Writing through Jane Crow

Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature

Ayesha K. Hardison

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813935942
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation—a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement—black writers also addressed the effects of "Jane Crow, " the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson.

By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women's writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

1. At the Point of No Return: A Native Son and His Gorgon Muse

“This is not a novel with a ‘feminist’ theme!” he insisted.

—Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times

To “see” nouns in quotation marks is to question their straightforward, direct meaning—to highlight through a specific ironic staging a queer multiplicity or polymorphous perversity.

—Jennifer Devere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play

In the essay “How Bigger Was Born” (1940), Richard Wright first discusses the impetus behind his best-selling first novel, Native Son (1940), then divulges his intentions to complete a new, unnamed work theorizing the distinct grievances of black women. Wright credits his northern migration and participation in the labor movement for engendering Native Son’s black male protagonist as a universal signifier for the politically disenfranchised and disinherited. Throughout his southern maturation, the writer knew personally several “Bigger Thomases” whose bullying swagger, intraracial violence, defiance of Jim Crow laws, social restlessness, and recurring melancholy fated their broken spirits, imprisonment, and death. The southern migrant also came to understand that there were numerous white “Biggers” around the world who shared black men’s economic oppression as well as their potential for fascism or communism. Despite these revelations, Wright admits in his exegesis that he felt fear and shame while writing Native Son. He questioned what white people would think and how middle-class blacks would respond to his work. These doubts made Native Son’s social commentary necessary as much as they made it possible. Although he grapples with the various influences shaping his work in “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright acknowledges that “reluctantly, [the writer] comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life, and he knows that is impossible.”¹ Wright, however, concedes Native Son’s flaws, including his privileging of morality over the plausibility of certain plot points and his overall investment in character destiny. “With what I’ve learned in the writing of this book, with all of its blemishes, imperfections, with all of its unrealized potentialities,” he discloses, “I am launching out upon another novel, this time about the status of women in modern American society.”² Just as the new text is informed by his experience writing Native Son, Wright reveals that this female-centered work “goes back to my childhood just as Bigger went, for, while I was storing away impressions of Bigger, I was storing away impressions of many other things that made me think and wonder.” The fascination—and amity—with which Wright briefly gestures toward the double jeopardy of racism and sexism in “How Bigger Was Born” is in stark contrast to Native Son’s dismal representations of black women, who emasculate Bigger or are violated by his machismo exertions. “I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book,” Wright confesses. “And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody.” After delineating Native Son’s preoccupations, the black male writer intimates his plans to retire the novel’s critically and commercially successful blueprint in his next revisionary work.

The resulting manuscript, “Black Hope,” is Wright’s first novelistic attempt to conceptualize a complex black female protagonist, yet the work is neither actualized nor recognized fully as a turning point in the writer’s oeuvre and critical legacy.³ Critiques of Wright’s failure to address black women’s multiple oppressions and his understood oppositional stance in relation to contemporaneous black female writers who effectively take up this project are due, in part, to the anonymity and neglect of the unfinished manuscript. While “Black Hope” remains unpublished, its explicit consideration of Jane Crow politics is not prioritized or resolved in his previous or subsequent fiction. Native Son exposes the systematic segregation and Jim Crow practices that sentence the benighted Bigger to death, and the novel initiates a series of disenfranchised black male protagonists defining Wright’s later work. In contrast, “Black Hope” presents a socially aware, articulate, and yet flawed agent in Maud Hampton, who shuns true love and stunts her political consciousness by passing for white. Maud’s willingness to ingest arsenic to escape racism, poverty, and the circumscriptions of domesticity illustrates the hierarchical power dynamics of black women’s interracial, intraracial, and heterosexual relationships.

Moreover the manuscript’s unexpected portrayal of middle-class black, working-class black, and elite white women’s comparable subjugation in white patriarchal society exposes the interconnectedness of whites’ racism, black men’s chauvinism, and the class dissidence between women. With a triptych relationship between the educated and passing Maud, her southern migrant black maid, Ollie Knight, and her wealthy white stepdaughter, Lily Spencer, Wright tries to imagine “black hope.” The manuscript’s working title is a sardonic comment on Maud, who dies at the end of the narrative, like Wright’s other defeated black protagonists. This catalogue includes but is not limited to Bigger, Mann and Silas of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), and Cross Damon in The Outsider (1953). Yet the manuscript’s working title is also an earnest compliment to Ollie, as Wright materializes “black hope” in the conclusion via her participation in a domestic workers’ union organized to confront black women’s economic and sexual exploitation. Wright attempts to refine the palimpsest Native Son with a black female protagonist and a more productive strategy for social protest in “Black Hope.” Granted, the unpublished work’s obscurity means that the manuscript is not a definitive statement on Wright’s body of work. Nonetheless the text’s exploration of Jane Crow oppression attests to the complex gender politics shaping the black male writer’s career. Wright’s unrealized efforts to address sexism in “Black Hope” undoubtedly also informed his published, more critically engaged fiction.

In spite of Wright’s apparent enthusiasm for the manuscript and its political objectives, a succession of productive waves and slack wanes delayed the publication of “Black Hope” and its exploration of black female subjectivity. In May 1939 Wright received a Guggenheim Fellowship to finish Native Son and begin his new work, which was then titled “Little Sister.” The manuscript’s initial title potentially nods to, Sondra Guttman suggests, Bigger’s little sister, Vera, in Native Son. Whereas Bigger makes Vera feel like “a dog” within his denigrating gaze, Wright’s impending text promised to foreground a black woman’s perspective.⁴ By December 1939 Wright had a five-hundred-page draft of “Little Sister,” and as early as March 1940, the date of Native Son’s publication, the New York Sun publicized Wright’s “960-page first draft of a new novel dealing with the plight of Negro women, especially domestics in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”⁵ In the summer of the following year Wright continued to promote the work in the New York Herald Tribune as “a sort of feminine counterpart of Native Son.”⁶ He settled on the title “Black Hope” in 1942 after deliberating numerous alternatives that signified on Native Son but spotlighted the status of women, alluded to the passing plot, or centralized the exploitation of domestic workers. During the fall of that same year Wright’s publishers Harper & Brothers scheduled “Black Hope” for production, while Warner Brothers studio considered translating the work into film.⁷ Wright produced more than one draft of the lengthy manuscript as well as a distinct, shorter version of the narrative with a revamped black female protagonist, but he ceased all efforts to finish “Black Hope” in 1948. That year the prolific writer directed his focus toward drafting The Outsider—only his second novel published thirteen years after Native Son.

Wright’s sundry revisions to “Black Hope” stall at a defining cultural and historical moment that would later dictate the race and gender politics of his oeuvre. The fiction of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, and Zora Neale Hurston demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black female writers managed to devise and contest Jane Crow oppression in ways Wright did not in his work published during the heyday of social realism and lauded long afterward. Yet the materiality of “Black Hope” problematizes the critical nature of Wright’s canonicity even as the text’s unpublished status recapitulates it. The writer’s most noted contribution to the tradition, as Paul Gilroy contends, is an articulation of blackness as “a distinct mode of lived masculinity.”⁸ Consequently black feminist critics often conflate Native Son’s misogyny with Wright’s own chauvinism. The enmity Bigger directs at his sister, mother, and girlfriend in his gaze as well as by his hands is at the behest of Wright’s pen. The writer’s failure to complete “Black Hope” affirms such critiques, and his multiple drafts of the manuscript suggest the impasse black female subjectivity posed for him.

Still, “Black Hope” warrants critical study. As Wright’s only female-centered text, the manuscript’s publication might have changed the classification of the writer and his oeuvre in literary history. In the biography Richard Wright: The Life and Times, Hazel Rowley suggests that living with his first wife and her mother inspired him to privilege the social and psychological aspects of female subjectivity. Rowley contends that the race and gender politics motivating “Black Hope” coalesce around one primary question: “If blacks were placed in positions that made them dependent, and black women even more so, how far would a highly intelligent, restless black woman be prepared to go to acquire freedom, money, and power?”⁹ Maud goes so far as to sever her connections with the black community and pass for white in order to nullify the handicap of race and obtain agency. In the Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, Michel Fabre qualifies, “Although Maud finds herself caught between the two races, her principal concern is her role as a woman, and the racial aspect of her dilemma merely supplies the pivot for the plot. Wright did not set out to describe the place of women in modern society as a piece of ‘feminist’ propaganda, but he cannot help concluding that they are victims more often than not.”¹⁰ Fabre identifies Maud’s “role as a woman” as the manuscript’s main subject, but he notes Wright’s discomfort actualizing her in the context of a mass woman’s movement.

“Black Hope” endorses political alliances between black and white women as well as between working-class and middle-class women, but one would be remiss to read the manuscript simply as feminist agitprop—or not. As if retreating to a familiar masculinist agenda, Wright stresses in a letter that his work in progress “is not a novel with a ‘feminist’ theme!”¹¹ He offsets his aversion to a feminist reading of the manuscript with scare quotes and creates symbolic distance between his intentions and their perceived misinterpretation. The use of quotation marks, as Jennifer DeVere Brody infers, “questions the status of that which passes for the naturalized and the normal.”¹² By interrogating the validity of a feminist reading, Wright’s use of scare quotes calls into question the female-centered focus of “Black Hope” and problematizes a more generous reading of his gender politics. At the same time, the scare quotes indicate feminism’s cultural currency regardless of his oeuvre’s masculinist focal point.

Wright’s reticence to name his new writing trajectory “feminist” reflects the tensions surrounding the term during the postsuffrage and interwar period. Early twentieth-century feminists struggled for economic independence, called for the end of the sexual double standard, and desired equal opportunity in civic and professional arenas. However, other women and chauvinists characterized feminists as anti-male, women who wanted to force femininity onto men, and lesbians.¹³ In “Black Hope” Maud passionately expresses her condemnation of men’s desires to relegate her to the labors and obligations of the domestic space, but the third-person narrator makes it clear that she neither detests men nor desires to be a “man.” The manuscript maintains women’s conventional gender roles, while its black female protagonist attempts to circumvent the institutional oppressions of race, class, and gender. As the Communist Party was a cultural broker for Wright’s early work, its censure of feminists as bourgeois separatists—potential workers who privileged their gender over class oppression—underwrote his rejection of “feminist” ideology.¹⁴ Modern feminism ostensibly had an inherent paradox: it asserted “woman” as an individual while promoting the need for women’s collective awareness. In “Black Hope” women’s social and political desire, which Wright characterizes as class-conscious and collective, and not their performance of gender, which he essentializes as heterosexual and feminine, seems to be his primary concern.

Thus “Black Hope” invokes a female-centered discourse that documents Wright’s efforts to usurp Jane Crow social oppression, but it also demonstrates his concession to Jane Crow’s literary politics. In the biography Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, Margaret Walker posits that the writer’s frustrated relationship to racism, classism, and sexism is emblematic of the Greek mythological figure Medusa. Walker claims Medusa “was part of his ambivalent self—sexually, politically, and racially. She was a teasing presence all his life, sometimes appearing beautiful and benevolent and at other times reversing her face and revealing the twisted, malevolent, serpent-ridden monster. Medusa is a woman!”¹⁵ The enigmatic trope is useful for thinking about Wright’s circuitous gendered discourse in “Black Hope.” The binary or two-faced conceptualization of “woman” reflects his aesthetic struggle both to theorize black women’s subjugation and realize their subjectivity in the manuscript. Maud transcends her social immobility by marrying white and rich and then murdering her aged husband. Yet as a privileged white widow, she economically exploits her black female domestic worker, Ollie; she literally perpetuates intraracial class conflicts and symbolically reenacts the interracial oppression she escapes by passing. Like Medusa, Maud is a double-dealing agent within a matrix of intraracial, interracial, and gender violence; she is both black and white, victim and perpetrator. The stony gaze of Wright’s gorgon muse attested to black women’s multiple oppressions, but Medusa’s duplicity also signaled the limitations of his Jane Crow text. Though Maud is Wright’s protagonist, she is complicit as an antagonist in “Black Hope.”

In lieu of advancing an explicit feminist or womanist project, “Black Hope” unsettles neat literary histories of mid-twentieth-century social realism dominated by not only a masculinist Wright but also a naturalist Wright. Gene A. Jarrett suggests Wright’s oeuvre is more complicated than typically recognized. In identifying Frank Yerby as a lesser-known truant writer in the context of Wright’s predominance as dean, Jarrett also asks, “How do we reconcile Wright’s persona in the late 1930s and the 1940s and his persona in the 1950s, when he wrote Savage Holiday (1954)?”¹⁶ Jarrett points to the obvious differences between Wright’s work when he was a Depression-era, Communist Party loyalist and when he published the white-plot novel as an American expatriate. The writer’s nuances during World War II, however, are far subtler. Although Native Son is the quintessential novel of mid-twentieth-century African American protest fiction, Wright experimented with naturalist conventions in the text. This is exemplified in the novel’s conclusion, when Bigger faces his impending execution, by his struggle to articulate his personhood and the reason he commits murder. Native Son’s indeterminacy in this moment is what James Baldwin criticized as the novel’s racist sentimentality and overdetermination of Bigger as a cipher and not a subject.¹⁷ If Wright’s preeminent fiction is more an exploration than a testament to naturalism, how might critics rethink the novel’s testament to masculinity? More specifically, how might the unpublished “Black Hope” complicate critics’ understanding of the black male writer’s generic and gendered conventions? “Black Hope” is what Claudia Tate terms a “latent narrative” in Wright’s oeuvre; it reflects the conflict between the conventional, commercial demand for the black male protagonists repeatedly featured in his published work and the writer’s unknown efforts to represent black female subjectivity.¹⁸ The manuscript points to an underlying narrative of potential black female social protest, in spite of its perpetual deferment, throughout Wright’s divergent oeuvre. Ironically in “Black Hope,” Maud’s suicide negates her ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Defining Jane Crow
• 1. At the Point of No Return: A Native Son and His Gorgon Muse
• 2. Gender Conscriptions, Class Conciliations, and the Bourgeois Blues Aesthetic
• 3. “Nobody Could Tell Who This Be”: Black and White Doubles and the Challenge to Pedestal Femininity
• 4. “I’ll See How Crazy They Think I Am”: Pulping Sexual Violence, Racial Melancholia, and Healthy Citizenship
• 5. Rereading the Construction of Womanhood in Popular Narratives of Domesticity
• 6. The Audacity of Hope: An American Daughter and Her Dream of Cultural Hybridity
• Epilogue: Refashioning Jane Crow and the Black Female Body
• Notes
• Works Cited