The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written along the Color Line by Mark Richardson Rochester (review)

In her book of poetic and visual art, Citizen, Claudia Rankine observes that the condition of a black body is "rendered hypervisible" when it is subjected to "language acts" that aim at its erasure. She takes inspiration for this insight from a line in a Zora Neale Hurston essay: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Or, as Rankine alters it in her analysis of tennis superstar Serena Williams, "against our American background."¹

It is this American background, we might say, that Mark Richardson investigates in his rich study of race relations in U.S. literature and culture, The Wings of Atalanta. Richardson draws the appropriately mythological title for his book about the American imagination from a central essay in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). There, W. E. B. Du Bois, whose prescient cultural criticism forms the bedrock of Richardson's argument, advances a cautionary tale about the rise of the post-Reconstruction South, in part to counter the industrial training logic for the invention of the New Negro espoused by his rival Booker T. Washington. "Swarthy Atalanta," in Du Bois's re-telling of the Greek myth, outstrips her suitor Hippomenes in a footrace for independence until the third golden apple he hurls in her path lures her in long enough for him to pounce, seizing Atalanta in his arms with a "blazing passion" that he finds mirrored in her eyes. "They were cursed" warns Du Bois, fearing that the black folk of the South will be seduced, like Atalanta, into a surrogate slavery when white capitalists in the form of northern industrialists and southern planters conspire, like Hippomenes (who may represent Washington himself), to tempt them with pittances of gold. Without the use of her wings to soar above the forbidden fruit, Atalanta will seal her fate in an unholy marriage. And those wings, Du Bois explains, are the "coming universities of the South" (19), the education necessary to elevate the class position of an African American folk population systematically stripped of citizenship and human rights regardless of emancipation.

In Du Bois's stories about Atalanta, Richardson finds a competition between reality and potential. On the one hand, there is a depiction of a stark American future as brutally oppressive toward people of color as its past has been. On the other, there is the potential for a creative act of re-imagination, an authorial re-invention of self with roots in the American mythos, toward the radical democracy that lies in our national dreams. "Such splendid ideals," he writes on the first page, "and yet so often such sordid realities." Those ideals keep America always imaginary as a place, but this wide-ranging book is interested, with a clever play on Marianne Moore's "Poetry," in how the real people in that imaginary place negotiate those ideals.

Richardson's is, in the end, a story of negotiation, compellingly told. "Discussions of race in America," he reminds us with support from scholars such as David Roediger and James Blackmon, "are always discussions of labor relations" (15). American capitalism in its push for an inexpensive and tractable workforce has depended—and still does—on white supremacy. That provocative phrase is meant to be understood in its most fundamental sense: the belief that the white race is superior to others. Richardson uses it deliberately so as not to blunt his sharp critique of the exploitation of "working people of color" (5) in a country that tends to nurture dreams about itself to the contrary. Nothing short of an economy of slavery buoys those American dreams, the book aims to show, and many of them serve the violent purpose of reproducing the same racialized labor relations involved in antebellum slavery, even and especially after it came to an end in the United States. Hence the title's allusion to Du Bois's Atalanta...