Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division

Black Is a Region

185 Black Is a Region Black Is a Region Segregation and American Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain EVE DUNBAR What has my geographical position on earth have to do with the faults or merits of a book? —Richard Wright “I am a rootless man,” Richard Wright declares very early in White Man, Listen! (1957). The simple utterance captures the tie between his statelessness and his humanity: “I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness; it does not bother me; indeed, to me it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it,” says Wright (White Man 17). Many will note that Wright’s statement is colored by his acquaintance with French existentialism; but if we consider that his personal and literary roots are grounded in Jim Crow America—roots publicly solidified with the publication of his autobiography Black Boy (1945)—the statement illuminates the complex relationship among geography, blackness, and humanity in Wright’s work. The connectivity between these subjects is what Paul Gilroy challenged us to explore more deeply in his foundational The Black Atlantic (1993). For Gilroy, Wright’s work while living in Paris symbolized black writing that contradicted the “ethnic absolutism” that has historically characterized black political culture (Gilroy 5). Gilroy understands Wright’s movement away from the particularity of African American life and culture in the United States to topics as far ranging as Spanish religion and Asian identity as a move toward anti-essentialism. Yet, paying close attention to tension among race, roots, and humanity in Wright’s travel writing, I encourage a reconsideration of the uneasy literary ties that bound Wright to American racial segregation, even in his most global writing. What follows is an exploration of how “Rootless” Wright remained 185 186 Representing Segregation tethered to the U.S. racial constructs by the conventions of American literary regionalism and, by extension, racial segregation’s role on black American writing. Moving past common criticism of Wright’s expatriation as either time spent alienated from African American concerns or as maturation beyond a provincial focus on African American culture, I argue that Wright’s attachment to African Americans exhibits something much deeper than alienation. When we consider the relationship between books like Black Boy/American Hunger and The Color Curtain (1956), Wright’s struggle with American literary regionalism —which I conceive in this essay as a type of literary segregation—informs his struggle to understand black Americans in a global context. This essay takes seriously Gilroy’s call for an increased focus on Wright’s travel writing, but concentrates on the role American racial segregation played in one of his most geographically alien texts, The Color Curtain. To state my aims more clearly, I argue that Wright is not the complete “anti-essentialist” that Gilroy contends. Rather, Wright remained deeply attached to an essentializing notion of African Americaness into the mid-1950s, while simultaneously positing the necessity of racial–political nonalignment. The conflicting impulses to essentialize black Americans while calling for their political nonalignment produced a fractured narrative around African Americaness that Wright found impossible to remediate , but necessary to represent. Black Boy solidified Wright’s standing as one of the most important African American voices of mid-twentieth century regarding U.S. race relations. As a coming of age story about racial segregation, Black Boy places Wright in step with the black literary tradition dating back to slave narratives, which often underscores freedom’s dependence on literacy and northern migration. Interestingly , however, as early as Black Boy, Wright prophesied not only his inability to escape the American South, but also the possibility that sentiments born in Southern soil might bloom elsewhere. “Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness , black though I was, the culture of the South,” Wright writes in the final pages Black Boy. “So, in leaving, I was taking part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom” (228). His quest to transplant in alien soil, not Northern, points to Wright’s early understanding that uprooting would be necessary to achieve a sort of human dignity unheard of...