"Like a violin for the wind to play": lyrical approaches to lynching by Hughes, Du Bois, and Toomer

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Kimberly Banks

The idea of familial return that Toomer uses in "Blood-Burning Moon" complicates ideas around geographical return. If the geographical return is an attempt to fulfill a new dream in an old place, then the familial return is an attempt to produce new familial relationships by discarding the distanced intimacy fostered during slavery. The danger is that the new family form will reproduce the dynamics of the master-mistress relationship. Unlike Carma in Toomer's story of the same name, Louisa does not negotiate with men for freedom and security. Louisa naively enjoys the fact that Bob's whiteness pulls against Tom's blackness. After Tom's death, Louisa loses her naivete and seeks to build community around a conscious understanding of racial violence. Louisa's transformation over the course of the short story throws Tom's relationship ideal into question. Each of them seeks a relationship that has no models. Tom only knows that Bob's presence mires their relationship in patterns of slavery, whereas Louisa is initially unaware of such a pattern. Tom seeks to alter the terms by which black men and women relate to one another, and his efforts eventually transform Louisa's understanding. In contrast to the myth of black men raping white women, Tom dies in order to foster new, mutual, long-term relationships between black men and women.

Both Toomer and Du Bois emphasize the importance of white men losing the power associated with being the master of a plantation to explain the occurrence of lynching. Toomer is more explicit about this transition as he describes Bob's shift in consciousness as becoming "consciously a white man's" (31). Through this consciousness, Bob envisions his power to rape Louisa during the days of slavery, thereby establishing his current relationship to Louisa as parallel to the one before Emancipation. Bob conceptualizes his relationship to Louisa in terms of violence, specifically rape. He understands her as a "nigger gal" (32) in order to heighten his sense of power over her and her exoticism. He thinks that "no nigger had ever been with his girl. He'd like to see one try. Some position for him to be in. Him, Bob Stone, of the old Stone family, in a scrap with a nigger over a nigger girl" (32). Bob recognizes that he is entering uncharted territory by articulating his relationship to Louisa as one of both violence and mutuality. Louisa is both his victim and his girlfriend. While asserting the power to claim a black man's girlfriend, he also claims an exclusive relationship with Louisa. John Henderson's attempt to rape Jennie in "Of the Coming of John" is not so fully articulated as Bob Stone's relationship with Louisa. John Henderson has a similar family background to Bob Stone, and this unspoken background enables Du Bois to take the racial history in the South for granted. The attempt to assert an exclusive relationship betrays a change in power dynamics. Stone's exercise of power is excessive as a response to his loss of power over black people's everyday movements.