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Writing the Black Man’s Blues
- The University of Tennessee Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
69 Mapping the New World Order | Bailey’s Café Eve’s declaration to Peaches’s father, “Go home, my friend. I’ll return your daughter to you whole,” reveals the transformation the young woman is to undergo (114). As if to signal her new social identity among a community of women, not only is Peaches present among the multinational group gathered at George’s birth, but she is first to intone the gospel song that inscribes the child’s sacred identity. Writing the Black Man’s Blues Naylor’s fourth novel foregrounds the transnational journey home in ways that encourage the reader to rethink predictable ways of knowing and adopt a new basis for self and society—one predicated upon the feminine. In this regard, Eve’s place serves as a liminal space of becoming and possibility recalling the middle passage and the cross-cultural exchange leading to the creation of a dynamic identity. The presence of Miss Maple among an otherwise exclusively female household raises questions about the feminine and its implications for masculinity. What unites him with the female narrators is his entrapment within socially prescribed gender roles. That his story is situated against a backdrop involving tension between Mexico, Texas, and California serves to locate his quest for self-identity within the context of the border strife in the American Southwest. Miss Maple is a border subject whose heritage includes American Indian, European, Mexican, African, and Spanish ancestry . Despite the fact of his multicultural identity, he is subject to the larger society’s tendency toward reductive racial categorization. Miss Maple’s father, a refined, erudite man with a love for the classics, offers an image of maleness that is at once both enabling and contradictory. The father’s insistence upon a definition of manhood existing apart from the exercise of sexual prowess places the son in a position where he questions his own masculinity. In response to the images of maleness represented in Shakespeare’s plays, Miss Maple announces, “Manhood is a pervasive preoccupation when you’re an adolescent boy, and you tend to see a fairy under every bush” (175). Miss Maple is a transgendered character who 70 Mapping the New World Order | Bailey’s Café prefigures the cross-dressing Chino in The Men of Brewster Place. Unlike the flamboyant, sadomasochistic Chino, Miss Maple is not gay; the one encounter Miss Maple has with a male occurs in prison and takes place when he is coerced into submission. Naylor’s description of the sole male resident at Eve’s place as “the manliest man she has ever known” reveals her attempt to expand her efforts at dismantling society’s identity politics so that she challenges socially constructed notions of masculinity.5 If Miss Maple’s father is a catalyst for the son’s sexual anxiety, he is also the medium for the dynamic self-reflection that prompts Miss Maple to distance himself from the ideas of machismo that govern social relations in America’s southwestern border region. An encounter with the Gatlins, a gang of poor, ignorant vigilante whites, is the defining moment for the father and son. The Gatlins urinate on the father’s books and lock the father-son duo in a storeroom in an expression of a disdain for the renaissance lifestyle that the father valorizes. In his attempt to escape his entrapment, Miss Maple’s father dons a corset and lace crinoline as he fights his way out of his the room. The father’s cross-dressing masquerade offers an alternate model of self-identity for Miss Maple, whose decision to adopt modes of dress from a range of cultures reflects his adoption of a fluid persona existing in opposition to the essentialist self that the Gatlins impose. Much of his narrative involves his frustrating efforts to find acceptance within the academy and corporate America. His refusal to define himself solely in terms of a phallocentric ideal is evident by his role as both housekeeper and bouncer at Eve’s place. It is within the recesses of a female domestic space that he combines his knowledge of statistics with his creative ability in writing award winning jingles. Miss Maple’s research for Armour Company reveals a keen awareness of the needs of women. He tells the reader that “the new attitudes of American housewives made them ripe for a dishwashing detergent that would leave them feeling both married and sexy” (215). [18.207.240.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:16...