The understanding he could not have with Cleaver he believed he’d found with Huey Newton, who in 1970 told the Panther membership that if they were inclined to slap a woman in the mouth or beat up a homosexual, then maybe that was because they were afraid of being castrated by women or afraid of being themselves homosexual. Newton would recall in Revolutionary Suicide the importance of sex for the inmates of the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, where “80 per cent of the prisoners were homosexual, and homosexuals are docile and subservient; they tend to obey prison regulations.” Their sexuality was a “pseudosexuality” that “undermined their normal yearnings for dignity.” Every inmate—“except me”—had a key to his own cell, and the guards, many of whom were homosexual, looked the other way. Only political action brought “repressive steps.” Newton says he laughed at the guards who eyed him when he showered.
Newton adored Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Sweet got his nickname from a prostitute who was into his thing. Gordon Parks’s detective in Shaft (1971) is a sex machine. These black heroes outsmart their enemies, and the sexual prowess of “blaxploitation” is playful. The revolution will be entertaining. Baldwin idolized Newton, as had many, and in No Name in the Street, he praises his gentleness, his devotion to justice, and says that he could imagine him as a lawyer, with a family in the suburbs, had the revolution not intervened. He expresses a romantic feeling about the Black Panthers as a “force of rehabilitation” for black youth.
The New York Times writer Don A. Schanche, in The Panther Paradox: A Liberal’s Dilemma (1971), had unburdened himself of his reservations about the Panthers, because their tactics were to him just the suicidal acts of the immature, the doomed. But he applauded Cleaver for criticizing “the distorting effect of homosexuality” in Baldwin’s work. Cleaver “focused with ruthless accuracy on the one element essential to an understanding of Baldwin that white critics, too, had seen but never dared to analyze.”
* * *
In the essay “The White Negro,” reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (1959), Norman Mailer equates the rebel with the psychopath and praises his masculine philosophy of being willing to go through more in the nature of experience than the conformist or the square is. He is rewarded with much better orgasms, and jazz was the music of the orgasm. The white bohemian or juvenile delinquent met the Negro, living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy, and the hipster was born, the American existentialist, the urban adventurer. Marijuana was the wedding ring, and to this marriage “it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry.” Mailer asserts that the Negro kept the art of the primitive in order to survive and therefore lived in the enormous present. It was body over mind. Writers such as Sherwood Anderson were saying pretty much the same kind of thing a generation earlier.
Elsewhere in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer is unpleasant about Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, but he admires aspects of their work, however grudgingly. But in the same essay, Mailer not only can’t find anything good to say about James Baldwin, he also employs the homophobic codes of the period, observing that Baldwin is “too charming to be major” and that even the best of his paragraphs are too “sprayed with perfume.” Mailer goes on to attack Baldwin for not being primitive, for not having done that thing of giving up the mind in favor of the body. Giovanni’s Room (1956) may have been brave, but his writing would remain “noble toilet water” until someone or something took a hammer and smashed the detachment and “perfumed dome of his ego.”
In his rebuttal, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” collected in Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin says that when he and Mailer met in Paris in 1956, he was a lean, “abnormally intelligent and hungry” black cat, while Mailer was a middle-class Jew. In other words, he asserts his hipster credentials over Mailer’s right off. Baldwin said more than once that he did not like bohemians. He says that he knew more than Mailer would ever know about the periphery Mailer “hopelessly maligns” in “The White Negro.” He goes on to say that although it was just a case of the toughest kid on the block meeting the toughest kid on the block, he was actually fond of Mailer. He says that at the time he was envious of Mailer’s success and kept a protective distance from someone he was otherwise drawn to. Baldwin has his target and takes aim. No, the jazz musicians they hung out with did not consider Mailer remotely hip, and no one, himself included, had the heart to tell Mailer this, a real sweet ofay cat but a little “frantic.”
Having taken away the cultural passport of which Mailer had been so proud, Baldwin then delves into the self, into his own circumstances around the time they first met, his pain over the end of a love affair, which felt like the end of love itself as a possibility in his life; in other words he ignores the digs about the “perfume” side of his life and reveals something else, the reality of it, and then asserts his own right to aspire, just like Mailer, to be a great writer. He, too, had to come back to a room somewhere and look at the waiting typewriter. From this point on in his essay, Baldwin defeats Mailer with understanding and defends the novels by Mailer he has at last read against the criticisms of them at the time. Once he has insisted that Mailer is a genuine talent, he castigates him again for his flirtation with Beat, beatniks, and hipsters, asking why it should be necessary to borrow the Depression language of deprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, or why the sorely menaced sexuality of Negroes should be maligned in order to justify the white man’s own sexual panic.
The answers to these questions, Baldwin suggests, are to be found in what he calls Kerouac’s absolute, offensive nonsense. He means the confession in On the Road, when the narrator finds himself in the black section of Denver, “wishing I were a Negro.” Kerouac’s hero says he’d rather be an overworked Jap than what he was, a disillusioned white man. Baldwin said he wouldn’t want to be Kerouac trying to read this at the Apollo.
Toward the end of the essay, Baldwin discloses that in Paris he, William Styron, and James Jones, in drunken, masochistic fascination, read Mailer’s assessment of them and their work in Advertisements for Myself. Baldwin thinks he comes off the best of the three, that there is nothing venomous in what Mailer said about him, although the condescension certainly hurt. “No, I would be cool about it, and fail to react as he so clearly wanted me to. Also, I must say, his judgment of myself seemed so wide of the mark and so childish that it was hard to stay angry. I wondered what in the world was going on in his mind. Did he really suppose that he had now become the builder and destroyer of reputations?”
This was still the Baldwin who got furious with Mailer for running for mayor of New York. “I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it trying to be something else.” Mailer’s work is all that will be left “when the newspapers are yellowed, all the gossip columnists silenced, and all the cocktail parties over.” Mailer used to be such a presence in the culture, but he is hardly mentioned now. Writers sometimes disappear like that after their deaths, for a little while or for good.
Cleaver took umbrage in Soul on Ice, branding Baldwin’s dismissal of “The White Negro” a “literary crime” against “one of the few gravely important expressions of our time.” Cleaver draws an analogy between the “punk-hunting” that ghetto black youth made a sport of and the lynching of blacks down South. He was talking about power, who had it and could do violence to the people who didn’t. He didn’t seem to notice, or care, that if lynching was wrong, then so was punk-hunting, in the way that Jervis Anderson pointed out that if blackness was an absolute, then so was whiteness. Mailer’s essay exposed the “depth of ferment” in the white world, Cleaver goes on blithely, and was the work of “a tiger,” while Baldwin was just “a purring pussy cat.” Think of running a gauntlet, hearing “bootlicking Uncle Tom,” “intellectual buckdancer,” “a white man in a black body,” the white man’s most valuable tool in oppressing other blacks.
Baldwin’s exchange with Mailer shows that he could forgive—Mailer used homos
exual characters as vessels of evil, as he called them, and then recanted in an essay, “The Homosexual Villain,” in 1955. He’d also knocked Baldwin for expressing “tired, novelettish” notions of “sex, success, and ‘race problems.’” But their exchange also presents the Baldwin who could hit back, push through the dilemma for blacks of always having to behave better than white people. And yet when Mailer talks about the problem of every good liberal—the inability to admit the hatred and violence just beneath society’s skin—he himself sounds like Baldwin, who buried Dr. King and began to speak the language of the new faith. But now within my heart by tempests chastened.
In No Name in the Street, Baldwin divulges that on his first trip to the South in 1956 he was “groped by one of the most powerful men in one of the states I visited.” The man had to get himself “sweating drunk” in order to arrive at the “despairing titillation” of his “wet hands groping for my cock,” putting both himself and Baldwin, “abruptly, into history’s ass-pocket.” Baldwin’s identity was defined by the white man’s power, his humanity to be placed in the service of the white man’s fantasies. The commercial and sexual license of masters emasculated the masters themselves as well as the enslaved. Most men will choose women to debase, and men have an enormous need to debase other men. “And it is absolutely certain that white men, who invented the nigger’s big black prick, are still at the mercy of this nightmare, and are still, for the most part, doomed, in one way or another, to attempt to make this prick their own.”
Black men are “marvelously mocking” about the price they pay to walk with dignity. “Men are not women, and a man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs. All men, however they may face it or fail to face it, however they may handle, or be handled by it, know something about each other, which is simply that a man without balls is not a man.” When a man can’t respect that in another man—“and this remains true even if that man is his lover”—then he has “abdicated from the man’s estate,” by which Baldwin may mean the man isn’t a man anymore. The South and Jim Crow shocked Baldwin when he saw its racial order for the first time. His insights come as insults: the most blighted women he has ever seen; the only reason the region isn’t one big homosexual community is that it has no real men.
White domination and black resistance have become male contests, and the advent of the Panthers was “inevitable,” as was their challenge to the policeman’s gun, even to his right to be in the neighborhood. The Panthers bore arms, Baldwin reminds us, to protect their lives, their women and children, their homes. He uses the same vocabulary of self-defense that Robert F. Williams introduces in Negroes with Guns (1962), his story of how in 1961 he, as head of his NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, held off a white mob during a protest because his group of black men were armed. Mass hysteria ensued, and, fearing “the lack of law,” Williams sought political asylum in Cuba. After Attica, Elaine Brown would sing, “We’ll just have to get guns and be men.” Baldwin seemed to be saying that after the assassinations and shoot-outs, funerals and trials of black radical politics, he accepted a definition of black manhood that elsewhere he had described as the prison of masculinity.
* * *
Angela Davis has observed that the cult of Malcolm X as the personification of black manhood implied that male supremacy was the only response to white supremacy and obscured the part of his legacy that stood for intellectual growth. My interest in Soul on Ice has been confined mostly to Baldwin’s calculated response to it, a question vigorously taken up in Michele Wallace’s outspoken, bold Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978).
Wallace maintains that the black man and the black woman became unable to see each other through the fog of sexual myth and their shared ignorance about the sexual politics that ruled them. The problem, as Wallace sees it, was that the black man began to believe in America’s picture of him. In harping on the white man’s obsession with his genitals, the black man fell under the same spell. The chance for black patriarchy died with Malcolm X, she says; nevertheless, Cleaver pledged, “We shall have our manhood.”
Interestingly enough, Wallace credits Mailer with being pretty accurate in “The White Negro” about the “intersection of the black man’s and the white man’s fantasies.” She locates the beginning of the black writer’s “love affair with Black Macho” in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and his protagonist, Bigger Thomas. The black man can only come to life as the white man’s nightmare, the defiler of white women. Baldwin, on the other hand, at least in his early work, tried to explore the man the black man had to be in order to become himself, prompted in large measure by what he could not forgive in his own father’s insensitivities.
In the late 1960s, Baldwin gave up altogether the “interior struggle” about “patriarchal morality” that had been going on in his work before he became “an anachronism,” in Wallace’s view. He was singled out for attack by Baraka and Cleaver because of his earlier ambiguities and ambivalences. He took his punishment, Wallace goes on to say, and said what other black writers wanted him to say. For her, No Name in the Street is proof that Baldwin had believed all along in the “brutal masculinity” and “quixotic virility” of the black man. The offense is retroactive; Wallace finds that Baldwin was always writing as though it were a man’s world. But the traditional patriarchy that black self-defense movements were supposed to embody—protection of the black community—had become almost “sissified” in the eyes of militants, she says. The male narcissism was blinding: “the black man’s sexuality and the physical fact of his penis were the major evidence of his manhood and the purpose of it.”
Nevertheless, Baldwin was a “counterrevolutionary” in Cleaver’s ex-convict’s world, because he was, theoretically, getting fucked by the white man. Wallace challenges Black Macho on what she regarded as its own terms: “If whom you fuck indicates your power, then obviously the greatest power would be gained by fucking a white man first, a black man second, a white woman third, and a black woman not at all. The most important rule is that nobody fucks you.” The black man had accepted a self-destructive definition of manhood. Even as a political metaphor it was troublesome to Wallace, because its premise excluded black women or relegated them into needing to be passive and controlled.
The separation of the political and the personal was perhaps among the dualities Baldwin was aware of in himself, a legacy of his experience in the black church, the distance between the private man and the one in the pulpit. Whether speaking in the first-person voice or third-person plural, he is a kind of black Everyman, or Everyperson, who is straight. When he must dissent from or qualify the black Everyman’s position, he can only speak as himself, the difference between being a poet and a philosopher, a source of the tension that Wallace says she once trusted in Baldwin. No Name in the Street is for her Baldwin’s capitulation to Black Macho, while Cleaver doesn’t appear to understand that “Amazon” means female warrior.
* * *
“The white man can’t cool it because he’s never dug it,” Marlon Brando said, quoting Lord knows whom after Bobby Hutton’s funeral in 1968. However, the black nation within the nation was not coming to my family’s dinner table that spring of 1968. Far from accepting that nonviolence had gone into the grave with Dr. King, we and everyone we knew saw his willingness to die for what he believed in as testimony to the life in that principle still. The struggle was not to let white America morally degrade black America or goad us as a minority people into suicidal armed confrontations, both my father and my mother said.
Other parents in their circle were also starting to worry about what their kids could be drawn into. When I left home, the middle-class black was still being castigated for supposedly wanting to be white and for having made the kind of racial accommodations that engender self-hate. I associate cultural black nationalism of the 1970s with bullying. Prove yourself. Are you black enough. You are a suppressed orgasm. Incidents of dangerous make-believe are humiliating to re
call. The heavy silence in a crowded car someone not a fool would never have gotten into; the heart-jacking terror that it’s actually you who’s marked for discipline, the old-fashioned, punk-hunting kind.
I didn’t read Soul on Ice until ten years after it was published, when Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman came out. When I finished Cleaver’s book, I was annoyed that I’d thought even for a moment that maybe Cleaver was right, that maybe he had sussed out a terrible secret in me. Richard Pryor had yet to get with Brando and it was years before we found out that they had gone that way with each other. But nobody could accuse Baldwin of lacking self-knowledge, and Wallace hadn’t enough sympathy for his position in the political culture of the time.
Jeremiah downtown, Job uptown, Baldwin was no more acceptable to Black Power advocates than he was to mainstream black leaders. His expressions of solidarity with the Black Panthers may have been a kind of romantic appropriation, but his habit of projecting a kinship between himself and other people working in the civil rights movement meant something in addition to the convention of speaking of blacks as one family. Coming across as a big brother switched off the macho radar and said that his interest in them, streetwise young men, was social, not sexual. Jean Genet could eroticize the Panthers all he wanted, because, though queer, he was white and a foreigner, an ex-convict and famous for it. But Baldwin, a black man, knew he was required to neutralize what branded him an outcast among outlaws.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 19