Power to Undo Sin: Race, History and Literary Blackness in Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah, The

College Literature, Fall 2007 by Hada, Kenneth

After having been born so close to the time of whips and cold iron shackles we could fly up here in an airplane-which is like the promise of a miracle fulfilled-Which is no longer miraculous-but still there on the bed lies the old abiding mystery in its latest form and still mysterious. Why 'm I here, Master? Why? And how is it that a man [Sunraider] like him, who has learned so much and gone so far, never learned the simple fact that it takes two to make a bargain or to bury a hatchet, or even to forget words uttered in dedication and taken deep into the heart and made sanctified by suffering? Blood spilled in violence doesn't just dry and drift away in the wind, no! It cries out for restitution, redemption. (Ellison 1999, 271)

Ellison depicts a man who crossed racial barriers for the sake of political expediency, and in the process, he has denied the truth of himself and betrayed the righteousness of the African American cause. Finally, Ellison suggests that restitution and redemption are the vital elements missing from Senator Sunraider's life, which is to say that spiritual qualitites are essential to black liberation and potential harmony between the races.

Askew, like Ellison, connects an honest implementation of Christianity with the hope for racial toleration. Moreover, both authors depict the truest expressions of Christian virtue within their African-American characters whose endurance of racial intolerance justifies their esteemed places in the novels.

Another example of crossing barriers occurs when Althea finds herself in the office of a black newspaper in Greenwood. It is here that she encounters professional blacks who are unmoved by her histrionic behavior, yet they are obligated to help her given the nature of Jim Crow society (Askew 2001, 156ft). Shortly thereafter, Althea finds herself at Graceful s house. Uninvited, she simply barges into the empty home, showing little concern for the fact of individual ownership or privacy. Yet it is in this crossing, as Althea pokes around in the home of Graceful's mother, that she begins to recognize that Graceful is a person with a "history" rather than a dehumanized object that exists to serve Althea 's whims (167). By the use of crossing scenes such as these, Askew seeks to undo the master-slave hegemony operative within Althea as representative of the white power structure.10

Shared pain is another strategy that Askew uses to crumble the hierarchy that objectifies blacks. Pain is an equalizer. Physical pain of child birth is graphically displayed as is the emotional pain of unwanted births that are the result of rape. Askew develops three birth scenes in the novel. These suggest both inter and intra-racial violence with the accompanying emotional pain of regretable individual histories that characters futilely try to repress. Both Graceful and Althea share the same last name (Whiteside). Both are trying to make sense out of their inherited familial dysfunction, and both are intimately aware of problematic births occurring under mysterious circumstances. Askew s depiction of emotional and physical pain serves to unite the characters in a shared world where survival is more important than social hierarchies.