Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

Eleven. Richard Wright's Pagan Spain: A Southern Protestant Abroad

11Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain A Southern Protestant Abroad When Richard Wright arrived in Seville in the spring of 1955 to observe Holy Week in the Spanish city, the first thing he commented on were shop windows filled with “tiny robed figures with tall, pointed hoods that gave [him] a creepy feeling, for these objects reminded [him] of the Ku Klux Klan of the Old American South.” He surmised that “it must have been from here that the Ku Klux Klan regalia had been copied.” Wright may or may not have been correct that the Seville Catholic symbolism was the source for the Klan’s ceremonial dress, much of which came instead from the assumed mysteries of a Celtic religion. The Klan, in any event, would hardly have admitted to borrowing from Catholics. Nonetheless, Wright’s book Pagan Spain is a powerful expression of connections between Spain and the American South.1 This chapter argues that Wright saw the Spain he visited in the 1950s through the lens of the American South in which he was raised and developed his purpose as a writer. That South was a Jim Crow, white supremacist society; but it was also a hegemonic evangelical Protestant culture that suffused both white and black life with certain forms of spirituality . In Spain, he recognized some of those similarities with the South; 194 Chapter Eleven others he portrayed in his text but without self-consciously naming them. A careful study of Pagan Spain suggests the importance of civil religion and popular religion as the defining traditions connecting the American South and Spain. To raise religion rather than race as a central issue for Pagan Spain seems surprising. Wright’s memoir Black Boy outlines the brutal and demeaning education he received as a black southerner living at the apogee of racial segregation. While we know to be careful in using that memoir as the full story of his childhood and youth, the book’s undeniable power comes from its single-minded focus on the tragic results of the Jim Crow system. But Wright finds that race is not an issue in the Spain of the 1950s, noting “they had no racial consciousness whatsoever ” after his first encounters with Spanish youth.2 Wright’s career in the 1950s has become a subject of increasing interest, mostly because of studies of the literature of the African diaspora. His other nonfiction writings of the 1950s, Black Power (1954) and The Color Curtain (1956), are about non-Western cultures and his explorations of race in Africa and Asia in postcolonial times, as he struggled to position his experience, and those of African Americans in general, in relation to these worlds. Yet little of this perspective enters Pagan Spain. From the beginning, religion is Wright’s key focus. On his first visit, he is awakened by “the melancholy tolling of churchbells.” Two young men befriend him, taking him to their cathedral. Wright is impressed by their religiosity. “To these boys it was unthinkable that there was no God and that we were not all His sons,” he writes. As he walks down the aisle of the cathedral, he admits to feeling “a mood of awe.” That feeling turns more skeptical, if Wright is not downright offended, when he sees a mummified corpse of a bishop displayed in a glass coffin.3 Wright’s daughter Julia once observed that “the very aspects of suffering , oppression, and religious mysticism Wright is most sensitive to in Spain are those which molded his own oppressed youth in the American South.” And yet Wright himself confesses, “I have no religion in the formal sense of the word.” I want to go deeper into the religious context of the South that produced Wright to explore how he reads Spain through the South.4 In Black Boy, Wright recounts several formative religious experiences . One is exposure to the millennialist faith of his grandmother, who Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain 195 attended the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This denomination was not a mainstream church among either white or black Protestants in the South, but it was part of a culture of apocalypse that was deeply rooted among poor and working-class southerners. It was a world-denying faith that taught of the wickedness of human society and the need to retreat from it and build enclaves of faith from which to wait for the end...