Love and Sex in the Afro-American Novel

Gloria Naylor

In The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

This dual consciousness was present from the beginning of the Afro-American literary experience. When black writers officially joined American letters with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, they brought along a separate and individual history of letters that was already 122 years old. But the eighteenth-century poets Lucy Terry, Jupiter Hammon, and Phillis Wheatley were legal nonentities because they were slaves, and they were representative of a people for whom literacy was not just denied but illegal. I think it is important that we stop a moment and reflect on exactly what this meant. When a government declares that murder, rape, arson, and theft are illegal, it is saying that individuals who insist upon engaging in such activities are a danger to the orderly and decent progress of that society. The laws decree that there is no place within society for murderers, and so it provides guidelines on how they are to be removed, to be made nonbeings, through prison or death. And the laws decreed that there was no place in this society for blacks who could read and write, or who wanted to teach their children to read and write. To attain literacy, then, was actually to attain “being” within the social fabric, and that was an illegal existence until the abolition of slavery.

When these newly declared Americans joined the literary mainstream and turned their attention to the novel, they quite understandably did not pattern their efforts after the romanticism then prevalent in the Euro-American literary tradition, They used slave narratives to inform the structure of their work because it was slavery that had informed their consciousness within the American experience; their creative imagination had been shaped by who they were and what they had been. In this the Afro-American writer was one with the Euro-American writer and all writers from the beginning of recorded history. The idea of art as a disembodied, autonomous entity is entirely false. Yes, the process behind the work of art has no race or gender.

When I am actually within a work I am not black, I am not a woman, and I contend that I am not even a human being. I have given myself over to a force. But the product of that force is always rooted in a specific body politic, both personal and historical. It is not just a matter of writers gathering “material” from their surroundings; the words produced by that mindless state of possession, by that raw imagination, need to be filtered through the mind of the writer in order to attain coherence, and that filter can only be what he or she is.

However, when the nineteenth-century Afro-American writers found themselves thrust into a Euro-American society and readership, they felt the tension of having to reconcile the halves of their dual, hyphenated existence as they encountered mores and expectations that had come from a history that was foreign—or even antithetical to—their own. The result of this tension can be illustrated with Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1856) and William Wells Brown’s Clotell (1853). Both were abolitionist works with the same audience in mind—northern white liberals. Melville was able to obtain a subtle irony in “Benito Cereno” by viewing slavery and the activities aboard the San Dominick through the eyes of his white contemporaries, and then slowly turning the tables to expose some of the stereotypes held about black slaves. What you see in that novella is not really what you see. By emphasizing the gap between the reality of the slave experience and white perceptions of it, Melville gives “Benito Cereno” a complexity of meaning which makes it art.

Brown’s novel, however, remains an artifact because, among other reasons, of its total absence of irony. Brown’s vision of slavery was shaped solely through the eyes—and ideals—of Melville’s white contemporaries. Clotell had little to do with the reality of slavery for black women, but much to do with the writer’s consciousness of white perceptions and sensibilities—especially those concerning the ideal roles for a white female. Brown’s light-skinned female slaves were wrapped in the piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness that were part of the Cult of True Womanhood in the nineteenth century. Brown stressed piety and purity because, above all, he wanted to protest the forced sexual liaisons between black women and white men, and to allay perceptions of black women as promiscuous. The myth of the black woman as sexual temptress had arisen, like all myths, to serve a need. And in this case it was to assuage the guilt of the perpetrators of rape by placing the burden for the crime upon its victims. No one had stopped to question the absence of simple common sense behind this myth, of course. After twelve to sixteen hours of field work—“from can’t see to can’t see”—and after cooking, cleaning, and caring for their own families, wouldn’t it be more likely that black women with energy left for satisfying those huge sexual appetites of theirs would grab the nearest male slave rather than sneak all the way up to the big house to lurk in the bushes for a chance to seduce the white master?

Female sexuality was now painted in shades that were, if anything, too vivid.

But Clotell was to set the pattern for addressing sexuality in Afro-American literature for the next sixty years. At the turn of the century, when Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie were daring to examine the causes and subtle repercussions of white female prostitution, black women in our literature were continually depicted as overly chaste and virtuous. Novels such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Contending Forces had light-skinned heroines whose sterling morals were instruments in the cause of racial uplift. It is interesting to note that liaisons between black men and white women, though not common, did exist. But novelists never seemed to feel a need to defend the purity of black men. Rather, always at the center of the issue were black women, whose sexuality was believed to reflect upon the entire race. And black female sexuality was therefore whitened and deadened to the point of invisibility.

This was to change during the Harlem Renaissance. The young artists who came to the forefront during the 1930s made it their personal mission to celebrate those aspects of the Afro-American experience that had been overlooked by earlier writers. Female sexuality was now painted in shades that were, if anything, too vivid. The literature of this era is full of brown skins, swaying hips, fecundity, and primitive sexuality. One critical line of thought suggests that this was no real change from the nineteenth century, in that Afro-American writers were still overly conscious of their white audience. The popular success of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, the argument goes, indicated a voyeuristic desire on the part of white readers for portrayals of excessive sexuality in blacks, and Afro-American writers therefore knew that it would have been impossible for images other than these to be commercially successful. I disagree with that line of thought. Serious artists don’t look to the marketplace to supply the visions in their work. These younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance were actually rebelling against the burden of “lifting the race” to white approval. I believe that Zora Neale Hurston’s attitude is truer to their real motives: she thought that you did not have to elevate folk culture to art because it is art.

These writers had taken their lead, actually, from Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), which predated Nigger Heaven by three years. It must have been liberating for them to read of a Karintha whose “skin was like the dusk on the eastern horizon”—yes, dark and beautiful—or to have lusty accounts of men sent to prison or to their graves for fighting over a woman's sexual favors. In Cane, a long-denied part of life was finally being breathed into black characters.

A certain double consciousness, however, was at play during the Harlem Renaissance. First of all, black female writers were more restrained in depicting female sexuality than black male writers. Women protagonists in works like Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Jesse Fauset’s There Is Confusion give only subtle suggestions of wanting to defy convention and fully realize both their sexual and professional needs, and they finally opt for the safe confines of marriage. It is quite telling that Du Bois, a voice from the conservative generation, reviewed both Claude McKay’s Home To Harlem and Larsen’s Quicksand in the same issue of Crisis. He found McKay’s graphic depiction of urban black life so disturbing in its emphasis on “drunkenness, fighting, and sexual promiscuity” that it made him feel like taking a bath, while he approved of Larsen’s work wholeheartedly. Even Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which has been lauded by the feminist community as a revolutionary breakthrough for its time, displays the same restraint. Hurston’s vivid sexual imagery of a bee in the pear blossom is clearly her protagonist’s desire for a man to bring her to orgasm, but she slowly translates that into Janie Starks’s actively seeking one form of male support—financial or emotional—after another. Since it was imperative that Janie marry each of her partners in order to be a sympathetic heroine, Hurston glides over the fact that she leaves her first husband without benefit of divorce. The only revolutionary aspect of Their Eyes is that the woman does the choosing, not the man.

Moreover, a central irony underlies Langston Hughes’s classic manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:

We Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.

Hughes, together with Arna Bontemps and Wallace Thurman, did not openly explore his own sexuality in his work. I am not saying that it is necessary for gay writers to concern themselves only with the themes of homosexuality, but the total silence one finds within the prolific output of these men suggests conscious evasion. Like the heterosexual woman, the homosexual man was the victim of a double consciousness, a double standard. Obviously, fear or shame, within their own community and in the world outside it, held these newer voices back from full creative expression—expression, that is, of their whole selves.

James Baldwin is the only established male voice in the literary tradition to dare to explore black sexuality, and in all of its forms. He gave us the black family. He gave us men in love with men and with women, black and white. He gave us women in love with men, white and black. The following passage from If Beale Street Could Talk, a novel with a female narrator, manages to blend several forms of love and sexuality in a small space:

She put on a Ray Charles record and sat down on the sofa.

I listened to the music and the sounds from the streets and Daddy’s hand rested lightly on my hair. And everything seemed connected—the street sounds, and Ray’s voice and his piano and my Daddy’s hand and my sister’s silhouette and the sounds and the lights coming from the kitchen. It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues. And it was as though, out of these elements, this patience, my Daddy’s touch, the sounds of my mother in the kitchen, the way the light fell, the way the music continued beneath everything, the movement of Ernestine’s head as she lit a cigarette, the movement of her hand as she dropped the match into the ashtray, the blurred human voices rising from the street, out of this rage and a steady, somehow triumphant sorrow, my baby was slowly being formed. I wondered if it would have Fonny’s eyes. As someone had wondered, not, after all, so very long ago, about the eyes of Joseph, my father, whose hand rested on my head. What struck me suddenly, more than anything else, was something I knew but hadn’t looked at: this was Fonny’s baby and mine, we had made it together, it was both of us. I didn’t know either of us well. What would both of us be like? But this, somehow, made me think of Fonny and made me smile. My father rubbed his hand over my forehead. I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me and his breath being snarled, as if by a golden thread, deeper and deeper in this throat as he rode—as he rode deeper and deeper not so much into me as into a kingdom which lay just behind his eyes. He worked on wood that way. He worked on stone that way. If I had never seen him work, I might never have known he loved me.

While some say that Baldwin’s most lasting legacy will be his essays, this passage reflects beautifully the complex webs of human interaction that he so relentlessly pursued in his fiction.

It’s as if he saw a vacuum within the tradition and attempted to fill it with his novels. It might have been encouraging for him to have seen before he died another black male writer step forward with that kind of sensitivity and courage.

Modern black women writers have not only stepped forward but stepped beyond the traditional restraints against females exploring their own sexuality. Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, and Ntozake Shange are among the many poets who have led the way in tackling the taboos against writing about abortion, menstruation, and orgasm—the last a whole subject in and of itself. But in just confining ourselves to the novel, we see a wealth of exploration. Without apology or romanticism, Paule Marshall produced Merle Kibona, a beautiful black-skinned woman with a loud voice, flashing bracelets, and a passion for living so strong that she haunted the minds of her sexual partners—male and female, black and white. Toni Morrison gave us Sula, who outraged an entire town because she saw nothing wrong in taking pleasure from sleeping with other women’s husbands without love or regret. But I believe Alice Walker is the most skilled and the most creative in portraying women characters who exult in and are sometimes victimized by their sexuality—Meridian, Celie, Shug Avery, and any female protagonist in In Love and Trouble.

And right there—behind the brown of our irises—there’s a tiny little white man staring back at us.

But sex is sex, and love is something else again. Whenever the question arises about the alleged lack of love or affection in the Afro-American literary tradition, criticism is rarely directed toward the classics—Native Son or Invisible Man, or, for that matter, any novel by a male. While black men have written freely about female sexuality, depicting love seems to have been silently relegated to women. Just as the black woman’s body was the battleground for “proving” the chastity of an entire race, now it is the black woman’s novels that are held accountable for “proving” that the Afro-American community contains harmonious and loving couples. Having said that much by way of a preface, I want to address this particular criticism of the Afro-American female novelist because I feel that it is not only fallacious but rooted in another—and more insidious—form of double consciousness.

Baldwin’s narrator in Beale Street says: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.” She is referring to the glass that is erected in the visiting rooms of prisons. Many of us are still prisoners. Du Bois’s veil has been lifted for many middle-class professionals in the arts and in academia, some of whom were born into privilege, and some of whom are now power brokers. The veil has turned into glass, and that glass is a mirror in which we believe we are seeing our true selves. But we're actually seeing something else: we will wake up in the morning and notice that there are a pair of dark feet peeking out of our Bill Blass pajamas. Then we bathe, shave, comb our hair. And since there’s been a civil rights movement, we’ve no reservation about fixing ourselves a bowl of gourmet grits for breakfast. We may even take the time to write out checks for the United Negro College Fund or Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. A quick glance into the hall mirror before going out of the door to meet the world, and right there—behind the brown of our irises—there’s a tiny little white man staring back at us. And these are the eyes that have read and judged whether or not there has been love in the Afro-American novel, not the eyes that should be turned inward to our own experiences.

The novels by contemporary black women are, indeed, reflective of our unique history and experience. Although the African and European lived and worked side by side, they were governed by radically different worldviews and adhered to a different set of mores in their respective communities as slave and master. And when Africans entered the broader stream of society as Afro-Americans they were able to survive in a hostile environment—and some even to succeed—due to a unique relationship between the sexes. Survival meant that black men and women had to define their roles differently. While William Wells Brown was cloning his female slaves in the image of the white cult of true womanhood, Harriet Jacobs was living the life of an enslaved mulatto; and her account of how she retained her dignity under sexual assault is vastly different from that of the fictionalized Clotell. By the time Jacobs had reached puberty she knew that she was soon going to be forced into a sexual liaison with her owner. who was much older than herself and married. So she deliberately entered into a relationship with another white man who was young and single, and she bore him two children. Jacobs understood the effect this brutally honest account would have on her northern liberal audiences, but she also understood that she existed within a different set of moral parameters. And it was within those boundaries that she carved a path of dignity for herself by her own definition of piety and purity:

But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely. If slavery had been abolished, I, also, could have married the man of my choice, I could have had a home shielded by the laws . . . but all my prospects have been blighted by

slavery. . . . I tried hard to preserve my self-respect.

The Afro-American also inherited a different definition of domesticity. Slave women would live in trial marriages with a man, and it was only after conception that the arrangement would be finalized. And once finalized, it was normally adhered to until death or forced separation tore the couple apart. The security of most Euro-American marriages hinged on the bride bringing chastity to her new home, but for the slave Afro-American it was a demonstrated ability to conceive. The child was the true beginning of a family, and the family was the source of sanity in the slave community. Given the precariousness of their circumstances, slaves even created extended families that held the same import for them as the Euro-American nuclear family. So while a father figure might be absent in black women’s literature, there is always a family. And that presence is central and often celebrated in all of its forms.

Both ways we lose the message: I am here.

Finally, we need to speak of submissiveness. That was not in the cards for us. Black women have rightfully not depicted themselves as frail damsels given to fainting spells, or as the kind of silent, long-suffering middle-class housewives who have emerged in contemporary literature. Our history decreed that if we tried to pull something like a fainting spell, our heads would hit the floor. Whether in the cotton fields of the South or the factories of the North, black women worked side by side with their men to contribute to the welfare of the family. This did not mean that men were demeaned and unloved, but it did mean that black women had a voice about the destiny of their families. That independence and resiliency were admired because they aided in our collective survival when society made it difficult for black men to find work. But when we began to internalize Euro-American values, then black women were no longer “real” women—and of course only a real woman could love or be loved by a man.

Depictions of strong women who fought back with their hands or their mouths flow from our unique history, and it does not mean that there is an absence of affection between the sexes.

Note carefully the timbre of this passage from Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow:

But she never left off telling him about himself—his no-’count, shiftless ways, his selfishness, his neglect of his own. Spending damn near your whole paycheck on some barfly and a bunch of good-timing niggers and your children’s feet at the door. She sent her grievances echoing up and down the deserted street, and strumming along the power line to the trolley, telegraphing them from one end of Brooklyn to the other. She acquainted the sleeping houses with her sorrow. Her rage those dark mornings spoke not only for herself but for the thousands like her for blocks around, lying sleepless in the cold-water flats and one-room kitchenettes, the railroad apartments you could run a rat through and the firetraps above the stores on busy Fulton Street and Broadway; waiting, all of them, for some fool to come home with his sodden breath and half his pay envelope gone. Lying there enraged and vengeful, planning to put the chain on the door, change the lock first thing in the morning, have his clothes waiting out in the hall for him when he came lurching in at dawn. Or she’d be gone, her and the kids. She’d just take her babies and go! The place stripped of all sign of them when he got there. Vowing as she lay there straining to hear his unfocused step on the stairs and the key scratching blindly around the eye of the lock, that there would be no making up this time, no forgiving. This was one time he wasn’t going to get around her with his pleas and apologies and talk, with his hands seeking out her breasts in the darkness. Not this morning! Nigger, you so much as put a finger on me this morning and you’ll draw back a nub! Praying (Lord please!) that he wouldn't turn on the light and simply stand there looking at her with his shamefaced self, his pain, until her love—or whatever it was she still felt for him—came down.

In the writings of Afro-American women, the test of love is what black woman stays through. It is normally only death or desertion that tears her from the man. But critics only zero in on the trials in an attempt to show that this literature is pessimistic and hopeless. Margaret Atwood said, “People without hope do not write books.” That is quite true. It is more than difficult to craft a work of art—at times it is inhumanly demanding. Bitterness and hatred are simply not powerful enough to keep you going. You cannot make those sacrifices year after year if you are not fueled by both love of your work and love of your subject matter.

Alice Walker’s work has been distorted by many black critics through the very glass I've been discussing. People who attacked her recent novel, The Color Purple, blatantly misrepresented the entire context of that book. They only looked at the first third and disregarded the growth of all of her characters. The infamous Mister changes into a sensitive man (as most of the men have changed in her novels) and he actually becomes the spokesperson for Walker’s definition of love:

This is the first time I lived on earth as a natural man. It feels like a new experience. . . .

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love, why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. . . .

Why you think? I ast.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones almost by accident. . . . The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

In their novels black women writers have always wondered about our relationships to our men (sexual or not), and our relationships to each other (sexual or not). And I believe it is fair to say that we have not been met halfway. We already know about the classics, Native Son and Invisible Man. David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident and Ernest J. Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men are classics in the making, and it is refreshing to read in the first of them a probing and sensitive treatment of male bonding. But, ironically, both novels have white women as the motivating force or channel for their narratives. It seems that for the most part black male writers have not used their creative energy to wonder about their relationships with us. And, since Baldwin, none have stepped forward even to explore the subject of relationships between black men.

It is not my intention here to castigate male writers or critics. On the contrary: I am putting out a call to the black men who are within reach of my voice. There is a whole unexplored territory in our literature—and in our experience—waiting for some man who is courageous enough to enter it. And it does take courage, given this society’s definition of what it is to be a “man,” for a male and especially a black male to say, yes, I am vulnerable enough to fear loving her or him; I fear hurting; I fear that the relationship just may not work, but I am willing to expose the whole process of wondering on paper. It would be a pity if, after wresting literacy and our very being out of this society, we as artists don’t have the courage to define ourselves only by what we are. And it would also be a pity if we as critics wait for the outside world to view our work through its value systems and hail the pain, so we can jump in and hail the pain, too. Both ways we lose the message: I am here. That I contains myriad realities—not all of them pretty, but not all of them ugly, either:

and somehow when you talk about home

it never gets across how much you

understood their feelings

as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale

and even though you remember

your biographers never understand

your father’s pain as he sells his stock

and another dream goes

And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that

concerns you

and though they fought a lot

it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference