Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  Although Bergman’s observation that these and other breakthrough novels by gay white authors, including Felice Picano’s The Lure (1978), meant that booksellers and publishers could no longer deny the commercial demand for popular gay fiction, the reception of black gay novelists in the publishing world remained for all purposes unaffected for nearly a decade. While one can only speculate that the reasons might be simply the realities of racism and homophobia, it seems probable, if not more instructive, to point out that white publishers also may not have imagined a viable audience for black gay books—notwithstanding that there had been an audience for black gay fiction as long as there had been one for gay books. Indeed, the publishing market for African American fiction did not more fully emerge until the 1990s, when blockbuster successes like Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992) demonstrated to publishers and the larger literary world the existence of an enthusiastic but underserved African American reading public.

  Still, an unanswerable question remains: How did Black gays and lesbians experience the almost exclusively white gay literary terrain of the day? Joseph Beam, writing in his introduction to the black gay anthology In the Life (1986), expressed a view that was perhaps shared by many African American lesbians and gay men of the period:

  I had grown weary of reading literature by white gay men who fell, quite easily, into three camps: the incestuous literati of Manhattan and Fire Island, the San Francisco cropped-mustache- clones, and the Boston-to-Cambridge politically correct radical faggot. None of them spoke to me as a Black gay man…. I called a personal moratorium on the writings by white gay men, and read, exclusively, works by lesbians and Black women. At the very least, their Black characters were credible and I caught glimpses of my reality in their words.80

  Although the literature of white gay men continued to incorporate many of the stereotypes that Beam decried, by the late 1980s writings by African American lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals were entering the mainstream more frequently. Cumulatively, these works provided alternative perspectives of lesbian and gay life unimaginable only a decade earlier. The postwar protest movements for racial and sexual equality helped to infuse black queer literature with unprecedented sexual candor and political intent. While these movements fully liberated neither the writing nor the authors from extant social prejudices, they helped to expand the black lesbian, gay, and bisexual literary tradition begun in the Harlem Renaissance. This expansion provided new possibilities and hope for generations to come.

  By the late 1970s, the topic of homosexuality in the greater African American community together with issues of race within the broader lesbian and gay population remained largely sidelined. Despite a quarter century of liberation movements, the voices of black lesbians, black gay men, and black bisexuals were often marginalized, even silenced, during this period of intense public protest. To be certain, the entire civil rights struggle empowered African Americans regardless of gender or sexual orientation, just as the gay movement empowered homosexuals and bisexuals regardless of gender or race, quite as the feminist movement empowered women irrespective of race or sexual orientation. In spite of internal differences that sometimes splintered and occasionally destroyed social protest groups, all these organizations nonetheless contributed to the larger struggle for equality that benefited African American lesbians and gay men. Furthermore, and perhaps more central to the focus of this book, the social protest model served the essential function of radicalizing notions of identity politics, which empowered black lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers to incorporate comparably radical themes of race, gender, and sexuality into their works. Unambiguous depictions of same-sex relations in a decidedly African American context were only one among many hallmarks particular to the emerging literature.

  OWEN DODSON

  [1914–1983]

  The works of such civil rights pioneers as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington introduced Owen Dodson early to the classic African American writings. Although Dodson’s family had little money—his mother died when he was twelve and his father, a freelance journalist, served as director of the National Negro Press Association— he was able to attend Bates College and Yale University, even after the family’s situation worsened with the onset of the Depression. Dodson earned an MFA degree in playwrighting in 1939 and went on to teach drama at Howard University for twenty-three years. He produced a voluminous body of work, including two novels, two books of poetry, and thirty-seven plays and operas.

  Dodson’s debut play, the prize-winning Divine Comedy (1938), set the course for his career as one of the most prolific African American dramatists ever. By the 1950s, he had also taken up fiction. His first novel, Boy at the Window (1951), a semiautobiographical story about a sensitive boy who loses his mother, alludes to the author’s homosexuality, but only suggestively and always innocently from a child’s perspective. Based on the success of Boy at the Window, Dodson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 to complete the sequel, Come Home Early, Child, which deals with the protagonist’s sexual coming of age. Significantly, the follow-up novel went unpublished until 1977, seven years after Dodson had retired from his position as chair of the drama department at Howard. He continued to write, direct, and produce stage work until his death from a heart attack in 1983.

  In this excerpt from Boy at the Window, Coin, the novel’s nine-year- old protagonist, meets Ferris, an older boy visiting his aunt in Washington, D.C. While coming to an awareness of his budding sexual identity, Coin finds himself struggling with the memory of his mother.

  from Boy at the Window

  [1951]

  When he first entered the Gem Movie Playhouse, on Seventh Street, the darkness reminded him of underwater and deep periods of sleep and down in the damp cellar on Berriman Street. He thought of the woods, near Atkins Avenue, with trees at the top spreading, long branches shaking hands and all the birds you could hardly ever see. The kids called them the up-in-the-tree birds. Now it was brighter and he felt alone, more alone than ever, with kids everywhere. In his remembered woods he saw a squirrel leap from branch to branch in the nanny goat lady’s oak tree. He wished the animal would hop to him. Come to him like on the day his mother died, the sparrow came and he knew the chirping was asking for crumbs. He bit his left thumbnail off and placed it between his two front teeth and worked it in and out there. He slid down into his seat and looked at the silver screen. Tom Mix raced along low slopes toward a sign that read el paso. He caught up a girl riding on the behind of the bad guy’s horse. A whole flock of men waited in the distance with guns. Then all of a sudden a shot banged out of the piano in the front of the theatre and the bad guy’s horse’s front legs hit up in the air kicking. The pretty girl slid down the slick behind of the horse like on a slide in the playground and she was on a cactus plant crying to beat the band. Coin let out a long ahhhhh geeeeeeeee. That was when he noticed the boy beside him.

  “That’s all right,” said the boy, “it’s only a picture; it ain’t real.”

  “Yeah,” said Coin. But it was realer than that and he wanted to help the girl up and bring some iodine. Iodine all over her arms and behind. It wasn’t real, that’s right, he thought. And Rudolph Valentino wasn’t real. “Valentino was dead living on the silver screen,” Mrs. Jeffers had said last summer between her crying. So now he knew. And he knew the boy realized the same thing, so he answered, “Yeah, yeah, I know that.” When the lights went on he smelled the perfume like toilet smell and baby talcum powder mixed. He wanted to rush into fresh air. A big bag of peanuts was thrust under his nose and he took a handful as the seat snapped up and the kids began to rush out in scrambled talk, piano pounding and giggling. The boy at his side asked, “You goin’ out or stayin’ for the next show?”

  “I’m goin’. I gotta wait for my uncle.”

  In the light outside the movie he sneaked a look at the boy. He was older than him. His hair grew forward and his eyes were real black and white, like the color black had been separated from th
e white by a jacknife. The boy’s face shone. Not greasy but the leaping shiny of autos. His fingers looked strong and hard as he asked Coin to have some more peanuts. “Fillin’. Almost a meal, that’s what peanuts is. Peanuts is the best thing in Washington, District of Columbia.” And he cocked his head from side to side and began a smile that showed laughing teeth. “This Washington ain’t the other, Washington, the state. Teacher said so.”

  “Yeah,” said Coin twisting his face on a sour peanut. Probably one of Mrs. Carth’s. He smiled too. They were both smiling at each other and Coin couldn’t stop.

  “Can’t you say nothin’ but yeah?” the boy asked Coin.

  “Yeah. What’s your name?”

  “That’s more like it. Whoever ain’t got the grit to talk ain’t from nothin’ or nowhere. My name’s Ferris.”

  “I ain’t heard of no name like that.”

  “Well, that’s my name. Ferris. I was named after the wheel, Ferris wheel. Sometimes I feel like a wheel too, feel like I’m goin’ round and round up and down. I can turn a cartwheel, too.”

  “Ferris sounds made up.”

  “A Ferris wheel got lights on it. Lights in a ball of glass. Seen ’em in a carnival in Kentucky. A big ring lighted in the sky. Music, too. When my Mama was carryin’ me she was ridin’ the wheel. That’s how come my name.”

  “Your Mama took a baby up in them swingin’ seats?”

  “That was before I was born.”

  “She couldn’t have been carryin’ you then.”

  “Yes, she was. My Mama was.”

  “Not before you were born.”

  “You don’t know from nothin’. How you suppose babies is made?” “Well, you know,” Coin answered vaguely. He bit a peanut loud. “Say, Ferris, look at that big airplane flying up there. It looks like a grasshopper with double wings.”

  “Hey, hey all over. Look at that big airplane,” Ferris repeated. “Don’t you know babies is carried?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “You do! Then tell me if you’re so knowing.” Coin just shuffled along and looked like he was interested in the sky and the airplane that was out of sight. But Ferris kept at it like rubbing in sandpaper. All Coin could think of was that he was delivered when he was born. He looked slantways at Ferris and thought, old country boy. He don’t know from doodley-squat.

  Ferris began to laugh sharp and gooey like an egg-beater going.

  “Don’t you know all carry their young. Except some birds. They lay ’em in eggs.”

  “Uh huh,” Coin managed to say.

  “Furthermore, do you know how babies is conceived?”

  “Conceived?”

  “Began and started, boy you is the dumbest boy this side Kentucky.” They had reached a small park surrounded by stores and houses, where hardly anybody was.

  Ferris sat down on the first bench and kept on talking. “Babies is made from a man and a woman. I seen it. Man goes in and after the woman is fat for nine months, baby comes crying. That’s the gist of it.” Coin had heard of that but he didn’t believe babies came from it. He didn’t come from nothing dirty like that. “My mother and father never did anything like that.”

  Ferris laughed. “How do you think you’re here eatin’ peanuts and talkin’ to me?”

  “My mother never did nothin’ dirty like that and you better shut up. You better shut right up, if you don’t want a punch in your friggin’ nose.” Coin felt hot all over like a blazing was inside him. He stood up over Ferris with fists clenched and tears in his eyes, muttering to the boy lying on the bench rolling with laughing. “You’re a bastard, you’re a bastard. Bastard, bastard. Double bastard. Get up and fight.”

  Ferris sat up quickly.

  “Maybe your mother did that thing but mine never did. My mother’s the salt of the earth. She was the salt…”

  “Hey boy. Hey, hey.” Ferris put his arms friendly around Coin and Coin thrust him off. Ferris landed on the bench.

  “I don’t allow nobody to call me that. If you wanta fight, put ’em up. Put ’em up.” Ferris’ eyes were turning red as Coin talked.

  Coin was shaking and sweat was on his forehead as a small group of boys began crowding, egging them on.

  “Better knock him in the head before he gets up offa that bench.” “He’s afraid: ha ha ha.”

  “They both sissies, that’s what.”

  “Nobody better not call me no bastard.” Ferris, growling like a dog, got to his feet and faced Coin. Coin hitched his knickers up and hitched them up again. Ferris narrowed his eyes. Then they stood dead still staring into each other’s eyes.

  One sideline kid shouted, “Shucks, ain’t no use waitin’, ain’t no use waitin’. They both sissies.”

  Just then a fly began to tickle on Coin’s nose and he raised a hand to brush it off. He felt a slam in his right eye and saw firecracker stars of all colors. Raising his fists to hit at Ferris, he tripped. His knickers had fallen down. Ferris was on top of him and he heard all the yelling children, felt blow after blow on his cheeks and chest. He knew he was a mess. When one sock of Ferris’ went into his right eye, he saw a shooting star land and his mother’s face came out of it. A blue face laughing and stars splintering in her hair. That was when he made force in his left arm and flinging it up gripped Ferris’ head in a half-nelson. He heard his voice sputtering, “Do you give up, do you give up, do you give up?”

  With every repeat of the phrase he locked Ferris’ head tighter till he thought Ferris must be dead. They were both sweating and dirt scratched everywhere on Coin’s body. His mother was sitting in the window and the little man of sunshine bowed and bowed over her white hair; he saw her face in the coffin with red stuff on the cheeks and the lips bugged close. Mama over the washtub and Mama inspecting him saying: get up get up get up before you get so dirty Popa will be mad. Mama and johnnycake. Ferris was still as nothing and the sideline boys were still but he asked the question, “How is babies born, how, how, how…no dirty, no dirty…?”

  Ferris’ voice came at last as Coin released him, “Babies…?”

  “Take it all back!”

  “Babies…is delivered,” Ferris voice was panting. Through his sweat Coin looked at him close. Ferris’ eyes began to get big.

  “All right, all right,” Coin said. “You give up?”

  “I gives up.”

  With the excitement over the kids drifted away. Coin didn’t know what to say. Ferris was over by the bench. He picked up the bag that had had peanuts in it, gathered it together at the top and blew hard. The bag puffed

  out. Taking it out of his mouth he twisted the ragged edges and popped the paper ball with his fist. Coin turned around to a smiling Ferris.

  “There ain’t, there ain’t not even one peanut left.”

  They smoothed their clothes in silence and drank at a fountain. Ferris broke the silence first.

  “I ain’t asked you your name.”

  “Coin.”

  “Like a penny?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ferris laughed until be bent over. “Whoooooo wheeeee whooooo ummmmmmmm. That’s the funniest yet. Why boy, you as bad as me in name.”

  “Yeah,” grinned Coin.

  Ferris whooped harder. He turned a cartwheel and yelled, “I’m gonna spend you, boy.” He ran along a path quick as hot cakes, quick as sixty and Coin was at his heels laughing with his nose running and the sunlight sharp in his hurting eyes but he didn’t care.

  At the edge of the park a man was ringing a Santa Claus bell, standing by a dirty white cart looking like who-struck-john. The boys stopped short. Ferris went over to the cart with bottles of all flavors in them and a big hunk of ice and a scooping cup.

  “Coin, you like scraped ice and flavorin’?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t ever say thanks till you get somethin’ to thank for,” said Ferris handing him a snowball of shaved ice with mint green flavoring. “Ferris, you know, you’re one of the nicest friends I ever had. You’re the nicest.�
��

  “You know why? I was raised on a sugar tit.”

  “You ought to come by my room and meet my uncle. He’s blind but he can really get around with that stick.”

  “Wish I could, Coin, but I gotta get to the station. Lord, that reminds me, what time do you reckon it is? Mister, what time is it?”

  The man at the cart took an alarm clock from under his apron.

  “Twenty minutes to six.”

  “What are you in such a big hurry for, Ferris?”

  “I’m going home tonight, goin’ to Kentucky. And I ain’t gonna miss the seven o’clock train. I’m gonna scoot out of this Washington, District of Columbia, so fast the wind gonna wonder how I flew.”

  “I’m sorry you’re leavin’ just when I found someb…” Coin couldn’t swallow his last scraps of ice and he liked mint flavoring too. “Can I go to the station with you?”

  “You better come. We can walk from here.”

  “How about your bag and things?”

  “My Aunt Louise sent everything along ahead, before she went to work, and left a lunch box in the bag room. I got the ticket here.”

  “Lord,” sighed Ferris as they walked along kicking stones and cans ahead, “Lord, I sure will be glad to get back. Wake up in the morning and it’s so quiet and no noise to make you sick. Just before the sun come out, the birds commence to sing and by midday you can hardly bear it. Their music everywhere; catbirds, finches, little finches, redbirds, chickadees. Sure will be glad to get back. An’ fishin’, too, in the crick. Stand sometime in quicksand…”

  Coin’s face was almost stuck under Ferris’ mouth.

  “…of course I hold onto a branch. Sometimes gold minnows fairly blazin’. And sometimes I just lie down in the high grass and look up in the sky…look like a big old blue tent. Brush snake doctors away.”

  “What are snake doctors?”

  “Boy, you don’t know nothing. They flies that tend sick snakes. Got wings like glass when they fly in the sun. They pretty but they mean. I ain’t scared of them though. Just lay down in the high grass and watch the clay hills, ’long about sunset, roll away like molasses puddin’s.”