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

African American Review, Winter, 2000

So it is not surprising that at the end of "Heritage" the narrator chooses survival. If his heart and head--his private longings, thoughts, and desires-- have not yet realized they are civilized, he at least must guard against the destructive flood their publicity might entail. He seeks to cool his blood, an image of the death of his desire that avoids the social death that his stripping might occasion. Indeed, perhaps it is not accidental that in the collection Color, Cullen chose to follow "Heritage" with "For a Poet," wherein he imagines his dreams wrapped in a silken cloth and buried in a coffin-like box, a form of psychic death that purchases a form of public freedom. [15]

"Heritage" is often taken to be Cullen's best poem. In many ways it foreshadows the obsessions that mark Cullen's poetry throughout the rest of his career, particularly an obsession with the need to sacrifice individual desire for some greater good, often but not exclusively associated with Christianity. In "Judas Iscariot," the clearly homosocial and suggestively homoerotic bond between Judas and Jesus is broken when Jesus asks Judas to betray him to fulfill God's work of salvation.

Then Judas in his hot desire

Said, "Give me what you will."

Christ spoke to him with words of fire,

"Then, Judas, you must kill

One whom you love, One who loves you

As only God's son can:

This is the work for you to do

To save the creature man." (126)

In this reading, Judas is the most faithful disciple to his friend/lover Christ. He gives the "young Christ heart, soul, and limb / and all the love he had" (128), but he gives that love precisely by giving up Jesus as the object of his "hot desire" for the higher purpose of the people's salvation. In "The Ballad of the Brown Girl," the doubting "Lord Tom" gives up on the true object of his desire in order to marry a "nut-brown maid" with riches and social standing.

Many of the poems that appear in Copper Sun and in The Black Christ deal with the problem of lost love, failed love, the failure to love--too many to analyze individually. While some of this can be attached to his failing marriage with Yolande Du Bois, it also seems clear that Cullen is crestfallen at his decision to leave behind male lovers for a publicly acceptable marriage, men whom he cast in the role of poetic muses. During this period Cullen writes Alain Locke, complaining not only of his sexual failures in marriage but of his loss of social contact with male associates who have since been identified as gay (Reimonenq 150). Further, in the dedicatory poem for The Black Christ, Harold Jackman and two others are described as three who have not bowed the knee to "grasp a lock / Of Mammon's hair." Instead, they are those "Who have not bent / The idolatrous knee, / Nor worship lent to modern rites ... / Three to whom Pan is no mere myth / But a singing Man / To be reckoned with" (180). Pan, as Gerald Early points out, is a mythological figure noted not only for his singing abilities but also for his sexual prowess, a predilection often directed toward young males (180). For the poet, Jackman appreciates the powers of a highly sexualized singing man. If Cullen's marriage to Yolande Du Bois was a way of sealing his position in acceptable social circles, it seems that Cullen's lamentations of the lost loves and desires of his youth have less to do with Yolande than with the losses required to achieve social acceptance.