Beneath the Black aesthetic: James Baldwin's primer of Black American masculinity

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Andrew Shin, Barbara Hudson

Early on, the novel introduces the interactions among members of the Miller and Montana families, whose stories dramatize the impotence of black religion, which is portrayed as otherworldly, indifferent to civic duty. Through the Miller family Baldwin examines the dark underside of the black church, traditionally conceived as the heart of black communities and an integral element of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the source of forms of indigenous black expression. As Hall suggests, "Somebody was jiving the public, and I knew it had to be . . . [Julia's] father and mother, who surely did not look holy to me" (69). Julia, who is called to preach when she is seven years old, is the cynosure of the Miller family, but she is merely the instrument of a dominating father - "the zoot-suited stud of studs" (70) - whose familial authority has its analogue in the institutional power of the church. Julia is possessed of a beauty and voice that is coopted by a system of hieratic privilege: ". . . as a child and as a preacher, she had not belonged to herself, nor had the remotest idea who she was. She had then been at the mercy of a force she had had no way of understanding" (524). Julia's precociously charismatic style enthralls parishioners everywhere, and her father exploits this talent to make money - she is ultimately raped by him, symbolizing her assimilation to his despotic power.

For Julia's mother Amy, religious enthusiasm assumes the form of sexual display: "Julia's mother put up the better show, though her hats were flaunting, and her skirts were tight. . . . she always wore high heels - just to make sure you didn't miss those legs" (69). Baldwin here presents the church as incapable of organizing and using the energy of sexual desire to work for social and political change. Instead, this specifically feminine charisma is dissipated, channeled into the minutiae of sexual conquest, visual display, and vain enthusiasm, as witnessed by the erotic spectacle Amy makes in church: "When she got happy," Hall reports, "she would stroke her breasts" (69-70). Baldwin is not denigrating or ridiculing women; rather, he is dramatizing the tragic waste of Amy's spiritual energy, which, in the absence of a worthy political object to give it direction, ends by devouring her, consuming her from within - hence her death from breast cancer. In the Miller family, Amy's sphere of influence is limited to her ability to please her husband; thus, she is inevitably pitted against the charms of the daughter, who desires unconsciously to displace Amy in her husband's affections. Through Amy and Julia's fates Baldwin suggests that in the absence of political organization - like the Civil Rights Movement - female sexuality exhausts itself in invidious competition and aesthetic gesture. Baldwin does not aim to trivialize women in his depiction of Amy and Julia but rather to criticize the social structures that disempower them.

The relationship between Hall and Arthur Montana supplants the patriarchal incest of Joel and Julia Miller, a relationship based on coercion, violence, and rivalry. The boys take their cue from their father Paul, a jazz pianist who, unlike Julia's father, refuses to play the role of mentor, deeming it too authoritarian, allowing Arthur instead to cultivate his own voice in gospel music and the blues. Arthur develops into a fine singer and with his friends Crunch, Peanut, and Red tours the South, a trip that is also an excursion back in time; significantly, it is the site of Arthur's first fulfilling homosexual experience as well. From Tennessee to Atlanta and Birmingham, Baldwin presents a series of erotic images that rewrite the cultural mythology of the South, a mythology responsible for Peanut's lynching on a subsequent trip. Here, Baldwin challenges the sexual iconography that white Southerners consciously vilify and unconsciously imagine, offering in its place the tableau of two black men embracing: "They curled into each other, spoon fashion, Arthur cradled by Crunch" (207). This image of two musicians side by side offers a utopian vision of gay sexuality that challenges the figurations of a dystopic homophobia, destabilizing the culture's oppressive imagining of a fetishized black phallus. Through these images, Baldwin generates an alternative vernacular of black American masculinity.