“A Decent Life in these United States”: Walker, Williams, Wright and the Problem of the Black Middlebrow

I suppose I wanted to stake out, so no one could misunderstand it, my claim and the claim of most black men to a decent life in these United States.

John A. Williams

How far shall I dare go in planning and plotting this America which Negroes want?

Margaret Walker

At first glance, Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) and John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) appear to have little in common.1 The first African American historical novel of slavery, Jubilee draws from family lore and archival research to tell an epic story of endurance and aspiration. The novel's protagonist Vyry survives bondage and torture and holds her family together through the cataclysm of Civil War and the racist terror that flourishes during Reconstruction, never losing the faith that enables her resilience. The Man Who Cried I Am, by comparison, tells an equally sweeping story of conspiracy and fatality. Following novelist and journalist Max Reddick through his multi-decade career in the post-WWII media industries, Williams's novel ultimately turns on Max's discovery of the American government's genocidal plan to round up its African American population. A celebration of maternal strength and benevolence, Jubilee ends with Vyry envisioning her children's future and calling a brood of chicks to her feet. Williams's Max, on the other hand, is a tired and cynical man who suffers throughout his narrative from rectal cancer and his awareness of mortality. He ends his narrative shot down by traitorous black employees of the CIA and dies in the novel's penultimate scene alone in the street.

Yet, despite their significant differences, each of these works offers a similar reflection on the pivotal historical juncture of the mid-1960s. When Walker and Williams published their novels, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had recently been signed into law, heralding the end of the Jim Crow order and marking, as Kenneth Warren observes, "the epochal shift in the country's history" in which a constitutional system of racial hierarchy would be displaced by the legal (and theoretical) equality of citizens.2 Both Walker and Williams had been profoundly affected by the intense political conflict leading up to this moment, and both addressed it throughout their work. The Man Who Cried I Am quite directly offers Max Reddick's first exuberantly hopeful and then jaundiced response to the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, conveying his acid view of a character modeled on Martin Luther King, Jr. and his more admiring perspective on a Malcolm X stand-in. Jubilee takes place entirely in the nineteenth century, beginning in the 1850s and ending in the 1870s. But Walker had originally planned for the novel to be a multigenerational family saga chronicling "the birth, rise, and development of the New Negro," and it is not difficult to see that this story, culminating during Reconstruction, implicitly responded to the political transformation that C. Vann Woodward influentially described as "a Second Reconstruction."3 Each novel registers the epochal scope of the era with its own epic narrative, and each focuses in particular on talented representatives of the black middle class and on their desire to play a leadership role in a society organized by racial hierarchy.4

The fact that the novels share the same subject makes their tonal differences all the starker. Ending in the late nineteenth century, Jubilee concludes by anticipating the rise of a family of black educators who are expected to take a vital part in leading their people amid the looming "counterrevolution of the white South" and the lasting "minority" status that that counterrevolution will impose on African Americans.5 Seeing the establishment of the Jim Crow system on the horizon, the characters of Jubilee prepare to meet it by producing a family of "teachers and preachers." "That's what our race needs now more than anything else," Walker's novel concludes optimistically.6 The Man Who Cried I Am looks at much the same history from a bleakly pessimistic, reverse vantage, narrating Max Reddick's aspiration to be a black writer capable of representing his people in the post-WWII media industries and dramatizing the fateful foreclosure of his hopes. In effect, their two historical sagas bookend the Jim Crow era and the aspirations of the black bourgeoisie that survived within it.

Yet, tonal differences aside, both novels are inflected by Walker's and Williams's shared view of this history, which was shaped not only by the exigencies of the moment, but by the two writers' comparable experiences of the New Deal. Walker, who was born in 1915, began her literary career as an employee of the Federal Writers' Project of the WPA and as a member of the South Side Writers group — the influential coterie of radical writers formed by Richard Wright which sought to revitalize African American literature with a synthesis of Marxist politics and modernist aesthetics. She achieved initial prominence in the late 1930s and early 1940s with the poems collected in For My People (1942), bringing a Whitmanian poetics of inclusion to the Popular Front's politics of social transformation. "Let a new earth arise," her most famous poem concluded, "let a people / loving freedom come to growth."7 Throughout her life, Walker understood the issues of her time in the terms that had been prominent among leftists and New Deal liberals in her youth. Williams, though a decade younger than Walker, was similarly influenced by the critical years in which the United States, along with Western Europe, established the rudiments of a social democratic order. After service in the Navy during World War II, he attended college on the GI Bill, and, like Walker, called on the language of civic nationalism promoted by the Popular Front and the New Deal throughout his career.8

As they witnessed the events of Second Reconstruction, then, both Walker and Williams measured them by comparison to the promise of "a more egalitarian, democratic, and inclusive community" that had been central to the cultural politics of the late 1930s and early 1940s.9 Both, too, considered their own work in relation to the ideas of artistic vocation that had been promoted in their youth by the New Deal state. As a number of historians have noted, New Deal arts programs played an influential role in fostering a "middlebrow" vision of "cultural democracy" — one in which the arts would serve a mission of civic education, linking culture to the everyday lives of the nation's people and inspiring in them a deepened commitment to democratic citizenship.10 But that mission was especially crucial to the complicated racial politics of the New Deal, which remained systematically distorted by the institutions of the Jim Crow order. Though African American voters were enthusiastic supporters of the Roosevelt administration, their access to key benefits of the New Deal, and their participation in the political process, was severely hampered by the disproportionate influence of racist politicians and white Southern voters. For precisely that reason, Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff points out, expectations for the Civil Rights mission of the New Deal's cultural programs ran high. As Sklaroff explains, New Deal arts programs were expected to foster an image of black culture in which African American artistry could counter the restrictions of a political system still profoundly determined by racial exclusion and lead the nation toward a more inclusive democracy.11 This was the premise articulated by Stephen Vincent Benét when, in introducing Walker's poetry, he remarked that it was "the song of her people, of her part of America. . . . She has spoken of her people so that all may listen."12 Like the advocates of the New Deal's arts programs, Benét both implicitly acknowledged the limits of a racist political system and invoked the hope of "cultural emancipation" against it.13

No one did more to exemplify that hope for Walker and Williams, as for many of their contemporaries, than Richard Wright. Wright was, in their estimation, a titanic figure who had reformed the landscape of cultural politics around his charismatic example. He had seized the advantages provided by the New Deal and by the Communist Party and made use of them to foster a vibrant community of African American artists and intellectuals, thus encouraging the professional ambitions that Walker and Williams both cherished. He had embraced the era's vision of art-as-civic-education and turned it to radical ends that his patrons in both the Party and the liberal state had not anticipated. Above all, in Native Son, he had compelled the public to confront the oppression and racial animus at the heart of American society, doing so in pursuit of a vision of genuine popular democracy. He had acted, Wright wrote, on the belief that he could "create with words a scheme of images and symbols whose direction could enlist the sympathies, loyalties, and yearnings of the millions."14

But, if Wright was an inspiring figure, he was also, Walker and Williams discovered in different ways, impossible to emulate. The image he represented for them — of artistic dedication, radical commitment, and vast public authority — would have been difficult to imitate in any case, but, especially after he went into voluntary exile in France in 1946, Wright's example illuminated the contradictions built into the language of "cultural emancipation." If Wright showed that African American writers could turn literary expression into a forceful demand for democratic equality, the relentless opposition he encountered also revealed just how powerful American racism remained.

In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that when Walker and Williams came to write their major novels in the mid-1960s, they used the occasion as an opportunity to reflect back on the troubling example of Richard Wright, doing so in strikingly comparable ways. Like many other historical novels, both Jubilee and The Man Who Cried I Am are built on the narrative template of the love triangle, and the most charismatic and troubling pole of the triangle in each novel is a character modeled on Wright himself. That Williams built The Man Who Cried I Am on a fictionalized narrative about the friendship between Wright and Chester Himes has been a well-known fact since the novel's publication.15 In the case of Jubilee, the connection to Wright is less direct, but, as we'll see below, it is equally inescapable and equally telling. Despite their seeming divergence in perspective, moreover, what Wright meant for Walker and Williams was in a number of respects fundamentally similar. Each saw in Wright's example a set of ultimately unmanageable contradictions that had been foregrounded by the New Deal and left unresolved by the unstable political settlement established in the wake of World War II. Wright's remarkable achievements represented, on the one hand, the possibility that new institutions of cultural expression would give African American writers access to unprecedented levels of professional autonomy and public esteem.16 At the same time, Wright spoke for the conviction that literature could be a vehicle for political transformation, with a commitment and stringency that was in tension with the very professional success Walker and Williams alike sought. At the center of both Jubilee and The Man Who Cried I Am lies an unfinished struggle to come to grips with his example.

The Most Illustrious Black Refugee: Richard Wright and the Lost Promise of Civic Nationalism

In one respect, of course, it is not surprising that both Walker and Williams should have been preoccupied with Wright. In the view of each, Wright remained the towering genius of African American literature — the founding figure who had enabled the work and careers of numerous successors. Walker spoke of him as the Gogol of African American literature: "Most of our writers have come out of Wright's cloak" (HIW 48). For Williams's Max Reddick, Wright is simply "the father of all contemporary Negro writers" (217).17 Indeed, both Walker and Williams published biographies of Wright, and both returned to his memory consistently over decades of work in which they struggled to define and justify their careers.18

But that may not put the case strongly enough. For both Walker and Williams treated Wright not merely as a revered predecessor but as a looming personal presence whose enduring charisma made his legacy difficult to embrace or reject. Reading through her essays and interviews, along with the journals she maintained over the length of her life, it becomes clear that, even though Walker knew Wright for only a few years, he influenced her career as much as any other single person.19 Wright was, she wrote decades later, "a rare and once-in-a-lifetime association" (HIW 33). He was Walker's mentor in Chicago when, in 1935 at the age of 20, she graduated from Northwestern University and found work on the Federal Writers' Project. He played the key role in leading his young protégé from the Christian idealism she had absorbed while growing up as the daughter of a Methodist minister in New Orleans to the Marxism and modern literature that were the mainsprings of the Chicago Renaissance. Working alongside him in the WPA and in the South Side Writers Group, Walker fell in love with Wright, pursued him to New York in the spring of 1939, and there found herself cruelly rejected.20

That experience led Walker to a long period of uncertainty in which she considered and reconsidered her experience with Wright and its significance for her ideas about literature, politics, and religion. As Walker recorded in her notebooks, Wright had introduced her to the shocking power of naturalist and modernist writing and to the allure of political radicalism. He had shown her that literature could be not merely a refined form of spiritual expression but a transgressive exploration of buried desires, and he had told her that the drive to know and express the truth could itself be a kind of metaphysical justification that made life meaningful. But Wright had also helped knock aside the religious convictions and the principles of upright behavior that had long oriented Walker's life and that had made it possible for her to leave her home in New Orleans at the age of 16, come to Chicago, enroll in college, and patch together a life on pennies in the midst of the Depression. When Wright harshly cut off their friendship, Walker not only felt publicly abandoned, she mourned that he had "upset my whole world." The experience, she wrote in her journal a year later, was "acid and humiliating."21

Walker returned time and again over the course of years in her private writing to mull over that painful experience and to seek in its wake what she called "new foundations." Eventually, she decided that it should be possible to combine a broadly Marxian view of economics with an intense Methodist faith and to reconcile the security of middle-class domesticity with a committed opposition to racial injustice.22 Wright was, Walker ultimately decided, a powerful but finally limited artist — both a "daemonic genius" and a nihilist whose failure to find an ultimate faith left him the singer of "a broken song."23 But the biography , equal parts reverential and vindictive, that Walker wrote decades after the end of their friendship suggests that she never fully resolved the troubles that Wright had prompted for her. "When we hold his heart in our hands, like ancient Aztecs," Walker wrote in a stunning passage, "we can lift it up to the gods and sacrifice that bleeding heart to the sun. We can then say, justly let this man's heart live forever" (DG 10).24

Unlike Walker, Williams never knew Richard Wright personally. His deepest literary friendship was with Chester Himes, a man who played a tutelary role in his career, just as Wright had previously done for Himes. By Williams's account, Himes was Wright's sole loyal protégé — "his chief ally and confidante, his friend and brother."25 Williams himself, as he tells us in the introduction to a volume of their letters, was in turn Himes's devoted friend and retainer.26 But, if only at one remove, Wright consistently appears in Williams's work as both a heroic and diminished predecessor — "the most illustrious black refugee."27 As Harry Ames in The Man Who Cried I Am, Wright appears as lifelong mentor, friend, and rival to Max Reddick, and an inspiring yet irksome prophet. "Your job," Harry teaches Max about white America, "is to tell those people to stop lying, not only to us, but to themselves" (50). But, despite — or in keeping with — this exhortation, Harry's major role in Williams's novel is simultaneously to encourage and interfere with Max's professional ambitions. In the novel's shocking final revelation, Harry passes on to Max knowledge of the conspiracy that leads to the murder of both men — an act of payback Harry carries out as vengeance for the time that Max slept with his wife and the culmination of their lifelong rivalry. If Harry inspires Max, he also makes it quite literally impossible for him to have a life.

For both Walker and Williams, then, Wright was a troubling prophet whose memory lingered even as his time had passed. More specifically, both Walker and Williams associated Wright with a rhetoric of civic nationalism that had been widely prominent among liberals and on the left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Recent scholarship on Wright has tended to downplay this aspect of his work, emphasizing instead the anti-fascist internationalism that was a significant feature of his political imagination before and during WWII and the postcolonial and existentialist cosmopolitanism that became increasingly central to his work after his exile to France.28 Nevertheless, in the major writing he did in the early 1940s, Wright also called on the rhetoric of democratic nationalism that was widely shared among both New Deal liberals and leftists at the time. As he articulated the case in works like the documentary photography book 12 Million Black Voices (1941), for example, Wright cast the demand for full citizenship in the nation-state as the political engine that drove the historical quest of a whole people. Oppression had made African Americans "a debased feudal folk," Wright claimed, subject first to the "Lords of the Land" and then to "Bosses of the Buildings." In the critical moment of the Great Depression and amid the global struggle against fascism, however, Wright depicted African Americans as having arrived at a historical juncture where they could demand a place in "the vital processes of America's national growth." "What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is . . . the right to share in the upward march of American life."29

That vision of democratic citizenship was but one element of Wright's work — one in tension with his more radical commitments — but the language of civic nationalism spoke powerfully to both Walker and Williams. Each, in fact, frequently looked back to the years during and just after World War II as a rare period when the achievement of a non-racist, social democratic nation had seemed nearly within view. Describing her enthusiasm for the radio dramas of Archibald MacLeish and Maxwell Anderson, Walker enthused, "I have a strange thrill when I see the American flag flying high. . . . I have a hope in that flag and I have a hope in America."30 In her early plans for the novel that would become Jubilee, she anticipated titling the book "For Pilgrim Feet," after a verse in "America, the Beautiful." Though she continued through the remainder of her life to call on the left's language of revolutionary militance, Walker came to understand that rhetoric entirely in the context of the liberal nation-state. The goal, she wrote in 1956, was "complete freedom — first class citizenship in America."31

Despite the militant black nationalism with which he is often associated, Williams no less consistently invoked the allure of American nationalism and the goal of full and equal citizenship. In a travelogue he first wrote for Holiday magazine in 1964, Williams toured the U.S., indicting the symptoms of crippling racism he found everywhere and titling his jeremiad This is My Country, Too. Along with Walker, he interpreted Wright as above all "a man of American letters" and a sadly disregarded national prophet. "America never had a greater ally than [Richard Wright]," Williams claimed. He warned of racial conflict "not as a threat, but in the hope that Americans could act then. But they did not" (MN 135).32 Walker made the same case. The "foremost" idea expressed in Wright's work, she explained, was "the broken promise of the idea of American democracy" (DG xiv).

Educational and Cultural Advantages: Wright and the Problem of the Middlebrow

But if Wright appeared to both Walker and Williams as a forgotten prophet of democratic nationalism, by the same token he also seemed to them an exemplary middlebrow writer. Each was struck not merely by Wright's talent or determination or by the grandeur of his literary and political vision; they were equally awed by his seemingly unique capacity to achieve professional esteem speaking as a black writer to a mass audience. "The spectacular success of Native Son," Walker wrote, "was unlike anything black or white America had seen of a black writer in the history of the country" (DG 149). In his correspondence with Williams, Chester Himes stressed the same point: "I always had a great respect for Richard Wright because [his work] opened up certain fields in the publishing industry for the black writer, more so than anything else that had happened."33

If that public stature had been made possible in part by Wright's alignment with both the Communist Party and the cultural projects of the New Deal, the critical role in his mass success was played by his alliance with The-Book-of-the-Month-Club, the era's quintessential middlebrow institution. And, in truth, as radical as Native Son was, the book, whose final text was influenced by BOMC representative Dorothy Canfield Fisher, resembled in its broad outline many of the Club's most successful offerings: a powerful and engaging narrative, broadly accessible in style, that aimed to address a matter of civic concern to a mass public in an emotionally compelling style.34 A similar point could be made about Black Boy, also a BOMC selection and another work whose ultimate form was significantly shaped by Fisher's editorial hand. In the last lines of this first published version of his memoir, an ending which Wright drafted in response to Fisher's advice, Black Boy concluded by invoking the inspiration that the young Wright found in the work of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, pointing to them as models of the kind of national community of sentiment that middlebrow literature often favored: "They seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it."35

For a time, in the early 1940s, in short, there was a moment when writers as unlike each other as Richard Wright and Dorothy Canfield Fisher could meet on the ground of the middlebrow, collaborating to publish books that would meld a radical vision of proletarian anger to a liberal project of literary enlightenment. Such an alignment was surely only possible because of the broader agenda promoted by the arts programs of the New Deal, which aligned liberal policy makers with writers who were often much further to the left. But it was encouraged as well by the ascendance of America's middlebrow cultural institutions, which were at the height of their influence in the mid-twentieth century.36 Indeed, the values promoted by those institutions found wide support among the activists of pre-WWII Chicago's African American middle class, whose circles overlapped with those of Wright and Walker's more radical South Side Writers Group and who often linked a vision of literature as civic discourse with a politics of activism and uplift.37

But, just as Walker and Williams turned Wright's politics of citizenship toward an American nationalism that was at once more fervent and less confident than anything expressed by their predecessor, so, too, did the promise of the middlebrow become both more direct and more problematic in their work. One core implication of middlebrow culture — as both Janice Radway and Joan Shelly Rubin note in their seminal studies — was that self-improvement, personal ambition, and civic welfare could all be advanced, without conflict, via mass-market literature. Middlebrow culture, in short, made middle-class aspiration and social reform seem harmonious and consistent with an economy built on private property. Walker and Williams struggled to maintain that belief. Each wanted their work to bear politically radical implications. At the same time, both expressed a desire for middle-class status and strove to defend a view of middle-class propriety in which literature could link professional ambition to cultural improvement and the advancement of racial equality.38

In his history of uplift politics, Kevin Gaines identifies the central contradiction that characterized the small class of educated professionals who dominated African American public discourse in the Jim Crow era. They were "both an aspiring social class and a racially subordinated caste denied all political rights and protections."39 Walker and Williams ruminated on the disappointments of that contradiction time and again. Struggling, despite the impediments of a racist society, to establish professional careers and witnessing the way economic stress divided their families, they saw the middlebrow promise of upward mobility and cultural refinement grow increasingly distant. "I want a nice home for my children and a chance to give them good educational and cultural advantages," Walker noted in her journal, and she complained bitterly that the man that she had met and married after her break with Wright could see little point to her ambitions. Her journals are full of dozens of entries, running over more than 20 years, where she plans for the homes she longs to possess, worries over the stress of housekeeping, and revisits scenes of harsh conflict with her husband and parents, leading her to wonder whether it will be possible at all to hold onto her family and maintain her professional ambitions.40

In nearly all his dozen novels and five works of non-fiction, Williams charted related anxieties. Time and again he told the story of an ambitious young man who, gifted with talent and intelligence and a sterling college degree, nevertheless finds himself shunted away from a rewarding professional career and whose relationship with a security-conscious beloved falls apart as a result.41 His most memorable version of the tale appeared in the Lillian Patch subplot of The Man Who Cried I Am. There Williams tells of the crushing heartbreak Max Reddick suffers after the loss of his fiancé Lillian, a schoolteacher who longs for a middle-class home and who dies following the illegal abortion she undertakes because Max will not give up his literary ambitions in favor of a stable career as a social worker. Notably, although he is Max's friend and mentor, Harry Ames cannot fully share Max's sorrow. The child of a "petit bourgeois" home in upstate New York, Max has been shielded, Harry believes, from "the horror of the ghettoes" and "the oozing horror of being a Negro in the South." With strange approval he thus thinks that "the girl's death could rip the last ragged curtain of illusion from Reddick" (120). For Williams, in short, the problem of denied middle-class ambition could not be separated from the troubling implication that Richard Wright would not sympathize with his concern.

The Conservative World of the University: Walker's Reinterpretation of Wright

Walker, too, understood that her yearning for a life of middle-class stability and propriety was the place where her own attitudes parted most directly with Wright's. By her account, Wright had grown up feeling excluded from the black middle-class of the Jim Crow South and never lost his contempt for its "bourgeois aspirations." "Wright said to me, 'I know where you come from. I have seen through those lighted windows in those houses where people like you live'" (DG 35).42 Walker, in turn, came to resent the thought that her own middle-class background should count against her. "I'm considered a black snob," she complained. "I have to face the fact that I inherited a tradition — I'm a third-generation college graduate."43

Embracing that tradition was, in fact, one of the ways that Walker negotiated the failure of her relationship with Wright. During their friendship, she had been active in Chicago's vibrant literary left and had embraced its politics and literary attitudes. "I had rebelled," she later recalled, "against my background and all my life had formerly meant."44 When Wright rejected her, however, Walker fell into period of despondency that led her to question all that she had come to believe. The exciting world of the left now seemed treacherous and disloyal. Marxism appeared limited by its "cold materialism," and naturalist fiction she found a "dehumanized art" distorted by its own "revolt from gentility."45

Walker eventually drafted in her journals a life plan and a literary aesthetic that she hoped would resolve those concerns. At its core was a determined re-purposing of the middle-class values she had learned in her youth. She would leave Chicago and study for an MFA at the University of Iowa, refining the poetry she would publish in For My People and crafting an aesthetic that would meld the influence of Marxism with a newly rediscovered Christian humanism. She would find a husband who would join her in the domestic happiness for which she longed, and she would call on her degree to land a position teaching at a Negro college, a career path that she hoped would grant her economic security while allowing her to maintain a public role in the media and the black press. According to this "long range program," Walker would enter "the conservative world of the university" and "cloak" her "radical beliefs" with "conventionality."46 In that way, she anticipated, she could find "success and happiness" and "economic security" and still be an artist and a "friend and champion" for "my people." "Why can't I have them all?" she asked.47

On the face of it, Walker's subsequent life appears to have fulfilled that plan exactly. After earning a Master's degree at Iowa and returning for a time to the home of her parents, Walker did indeed begin an academic career, first at Livingstone College in North Carolina and then eventually at Jackson College for Negro Teachers (later to become Jackson State College, then University) in Mississippi, where she taught for decades and built a program in literature and creative writing. During her travels as a lecturer in World War II, she met an enlisted man named Firnist Alexander who would become her husband and with whom she reared four children. Over the course of twenty years of research and writing, finally, Walker did work out a literary vision that culminated in Jubilee — which managed artfully to combine a narrative of revolutionary historical transformation with a story of personal spiritual devotion.

None of that, however, came easily. Rather, Walker's journals describe every feature of her long-range program as an unrelenting source of unhappiness and anxiety — a consequence, as she understood it, of the fact that an oppressive society both encouraged and denied the ambitions she shared with her family.48 In her early plans for Jubilee, Walker invoked her great-grandmother as the founder of a maternal line of race leaders. In her journals, however, she described the home of her parents as a mean and narrow place, ruled over by a dominating mother whom she had come to resent bitterly and divided by the ever-present threat of poverty. Her family was of the "salaried professional petty bourgeois class," Walker noted, but "our livelihood has always been uncertain and our position insecure." The consequence for herself, Walker believed, had been unbearable pressure and a life of constant conflict and "untold whippings."49

In her own marriage, Walker often described feeling demoralized to see those struggles continue. Her journals recount long-running battles with her husband and episodes of domestic violence in which he beat and threatened to kill her, as well as several extended separations.50 Nor was academia the refuge Walker hoped it might be. As a black woman teaching in Negro colleges, Walker found herself paid a minimal salary and granted little respect from administrations that viewed her with distrust. With the advance of the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and the wave of Southern backlash, those challenges only intensified. Walker felt herself to be less the enlightened race leader she had sought to become and more an embattled figure trapped between increasingly assertive students and an administration beholden to Mississippi's racist status quo.

For years, as she ruminated about the sources of her unhappiness, Walker returned in her notebooks to memories of Wright. "I am not through with that man for the simple reason that he is not through with me," she wrote in one characteristic entry. "He hurt me as a deadly enemy."51 When her anxieties about her life and career were at their darkest, Walker drafted plans for two narratives — one a "poetic drama" and the other a novel — that would put her unresolved feelings in narrative form. In the first of these plans, Walker sketched the outline of the "tragedy" of a "Negro race leader jealous for his people but untrue to his family, his friends, and the womanhood of his people." When this treacherous leader falls for "a foreign woman," he is murdered by the lover he has abandoned. Feeling convinced that "she will never be as successful" as the man who abandoned her, this unnamed woman "also kills herself."52

In her second approach to the problem, Walker conceived a more complex and less tragic narrative. Envisioning a novel that would draw on "the history of my own family," she imagined a story that would combine domestic drama with a political narrative about "the war between capital and labor." Her protagonist would be a young woman named Dotie who finds herself marooned in the unhappy home of her childhood when revolution and race war break out across the United States. Her husband, a doctor and "young liberal," joins the radical cause but is imprisoned in Chicago during the conflict, and the couple is separated until the new civil war is resolved. In the novel's conclusion, Walker envisioned a revolutionary transformation of the United States in which racial injustice and economic exploitation would be resolved through the creation of a "new order" — "neither communist, nor fascist, but something of a curious mixture of both and bureaucratic democracy." But she also anticipated a story in which the protagonist's love and resilience turn out to be more powerful than the weak political commitments of her beloved. "The doctor comes out of jail bitter, broken, slightly disillusioned" — to be restored to health only by his wife. "In the end," Walker imagined, "it is Dotie who is free and emancipated, Dotie who has grown to a woman's stature and created happiness for Joe, her children, and herself."53

Neither of these narratives was ever written, but within a year, Walker had replaced them with the plan for a historical narrative of slavery that would become Jubilee.54 Despite the shift in setting and subject matter, when she finally completed the novel more than two decades later, Walker had constructed a narrative that addressed the concerns at the heart of those earlier ideas. Like the unwritten story of Dotie, Jubilee tells of a revolutionary historical transformation and of a civil war that divides a captive wife and mother from her radical husband. Indeed, as with her earlier plan, Walker understood Jubilee to be anchored by her "knowledge of Marxism and of class society." But, still more fundamentally, as in her earlier outline, Jubilee frames that perspective through a woman's love shown to be both necessary to and stronger than the political beliefs proclaimed by otherwise untrustworthy men. Her protagonist's "Christian faith," Walker decided, "naïve . . . though it might be," would be the source of her "strength and power." As she began writing the novel, after 17 years of research and planning, Walker recorded her expectation that it would resolve the issues to which she had returning consistently since 1939: "all my life's purposes will fall into place . . . all the religious and racial meaning."55

Her protagonist Vyry bears out that plan. Born on a Georgia cotton plantation, the daughter of her master and of the woman he repeatedly rapes, Vyry survives the brutality of slavery and witnesses the destruction amid the Civil War of the family that once owned her. Separated from her first husband Randall Ware by slavery and then by the Civil War, Vyry goes on to marry her second husband Innis Brown and travels with him to Alabama, where they strive to build a home in the face of racist terror and economic exploitation. As a slave, Vyry endures the loss not only of her first husband, but of her mother, sister, and several loved ones, and she herself is whipped and left badly scarred. In later years, she sees her home burned down by the Klan. To her still greater horror, in the novel's climactic chapters, she witnesses violence break out in her own family. Her husband, struggling amid oppression and poverty to maintain their farm, begins to beat Jim — Vyry's son from her first marriage and Brown's own adopted child. Through all these trials, Vyry never loses the strength that is rooted for her in love and spiritual conviction. "She must emerge a victorious woman," Walker wrote in her notes for the book, "her life meaningful because of her deep and abiding religious faith."56

As she developed her final plans for the novel, Walker made it clear in her journals that Vyry's victory should be registered against the failure of the politics of radical transformation that she associated with Randall Ware. "Vyry's world is small — but her vision is greater." By comparison, "Randall Ware is aware of the big world, but his outlook becomes narrowed to a smaller world."57 To achieve this resolution, Walker needed a narrative that would allow her to settle the concerns that she had long associated with Wright. She eventually found such a structure in a plot device — inspired by Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" — that allowed her to bring Randall Ware and Innis Brown into direct conflict and then to transform them from enemies who bully and belittle Vyry to brothers who support her. In this struggle, Ware represents qualities that Walker had long associated with Wright. From her earliest plans for the novel, Walker had been clear that at its heart would be the sundered marriage between Vyry and her first husband and that he would possess the characteristics she had given to her previous portraits of political radicals. Ware was to be "a free man of color who is a revolutionary character," Walker recorded in her journals, "Black and Biggity."58 But, as she had done in her journal entries, Walker interpreted such political radicalism as a slender reed that could not sustain the domestic affiliations she valued. Ware is first separated from Vyry after he encourages her failed flight from slavery — an event that leads to the whipping that will scar her. He is further distanced from her when, in the immediate aftermath of the War, he chooses to attend the Georgia State Freedman's Convention rather than to search for his family. His radical convictions, however, lead to bitterness and disappointment. "I thought once, right after the war," he tells Vyry, "that colored people were going to reach the Promised Land. . . . But I've learned different. Nobody is going to give us anything. We're going to have to fight and struggle" (472).

As she would later do in her biography of Wright, then, Walker depicted Ware as a brilliant man crippled by arrogance and cynicism. "You is ate up with hatred," Vyry informs him. "You ain't got no God in you at all" (480). Against his example, she positions Innis Brown as a character who shares the qualities she perceived in her own husband Firnist Alexander. Brown is industrious and keen to own property and to care for his family, but he distrusts education; and he resents the sense of class superiority he perceives in Vyry and Ware alike. Importantly, neither Ware nor Brown is capable of contending with the destructive anger and violence that Walker casts as a principle legacy of slavery. When Innis Brown beats Vyry's child, leading Randall Ware to threaten him with devastating retaliation, Vyry sees, as the men in their fury fail to do, a history that promises to swallow them all. "It brought back all the violence and killing on the plantation. . . . It went back to the war and all the bloody fighting and killing and dying. . . . Now this awful hatred and violence was threatening to destroy her happy home and her loving family" (453).

It is only in the climactic scene — when she forces her two husbands to look upon her scars and witness her suffering — that Vyry is finally able to resolve this conflict. Compelling the men to recognize the injuries she has long born in secret, Vyry convinces them to put aside their rivalry and attend instead to her pain. "In the moonlight the two men stood horrified before the sight of her terribly scarred back. . . . [Innis] knew and understood now why Vyry went wild when she saw him with a whip in his hand. . . . Randall Ware knew from the moment he looked on Vyry's lacerated back that they could never go back to what they had been before he left" (484-485). In this unlikely scene, in short, Walker draws on the poetics of melodrama and creates a moment of revelation that suddenly makes clear the meaning of a hidden history and in so doing resolves the characters' tangled relations.59 That revelation not only gives Vyry a moral power over her husbands that she has previously lacked; it allows her to devise a family re-structured and strengthened by its commitment to their shared children.

For Walker, in short, the love triangle serves to highlight the mission of a black leadership class and a sense of shared identity that rises above envy and competing interests. By the same token, the novel's conclusion works to resolve Walker's history with Wright, turning him from a burden and obstacle to an enabling mentor who finally supports her vision. If Wright had once mocked Walker's roots in the black bourgeoisie of the Jim Crow South, in the figure of Randall Ware, Jubilee re-defines his memory and in effect allows him to endorse her family's history. In this way, Jubilee's conclusion achieves at the level of plot what Walker had sought to do as a matter of literary style and ideology. It at once invokes what Walker had called "radical ideas" and finally subordinates them to a vision of Christian belief and middle-class uplift. In place of the politics of promethean revolution with which Walker identified Wright, Jubilee envisions a future of long struggle led by an educated middle class.

And yet, as deftly as Jubilee manages this resolution, Walker must have known at some level that the conclusion she arrived at could seem a little pat. She had once planned a narrative that would follow several generations of black educators and expected that it would respond to an issue she had recognized early on in her thoughts about the novel: that "the revolutionary character of the civil war" had been "completely nullified" by "reaction" following Reconstruction.60 Having recognized that problem, however, Walker ultimately decided to end Jubilee in the last years of Reconstruction, when the hopes of someone like Vyry might well have remained at their highest, and just before the United States was about to begin the worst period of racist terror in its postbellum history.

The Gossip: Williams Responds to Wright

Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am allegorizes the consequences and the persisting reality of that terror. In Max Reddick's memories of his career and his long friendship with Harry Ames, we see both men's struggle to survive the continual indignities and frustrations imposed on them by Jim Crow America. The narrative culminates in the discovery of the American government's genocidal "King Alfred Plan" — Williams's own moment of stark revelation, its narrative role paralleling the episode of Vyry's disrobing. "Before, all was so nebulous," Max considers, as he thinks back over the obstacles that had long hindered his career. "There were few names and places and the form was so all-pervading that it seemed formless. But now the truth had been literally placed in Max's lap" (386). If the climactic moment of Jubilee reveals the history of brutality suffered by African American women under slavery, turning it from injury to the catalyst of collective solidarity, Williams's scene of revelation discloses the crucial fact that organized violence against African Americans has never ceased, becoming only more secret, elaborate, and powerful. All the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement, "the laws and committees . . . were fraudulent" (368). "The Second Reconstruction, which, like the first, promised equal stature to black citizens on paper," Williams added a few years later, "failed completely to deliver" (TKGDS 172).

And, indeed, in most obvious respects, Walker's and Williams's historical visions, along with their literary styles and gender politics, appear to differ sharply — as did their professional careers. Williams visited Jackson College during the same years Walker was on leave from the school and writing Jubilee at the University of Iowa. He was appalled by the compromises he thought the school's faculty were forced to accept. Where Walker worked to dignify the daily struggle to nurture African American education in the face of ruthless oppression, Williams, much like Wright before him, saw in the black bourgeoisie of the Jim Crow South only a craven need for security. "I had noticed," he wrote of his time in Mississippi, "that the elite among the Negroes, the academicians, the professionals, and the like, were as estranged from the masses of Negroes as the whites" (TIMC 73).

Yet, like Walker, Williams, who earned a degree at Syracuse University, differed from Wright in that his main concern was always the distinctive challenges faced by college-educated African Americans. In his non-fiction writing, he often cast the men of the black professional class as militant race leaders who could spark an otherwise undirected black revolution.61 In his fiction, Williams tended to invert this heroic image, describing his protagonists as trapped in the coils of a racist society and constantly threatened with emasculation. In one particularly eloquent passage in The Man Who Cried I Am, set in Harlem in the 1940s, Max Reddick muses on the humiliations he can expect if he chooses to avoid the economic insecurity endured by Harry Ames — who has fled America for exile in France — and instead pursues the career of a journalist in the black press in America. He would have to "scheme and jive," Max realizes, "dance in the sandbox, Tom, kiss behinds." As he ponders these indignities, Max notices "a young sharpie in draped coat and pegged pants" and thinks bitterly about his distance from the life of the city's working-class youth: "Why couldn't I have been like him?" Max asks. "Why can't I wear zoot suits, dance the Lindy better, until my nuts fall. . . . Why am I the way I am? Mutant, freak, caprice, fluke" (46-47).

The moment neatly illustrates how distant Williams was from the writer he viewed as his predecessor. In "How 'Bigger' Was Born," his lecture on the writing of Native Son, Wright had written of Bigger Thomas as a "dispossessed and disinherited man" typical of "a vast, muddied pool of human life in America." His account emphasized both the way Bigger's alienation was typical of the "tensity" Wright saw in politically hungry masses around the globe and his own capacity as an artist to plumb Bigger's "personal and private life . . . his yearnings, visions, his deep emotional responses." His implication was that, as a dispossessed man himself, he understood Bigger and the feelings and desires that linked Bigger with millions of "other people possessing a kindred consciousness."62 Williams, by contrast, emphasizes the social and psychic gulf that divides his protagonist from the working-class youth he can view only from afar. Such men, mysterious and obscure to him, no longer appear, as they did to Wright, among a vast pool of people disinherited by modernity, but rather as the representatives of a distinctive and vital folk — an image of self-possession rather than dispossession. Viewing the young hipster, Max marvels, "he seemed able to live life as he found it" (46).

It is part of the obsessive narrative mode of Williams's novel that its themes are worked out in baroque elaboration, and so Max's meditation on the zoot-suiter is complemented by a subplot that further underscores how directly Williams's fiction worked to revise the legacy left by Wright. When Max does indeed take up a career in the black press and begins a job as a reporter for the Harlem Democrat, he is assigned to profile Moses Boatwright, an African American man being held for serial murder who has cannibalized the heart and genitals of his male victims. Max interviews the suspect in jail, where Boatwright tells him of both his illustrious education and his grotesquely criminal acts. "He was a cannibal even though a graduate of Harvard" (52). Boatwright is, of course, the opposite of the Harlem hipster — like Max, the middle-class man as freak and caprice — and he gives rise to a homophobic fantasy of sexual disgust. Max is horrified to recognize in the college-educated murderer an image of himself as a kind of venereal disease — he feels "like a man studying a sore on his own body, a chancre" — and he experiences their conversation as a kind of gothic sexual possession: "From the pit of his stomach an ugliness gave birth . . . [and] struggled upward . . . writhed in fury then slid back down where it pulsed hard against Max's belly" (52, 58).

Max's encounter with Boatright is, in short, a scene of grotesque abjection. Appropriately, the language of his disgust invokes the scenes in Native Son in which Wright describes the anger that possesses Bigger Thomas: "that ball of hot tightness growing larger and heavier in his stomach" (NS 35). But where Wright emphasizes the fear and rage of a working-class adolescent, Williams features a middle-class man's sense of moral queasiness. To be an African American professional in Jim Crow America, Williams suggests, is to sacrifice the virility of working-class youth amid a web of emasculating perversion.

No less than Walker, then, Williams saw African American professionals as a frustrated leadership class, tormented by an awareness of their lack of power and authority. But, where Walker situated those concerns in the realm of the Negro college, Williams's experience led him to emphasize the context of Jim Crow media and marketing. As Walker had done with the Negro colleges, Williams saw his path through that world as one of dogged struggle in the face of countless frustrations and forced compromises. Looking back over his long apprentice years in the black press, Williams likened himself to "an old-time baseball player in the Negro leagues. . . . I played all the positions, writing for monthlies, dailies and weeklies; I wrote advertising and radio advertising copy, publicity copy. I cranked out speeches and I've written screenplays, short fiction, novels, and long nonfiction. . . . I think of myself as a writer only because I've done nearly all kinds of it" (FB 394).

In The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams gives this history to Max Reddick. When Harry Ames is compelled to flee abroad, Max remains in the United States, struggling inch-by-inch to break out of the black press and pursue a career as a reporter with a Time Life-like organization. As he recalls this history, Max muses on the vivid gallery of writers, reporters, critics, editors, agents, and politicians he has met in New York, Washington, and Paris, who are rendered with roman-à-clef directness. (Along with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, there are characters who are modeled on, among others, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Carl Van Vechten, William Faulkner, Anatole Broyard, and Oliver Harrington.) Throughout, Max conveys Williams's sense that the media and the cultural and political institutions with which it intersects act as a dense and complex network, ruled by obscure figures who have vast abilities to shape popular attitudes and to dole out or retract opportunities as they see fit. It was such intermediaries — editors, publishers, agents, wheeler-dealers — not writers, Williams complained, who wielded cultural power in America. Such people decided "what's passed on to the public, which just as it wordlessly and spinelessly accepts the glittering junk from Detroit, accepts what" the media churns out (FB 7).

For Williams, the darkness and treachery of that world, the hidden racism and Machiavellian backstabbing of ostensibly liberal institutions, was always the great subject.63 "The gossip," the legendary editor Ted Solatoroff called this topic dismissively, urging Williams to drop his preoccupation with backstage stories of competition and intrigue and instead to write more like Ralph Ellison (FB 7). Williams, who did not admire Ellison, was bemused by the suggestion. But Solataroff's comment nevertheless illuminates something important about Williams's central preoccupations. In Invisible Man, Ellison had crafted a resolution to the professional frustrations and racist humiliations faced by his own middle-class protagonist, and he had done so, in good part, through that unnamed man's sense of profound obligation to the Harlem zoot-suiters he witnesses on a subway platform.64 For Ellison, the encounter dramatizes the premise that Kenneth Warren argues has long been crucial to the idea of African American literature: the belief that "cultural identity" establishes a community of interest that allows African American elites to "direct and speak on behalf of the nation's black population."65 By contrast, The Man Who Cried I Am's quite different zoot-suit encounter suggests that there is, in fact, no profound connection between Max Reddick and "the whole ghetto scene" (71). Lacking Ellison's sense of warrant, what Williams has in its absence is merely the vocational trials of a man who thinks of himself not as the voice of his people, but as a freak and caprice. His very preoccupation with the mysteries of backroom deals and insider scuttlebutt confirms his marginalization.

Where for Ellison cultural identity is the material of profound art, then, for Williams "the gossip" becomes the occasion for baroque conspiracy narrative. By Williams's own account, in fact, The Man Who Cried I Am sprang directly from his sojourn in a sub-literary world rife with innuendo. "The idea for the book began to take shape in the early sixties," he wrote, while he "was travelling . . . for magazines, [and] newspapers." It was inspired, he added, by "people I'd met in publishing, [and] the news media," who spoke "knowingly" but obscurely about clandestine intrigue and Cold War geopolitics.66 Just as the novel focuses on publishing-industry gossip, in short, it was inspired by political gossip. The Man Who Cried I Am makes that material into an elaborate allegory about the corruption of civic discourse by concealed power. Gossip can be understood in one of its polar modes, Patricia Meyer Spacks points out, as "distilled malice," in which mode it functions as an informal means of social policing, reinforcing "complacencies of groups in power, groups whose members, when they gather, feel no need to question themselves or their assumptions."67 The conspiracy narrative distills such malice at still more intense levels of concentration. Hence the progress of Williams's narrative, which takes Max Reddick from doubts about the good faith of his friends and colleagues, to concerns about alliances among his peers and employers, to dark suspicions of hidden arrangements among the leaders of his industry, to the ultimate revelation of a vast, genocidal conspiracy.

Here the stakes of Williams's dispute with Wright become most clear. Wright had spoken powerfully on behalf of a promethean vision of civic education that had been a prominent feature of the cultural politics of the New Deal era — "enlist[ing] the sympathies, loyalties, and yearnings of the millions." William's fiction in response emphasizes the displacement of public speech by clandestine intrigue. Because the effect of that corruption is, in Williams's telling, to deny manhood to those it excludes from influence, The Man Who Cried I Am consistently figures conspiracy as sexual deviance. The Moses Boatwright incident is thus but one episode in a novel jammed with fantasies of emasculation and homosexual predation. Max Reddick's rectal cancer, it is implied, is a consequence of long years of racist treatment. A black man feels "the toe of the world halfway up his ass," Max thinks, in a motif repeated frequently throughout the novel (97). Alongside such fantasies of sexual victimization, the novel offers angry visions of covert homosexual power. In one extended dream sequence, for example, a character modeled on Carl Van Vechten visits Max in the hospital, where he is undergoing surgical treatment for hemorrhoids, to explain that gay men are in truth an alien species who have crossed interstellar space to invade the earth and set up a hidden network of global power.

Such bizarrely inventive fantasies of sexual paranoia function as counterpoint to the novel's seemingly dominant narrative of homosocial rivalry and male bonding. The friendship between Max and Harry first appears to be the stark inverse of the conspiratorial world that Williams associates with homosexuality, their stalwart commitment to their work chastely rigorous by contrast. But as Williams's novel proceeds ever deeper into paranoia, it inevitably undermines the distinctions Max would like to maintain. The pattern manifests most dramatically in the climactic moments when Max reads the dossier Harry has sent him containing evidence of the King Alfred plan. Harry has passed on the dossier — significantly, through the intermediary of an adulterous lover — as concealed revenge for Max's own adultery with his wife. Williams thus implicitly renders the lives of the straight writers as baroquely erotic as the queer conspiracy they imagine. Where the resolution to Jubilee hinges on the climax in which Vyry's naked torso is de-eroticized and made the catalyst of sentimental bonding, the conclusion to The Man Who Cried I Am, by contrast, makes Max and Harry's lives all about sex.

Most critical commentary on The Man Who Cried I Am views the revelation of genocidal conspiracy as the core of Williams's novel. In truth, the novel places as much emphasis on the implications of this erotic intrigue. But genocidal conspiracy and sexual rivalry serve in any case a complementary purpose in Williams's narrative. Both features work to supplant the ideal of public discourse with the truth of hidden power and concealed desire. On the face of it, by passing evidence of political corruption and racist conspiracy to Max, Harry should be fulfilling the two men's shared commitment to their mission as writers — to speak the truth and challenge illegitimate power. This is the mission for which Wright had eloquently spoken and that Harry Ames in turn has affirmed, writing to Max of his "hope that you can do with this information what I could not" (363). But both Harry's vengeful motive for sharing the lethal knowledge of conspiracy and his mode of transmitting it paints their exchange with the very intimations of intrigue and illicit desire that Max had fearfully perceived in homosexuality. "This is the jungle side . . . This is where the crawling things are," Max thinks, as he ponders Harry's treachery (379). "All these years I've been running to you, paying homage to you because to so many of us you were larger than life. . . . How you shrank" (381).

Seen in the light of its central love triangle, then, Williams's plot, although it appears nearly the inverse of Walker's, turns out to serve a similar mission. In Jubilee, Walker uses the plot of sexual rivalry to imagine a solidarity that transcends desire and thus to heroize the black leadership class whose mission of racial uplift she longed to see fulfilled. Williams uses the same plot device to limn the frustration of that class's sense of historical purpose; in The Man Who Cried I Am, racial solidarity cannot withstand the rivalry and suspicion fostered by a repressive society. But, even in depicting that failure, The Man Who Cried I Am, much like Walker's Jubilee, is centrally concerned to reframe and ultimately set aside the example of Wright, seeking in doing so to imagine a role for the middle-class African American writer that would both inherit and somehow move beyond the revolutionary politics with which Wright was associated. As an alternative to the visions of public speech and mass solidarity for which Wright had stood in the 1940s, Williams suggests, much like Walker, that only a politics of canny survival and clandestine subversion could endure.68

The affinity between Walker and Williams may be most clear in the closing chapters of The Man Who Cried I Am. Representing Max Reddick's final thoughts about Harry Ames there, Williams effectively redefines Wright's stature in a fashion that is surprisingly similar to Walker's approach. He "did not hate the way Harry had," Max thinks in his last moments, "not that killing hatred that turned in upon yourself and those close to you" (385). The line suggests an effort, like Walker's, to repurpose the radicalism each writer saw in Wright, to re-make a vision of promethean transformation into a design for surviving a persistently racist society. That the problem was in some ways insurmountable is evident in the fact that neither writer seemed able to keep from thinking that Wright would not approve.

---

Sean McCann is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.

---

Banner Image: Russell Lee, Street in Negro section of Chicago, Illinois, April 1941, photograph, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

References