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

African American Review, Winter, 2000

On this score, Cullen was not simply conflicted among allegiance to Africa, African Americans, and white cultural forms--different forms of cultural/public expression, we might say. Rather this cultural conflict was also a coded conflict between the public persona with its own very real longing and public displays of the body (one thinks of the dangling Phi Beta Kappa key at which Lewis smirks and the rather uncomfortable suits which Cullen always seems to be wearing in publicity photographs) and the private longings of the lover. Indeed, if we follow Houston Baker, Jr., and notice that the predominant motive of Cullen's romantic poetry is love, it seems appropriate to say that his private and illicit desires were the occasion for the lyric poetry that made him famous, that made his public and proper self-display possible at all (53). Cullen embraced a particular form of public "blackness" in his position as poet, but that very public position, which he eagerly wished to maintain, conflicted with a very diff erent form of "blackness" embodied in his private desires for black men. The tension between these different modes of being produced the creative tension out of which much of Cullen's poetry was born.

This split in the body between public face and private desire is, of course, relatively typical to Victorian masculinity in general, figured predominantly in someone like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, all manner of vampire novels, even Dimmesdale lashing himself mercilessly/masochistically in the privacy of his closet while his sadistic counterpart, Roger Chillingsworth, leers at the spectacle from the crack in the door. It found a different but related psychological expression among African Americans in the many works associated with the problems of passing or of having to "wear the mask" in a hostile racial environment. This split in Cullen was perhaps inevitable given his homosexual inclinations, since few men of any stripe were openly and assertively gay at this particular point in American history. While Bruce Nugent may have written a short story that openly displayed homosexual desire and behavior, and while Claude McKay may have included a homosexual character in Home to Harlem, these few drops of public literary homosexuality seem meager indeed when compared to the rivers of desire that seem to have flowed among many of the Harlem Renaissance literary masters--Main Locke, McKay, Cullen, Nugent, and Langston Hughes, to name only a few. [8] Du Bois's scathing denunciations of literary works that depicted bohemian sexual practices--he reviewed or spoke negatively of McKay, Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, and the anthology Fire, which contained Nugent's short story--suggest the degree to which the cultural leadership of the Renaissance subscribed to traditional bourgeois social values, at least as a matter of public discourse. [9]

The split between public and private was all the more inevitable for Cullen given his situation in his adoptive home. Rumor has it that Frederick Asbury Cullen modeled this kind of split for his son, serving both as exemplary Christian leader of the race and as seducer of choir boys (Lewis 76). Perhaps more pertinent for my purposes is Reverend Cullen's model of responsible Christian maleness, "responsibility" in this case turning on one's public activity on behalf of the race. Reverend Cullen's autobiography is replete with the values of Christian self-renunciation in service to God and others. The elder Cullen transformed Salem Methodist Episcopal from a tiny, struggling mission church to one of the most powerful African American churches of the twenties, with more than three thousand members, large property holdings, and a plethora of ministries to the tidal wave of immigrants from the South. While much has been made of Reverend Cullen's criticisms of the cabaret and club life, as well as the prostitution and sexual peccadillos that his adopted son found alluring, Cullen was far from a simpleminded moralist. Indeed, some of his most important work included public action on issues attendant to the assertion of black maleness in the world. He served as president in the local chapter of the NAACP and helped to organize a protest of the race riot in Brownsville, Texas. He helped send W. E. B. Du Bois to the League of Nations, helped organize the Silent Parade, and helped found the Urban League. Among his most important ministries at Salem was a commitment to the YMCA, through which he hoped to rescue Harlem boys from gang activity in the streets (Ferguson 20-21; Sernett 134). Whatever the limitations of such activism proved to be, it can hardly be said that Reverend Cullen's Christianity encouraged racial self-hatred. Indeed, in many ways, Reverend Cullen stood as an exemplar of that icon of racial leadership, the black preacher, noted by Du Bois as a man at "the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousa nd in number" (199).