Searching for the New Black Man

Black Masculinity and Women's Bodies

Ronda C. Henry Anthony

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781626744448
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. In tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities, the author shows how black men's struggles for gendered agency are inextricably entwined with their complicated relation to white men and normative masculinity. The historical context in which this study couches these struggles highlights the extent to which shifting socioeconomic circumstances dictate the ideological, cultural, and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize identity.Yet, Anthony quickly moves to texts that challenge traditional constructions of black masculinity. In these texts she traces how the emergence of collaboratively gendered discourses, or a blending of black female/male feminist consciousnesses, are reshaping black masculinities, femininities, and intraracial relations for a new century.

Chapter One

Dominant versus Subordinate Masculinities and the Gendered Oppositions between Slavery and Freedom

AS I BEGIN MY STUDY WITH “A REPRESENTATIVE HISTORICAL EPISODE THAT HELPS RENder black masculinity evolutionary, frame by frame” (Wallace 9), there can be no more representative literary historical episode than the period during which the influence of slave narratives reached its zenith. Within the literary productions of black men during the nineteenth century, one man’s text stands as a beacon of ideal black manhood, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass’s narrative is a touchstone for the establishment and consolidation of black masculine ideality within the slave narrative genre, serving as template and yardstick not only for slave narrators to come, but for later writers and critics as they articulate Douglass’s importance as a model of how a lowly slave might transform into a powerful and heroic man.

This chapter will discuss the specific case of Douglass’s narrative (1845) and Henry Bibb’s The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849). Although not as well known, Bibb’s narrative is just as significant for critical study as Douglass’s for he reconceptualizes Douglass’s constructions of the black masculine ideal, in call-and-response fashion, to move beyond the boundaries of the exclusively masculinist, “rugged individualist” who is able to neatly free himself from the bonds of slavery. Bibb reconfigures the reductivist terms of the masculine ideal that Douglass was forced to adhere to.

Yet the importance of Bibb’s narrative to the history and significance of slave narrative and the possibilities for reconfigurations of black male identities are obscured by the ways in which it has been interpreted as subordinate to or “feminized” in comparison to Douglass. Critics such as Robert Stepto and James Olney have proposed that this supposed feminization rests in the ways Bibb reveals his private relations through his sustained use of the sentimental, romantic, and domestic elements of nineteenth-century literary conventions, aspects Douglass and other male slave narrators used but played down because of their potential unseemliness and close associations with women’s literatures.¹ However, Bibb’s expansion of the boundaries and terms of black male ideality is not without its own problematic. As we study his narrative, we cannot ignore that his expansion of the black masculine ideal is funded by and constructed simultaneous to his textual subordination and exploitation of his slave wife and child—whom he must abandon in slavery. Yet the public performance needed to justify his final abandonment of his slave family costs Bibb dearly. Thus, this chapter explores the complexly layered ways in which the processes and terms used to further black masculine ideality both subordinate and empower Henry Bibb’s textual identity.

BIBB’S LIFE AND ADVENTURES HELPS US GAIN A SOMEWHAT DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON the rhetorical strategies and weapons available to male writers during a formative period in African American literature as black men confronted the specific ways in which “gendered racism” oppressed and subordinated them.² Bibb’s text explicitly dramatizes the nexus of race and gender within constructions of African American masculinity in ways that cannot be fully considered by only examining Douglass’s 1845 Narrative or other narratives patterned more strictly after his that elide romantic relationships and entanglements. Like Douglass, Bibb discusses origins, Christian hypocrisy, the horrors and violence of slavery, and his road to freedom. However, Bibb also reveals in some detail his romantic relationships and marriage in slavery and how much more difficult these domestic and communal relations made his journey to freedom. Bibb brings together the rugged individualist and American democratic ideals emphasized in texts patterned after Douglass’s with the domestic concerns usually found in the “scribblings” of nineteenth-century women’s popular literature.³ Bibb’s inclusion of these details troubles the neat ideological hierarchy of race over gender maintained by most black male writers of the time.

To date, the implications of Bibb’s text for discussions of the development of strong or heroic black manhood have been largely ignored. Critics, including Robert Stepto and James Olney during the late 1970s and ‘80s, even suggest that Bibb’s text is not as well written or as important as Douglass’s, a critique that doesn’t seem to have been addressed at all within the scholarship about Bibb’s narrative, either then or now. Allowing such critiques of Bibb’s text to stand uninterrogated legitimizes a masculinist racial bias in the critical body of work that still shapes the current reception and positioning of Bibb’s narrative.⁴ These interpretations continue to obscure the very important role Bibb’s text can play in better understanding the frameworks grounding male-authored African American literature, critical work, and formations of ideal masculinity.

Stepto and Olney both compare Bibb’s narrative to Douglass’s using traditional masculinist frameworks of evaluation. Their readings not only subordinate Bibb’s narrative to Douglass’s, but position Bibb’s narrative as feminized by several influences, including white editors, Bibb’s depictions of his romantic relationships, and his use of sentimental language. For instance, in “I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives” (1979), Stepto argues that Bibb’s text is a “first phase/eclectic” narrative because the narrative does not integrate the authenticating documents into the text. They remain “segregated” as Bibb offers no comment on them (Stepto 3–4). Stepto argues that these authenticating or “appended” documents must be “totally subsumed into the tale” for the narrative to move beyond a “Phase I” classification as a “basic narrative” (5). Moreover, Stepto connects Bibb’s silence upon the authenticating documents and the complete separation of Bibb’s “Author’s Preface” from the white editor’s “Introduction” to the racist attitudes and practices of the time (6). Bibb’s narrative cannot even approach what Stepto sees as “the business of discovering how personal history may be transformed into autobiography” (22) because he does not have the same degree of control over his narrative that Douglass exerts. Thus, Stepto sets up an interpretive framework that classifies Bibb’s narrative as not as “sophisticated” or “remarkable” (11) as Douglass’s.

Stepto further questions Bibb’s status as a man:

Henry Bibb is alive and well in Detroit, but by what miraculous stroke will he, as a man, be able to cast his shadow on this soil? The effort in the narrative’s “Introduction” to prove that Bibb exists, and hence has a tale, goes far to explain why a prevailing metaphor in Afro-American letters is, in varying configurations, one of invisibility and translucence. Indirectly, and undoubtedly on a subconscious level, Matlack and the abolitionists confront the issue of Bibb’s inability “to cast his shadow.” But even in their case we may ask: Are they bolstering a cause, comforting a former slave, or recognizing a man? (8)

Stepto’s questions concerning Bibb’s ability to make his mark are a trope to convey Bibb’s supposed inability to prove himself a man. Stepto highlights one of the key objectives of male-authored slave narratives—not only to prove black humanity, but also to create, recognize, and deploy black manhood. And because Bibb cannot overcome racist segregation within his own narrative, Bibb cannot enact Douglass’s more powerful and heroic black masculine identity:

In the first two phases of slave narration [of Bibb and Solomon Northup] we observe the former slave’s ultimate lack of control over his own narrative, occasioned primarily by the demands of audience and authentication. … For this reason, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative … seems all the more a remarkable literary achievement. … [E]ach ancillary text is drawn to the tale by some sort of extraordinary gravitational pull or magnetic attraction. There is, in short, a dynamic energy between the tale and each supporting text that we do not discover in Bibb or Northup’s narratives. … The Douglass narrative is an integrated narrative of a very special order … [and] its new and major thrust is the creation of that aforementioned energy which binds the supporting texts to the tale, while at the same time removing them from participation in the narrative’s rhetorical and authenticating strategies. Douglass’s tale dominates the narrative because it alone authenticates the narrative. (Stepto 17)

Stepto’s diction and rhetoric here guarantee that the reader can feel Douglass as a powerful masculine force. In his reading, Douglass’s narrative is in some ways personified as feminized space to be forcefully and powerfully manhandled into submission. Implicit within the rhetorical structures and strategies of Stepto’s reading is the message that achieving full autobiographical control and maturity is analogous to achieving ideal masculinity. This masculinity must integrate the control, dominance, and “dynamic energy” (along with the “magnetic attraction” and “new and major thrust”) missing from more primitive narratives. Signs that white editors or audiences are controlling the narrative—especially the unintegrated or segregated prefatory authenticating materials—demonstrate that the author occupies a subordinate manhood not only within the narrative, but within the historic political and social worlds of American letters. In Stepto’s critique, Douglass’s narrative establishes the canonical, critically celebrated textual and rhetorical identity that all other ex-slave writers must measure up to. By positioning Bibb’s narrative as the ultimate feminized slave narrative in relation to Douglass’s masculinized master text, Stepto replicates the hegemonic structures of ideal white masculinity as he judges, critiques, and classifies male-authored slave narratives.⁵

Published six years later, James Olney’s “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature” (1984) reiterates the terms of Stepto’s critique, for it too employs the binaries of ideal white masculinity and femininity to marginalize Bibb’s narrative. Centering upon issues of authorial and narrative control, it too finds Bibb’s text second-rate. In addition, Olney disparages the sentimental aspects of Bibb’s narrative by arguing that the “florid, sentimental, declamatory rhetoric” used is similar to that found in ghostwritten narratives and those texts produced by white amanuensis editors (164). Olney further characterizes Henry Bibb’s Narrative in the following way: “It is all to the good, of course, that no one has ever spoken or could ever speak as Bibb and his beloved are said to have done—no one, that is, outside a bad, sentimental novel of date c. 1849” (164–65). For Olney these elements undermine the authenticating documents and the statement “written by himself” made by Bibb in both the title and preface. Olney’s comparison of Douglass and Bibb also suggests a kind of feminization of the masculine power, style, and authenticity Bibb’s text should convey. Yet in the case of Olney it is important to ask why, in Bibb’s narrative, the use of sentimentality points to an inability to sustain good writing and an undue amount of white control.

Anyone familiar with Douglass’s narrative can recall the highly sentimental passages found there, especially the passage describing his master’s abandonment of Douglass’s grandmother. In this section, Douglass’s representations stand out because the information related turns out to be historically inaccurate (Douglass 112, nt. 34).⁶ Douglass included the passage to achieve his overall objective—to show the horrors and brutality of the peculiar institution—and this to some degree takes precedence over veracity. No one has ever suggested that the sometimes florid and declamatory rhetoric of Douglass’s narrative (at the expense of expected “truth”) undermines his authorship. Olney’s statement that Bibb’s text contains elements of a “bad, sentimental novel” refers specifically to the passages where Bibb describes his courtship and marriage to Malinda. Olney argues that the language of these sections is inauthentic and that it proves that the narrative “might as well have been the product of Lucius Matlack,” Bibb’s editor (164–65). What, then, is the difference between the use of sentimentality here and the use of sentimentality in Douglass’s narrative?

The fundamental differences between Douglass’s and Bibb’s representations of sentimentality seem to lie in the object of the sentimental feelings: Douglass’s grandmother as opposed to Bibb’s slave wife. The change is from a familial relationship to a romantic one—the supposedly exclusive grounds of women’s literature—and this seems to have everything to do with Olney’s discomfort with Bibb’s particular sentimentality. What changes is not necessarily the use of sentimentality itself as a rhetorical device in slave narrative, but the introduction of African American romantic love as central to a narrative attempting to further formations of masculine ideality and power. Ironically, one of the great achievements of the genre of slave narrative lay in unifying the sentimental and the political to make the amalgam that catalyzes the abolishment of slavery, struggles to achieve African American rights and freedoms, and the growth and popularity of feminist concerns and women’s literatures.

Additionally, Bibb’s love relationship complicates his ability to fully and cleanly escape slavery in ways rarely visible in male-authored narratives. The Life and Adventures invites us to reexamine intraracial relations between black men and black women to problematize the positioning of race over gender in critical discourses and to rethink formations of the black masculine ideal. Thus, Bibb is unique in his discussions of the romantic and domestic aspects of slavery and the slave community and how they further complicate the dualistic structures of slavery and freedom. This, more than anything else, may account for Olney’s (and Stepto’s) implicit need to try to maintain a gendered hierarchy of critique. They construct Douglass as the independent, liberated, self-defining man and Bibb as the dependent, entangled, somewhat feminized husband and father who cannot quite achieve full masculine liberation.

I have spent some time tracing these particular rhetorical practices as applied in critical comparisons of Douglass and Bibb because through Bibb we can move beyond prescribed representations and positionings of black bodies. Continuing to examine how frameworks based in structures of patriarchy, ideal masculinity, and domination are functioning helps us understand how black manhood is simultaneously generated, empowered, and oppressed by the use of these ideological myths. Bibb’s text provides us a window into black intraracial romance and community, as well as the ways in which black men sometimes participate in their own domination. Thus, his text offers us more multidimensional understandings of black masculine privilege and power and the effects of gendered racism on formations of black manhood. Understanding, rather than disparaging, the differences of Bibb’s narrative provides insights important to the African American literary tradition, not only as it developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in our own contemporary historical moment as well. The forces structuring and deforming the production of powerful and progressive black masculinities continue to dominate and limit black men.

Patriarchal, masculinist, hegemonic structures and rhetorical methodologies both inside and outside the text shape Bibb’s use of language, his conceptions of himself, and the tropes through which he represents black women. Of these, only the often emphasized, racially determined facets have received much critical attention. Bibb mediates between being true to himself and appealing to his Northern, white audience with the goal of redefining and challenging contemporary ideologies of race, manhood, and slavery. Bibb’s particular configurations of African American male ideality and subjectivity as they relate to his roles as husband and father in slavery allow him some agency in structuring his own identity within the North and the abolitionist movement in particular. However, this agency comes at the expense of Bibb’s first wife and child.

LIKE DOUGLASS’S, BIBB’S OVERALL OBJECTIVE IS TO STRIKE A BLOW AGAINST SLAVERY and to precipitate its abolition. Yet racism and the prevalence of racialist thought did not just exist in the South but throughout the abolitionist movement and the North in discourses like colonization and “romantic racialism.”⁷ Bibb challenges racialist, paternalistic thought in both the North and the South, while trying not to anger his white readership, by attempting to further constructions of African American masculine ideality. He does this by drawing on the dominant definitions and discourses of manhood to refute pervasive stereotypes of African Americans. Thus, Bibb helps forge the chain of evidence through which blacks demonstrate unequivocally that they are part of established representations of humanity, hitherto coded as exclusively white. Powerfully masculine representations of blackness that demonstrate the moral, intellectual, responsible, and courageous character of slaves and ex-slaves like Bibb provide the grounds for reinterpreting definitions and stereotypes of the race as a whole (Gates). To accomplish this, Bibb intertwines the production of his oral and written personas with responsibility, commitment, and love of family.

Like many other ex-slave autobiographers who published their narratives during the 1840s, Bibb closely ties his narrative to an already established and authenticated Northern public identity that greatly influences his written text. From the first pages of his narrative—in which Lucius Matlack and, secondarily, the Detroit Liberty Association authenticate and introduce Bibb, his wife, and child in slavery—Bibb’s family plays a prominent role in how he publically identifies himself through the abolitionist platform. As Matlack attests, the details and facts of Bibb’s returns to the South to rescue his slave family are investigated before his narrative account is actually written (Bibb 2). This investigation is carried out based on the details of Bibb’s oral accounts of his life to white Northern abolitionist audiences after his final escape from slavery in 1841. When Bibb begins speaking on the abolitionist lecture platform in Adrian, Michigan, in May of 1844, the details of his life are indeed stranger than fiction to his white audiences and to one in particular. According to Charles Heglar, the white abolitionist James B. Birney’s “suspicions about the fantastic elements of Bibb’s oral account of escapes and returns for his slave family probably led to the Detroit Liberty Party committee’s investigation, which was largely carried out through correspondence with those who had known Bibb prior to 1845” (62). This point is further corroborated by the written testimony of the committee itself (Bibb 2). The establishment and validation of the facts of his public identity are less germane to my argument than the specific details with which Bibb’s persona and character become associated in the minds of his Northern audience.

In contrast to most ex-slave lecturers speaking prior to 1844, Bibb emphasizes his ties to domesticity, family, and community in his oral accounts of his experiences. One essential element in almost all of the letters included by Matlack in the introduction is Bibb’s relationships to his wife, Malinda, and his child, Mary Frances, and his wish to rescue them from slavery. In five of the seven letters—those written by Hiram Wilson, Silas Gatewood, W. Porter, William Gatewood, and Daniel Lane—each man identifies Bibb and authenticates his oral accounts of slavery, including his desire to rescue and reunite with his wife and child. The repeated mentions of Bibb’s family and his repeated returns to the South to rescue them are obviously part of the information Bibb has related to the abolitionists and, thus, a significant part of what the committee is investigating and requesting verification of. Malinda, Mary Frances, and Bibb’s attempts to rescue them are integral parts of Bibb’s Northern, public identity.⁸ And verification of their existence solidifies his public identity, an identity that implicitly and explicitly makes visible the existence and importance of the black family. Thus, for those readers who have heard the story orally and associate the attempted rescue of his wife and child with who Bibb is, the introduction grounds them and prepares them for what is to come. For those readers who have not yet heard Bibb’s story, they are at once introduced to him as an ex-slave about to narrate his experiences in slavery and simultaneously as the man who has tried heroically and courageously to save his family.

Representations of Malinda and Mary Frances within the establishment of Bibb’s oral and written identity serve as a code or shorthand that allows Bibb to gain access to certain traditional, patriarchal, heterosexist ideological structures of manhood for black men. The fact that he (and all black husbands and fathers with him...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Searching for the “New Black Man”? From Masculine Ideality to Progressive Black Masculinities
• Chapter One. Dominant versus Subordinate Masculinities and the Gendered Oppositions between Slavery and Freedom
• Chapter Two. Unsexing the Black Girl to Get to the Indian Princess
• Chapter Three. “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”
• Chapter Four. Breakin’ the Rules
• Chapter Five. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, the Economies of Respectable Black Manhood and Leadership, and the Politics of Collaboratively Gendered Black Male Feminist Autobiography
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index