Atlantic Studies
ISSN: 1478-8810 (Print) 1740-4649 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20
BOUNDARIES TRANSGRESSED Isabel Soto To cite this article: Isabel Soto (2006) BOUNDARIES TRANSGRESSED, Atlantic Studies, 3:1, 97-110, DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810500525499
Published online: 22 Aug 2006.
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BOUNDARIES TRANSGRESSED Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’1
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Isabel Soto
This essay argues that while Langston Hughes’s short story ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ (from The Ways of White Folks) may initially seem to depart from the Hughes repertoire (through its dizzying modernist style, for one), it ultimately endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and imaginative appropriation of alterity. I also seek to historicize Hughes’s text, inscribing it within a modernist practice, studies of which have traditionally promoted the EuroAmerican paradigm of a dehistoricized ‘‘modernist construction of authorship through displacement’’ (Cora Kaplan). Few writers of the first third of the twentieth century have undertaken travel */figurative and literal */as intensely as Hughes has. His work is anchored in representations of displacement and ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on modes of inquiry that promote displacement as central to an understanding of cultural practice. I draw substantially on Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic model and formulations of diaspora */not least because his influential work barely mentions Hughes, that most diasporic of modernist writers. I will argue that travel was aesthetically enabling for Hughes, enhancing what elsewhere I have termed his poetics of reciprocity or mutuality. Finally, Duboisian double consciousness also contributes to my discussion, which proposes a dialogic relationship between The Souls of Black Folks and The Ways of White Folks. KEYWORDS: Black Atlantic; Atlanticist; displacement; travel; modernism; miscegenation; poetics of mixture; Diaspora; Hughes, Langston
The last quarter of a century or so has seen a significant rise in critical studies which problematize the traditionalist view of literary modernism as a predominantly white, EuroAmerican practice, on the one hand, and that stress the inter-raciality of modernist production, on the other. Here, as elsewhere, Ralph Ellison sets an earlier example, acknowledging the role played in his literary apprenticeship by writers such as
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This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigacio´n en Enstudios Norteamericanos, Alcala´ de Henares (Spain), 28 /31 October 2004.
Atlantic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2006 ISSN 1478-8810 print/1470-4649 online/06/010097-14 – 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499
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Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, and, especially, T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land had ‘‘[the] power to move me [. . .] its rhythms were closer to jazz than were those of the Negro poets [. . .] its range of allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis Armstrong’’ (p. 160).2 Ellison was, of course, not alone in responding positively to the aesthetics of white modernist writers; Richard Wright and Langston Hughes3 are other, obvious examples, while the inflection of white modernist production by African and African American expressiveness boasts of a voluminous bibliography. More recently in critical terms, the revisionary approach to literary modernism has been driven largely, though not exclusively, by African American theorists. Houston A. Baker’s path-breaking Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, which posits a specifically African American modernist discourse, was closely followed by Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Morrison memorably advanced the argument that American literature is racially impure */‘‘there is no escape from racially inflected language’’4 */while Gilroy’s proposition of a creolized western modernity, driven by the forcible presence of Africans scattered throughout the New World, has become axiomatic. Indeed, such terms as ‘‘black Atlantic,’’ and variants such as ‘‘Atlanticist,’’ ‘‘transatlantic,’’ ‘‘circumatlantic,’’ ‘‘diasporic,’’ and so on, shape much current discussion of African American texts. A further crucial emphasis has been placed on the internationalist discourse of black American writing in the inter-war and post-war periods.5 It is with these critical interventions in mind and with the poetics of mixture they assert that I explore in this essay ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ from the short story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934) by that most diasporic of writers, Langston Hughes. I argue that the story richly rewards an Atlanticist approach and, further, that the text speaks */as does the collection as a whole */on behalf of the collaborative project among diasporic, racialized, and modernist discourses. 2
Ellison is also instructive on the hybrid sources of African American expressiveness itself. See, among others, his essay ‘‘Blues People,’’ Shadow and Act , 247 /58. 3 Hughes frequently cites Carl Sandburg as a literary mentor. The Spanish poet Federico Garcı´a Lorca (1898 /1936), in particular, exerted a significant */if critically largely unrecognized */ influence on Hughes’s work, especially in the 1930s. See Soto ‘‘Crossing Over: Langston Hughes and Lorca.’’ Hughes’s influence on Lorca remains to be explored. 4 Morrison, Playing , 13. 5 Michel Fabre’s work, too extensive to cite here, occupies a central place in this ongoing project. See also, among others, Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora. Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism ; William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left. African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars ; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind. Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935 /1960 . Edwards in particular has made a point of critiquing the Gilroy legacy for being either abstractionist (‘‘I am not arguing . . . to substitute another abstraction (an alternative principle of continuity such as the oceanic frame offered by Gilroy’s Atlantic [sic])’’ [The Practice of Diaspora, 12], or simply reductive: ‘‘[Gilroy’s] . . . fascination with the Atlantic frame . . . draws [him] back . . . into the quagmire of origins [. . .] we have started to see a reductive kind of ‘serial logic’ at work in studies of black transnational circuits of culture in which the ‘black Atlantic’ would have to be set beside a parallel oceanic frame of the ‘black Mediterranean’ or the ‘black Pacific.’ ‘‘The Uses of ‘Diaspora’,’’ 29 /30.
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This interpretive shift */the growing recognition of the racially hybrid (miscegenated) nature of American writing in tandem with a parallel acknowledgement of the place of African American expressiveness within twentieth-century literary modernism */ enables us to identify in ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ a diasporic or Atlanticist practice through a transgression of boundaries and the ability ‘‘to face (at least) two ways at once.’’6 Consistent with the aesthetically mixed well-spring of Hughes’s work, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ declares its allegiance to a modernist paradigm of hybrid poetics7 even as it endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and the imaginative appropriation of alterity. These concerns constitute themselves in the story on or across a boundary or threshold: point of view is not unitary but multiple, even elided; this in turn vexes discourse, which straddles various modes; finally, genre boundaries are compromised. All is executed in a dizzying and experimental ‘‘set of representational strategies,’’8 earning the text a rightful, if traditionally disputed, place within high modernist practice. The ways in which the African diaspora and miscegenation, events crucially constitutive of modernity in the Americas, give meaning to Hughes’s story also inform my discussion. Finally, it is worth reiterating that ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ not only engages the respective grammars of diaspora, race, and modernism, it places them in active dialogue, thus further problematizing the traditional paradigm that maintains these discourses as separate, stable, and racially uncontaminated. The negotiation of boundaries and thresholds, formal or otherwise, is addressed in Samira Kawash’s Dislocating the Color Line, an insightful enquiry into the presence of the manifold essentialisms in American culture insofar as they emanate from the entrenched trope of the colour line, a trope that Kawash revisits with the declared mission to offset the temptation ‘‘too quickly to ignore or forget the constitutive power of the color line [. . .] it produces and organizes knowledge, power, and subjectivity.’’9 Occasionally in isolation though more frequently in unison, knowledge, power, and subjectivity are indeed associated with, if not determined by, the colour line in The Ways of White Folks. There is perhaps no threshold crossing more fraught for the perpetrator, or that elicits more anxiety and punitive repression on the part of keepers of the colour line, than miscegenation. Even a cursory reading of the collection reveals that theme and execution, substance and style, are first and foremost driven by black-white relations. This dynamic is encoded in the title in the first place with its suggested objectivisation of ‘‘the ways of white folks.’’ Even if we were ignorant about Hughes’s own ethnicity, the title strongly points to a perspective located outside the ways of white folks, not within or pertaining to the ways of white folks. The title’s palimpestual resonance with Du Bois’s ‘‘epochal’’ The Souls of Black Folk10 and, more patently, with the scathing ‘‘The Souls of White Folk’’ from 6
Gilroy, Black Atlantic , 3. Perhaps the point to stress here is that Langston Hughes himself embodies a culturally hybrid subjectivity, most obviously as ‘‘an American, a Negro,’’ and draws on an attendant hybrid source of materials in his work, from folk material, vernacular speech, blues and jazz. Additionally, he was racially mixed. See below in the body of this article. The bibliography on this aspect of Hughes’s work is too voluminous to cite here, but Steve C. Tracy’s work on Hughes and the blues is particularly representative. 8 Seth Moglen, ‘‘Modernism’’ 232. 9 Kawash, Dislocating, 4. 10 Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes , I, 282. 7
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the Darkwater collection, hints at further lines, further thresholds to be crossed, towards an enabling literary kinship and simultaneously expressive of an uneasy ontology divided against itself. This kinship rests first and foremost on the recognition of an interracial dynamic at the heart of American life. Thus for Du Bois and Hughes the primary perspective, be it of ‘‘white folk(s)’’ or ‘‘black folk,’’ is both self-scrutinizing and illuminating of the other. As George Hutchinson declares with reference to the Hughes collection, ‘‘[it] is . . . important to recognize how the story about white folks’ ways has structured the narrative about the spiritual strivings and aesthetic manifestations of the souls of black folk.’’11 Inversely, in stressing how literary modernism, black and white, developed within, and helped determine, a mutual cultural context, Hutchinson notes that while ‘‘Southern black folks, ironically, had everything white folks most needed [. . .] part of the difficulty was proving to white people that blacks had anything of importance to offer.’’12 Du Bois’s dualistic racial model notwithstanding, Souls nevertheless also promoted an alternative paradigm of racial complementarity, wishfully envisaging ‘‘some day on American soil [when] two world-races may give each to each other those characteristics both so sadly lack.’’13 The Ways of White Folks ironically narrativizes both Du Bois’s wishful thinking and his subversive invitation to white folks to ‘‘step within the Veil’’14 and experience the reality of black folks. Hughes portrays a racial complementarity that exists more by default than by design, and always subject to a dynamic of power. Thus, black and white Americans are shown to co-exist in Hughes’s work according to that which, in another context, Mary Louise Pratt has described as the ‘‘radical asymmetrical relations of power’’15 which obtain in the contact zone between colonizers and colonized. As in the colonial contact zone, the balance of power in The Ways of White Folks is not uniformly favourable to whites: black Americans are portrayed not merely as enduring an abusive racist environment, but also and frequently operating within a context of resistance. This may take the form of direct or indirect challenge (‘‘Cora Unashamed,’’ ‘‘A Good Job Gone’’), irony or non-compliance (‘‘Slave on the Block’’), alternative creativity or appropriation of white cultural paradigms (‘‘Home,’’ ‘‘The Blues I’m Playing’’), but nowhere is that challenge more intense, and more transgressive, than in the bonding between black and white Americans. The breach of the colour line may manifest 11
Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White , 19. Hutchinson persuasively argues for further commonality between the respective authors of The Souls of Black Folk and The Ways of White Folks , that of pragmatist philosophy (especially as developed by William James) which interprets individual knowledge and beliefs in terms of their practical effect. Thus, ‘‘In Souls the pragmatic method was explicitly enunciated in the last paragraph of the first chapter’’ and ‘‘Langston Hughes may not have read pragmatist philosophy, but his short stories in The Ways of White Folks are like examples and arguments for pragmatist philosophy,’’ 37 /8. 12 Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance , 108 /9. 13 Du Bois, Souls , 16. 14 Du Bois, Souls , 5. In Darkwater, Du Bois’s vision has radicalized and darkened to the point where the Veil is presented as an exclusively black domain, marking the narrator off from the world even as he observes it: ‘‘I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within.’’ Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, viv. 15 Pratt, Imperial Eyes , 7.
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itself maternally (‘‘Cora Unashamed’’) or through the merest physical contact between two human beings such as a handshake (‘‘Home’’), or in the sublimated sexual desire of a white (female) patron for her black (female) prote´ge´e (‘‘The Blues I’m Playing’’). Thus, underpinning most if not all the stories is the suggestion, frequently the actualization, of erotic physical transaction. It would appear that The Ways of White Folks is making a very obvious and, therefore, fundamental point. Black and white Americans fall in love, have sex, make yellow or ‘‘red-headed’’ babies (the chromatic palette of the collection */indeed in Hughes’s work as a whole */deserves further scrutiny) in the first instance because blacks and whites travelled to the New World from the Old World and beyond */the former mostly under brutal duress, the latter mostly not. However, there it is */the story of the African diaspora and the black Atlantic is written to a significant degree on the racially impure body. In the last analysis, if the colour line holds */exists */at all in these stories, it is in the response of white society, anxious to maintain a genealogy of racial essentialism. Such is the case in ‘‘Poor Little Black Fellow,’’ which turns on a white family’s resistance to the inclusion ‘‘as one of its own’’ (an ironic phrase, which threads its way through the story) of the orphaned son of its deceased black servants. It is left to a black character, significantly encountered in Paris, to remark, ‘‘I haven’t been home in three years [. . .] the color line’s too much for me.’’16 Here, breaching the color line is part of an extra-national narrative, underscored in the final words where Arnie, the eponymous and ironically named ‘‘poor little black fellow,’’ abandons his white patrons and simply ‘‘went out.’’17 The considerable ironic power of ‘‘Poor Little Black Fellow’’ derives in part from its reversal of ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ immediately preceding it in the collection and whose plot on one level turns on the rejection by a white sailor of his (again) eponymous red-headed child. The offspring of racial transgression (the theme at the heart of ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’) is by contrast unproblematically accepted by his black mother and grandmother. Indeed, overall The Ways of White Folks provides an alternative narrative to pathological white allegiance to the colour line, inviting us to behold race in new ways. The relationship between life and aesthetics is not a facile one (it is more often intriguingly if frustratingly opaque), but one might venture the observation that mobility, including racial mobility or miscegenation, was an essential part of Hughes’s life experience. Revisiting in his autobiographical The Big Sea the paradigmatic slave narrative beginning, ‘‘I was born,’’ Hughes writes: ‘‘You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family.’’18 Surely not coincidentally, Hughes’s confessed disappointment over his ethnic mix follows on immediately from the memory of a challenge to his racial identity, which occurs in Africa in 1923 */‘‘The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was Negro.’’19 Kenneth W. Warren provides probably the most complete discussion of this incident, its reverberations throughout Hughes’s autobiography, in particular, and of the ‘‘ambiguities that inhere in diasporic thought,’’ in general: ‘‘[Hughes’s] narrative confronts the difficulty of sustaining, from a new world perspective, the imaginative contemporaneity of Africa and the ‘‘West’’ and of black elites and
16 17 18 19
Hughes, Hughes, Hughes, Hughes,
Ways, 147 /8. Ways, 159. The Big Sea, 11. The Big Sea, 11.
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masses.’’20 The Ways of White Folks similarly articulates the ambiguities at the heart of diasporic thought, itself a response to the ambiguity, slippage, and creolization which inhere in the transatlantic legacy. In Hughes’s stories, the body is invoked in metonymic representation of the African American experience as a whole; the poetics of mixture I noted earlier is revealed as a poetics rooted in a history of racial terror and transatlantic displacement. Indeed, a key concept in the present context is movement or spatial dislocation, long held to be a defining feature of Euro-American literary modernism21 yet, as has been persuasively advanced by Gilroy and others, no less constitutive of itinerant expressive culture such as the black Atlantic. What I am advancing here is that Hughes’s experience of displacement and transatlantic diaspora, as the offspring of ‘‘lots of different kinds of blood,’’ eventually found expression in the specific set of representational strategies */that is, a hybrid, fluid, characteristically modernist aesthetics / of ‘‘Red-Headed Baby.’’ Seth Moglen’s insightful article, ‘‘Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and ‘the broken cubes of Picasso’’’ notes that the representational experimentation of modernism was not mere formalism but also and crucially meaningful at the experiential level: ‘‘These formal experiments were the urgent efforts of men and women to find strategies to represent and respond to the social forces that were */often catastrophically */transforming their lives.’’22 The formal experimentation that characterizes ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ endorses this reading of modernist aesthetics, even (or especially) ‘‘the distinctive representational experiments of writers [such as Hughes] recently incorporated into an expanded modernist canon.’’23 Such emblematic black modernist texts as Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and Richard Bruce Nugent’s ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade’’ (1926), with their defiantly mixed poetics, inevitably come to mind as further examples of ‘‘distinctive representational experiments.’’ Moglen’s challenge to consider ‘‘the social system that gives rise, at once, to the modernist artistic revolution, [. . .] and to the confounding modern experience of the black diaspora itself’’24 urges us also to acknowledge the intersection of modernist, diasporic, and racialized discourses in ‘‘Red-Headed Baby.’’ Moglen’s article is but a very recent addition to the growing critical body attentive to a diasporic aesthetics extensive right across the colour line that I have been emphasizing. Once again, Paul Gilroy is instructive, noting that the transgression of racial boundaries performed by diasporic or Atlanticist poetics additionally reconfigures otherwise self-contained or discrete spatial and ontological categories: ‘‘[Diaspora] makes the spatialization of identity problematic and interrupts the ontologization of place.’’25 20
Warren, ‘‘Appeals for (Mis)recognition. Theorizing the Diaspora,’’ 392 /406. I have analyzed elsewhere how Hughes provides a partial corrective to Warren’s charge that Hughes compromises the Afro-diasporic solidarity expressed in ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’’ (1921), in particular through a cluster of poems on the Spanish Civil War that focuses on North African combatants. ‘‘Langston Hughes: The Poetics of Reciprocity,’’ 109 /25. 21 In Questions of Travel , Kaplan analyzes the theoretical practice that promotes the (EuroAmerican) myth of the dehistoricized ‘‘modernist construction of authorship through displacement,’’ 41. 22 Moglen, ‘‘Modernism,’’ 218. 23 Moglen, ‘‘Modernism,’’ 218. 24 Moglen, ‘‘Modernism,’’ 221. 25 Gilroy, Against Race , 122.
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Toni Morrison’s foundational argument in Playing in the Dark exposing the Africanist presence in white-authored texts and thus simultaneously acknowledging the imaginative coexistence of African- and European-identified traditions, is likewise profoundly relevant to ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ and other stories from the parent collection. In the same vein, Laura Doyle in Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture notes that ‘‘black and white literary practices form in dialogue and confrontation with each other over questions of race’’26 further pointing to ‘‘an underlying logic whereby the racial elements of the one tradition [. . .] depend on the presence of the other.’’27 In locating her arguments historically within the context of the period attributed to high modernism, that is, roughly the first third of the twentieth century, Doyle explicitly links Euro-American modernist aesthetics to a racialized discourse. Like all repressed events, the African diaspora returns to stalk the pages of modern fiction: The identities, settings and fates of white characters in modern novels [such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Absalom! Absalom!, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, or Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past] involve racial or racialized colonial questions; meanwhile the traditions behind these novels themselves took shape in contexts permeated by race, including not only slavery and imperialism but also racialized class transformations.28
Doyle explicitly acknowledges here the interracial Atlanticist dynamic linking European, American, and African American modernist practice. Her contention that black and white texts are mutually inflected, whether confrontationally or in acquiescence, by the racial elements in which inhere each tradition, is richly exemplified in ‘‘Red-Headed Baby.’’ Doyle’s central proposition of a racialised maternal prompt or ‘‘matrix’’ at the heart of certain major literary works in the English language of the twentieth century enables in the process a dialogue not only among the works themselves but also between the selfcontained critical discourses that the Harlem Renaissance and Euro-American modernism have traditionally commanded. Moglen similarly inscribes a black diasporic discourse within a modernist one. That the text he discusses, Hughes’s poem ‘‘Cubes’’ (1934), was published within a year of The Ways of White Folks, makes his reading particularly instructive in the context of the present discussion. Moglen points to ‘‘some of the idiosyncrasies of the scholarship on Langston Hughes and American modernism,’’ identifying that scholarship as part of a critical scenario that has traditionally excluded African American artists from the practice and development of twentieth-century literary modernism, and detecting a ‘‘racial myopia that has pervaded US literary studies more generally.’’29 Doyle provides a further and illuminating dimension to her thesis of the ‘‘racialised matrix’’ at the heart of twentieth-century (modernist) texts, by referencing an enduring eugenicist discourse. Bearing in mind that Hughes’s collection was written against a pervasive background of eugenicist ideology and policies such as forced sterilization, 26
Doyle, Bordering on the Body , 174. Doyle, Bordering on the Body , 174. 28 Doyle, Bordering on the Body , 174. 29 Moglen, ‘‘Modernism,’’ 214. At the same time, Moglen acknowledges a growing scholarly revisionism */‘‘new modernism studies’’ */overturning or interrogating that myopia. Footnotes 6, 7, and 8 (216 /7) cite numerous examples. 27
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which according to Doyle extended well into the 1950s, the critical response to The Ways of White Folks is a suggestive one. Arnold Rampersad reveals that Hughes’s agent Maxim Lieber warned him in reference to such stories as ‘‘Passing’’ and ‘‘Mother and Child’’ that ‘‘editors are frightfully squeamish and will not welcome such pieces.’’30 Precisely what editors might have considered squeamish in these stories, remains a matter of speculation, but in the event, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ was turned down by a wide variety of journals. They ranged from such illustrious establishment publications as Harper’s, to the male-oriented Esquire as well as the radical New Masses, and included magazines not averse to publishing young, relatively untried authors, of whatever colour (Story, Abbot’s).31 Certainly, the language of the story is heavily laced with profanity and may have aroused editorial squeamishness; in the first three paragraphs alone, we find six ‘‘hell’s,’’ one ‘‘Christ’’ (as an expletive), and two ‘‘damn’s.’’ I suggest that editorial reticence could also reasonably be read as reflective of contemporary eugenic anxieties and fear of transracial intimacy.32 Briefly, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ tells of the second meeting of a white sailor (Clarence) with a light-skinned black girl (Betsy) and with whom */the reader infers */he fathered the eponymous child with red hair during the previous encounter. The presence of the child, who is unable to hear or speak, unsettles Clarence sufficiently to flee and forego spending the night with Betsy. Within a mere eight pages, Hughes manages to distil a history of forced displacement, oppression, and discrimination as well as a powerful discourse of resistance. It is worth recalling here that the figure of the sailor intersects with Hughes’s oceanic and itinerant imaginary (he was a ship’s cabin boy in the early 1920s and sailors frequently appear in his poetry; note also the respective titles of his two-volume autobiography: The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander) and is expressive of Gilroy’s Atlanticist ‘‘central organizing symbol,’’33 the chronotope of the ship. The (transatlantic) ship and those who sail with her, be they crew or human cargo, metonymically represent the expressive and spatial mobility that characterizes western modernity. The story’s location on the nearest point of land to the sea */the Florida coastline */reinforces the transatlantic context. Further, Clarence’s terrified response to the red headed child who bears his name, ironically reverses the transnational potential embodied by the figure of the sailor, that of ‘‘a dynamic, revisional, unpredictable identity that steps outside the boundaries of the nation.’’34 Alternatively put, the mulatto child problematizes ‘‘the symbolism of ethnic and national reproduction,’’ prompting Clarence to flee Betsy’s cabin in an effort to re-establish ‘‘the sanctity of embodied difference.’’35 ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ which presents readers with a mulatto child, that is, the material (‘‘epidermal,’’ in Fanon’s memorable phrasing) embodiment of miscegenation, in 30
Rampersad, I, 282. ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ was also rejected by American Mercury and Scribner’s. Rampersad, Ibid. Intriguingly, Akiba Sullivan Harper’s 1996 anthology of Hughes’s short stories also fails to include ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ (‘‘Slave on the Block,’’ ‘‘Cora Unashamed,’’ and ‘‘The Blues I’m playing,’’ in that order, represent The Ways of White Folks ), while Hughes included it in his 1958 Reader. I wish to thank the anonymous reader who reviewed my draft submission for pointing out the still fitful fortunes of the story. 32 The phrase is Gilroy’s. 33 Gilroy, Black Atlantic , 4. 34 David Palumbo-Liu, ‘‘Against Race : Yes, but at what cost?’’ 47. 35 Gilroy, Against Race , 127. 31
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the event elicited, intriguingly, a minimal critical response. Tish Dace’s fine volume Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews reproduces over 50 reviews of The Ways of White Folks, of which only five mention ‘‘Red-Headed Baby.’’ They are more critical than approving, ranging from George Schuyler’s rejection because it is ‘‘unreal, unconvincing, often illogical and generally untrue to life,’’36 to Sherwood Anderson’s terse ‘‘I think ‘RedHeaded Baby’ is a bum story.’’37 One of the final reviews in the section devoted to The Ways of White Folks, by-lined cryptically by M. H., has this to say, ‘‘From the variety of these 14 tales, we choose ‘Red-Headed Baby’ as the most beautiful in expression, where the irrepressible poetic sense, obviously Mr Hughes’ natural form, flows on in a musical and creative style.’’38 This reviewer, whoever he or she is, isolates the story’s most salient feature: its experimental, almost improvisational expressiveness. The reviewer also pays tribute to the text’s indeterminate form, its ‘‘irrepressible poetic sense’’ and ‘‘musical [. . .] style.’’ When is a prose narrative not a prose narrative? Clearly, here. The story vexes stylistic boundaries, giving equal billing to the narrative and the lyrical, the normative and the vernacular, the profane and the inoffensive, direct and free indirect speech. Was it these formally transgressive qualities, suggestive of further, underlying or potential transgressions, that so unsettled some reviewers to the point where George Schuyler found the text ‘‘illogical and untrue to life’’ (Sherwood Anderson does not explain why for him ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ is a ‘‘bum story’’)? Here is a taste of what M.H. finds ‘‘irrepressibly poetic’’ and ‘‘musical’’ and Schuyler deems ‘‘illogical and untrue’’: Soft heavy hips. Hot and browner than the moon */good licker. Drinking it down in little nigger house Florida coast palm fronds scratching roof hum mosquitoes night bugs flies ain’t loud enough to keep a man named Clarence girl named Betsy old woman named Auntie from talking and drinking in a little nigger house on Florida coast dead warm night with the licker browner and more fiery than the moon.39
Illogical and untrue it patently is, but in that unrealistic or untrue way which nine years earlier Virginia Woolf in ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’’ (1924) had characterized as expressive of ‘‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary.’’40 (Note that Woolf’s remarks are coeval with Cane and ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade,’’ both exemplars of ‘‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary’’). Of course, Woolf wrote her landmark blistering assault on Edwardian realism from within high modernism where literary production, her own included, consciously strove towards the very features she hails as desirable. One can only wonder why one reviewer at least was unwilling or unable to include an African American writer among the practitioners of modernism, an established or relatively familiar mode by the time Langston Hughes wrote ‘‘Red-Headed Baby.’’ Schuyler appears to be emblematic of that critical legacy which conceives of ‘‘two important literary traditions */the Harlem Renaissance and modernism’’ and which ‘‘we have come to treat separately.’’41 The crossing of boundaries, the dynamic between one (race-inflected) system and another, is not only a literary practice characteristic of the period as Doyle observes (‘‘black 36 37 38 39 40 41
Dace, Langston Hughes , 201. Dace, Langston Hughes , 218. Dace, Langston Hughes , 231. Hughes, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ 129. Woolf, ‘‘Mr. Bennett,’’ 87. Doyle, Bordering on the Body , 3.
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and white literary practices form in dialogue and confrontation with each other over questions of race’’); it is moreover, according to Moglen, a ‘‘politically significant intervention.’’42 I noted earlier that ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ articulates a discourse of resistance, consistent with its companion pieces in the collection. While the resistance in many of these other stories emerges narratively, that is, as part of the plot, in ‘‘RedHeaded Baby’’ it is embedded in the characters and the language itself. The main centre of consciousness is that of a drunk, ‘‘red-headed’’ sailor, yet his voice is not only not hegemonic, alternating as it does with that of Betsy, the older woman, and of the narrator, it actually assumes the contours of black expressiveness. The reference to the possibility of ‘‘[having] another, in my stall,’’43 a standard blues lyric voicing male fear of cuckoldry, is perhaps only the most obvious instance. The co-optation by white Clarence of such a racially determined phrase avoids striking a false note because it is contextualized within the mixed poetics of the story. Alternatively put, it is not Clarence who co-opts the blues, but the blues that co-opts Clarence. Overall, Clarence’s voice weaves its way in and out of the narrative almost like a jazz riff; it is at times indistinguishable from the narrator’s diction through a richly associative free indirect discourse, reminding us how, in the work of Langston Hughes, modernist aesthetics are made supremely to cohere with black vernacular musical form. Here, possibly, is the narrator: Young yellow girl in a white house dress. Oiled hair. Skin like an autumn moon. Gold-ripe young yellow girl with a white house dress to her knees. Soft plump bare legs, the color of the moon.44
Here is Clarence: A red-headed baby. Moonlight-gone baby. No kind of yellow-white bow-legged goggled-eyed County Fair baseball baby. Get him the hell out of here pulling at my legs looking like me at me like me at myself like me red-headed as me.45
We might re-formulate Schuyler’s damning assessment of the story as being ‘‘illogical and untrue to white life’’ (it is the white sailor who baulks at the material challenge to racial purity, not the black women) and that, presumably, is the point of ‘‘RedHeaded Baby’’ (and perhaps of Schuyler’s rejection). In Dislocating the Color Line, Kawash notes that ‘‘central anxiety of miscegenation law’’ derives from the ‘‘disruption of epistemological certitude when being and seeming cannot be made to coincide.’’46 Clarence, white though he is, derives his meaning in the story from non-white expressiveness and contiguity with non-white individuals */none more so than with the red headed child who seems white but is black and, true to the tradition, acts as a liminal figure or device of mediation, enabling movement and transaction between the black 42
Moglen, 218; emphasis in the original. Hughes, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ 127. 44 Hughes, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ 128. 45 Hughes ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ 131. This imaginative appropriation of alterity */Hughes here speaks in a white man’s voice / is expressive of the interracial dynamic guiding Ways and this story in particular, but also of much of Hughes’s literary production at this time. His translations of Lorca, and the inflection of Hughes’s poetry by Lorca, are part of the same transnational, transcultural dialogue. See Soto, ‘‘Crossing Over: Langston Hughes and Lorca.’’ 46 Kawash, Dislocating , 131. 43
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world and the white. The (white) anxiety over the seeming/being disruption is patent in Clarence’s frantic and fruitless attempts to keep the infant physically at bay, and thus suppress the material challenge to his ontological determinacy. It is this anxiety that subtends The Ways of White Folks, exacting severe penalties ranging from social ostracism to violent death from those individuals caught, or suspected of being, in breach of the colour line. These penalties narrativize the potentially brutal consequences of miscegenation, which Gilroy theorizes thus:
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To have mixed is to have been party to a great betrayal. Any unsettling traces of hybridity must be excised from the tidy, bleached-out zones of impossibly pure culture. The safety of sameness can then be recovered by either of the two options that have regularly appeared at the meltdown point of this dismal logic: separation and slaughter.47
Faith Berry reveals that for Hughes the seeming/being mismatch appears to have been pivotal in the story, urging as he does Noel Sullivan in a letter from 1933 to hand ‘‘the poor little half-caste red-headed baby [. . .] over to the Englishman and see if he can make him whiter than snow in the final draft.’’48 The ‘‘nameless’’ Englishman49 entrusted by Hughes to make the mulatto child ‘‘whiter than snow’’ is intensely suggestive of the unavoidably collaborative nature of the Atlanticist project, evoking the intertwined discourses of race and culture. Threading its way through The Ways of White Folks, miscegenation, then, is the real protagonist of ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ and is partially embodied in the deaf, speechless red headed toddler. The child’s inability to hear or speak */‘‘over two years old and can’t even say, ‘Da!’,’’50 reveals Betsy */manifests a literal and symbolic isolation consistent with being ‘‘within the Veil.’’ Unable to communicate with the wider world and his father, baby Clarence’s disability also points up a legacy of racial exploitation and terror and establishes literary kinship with Douglass’s haunting understatement regarding his genealogy: I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs [. . .]. My father was a white man [. . .]. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father, but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me.’’51
The powerlessness soberly conveyed in these few lines connects with the red headed child’s inability nominally to identify his father. That powerlessness is likewise contested in both cases discursively: in the former, through the narrative equivalent of ‘‘talking b(l)ack’’52; in the latter, by reversing white society’s practice of excising hybridity. 47
Gilroy, Against Race, 131. Berry, Langston Hughes , 201. 49 Berry, Langston Hughes , 201. 50 Hughes, ’’Red-Headed Baby,’’ 130. 51 Douglass, Narrative , 48. 52 Henry Louis Gates, Jr argues that in the slave narrative A narrative of the most remarkable particulars in the life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince (1770), ‘‘a distinctively ‘African’ voice registered its presence in the republic of letters; it was a text that both talked ‘black,’ and, through its unrelenting indictment of the institution of slavery, talked back.’’ The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, xxviii. 48
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Note also that by giving the child red hair (and not just blue eyes) Hughes reinforces the white paternity theme, a detail that further resonates in the reader with the character ‘‘Red Head,’’ the dull-witted but essentially good-hearted childhood friend of James Weldon Johnson’s narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.53 Miscegenation also and startlingly materializes in the speech of the baby’s (presumed) father and its antiphonal relationship with the words uttered by Betsy and the older woman, an exchange that rises in rhythmical crescendo to bring the story to its close: ‘‘Lemme pay for those drinks . . .’’ ‘‘Ain’t you gonna stay all night?’’ ‘‘Lemme pay for that licker.’’ ‘‘Why, Mister Clarence? You stayed before.’’ ‘‘How much is the licker?’’ ‘‘Two dollars, Mr Clarence.’’ ‘‘Here.’’ ‘‘Thank you, Mister Clarence.’’ ‘‘Go’bye!’’ ‘‘Go’bye.’’54
We are in the presence of call-and-response, the creative paradigm at the heart of African American discourse, whether literary, idiomatic or musical. In From Behind the Veil. A Study of Afro-American Narrative Robert Stepto exposes the ideological function of calland-response as a strategy of empowerment and authorization, quite literally of making African American voices heard within and in response to a racist environment. ‘‘RedHeaded Baby,’’ however, signifies upon this paradigm by re-writing the racial dynamic. Here the (white) individual is delegitimized through the call-and-response strategy as represented on the page, with the black voice unequivocally seizing the last word, despite Clarence’s attempt to close the conversation. Thus in a final twist, voice-deprived Clarence both takes on the subjectivity of his deaf-mute child and also inscribes whiteness (his whiteness) within a further convention, that of the mulatto who is often born sickly and either does not survive or meets a tragic end. The subversive potential of Hughes’s story, which, as I suggested earlier, may plausibly account for reviewers’ silence or open hostility, also and crucially derives from the white character’s subjection to a non-white hegemony. ‘‘Crossing the railroad track at the edge of town,’’55 Clarence places his body in the black world. ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ challenges the ‘‘dismal logic’’ that penalizes mixture, not through the recombinant identity of the bastard mulatto child, but */and here lies the masterstroke */by constructing a narrative of mixture the protagonist of which happens to be white and for whom, in this story at least, the safety of sameness is not recoverable. Rephrasing my earlier statement, it is Clarence, Sr. who ultimately seems white, but is black. I have argued that the elision of ‘‘black and white folks’’ in Hughes’s collection and in ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’ in particular is an aesthetic and political strategy expressive of a modernist, diasporic and racialized practice. Crucially, Hughes’s work also betrays a 53
The resonance is less far-fetched than might initially seem given the context of racial complementarity (indeed, of homosocial inter-raciality) in which the anonymous narrator’s schooldays largely unfold, and is a theme echoed throughout The Ways of White Folks. 54 Hughes, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ 132. 55 Hughes, ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ 126.
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dialogic relationship with The Souls of Black Folk. Through Clarence, Hughes forces a white character to accept Du Bois’s invitation to ‘‘step within the Veil’’ and partake of black consciousness. The brazenly transgressive potential of Du Bois’ proposition */to experience reality with and as ‘‘black folk,’’ and not as ‘‘white folks’’ */is fulfilled by the figure of Clarence in ‘‘Red-Headed Baby,’’ a text that no longer invites us to engage in literary, but ultimately in literal miscegenation.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers who commented on an earlier draft of this essay. Any improvement in this, the final version, is due in no small measure to their suggestions.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Isabel Soto teaches English literature and Critical Theory in the Foreign Languages Department of the Universidad Nacional de Educacio´n a Distancia (Madrid). Her research interests include liminality theory and African American writing, on which she has lectured and published widely. She edited A Place That Is Not A Place (Madrid: The Gateway Press, 2000) and is currently preparing a book on diaspora and a collection of essays on Langston Hughes. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge History of African American Literature.
REFERENCES Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. New York: Citadel */Carol, 1992. Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. DOUGLASS, FREDERICK. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself [1845]. Harmondsworth (UK): Penguin Classics, 1982. DOYLE, LAURA. Bordering on the Body. The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. DU BOIS, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk [1903], edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999. ** /* /* /* / /. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil [1920]. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999. EDWARDS, BRENT HAYES. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ** /* /* /* / /. ‘‘The Uses of Diaspora’’. In African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds. Readings in the Post/Colonial. Literatures in English 69, edited by Genevie`ve Fabre and Klaus Benesch. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004. 3 /38. ELLISON, RALPH. Shadow and Act [1953]. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. GATES JR., HENRY LOUIS AND NELLIE Y. MCKAY, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. GILROY, PAUL. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ** /* /* /* / /. Against Race: Imaginary Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap */Harvard University Press, 2001. BERRY, FAITH. DACE, TISH.
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The Ways of White Folks [1933, 1934]. New York: Vintage-Random, 1990. ‘‘Red-Headed Baby’’. The Ways of White Folks. 125 /132. ** /* /* /* / /. The Big Sea [1940]. London: Pluto Press, 1986. ** /* /* /* / /. Short Stories. Langston Hughes, edited by Akira Sullivan Harper. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. HUTCHINSON, GEORGE. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap */ Harvard University Press, 1997. JOHNSON, JAMES WELDON. ‘‘Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’’ [1912]. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997. 777 /861. KAPLAN, CAREN. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. KAWASH, SAMIRA. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature. Mestizo Spaces/Espaces Me´tisse´s. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. MAXWELL, WILLIAM J. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. MOGLEN, SETH. ‘‘Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the ‘broken cubes of Picasso’’’. In African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds, edited by Genevie´ve Fabre and Klaus Benesch. Readings in the Post/Colonial. Literatures in English 69. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004. 213 /36. MORRISON, TONI. Playing in the Dark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. NUGENT, RICHARD BRUCE. ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade.’’ [1926] In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994. 569 /83. PLUMMER, BRENDA GAYLE. Rising Wind. Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935 /1960. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. PRATT, MARY LOUISE. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1995. RAMPERSAD, ARNOLD. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 /88. SOTO, ISABEL. ‘‘Crossing Over: Langston Hughes and Lorca.’’ In A Place That Is Not A Place. Essays in Liminality and Text, edited by Isabel Soto. Madrid: The Gateway Press, 2000, 115 /32. ** /* /* /* / /. ‘‘Langston Hughes: The Poetics of Reciprocity.’’ In Tendencias Actuales en los Estudios Filolo´gicos Anglo-Norteamericanos, edited by Elena Ortells Monto´n and Jose´ Ramo´n Prado Pe´rez. Castello´ de la Plana: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I, 2003, 109 /25. STEPTO, ROBERT. From Behind the Veil. A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. TOOMER, JEAN. Cane [1923], edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. WARREN, K. W. ‘‘Appeals for (Mis)recognition. Theorizing the Diaspora.’’ In Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. 392 /406. WOOLF, VIRGINIA. ‘‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’’ [1924]. In A Woman’s Essays. Harmondsworth: London, 1992. 69 /87.
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** /* /* /* / /.
Isabel Soto, Departamento de Filologı´as Extranjeras, UNED, Calle Senda del Rey / 7, 28040 Madrid, SPAIN. E-mail:
[email protected]
