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Interlude 3 gr andma k nows best: th e women in manchild in the p romised land I used to wonder how cats who came up in Harlem with mothers like these could be anything but strong men, because they came from such strong women. —claude brown, Manchild in the Promised Land There is an incident in Manchild in the Promised Land that illustrates the pivotal role of black women in shaping black masculinity. At the time of this incident, Sonny’s mother has sent her seemingly incorrigible ten-year-old son down South in the hope that his grandparents will banish the “too much devil in him” (42). She has taken the boy out of the city, but will she be able to pull the city out of the boy once it’s in him? Our hero’s paternal grandparents are sharecroppers, traditional country folk whose family roots date back to slavery in South Carolina. They are part of the large, mostly black labor force that sustained the region’s staple corn-crop economy. On this day, the rambunctious Sonny is outside on the plantation where his grandparents harvest crops. He is competing with another boy to lift a weighty sack of corn. Seeing Sonny straining to lift the heavy sack, his grandmother comes unhinged. She starts screaming , jumping up and down, striking him and stinging him on the neck with her switch, finally forcing him to drop the bundle. She threatens to kill him if she ever again catches him lifting a load too heavy for him. Dumbfounded and scared, Sonny is convinced that his grandmother is “going crazy” (50). He starts for the highway, determined to walk all the way back home to Harlem from South Carolina. His grandmother catches up with him on the highway. Even angrier now, she hits him again, this time with an even bigger switch for running away from her. She finally quiets down and explains to him that she hit him the first time to spare him his grandfather’s sorrowful fate. She refers to the way Sonny’s grandfather “swing[s] his left leg way out every time he take[s] a step” (50). It 86 “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender seems Sonny’s grandfather suffers from a herniated testicle. Never having been treated medically, it has permanently affected his ability to walk and function in a “manly” way. Grandpa is unable to “strut.” Moynihan wrote in his influential government document of 1965: “The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut. Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not for the Negro male. The ‘sassy nigger’ was lynched” (62). This grandmother is an odd parental authority, if one assumes the middle-class child-rearing practices that Moynihan probably had in mind in his presentation of white nuclear households. First she attacks Sonny, and then she explains why. With emotional and moral authority, she teaches him a lesson. Using the grandfather as a negative role model (“do not do as he did”), she explains how he became physically and sexually dysfunctional. But first, to prepare Sonny for the point she wants to make, she reminds Sonny, with some urgency, about “the things” he has seen black men on the plantation cut out of the pigs they have just slain with an ax. Then she moves in for her own metaphorical “kill” with her earthy story about the grandfather’s unhappy accident. She explains that right above the “things” in pigs—their guts—are the “chitterlings”1 that “press against a thin window in pigs and boys and men.” Sonny recounts: Grandma said if somebody lifted something too heavy for him, the chitterlings would press right through that window and the man would have a hard time walking and doing a lot of other things for the rest of his life. She said one time Grandpa was in the woods making liquor, and his dog started barking. Grandpa picked up his still and started running with it. The still was too heavy—the window broke, and now Grandpa had to walk real slow. She was saying that she didn’t mean to hit me. She just didn’t want me to break my window. (50–51; my emphasis) An elderly country woman, this grandmother gives us an explanation outside the purview of Western rationalism. She speaks in a code of...

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