difference provokes the sense, in the language of racism, that all people of color look alike. As the poem progresses, the voice moves across the flesh to the interior space of the penetrable body: the consuming open mouth of kissing and oral sex, the panting breath that emerges from it in the moment of orgasm, and the pallor of nudity too often covered by clothing. Grafted onto the objective correlative of the woman’s body are two timelines—the progressive narrative of sexual fulfillment and the escalating sequence of bodily violations—that correspond to fantasy and reality. When these chronologies touch, the reader is left with the flesh: transformed by desire in one narrative and violence in the other, resulting in an uncomfortable parallel between the two. This lyric theorization of fantasy removes the potential for resistance to the ritual scripts of mob violence within its psychic gates. Using Toomer’s poem as a departure point, I explore the character of fantasy under white supremacy through the archive of psychoanalysis and racial science, as well as George Schuyler’s Black No More—a 1931 novel of literal race-crossing—in which America is transformed from a nation of color variation to monolithic whiteness by a machine that uses electrical currents to strip away racial difference . Schuyler, at once an anti-essentialist racial theorist and ardent political conservative, was a dedicated anti-Communist, John Bircher, enemy of the Civil Rights Movement, and supporter of Richard Nixon. Indeed, Schuyler has “been identified as perhaps the most politically conservative black man in American history” whose theorization of race reveals symmetry between radical constructivism and conservative “color-blindness” (Tucker 1997, 138). 61 Beneath the Skin Though a more complete account of Schuyler’s absence from the canon would treat his long career, which includes an oeuvre with a...