"Born in a Mighty Bad Land": The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction

Index

I N D E X Abrahams, Roger D., 3, 13, 43, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96; on the Freudian signi¤cance of matrifocal households, 215n23 Ade, George, 34; and Pink Marsh, 34 African American male, 3; and drugs, 81; fate of, 16; and manhood, 5–6, 11, 87, 122, 131, 181, 184 Ali, Muhammad, 2 All Shot Up (Himes), 106, 112, 114 Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Mosley), 144 Anderson, Elijah, 86–87; on code of the street, 86. See also Malcolm X animal tale, the, 9, 91 Ars Poetica (Horace), 160 As Nasty As They Wanna Be (2 Live Crew), 157, 160 Aspects of Negro Life and Aspiration (Douglas ), 67 Atlanta report on violence (Du Bois), 20–21 Attaway, William, 76 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Johnson), 28, 29–31 ba-ad, 2, 52; humor of, 35; and inversion of white meaning, 2; rhetoric of, 11; and signifying , 2 Bad As I Wanna Be (Rodman), 2 Bad Boy Brawly Brown (Mosley), 143, 153 Bad Lee Brown (ballad character), 13, 42, 46, 56. See also ballads, analytical chart of “bad nigger,” the, 1–7, 23, 28, 44, 50, 52, 158, 182; attitude of whites toward, 2; commercial exploitation of, 163; compared with Brer Rabbit and Trickster John, 199n3; in Go Tell It on the Mountain , 69; Himes’s detectives as, 116–17; legitimization of, by Black Power movement , 185; modi¤ed by Mosley, 144–45; moral code of, 146; in Native Son, 63–64; in slavery, 2, 9; Stagolee as archetype of, 91. See also badman; bully Bad-Lan’ Stone (ballad character), 1, 11, 157, 197–98 badman, the, 1–7, 11, 27, 30–31, 35, 53, 54; admiration of, 24, 205n27; adolescence of, 93; and the boaster, 10–12; central to post–Civil War ballads, 10; commercial form of, 154, 162; danger of, to whites, 4; de¤nition of, 1, 13; as dispenser of justice, 147–48; early versions of, 28–39; the “fall” of, in toasts, 96–98; ¤rst literary versions of, 36; as “good,” 109, 144–45; Himes’s detectives as, 116–17; humiliation of, 95; iconoclastic treatment of, 95; as integral to the black sensibility, 180; as Jungian archetype, 3–4; as literary creation , 45; as a minstrel end man, 103; moral con¶ict in, 148; Toni Morrison’s epitaph for the tradition of, 196; in the primitivist novel, 43; and rejection of respectability , 12; shift of, from violence to wandering, 183; stages of, in oral folk tradition , 6; stoical resignation of, 98; sympathy for, 144–45; in toasts, 89–98; transition of, from oral to literary, 42, 50; trickster, comparison to, 215n26; types of, 2; variety of, in Chester Himes, 109– 13; from viewpoint of middle class, 86; and violence as natural behavior, 24. See also “bad nigger” badman ballad, the, 16; badman’s fate depicted in, 16–17; core drama, 17; fate and necessity in, 17; guilt and isolation in, 18; the mechanism of punishment in, 17; nonmurder ballads, 200n4; in the toast novel, 120. See also African American male; “betrayal ” ballads; “fugitive” ballads “Badman Dan and Two-Gun Green,” 95 badwoman, the, 5, 200n15 230 | Index Baldwin, James, 4, 18, 67–72, 79, 123, 125, 178; importance of psycho-religious to, 69, 71. See also “bad nigger”; Bone, Robert A.; Go Tell It on the Mountain ballads, analytical chart of, 197–98 Banned in the USA (2 Live Crew), 158 Beck, Robert (pseud. Iceberg Slim), 124, 125, 137–39, 156, 162; criticism of ghetto violence by, 133–34; racial anger of, 126 “The Beginning of Homewood” (Wideman), 173, 178 Bell, Bernard W., 67 Bellow, Saul, 76 Beloved (Morrison), 188, 189–90; destruction of manhood depicted in, 189; search for peace in, 189 “betrayal” ballads, the, 17, 191, 197–98 Big Bank Hank, 155, 156; ridiculing Superman , 156 The Big Gold Dream (Himes), 105, 110, 111 The Big Hit (Readus), 128, 129 Bigger Thomas, 4, 78, 111; as a different “bad nigger,” 4, 63–68; and rap, 163. See also Wright, Richard Bill Martin (ballad character), 13, 91. See also ballads, analytical chart of Black Arts movement, 2 Black Betty (Mosley), 146, 151 The Black Cat Club (Corrothers), 28, 31–39, 40; “coon song” in, 33–37; humor in, 35– 39; and middle-class acceptance, 38; optimism of its members, 38; oral folk tradition in, 32–33; razors as mythic weapon in, 35–37; ridicule of black elite in, 34; and superstitious blacks, 32; violence in, 35. See also razors black dialect, 33...