Michael K. Johnson. Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by John M. Reilly

Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2002. 293 pp. $34.95.

Among American cultural products only jazz has equaled the story of the frontier for durability. Before its classical formulation in the famous essay by Frederick Jackson Turner on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), recital of the encounter of representative civilized men with wilderness (or vacant spaces) and its denizens had been rendered in numerous exploration narratives such as Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America (1542); dozens of accounts of the captivity of settlers by Indians published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the forest romances of James Fenimore Cooper; and, of course, prolifically in the writings of American public figures, among the most influential of such writings, according to Richard Slotkin in his studies of frontier myth, probably being the volumes in The Winning of the West, published by Theodore Roosevelt (1889-1896).

The idea that the frontier rendered American experience, and American people, unique gained even greater cogency in popular consciousness during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the appearance of the variation on the frontier tale we know as the Western. The Buffalo Bill publications by Ned Buntline (1823-1886); the proliferation of novels by Zane Grey, Max Brand, and other cowboy champions; the more than 800 Western films produced by the Republic and Monogram studios; and, overseas, the publications of such devotees of the genre as Karl May, whose German language stories of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou reportedly sold more than 100 million copies,all of these have served to create a master narrative that provides a template applicable for all sorts of things American, from Martin Scorsese's scenario of The Taxi Driver to the mannerisms of an American president from Texas.

The insight Michael K. Johnson brings to bear on the subject of the frontier narrative is that within its chronicle of conquest it includes also a plot of male identity formation. Suggested in Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel and developed into fuller explanation by the scholarly work of Gail Bederman, David Leverenz, and Lee Clark Mitchell, this identity plot rests on the belief, in Johnson's words, "that an encounter with otherness transforms the subjectivity of the hero." The hero, thus, becomes "a new man and the representative of a new manhood, American masculinity ... superior to both the savagery of the American Indian and the overcivilized manliness of the European because American manhood combines the best elements of both."

Generally speaking the master narrative of the American frontier has been a white man's story. The Native American is marginalized once his utility to the European is exhausted, and the black man has been almost uniformly excluded from the cast of primary characters. The implication of such exclusion is severe: If the frontier master narrative accounts for the achievement of masculinity, the black man is denied normative identity. Yet it is Johnson's contention that African American male writers have, in fact, engaged the "mythic narrative" of the frontier and through that engagement altered and extended the tradition "in ways unimagined by white writers."

In point of time, Johnson's first exhibit is A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), a work that relates an encounter with Cherokee Indians during which Marrant recognizes the humanity of his captors and the savagery displayed by slaveholding whites. This inversion of the convention of the frontier narrative is absent from Johnson's next major example, Oscar Micheaux's The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), in which the protagonist, an autobiographical projection named Oscar Devereaux, is framed on the model of the self-sufficient pioneer and entrepreneur; however, Johnson's reading of the novel, in connection with other works by Micheaux, shows a failure to sustain the intended demonstration of black masculine attainment, since the last portion of the novel recounts a series of catastrophes that debilitate Devereaux. For Micheaux racism is not a factor in Devereaux's decline. Instead, the more likely obstruction to the rugged individual lies within the African American society that fails to support the ideology of individualism. It seems, then, that The Conquest best serves as an illustration of the mistaken tactic of imitating the patterns of the frontier story without adjustment for race.

Similar to Micheaux's novel in its assimilation of prevailing American ideology is Nat Love's The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" (1907). By a strategy Johnson terms "erasure of racial identity" that presents traits other than ethnicity and color as defining elements of his self-description, Love achieves the masculine identity expected in the frontier story. Unfortunately, though, the autobiography continues into a time when the frontier has closed, the cowboy's occupation is lost, and Love has become a Pullman porter who must endure racial segregation. Again race serves to impede an attempt to adopt the master frontier narrative without modification.