Folk culture and masculine identity Charles Burnett's 'To Sleep with Anger.'

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Karen Chandler

When Harry (Danny Glover), an old Southern friend of Gideon and Suzie's, arrives, he further exacerbates the tensions between Babe Brother and his family with exciting tales of aggression and subversion. Harry, having lived a nomadic existence, seems used to fast women and violent men; although he has fathered at least two sons, he has mostly lived apart from family. Making himself comfortable in Gideon and Suzie's house, Harry attracts a group of thrill-loving old friends, displaces Gideon, who suffers a stroke, and comes between Babe Brother and Linda, who eventually takes their child Sonny to live with Pat and Junior. After deciding to reject his family and accompany Harry on his travels, Babe Brother fights with Junior and accidently injures Suzie with a knife. He finally comes to his senses and renews his commitment to his family. After Harry suffers a fatal heart attack, Gideon emerges from his coma, rejoins the family, and reunites with Samuel. The film ends with neighbors helping the family cope with the continuing presence of Harry's corpse.

The narrative focuses on the process of Babe Brother's moral education. A naive protagonist for much of the film, he must choose between two traditional models of masculinity, Gideon's and Harry's, both rooted in African-American survival strategies of the post-reconstruction South and the Great Migration. The strategies differ, of course. Gideon embodies domesticity, respectability, and the sharing of paternal authority. He works to maintain the backyard garden and chicken pen, irons his own clothes, attends church regularly, and discusses family problems with Suzie. By contrast, Harry embodies mobility, masculine presumption, and dishonesty. He has lived and traveled in the South and the Midwest before coming to Los Angeles. He tries to gain an advantage over a former lover, Hattie, now a born-again Christian, through his knowledge of her promiscuous past. And he substitutes vague boasts of his courage for direct assertions about his deeds. To Sleep with Anger acknowledges that Gideon's and Harry's strategies hold appeal for a contemporary generation. Indeed, the film suggests the inevitable continuity of certain masculine poses in black life, given the persistence of such social formations as segregation and black alienation from the mainstream. Yet To Sleep with Anger also clearly upholds Gideon as the man best able to facilitate familial well-being and stresses the nihilism and misogyny of Harry's model.

Nevertheless, Gideon presents an ambiguous model of heroism, defined not only by competence and strength, but also by self-denial and submission to others, behaviors that are at odds with Samuel's professional ambition and desire for dominance. To Sleep with Anger indicates that Gideon, along with Suzie, has worked hard and successfully at raising a family and creating a home. The beautiful backyard garden and Junior's and Samuel's material success signal the effectiveness of Gideon and Suzie's methods. In making the move from the South to Los Angeles, Gideon has sought to fit squarely within a safe, secure African-American middle-class life that suggests an apparent alignment with the dominant culture, though the latter rarely appears in the film. Yet Samuel, for one, questions the personal costs of such an alignment for a black man. Attempting to impart his ethos to Samuel in their confrontations over caring for Sonny, Gideon repeatedly tells Samuel that a father must think first of his child, not of himself or his career. Yet Samuel perceives this concern for others as weakness. And through Samuel's references to his father as a slave and a farm animal, the film indicates that, in spite of the obvious fruits of his labor, Gideon may have been an object of others' exploitation.(4)