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

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

This grammar rewrites the heterosexual assumptions of black music as it is traditionally conceived. In the transitional Another Country, Baldwin attempted to evoke the bohemian world through a sequence of riffs and montages, fractured forms that express the brilliance and movement of improvisation. The late-night world of jazz clubs, endless talk, and sexuality - this is the milieu that Baldwin depicts, but he debunks the popular representations of bohemian elan, extending his public argument with Mailer here through the novel form instead of the polemical essay. Baldwin contends that white liberals' celebration of jazz as a form of oppositional cultural power has in effect robbed black bohemianism of its vanguard potential, holding it hostage to the misguided hero-worship of white consumer culture. Positions like Mailer's construct the black musician as stud, making his artistic authority a function of his sexual potency, a rhetorical move that epitomizes unconscious liberal racism. For Baldwin, the black musician is the intellectual, the restless experimenter who takes apart dominant musical forms and recasts them; the sexual lionizing of the black musician merely appropriates him for white consumption, and, Baldwin warns, if black musicians embrace this myth, they will be destroyed by it, as demonstrated by the case of Rufus Scott, the tragic character at the center of Another Country.(17)

Understood in terms of mourning, blues and jazz typically express the desire of a masculine subject for a lost feminine object.(18) Just Above My Head revises this formulation by interspersing scenes of gospel performances with explicitly homoerotic tableaux, highlighted by Arthur and Crunch's harmonious antiphony in Birmingham, their voices witnessing their love and desire for one another, a sexual longing that will be consummated shortly thereafter. Mourning is the psychosexual process that connects an individual to the past, insofar as the ego is constituted by a history of its losses - through linguistic substitution, the introjection of lost objects. Yet here Arthur, the itinerant bluesman who sings of love and loss, transforms the traumatic history of African Americans into a prophecy of the future, and his voice becomes the oracle of a new world. Hall recognizes Arthur as the instrument of a religious tradition that makes itself felt in social protest: "He sang, he had to sing, as though music could really accomplish the miracle of making the walls come tumbling down. He sang: as Julia abandoned her ministry, Arthur began to discover his" (219). In this view the blues singer embodies political and cultural agency, the opportunity to change society through participating in a vision that can raise the political consciousness of an audience.

But although Arthur enjoys the refuge of a shared space with Crunch and, later, with Jimmy, Julia's jazz pianist younger brother, the walls do not so much come tumbling down as implode upon him. Arthur's song may be his confession, but it is left to his brother Hall to redeem Arthur by passing on his story. Arthur's legacy remains in the memories of his friends and brother, who, at the end of the novel, imagines Arthur's voice raised in song and understands that redemption lies in interconnectedness, in living relationships, and in the memories of loved ones: ". . . ain't nothing up the road but us, man" (559).