Hemingway, Race, and Art: Bloodlines and the Color Line

Chapter Three: The Truth’s in the Shadows: Race in “The Light of the World” and “The Battler”

| 69 As master and man stood before him, the black upholding the white, Captain Del­ ano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could pre­ sent such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other. —Herman Melville, Benito Cereno The story of the life I have led may . . . not only contain some interest if told for its own sake, but may also shed some light on the life of our times. —Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson: In the Ring and Out In the summer of 1908, up became down, black became white, and the world as many knew it changed forever. In that year, Jack Johnson became the first African American heavyweight boxing world champion. Some seven years later, Johnson would lose that title to the last of several so-called great white hopes looking to knock the defiant smile from the black man’s face. In the spring of 1915, Jess Willard became that man, seizing the crown for himself, and reclaiming it for all of white America. It was a moment etched into the national consciousness, and a reality that Ernest Hemingway subtly infuses as backstory into the narrative threads of “The Light of the World” and “The Battler,” stories I refer to as his black-andwhite stories.1 These tales take us away from the wilds of the Indian camp and transplant us to the outskirts of town and anticipated civilization. Hemingway replaces red man with black as he negotiates yet another racial space. Like the Indian stories, the black-and-white tales anticipate (white) reader assumptions just to subvert them altogether in the end, and Hemingway’s means to chapter three The Truth’s in the Shadows Race in “The Light of the World” and “The Battler” 70 | hemingway, race, and art that end—as it was in the Indian stories—is a nod to the Gothic as he employs the grotesque in both tales to draw truth from the mouths of each story’s soothsayer. Truth-telling once more means exposing the myths of both racial essentiality and the totem. Like Flannery O’Connor’s deformed characters, Hemingway’s grotesques shock the system, awe, and teach. In each of his pugilistic stories, the marginalized figure—Johnson in “Light” and Bugs in “The Battler”—steps out from the shadows to wrest power from white hands. In each instance, dark figures transgress the all-important color line and the story becomes the black man’s as much as it is that of the young naïf, Nick Adams. With each transgression , Hemingway shows us how the color line is the stuff of imagination and how white supremacy is the material of myth, and Hemingway’s imagination would push the limits of this truth for years. The boxing ring becomes the perfect forum in which to explore the concept of the so-called great white hope, a racialized messiah destined to reclaim white primacy both in and, symbolically, outside the ring; in each of these spaces, tempered violence dictated by prescriptive rules within the ring and social protocol without maintained at least the semblance of order. Both stories anticipate and seemingly validate contemporary (white) reader assumptions. Then, through moments of violence, they altogether subvert and question expected racial definition and whiteness’s seemingly inherent greatness. While many critics note Nick Adams’s piecemeal initiation into manhood in these stories and others in the Hemingway canon, few go beyond standard readings of innocence lost amid sex and violence. Even fewer recognize the importance of race within this same paradigm.2 The majority of the few Hemingway race readings only go so far as to offer critiques of his Indian stories . This raises several questions: If we can concede that literature is a way of reading the world, why have scholars not applied a racial lens to more of the Hemingway oeuvre?3 Further, what does the overall trajectory suggested by Hemingway’s writings and his sustained interest in race throughout his career really mean? The import of Hemingway’s racial tales extends beyond what I will call “racial cognizance” on the part of a resistant white figure; the true significance lies in the traditionally marginalized figure and his awareness of the tenuous, even illusory, nature of the color line. So, how does “The Light of the World,” with Jack Johnson at its center, largely escape such a critical reading? Related criticism has been relatively sparse, debate relatively quiet. Race has...