"The Singing Man Who Must be Reckoned With": Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the Poetry of Countee Cullen

African American Review, Winter, 2000

Ultimately, Cullen begins to associate the loss of private desire with the loss of poetry itself. The tensions and creative interactions among sexual desire, creative production or "singing," and the temptations of social acceptance form the central conflict of much of "The Black Christ." Its inability to resolve these conflicts marks the dying fall of Cullen's poetic project. "The Black Christ" makes explicit what remains lurking just beneath the surface of "Heritage": that the realization of illicit forms of desire results in death, a death Cullen is finally unwilling to undergo.

Whereas the drama of desire and self-renunciation in "Heritage" is figured as a split within the one body of the narrator, in "The Black Christ" these are divided into various characters: the mother who becomes the feminine figure of Christian patience and forbearance; the white mobs who embody the threats that remain mostly felt but not seen in "Heritage"; the rebellious brother Jim who represents both sexual desire and to some degree the inspiring spirit of lyric poetry; and, of course, the narrator, who in the end represents nothing so much as the poetics of self-renunciation. The poem, in fact, opens with an act of self-renunciation similar to that which concludes "Heritage," as the narrator pleads to God for forgiveness, partially because he believed God would not act on his behalf. The burden of his guilt is something that the poet will carry with him to eternity, and his only response can be to sing "For all men's healing." His poetry must serve a public social purpose nobler than the failures of his individual soul which is "of flaws / Composed" (207).

Thus we already know before things get started what the appropriate mode of masculine behavior is to be: that of repentance and self-renunciation. Whereas the combination of desires in "Heritage" at least makes the narrator "writhe" with both ecstasy and indecision, creating a dramatic tension that needs to be resolved, in "The Black Christ" the plea for forgiveness and the enunciation of social purpose dissolve all dramatic tension from the outset. Ironically, the poet goes on to ask a few lines later why no powerful manifestations of masculine presence can be found in the present:

We cry for angels; yet wherefore,

Who raise no Jacobs any more?....

No men with eyes quick to perceive

The Shining Thing, clutch at its sleeve,

Against the strength of heaven try

The valiant force of men who die;

With heaving heart where courage sings

Strive with a mist of Light and Wings,

And wrestle all night long, though pressed

Be rib to rib and back to breast,

Till in the end the lofty guest

Pant, "Conquering human, be thou blest." (208)

Despite the sublimated suggestion of homoerotic desire in bodies that "wrestle all night long, though pressed / Be rib to rib and back to breast," the poem's opening lines clearly indicate that all the wrestling that needs to be done has been in the past. Rather than wrestling blessings from angels, the narrator needs somehow to wrestle a pardon from God that he will not receive until the last day.