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4. Disappearing the Leader: The Vanishing Spectacle in Civil Rights Fiction
- University of Minnesota Press
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IN A CHILLING SCENE at the end of William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 novel, A Different Drummer, a slick Northern preacher is forced to sing and dance for a mob of white men who have decided that the black residents of their Southern town who have followed the silent, puzzling actions of a quiet, boyish twenty-two-year-old and left the town empty of its black labor force were unduly influenced by the outside agitating preacher. Deciding that Reverend Bradshaw must pay the price for the blacks’ resistance by acting out a spectacle of minstrelsy for their viewing pleasure, the mob goes on to lynch the Northern leader, who “knew now and could understand why the Negroes had left without waiting or needing any organizations or leadership.”1 If the white townsmen’s violent act of coercing black performance before lynching the novel’s race man betrays a fear of charismatic leadership that demands his domestication—much like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decadeslong reign of terror in the black community testified to J. Edgar Hoover’s fear of “the rise of a black messiah”—it also exposes a fascination with charismatic leadership and charisma’s explanatory potential to make sense of what would otherwise, to the white audience within the novel, remain incomprehensible : African American resistance to the conditions of terror underwhich they live and the concerted movement of a mass of black subjects to permanently transform a racially polarized rural American South. This double affect regarding black leadership—it is the white characters’ worst nightmare and their preferred model for making sense of their social reality—shows us how vexed a position charisma occupies in the American cultural imaginary and, more importantly, in the twentieth-century archive of African American cultural production. The fascination with charisma as an epistemology and the fear of its phenomenological, political effects speak to a larger anxiety about black male representivity and visibility that motivates the white characters of Kelley’s novel as overwhelmingly as it does the Chapter 4 Disappearing the Leader The Vanishing Spectacle in Civil Rights Fiction 105 “black and blue” protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man, who slips into an underground hole while “that great leader,” Ras the Exhorter, seeks his destruction.2 (Given both Ellison’s and Kelley’s preoccupations with spectacles of race leadership, public political performance, and the anxieties of manhood, the two novels might be read as companion texts.) In A Different Drummer, the vanishing spectacle of civil rights leadership scripts the story of mass movement and the sometimes silent, sometimes shrill, altogether unattractive and antiheroic presence of its protagonist/leader provides a political counteraesthetic of black protest history that intervenes in the ideological production of civil rights as a narrative of charismatic leadership. Throughout the twentieth century, African American literature posited the dilemma of black leadership as a problem of a simultaneously magnetizing and dangerous spectacle of black male visibility. Zora Neale Hurston’s final erasure of Moses from Israel’s story of nationhood in the closing pages of Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), for example, privileges the cultural work of the legendary character’s sister over his own spectacle of divinely sanctioned leading. Disappearing from the narrative, Moses leaves Israel to its “songs and singers” and departs from its history in solitude, closing Hurston’s allegory of black leadership with his enigmatic departure and his sister Miriam’s move from the margin to the center of the freedom story. As in other twentieth-century African American literary texts, self-disappearance is the symbolic strategy through which Hurston contests the paradigmatic fiction of twentieth-century black political cultures: that political advancement is best achieved within the confines of charismatic authority. The trope of self-disappearance by which Hurston offers a gothic revision of the Exodus narrative found earlier voice in Schuyler’s Black Empire and, no doubt, finds later expression in the fiction of the civil rights era and the decades that followed. Kelley’s A Different Drummer stages an alternativeleadership model framed by disappearance and silence rather than visibility and spectacle; this is a kind of restaging, I argue, that social and cultural histories of the black freedom strugglehaveworked to produce in their own accounts of invisible political and cultural–political labor during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. While the novel tells the story of an exodus of black residents out of a segregated Southern town, it refuses to offer the reader the perspective of...