BLUES MULTIVOCALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND SONG

As A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University £o K In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree

• Lt3

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Collin Ludlovv-Mattson

San Francisco, California

January 2016 Copyright by Collin Ludlow-Mattson 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Blues Multivocality in Twentieth-Century Literature and Song by Collin Ludlow-Mattson, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of Arts in English: Concentration in Literature at San Francisco State University.

Lois Lyles, Ph.D. Professor of English

Geoffrey Green,'•'Ph.D. Professor of English BLUES MULTIVOCALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND SONG

Collin Ludlow-Mattson San Francisco, California 2016

This thesis argues for the existence of blues literature, a type of literature rooted in the ethos and aesthetic of blues music that, like blues music, is communally multi vocal and does very real work for its African-American creators and audience— serving as keeper of both cultural memory and habits of mind for psychological well-being. The kernel of each of the thesis’ three chapters is the reciprocally explicative rhetorical and philosophical comparison of a work of blues literature with a blues song. By looking at Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Blues Is a Feeling” in conversation with August

W ilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the first chapter argues that the singing of blues songs can be a sort of self-psychoanalytic “talking cure” useful for processing and moving past race-based trauma and that one can acquire this potentially salutary knowledge by reading Black Bottom. The second chapter, in which Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” are analyzed side-by-side, asserts that the reason that the blues is an effective vehicle for life lessons is that blues works impart life lessons in a way that is not abstract and moralistic but life- based and practical. The third chapter looks at Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man through the lens of

Jimmy Rushing’s, Count Basie’s, and Ed Durham's “Good Morning Blues” in order to argue that a depreciatory, Hobbesian type of comedy aimed at abusive whites, typically found in the blues, is psychologically cathartic and inoculative againsi future race-based traumatic stress injuries. All three chapters argue that blues literature and blues songs preserve time-tested techniques African

Americans can use to maintain psychological salubrity and cultural connection in the face of the iniquity and hostility they have historically encountered in their own country.

I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Committee ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my parents, Jon T. Mattson and Maryann Ludlow, without whose

love and support I would not be in the enviable position I am in today. I would also like to thank my two thesis readers, Dr. Lois Lyles and Dr. Geoffrey Green, without whose

guidance and encouragement I would not have been able to realize this piece of work.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Blues as Folk Medicine in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom...... 1

The Blues as Work Songs in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye...... 31

The Blues as a Comedic Tonic in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man...... 68

Bibliography...... 98 1

The Blues as Folk Medicine in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

I had to look at black life with an anthropological eye, use language, character, and image to reveal its cultural flashpoints and in the process tell a story that further illuminated them. This is what the blues did. Why couldn 7 1? I was, after all, a bluesman. —August Wilson, Preface to Three Plays

August Wilson was not a musician. He did not finger guitar strings or piano keys but typewriter keys. Still, he identified as a bluesman. He was much influenced by Amiri

Baraka, who contends that the blues is not just a musical style but a total way of life and a consciousness. Wilson expressed the idea in his plays and in interviews, associated with the Black Arts Movement, that in all aspects of life “blues people manifest a blues sensibility . . . [which] has been culturally codified into an aesthetic that shows out in everything done, not just in the music” (Salaam 10). To view the music as its own independent, isolate entity, apart from the culture it is an expression of, to see B.B. King in the spotlight and fail to see the rest of segregated Mississippi along with him, is to ignore the fact that the blues is folk music; and folk music is intimately related to the folkways of the community from which it springs (Asch 29). August Wilson, hov/ever, was not from the South—the wellspring of the blues. The grandchild of a woman who walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania during the early years of the Great

Migration, he grew up in Pittsburg during the fifties and sixties—the years when the blues was waning in popularity (Elkins xix). Lacking a direct connection to the source of 2

the music, his relationship with the blues was more mediated than that of a B.B. King or a

Muddy Waters (both Mississippians)—but not less real for that.

Coming of age in the mid-sixties, after soul music had overtaken the blues as the music of the working-class black community, Wilson discovered blues music (and, through blues music, himself) not through what we might, in the language of anthropology, call “blues informants” but through records—starting with a Bessie Smith seventy-eight from the early twenties called “Nobody in This Town Can Bake a Sweet

Jelly Roll Like Mine”1 (Wilson, Three Plays ix; Crawford 31). Wilson, reminiscing years later about how his thoughts upon first hearing that record contained, in nuce, his future literary themes (the importance, for America, of African-American identity and history and the struggle for African Americans to remain connected to both), asserted, “With my discover) of Bessie Smith and the blues I had been given a world that contained my image, a world at once rich and varied, marked and marking, brutal and beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle” (ix). In a crystalline moment with a forty-year-old record, Wilson realized two things that would be foundational for his future writings: there were others who felt like he did (both profoundly blessed and profoundly cursed to be black in

America), and they had been feeling that way for a very long time. Hearing Bessie Smith gave his feelings the validity of identification and the weight of history —the psychological roots and shoots Wilson would need to write the plays he would come to

1 In a move typical of the blues, “Nobody in This Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine” links sustenance and sexuality through double entendre. call “[my] 400-year autobiography . . . the story of myself and my ancestors” (Shannon and Wilson 540).

Wilson was a very self-conscious sort of bluesman. W'e might call him a meta- bluesman, a bluesman who talked about the blues as much as he talked through the blues.

In this, too, he was following after his forebears. Fittingly, as blues lyrics tend to be meditations on personal relationships, the primary way that blues musicians have traditionally talked about the blues in blues song is by personifying the blues—as Big Bill

Broonzy does in “Conversation with the Blues.’* Broonzy sings, “Yeah, now, blues, why don’t you give poor Bill a break? [x2] / Now why don’t you try to help me live instead of tryin’ to break my neck” (qtd. in Gussow, Seems Like Murder 24). Perhaps the most insightful meta-blues song in the tradition is Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Blues Is a Feeling,” a song that addresses a central blues theme (which is the theme of Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s

Black Bottom)—the blues as psychological sickness resulting from trauma (i.e., posttraumatic stress disorder). The song’s insight issues from its iteration of what Adam

Gussow calls “the blues dialectic,” the superficially contradictory but profoundly intertwined nature of what we might call the thesis and antithesis at the heart of all blues songs and works of blues literature. Because blues texts are always dialectical and never univocal, meaning is always negotiated, nuanced meaning in blues texts.3

2 Adam Gussow’s reading of “blues” here is as a metaphor for violently oppressive Southern whites, who were breaking the necks of African- Americans through lynching—a signification of "‘blues” that Angela Y. Davis, likewise, argues for (Gussow, Seems Like Murder 22; A. Davis 113). 3 As a rule of thumb, if a song can be boiled down to an unequivocal statement, it is not a biues song. It is a pop song. Multivocality is a hallmark of blues works. 4

In “Blues Is a Feeling,” Hopkins asserts that the blues is both psychic illness and psychic illness’ cure. Sharing an ecosystem, the cause and the cure of psychological illness have an obverse relationship (that is to say, they are different sides of the same coin), and must be treated as such. This is a view that jibes with Freudian psychoanalysis and its main therapy, the “talking cure,” which involves the patient limning his psychic injury in order to heal it.4 During the song’s spoken introduction, Hopkins says, in dialogue with his guitar (which answers each half of the line with a flutter of bluesy notes), “The blues will give you sickness [guitar response] when there was a pain that you never had.” Posttraumatic stress disorder (which Freud calls traumatic neurosis) is caused by a painful experience that is not truly experienced, not consciously processed and assimilated to one’s psyche—an experience that is so shocking, so sudden, that one does not have the time or psychic resources to make it one’s own (Caruth 59; Freud,

Beyond 10). In psychoanalytic terms, then, Hopkins is saying that when one has experienced psychological pain that one has not been able to consciously acknowledge to oneself that one has experienced, the repressed pain (the “pain you never had”) will make one sick—i.e., it will give one posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In Wilson’s Ma

Rainey’s Black Bottom, PTSD dogs Levee Green (the trumpet player in Ma Rainey’s

band, who is the play’s antagonist) and causes him to break and murder Toledo (the piano player in Rainey’s band) at the play’s close. Hopkins presents a cure for this psychic ill,

4 1 am using the verb limn both in the sense of “To describe or portray in words,” and “To describe or depict by painting or drawing” (American Heritage Dictionary). The second definition, which I am using figuratively, conveys the experiential yet mediated character of a successful “talking cure.” 5

the “talking cure” known as singin’ the blues—a cure that is tragically out of Levee’s reach because of his rejection of traditional folk (medicine) blues. The blues’ “talking cure” is not explained as much as it is demonstrated in Hopkins’ song. In order to demonstrate the blues “talking cure,” Hopkins assumes two different roles in the song.

While in the song’s spoken introduction, Hopkins assumes the role of the wise theorist of

“blues psychoanalysis,” in the body of the song he becomes the “patient” and sings (or talks, in the language of psychoanalysis) about being cheated on by his lover. He works through the pain, so that it will not haunt him, in a self-pitying/boastful way typical of the blues.5

Levee’s PTSD is the result of grief and rage that he has not worked through (of memories that still have the immediacy of something happening right now) caused by the twin pains of witnessing, at eight years old, his mother’s rape and, soon after, losing his father (who was lynched after killing a number of the white men who had violated his mother). Explaining the first of the two incidents to his bandmates, Levee says, “It was coming on planting time and daddy went into Natchez to get him some seed and fertilizer.

Called me, say, ‘Levee you the man of the house now. Take care of your mama while I’m gone’. . . . My mama was frying up some chicken when them mens come in that house”

(69). There is no indication that young Levee was at all apprehensive about being left

alone with his mother—without his father there to protect the family from what Richard

5 Hopkins sings, negotiating the self-pitying/boastfulness dialectic, “[Ilf you knowed you didn’t love me, darlin’, why did you tell me so? /' You know, I didn’t have to be dealing with you. I could be dealing with ... uh ... many more.” 6

Wright called “the white death” (qtd. in Gussow, Seems Like Murder 19). The incursion took him totally unawares. Secure in the rite of passage from boy to man described and licensed by his father, he was awaiting his inaugural meal as “man of the house” when the gang of men broke in, shattering his family and with it his incipient manhood. The coming-of-age ceremony thus became a sort of castration ceremony. Levee did not have the chance to psychologically prepare himself for the stress of the assault he experienced

(an assault on his mother and an assault on his Weltanschauung — on his sense of

security).6 In a sense, Levee did not really experience the assault,7 because he had no

chance to create a schema to experience it through.

We are led to assume that Levee left the South as a result of this violent severing

of his roots. Levee becomes the “rollin’ stone” of blues song. When one thinks of a

“rollin’ stone,” one likely thinks (largely because of Muddy Waters, whose songs of

gleeful “rollin’-stone” characters—“(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish

Boy”—are much more listened to than his song “Rollin’ Stone,” which is the story of a

desperate, distraught “rollin’-stone” character) of a joyous ramblin’ man glad to be

unburdened of quotidian worries. However, there is a dark side to the “rollin’-stone”

lifestyle. While Waters celebrates and heroicizes the unattached, pleasure-seeking, mojo-

6 It is just this sort of insecurity that this sort of terroristic assault was intended to cause. It was designed to make the black subject ever-fearful of a malevolent world—a state of mind in which it is extremely difficult to be reflective, to depart from the present moment with its pressing fear, its existential immediacy, in order to process one’s trauma and move on (to confront what we might call the “night riders of the mind”). 7 Levee is psychologically and physically assaulted. When he tries to come to the aid of his mother with his father’s knife (to enter the fray as “man of the house”), one of the rapists violently slashes him across the chest, leaving a scar that is an objective correlative to his scarred heart. 7

wielding “rollin’ stone” in “(I’m Your) Hooehie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy,” a darker picture of the “rollin’ stone” is painted in his earlier “Rollin’ Stone,” in which he sings, “Well I feel, yes, I feel, like my lowdown time ain’t long / I’m gonna catch the first thing smokin’ / Back down the road I’m goin\” Unlike the joyful “mannish boy,” who brags about the sexual power his unattached state gives him, this “rollin' stone” is resignedly, fatefully rolling along—likely towards doom. One does not sense agency in his unattached ways, as one does in the attitude of the singer of “Mannish Boy.” The rarnblin’ man of “Rollin’ Stone” is the version of the “rollin’ stone” that we get in

Levee—the “rollin’ stone” who did not choose to be one but was damned to be one, damned by a hostile world and a fractured psyche to a fate of running away from disaster towards more disaster. Levee is sent vertiginously rolling northward by the violent (and calculated) actions of terroristic Southern whit es. While some Southern African

Americans took up a peripatetic lifestyle by choice and were “'anxious to be on the move, unable to put down roots just yet,” as Kim Pereira puts it, others were just plain anxious, desperately in the grip of existential fear and its psychological fallout (61-2).

As Freud contends, a repressed trauma (Hopkins’ “pain that you never had”) must be re-experienced (or, rather, actually experienced for the first time) as a traumci redux8

in order to resolve the illness it causes—-an illness often expressed as a compulsion to repeat the trauma, as it is in Levee’s case (Freud, Beyond 19). As Cathy Caruth asserts,

discussing Freud’s concept of the “return of the repressed,” “The repetition at the heart of

8 This is a nonce phrase I am coining and using. 8

catastrophe . . . emerges as the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (2). It is important to note that this reenactment is reflexive, not reflective.

The traumatized person, in a futile attempt to undo what has already been done, literally relives the moment of trauma over and over. There is zero metacognition, involved.

Levee’s violent encounter with Cutler, Ma Rainey’s bandleader, (which starts when, in a rage, Cutler—feeling his worldview and way of life are under attack—attacks

Levee for saying, “Jesus don’t love you, Nigger! Jesus hate your black ass! Talking about burning in hell! God can kiss my ass”) brings Levee right back to the violent incident that

(mis)shaped his consciousness when he was a child (98). When Levee, who has pulled out a knife, screams, “Cutler’s God! Come on and save this nigger! Come on and save him like you did my mama!” the reader is alerted to the fact that Levee’s repressed trauma has returned (99). Levee is not commenting on his family’s attack when he mentions it; he is living it. Soon after saying these words, Levee is impotently waving his knife in the air, screaming at God, “Turn your back on me, motherfucker! I’ ll cut your heart out!” (100). The reenactment of his trauma is so powerful thai it makes Levee temporarily insensible of his surroundings. All of a sudden, it is as if he is alone, as if the only things in the world are him and a malevolent God—an all-powerful God who is ultimately responsible for his mother’s rape, who is the true motherfucker.

The trauma redux (which Freud asserts is necessary for the resolution of the psychic illness) must be experienced with “some degree of aloofness, which will enable

[the traumatized person], in spite of everything, to recognize that what appears to be 9

reality is in fact only a reflection of forgotten past” (Freud, Beyond 19). Performing a blues song or serving as witness to a blues performance is a strategy for re-experiencing trauma with the requisite distance described by Freud, a strategy that allows blues people to process their pain and move on from cycles of psychic and physical violence—a strategy for blues people to be reflective while still living in the present moment. Notice that the vast majority of blues songs employ first-person narration, and many are narrated in the present tense. This creates an ideal situation for Freudian experiential reflection— for plumbing the past without losing contact with the present. Singing the blues and experiencing the performance of blues songs is a strategy for experiencing pain in a ritualized, cathartic way. The blues that Hopkins speaks o f in the song is the blues of psychic illness (what Albert Murray calls “the blue devils”), but the blues that Hopkins speaks through is the blues that relieves psychic illness. As with Aristotelian catharsis, singing the blues purges negativity and pain by bringing it to the fore, by making latent pain experiential—a process which relegates the experience to the past. This is what

Hopkins’ songs do—and what Rainey’s songs do.

The conflict at the heart of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is over the ontology

of the blues—what it is and what it should do—centers on the question of whether

Hopkins’ conception of the blues as cathartic, communal healing ritual is apt. Levee, the

character who serves as the axis of the play’s action, is not inclined to see the blues in

these terms. While Ma Rainey (the character with whom Levee is locked in a

philosophical agon) conceives of the blues as a deeply-rooted cuitural expression that a 10

blues person can turn to for communitas and to better understand himself as a member of a community, Levee sees the blues in superficial and selfish terms. For Levee, the blues is a way to get ahead in the world and to make his own individual mark on it. In 1927, when Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is set, an obvious way for a trumpet player to get ahead was by playing hot jazz (blues-based New Orleans jazz that had migrated north with New

Orleanians like Joe “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong), which was enjoying crossover success as the accompaniment music for the latest dance craze, the black bottom (a dance that was the height of flapper chic in 1927). In contradistinction to Ma Rainey, flappers were not tradition-oriented. The pioneers of what is now recognized as youth culture and the youth market, they were trend-oriented. Levee, looking for quick success, is eager to cater to their whims in order to get ahead (to try to take advantage of the gold rush that surrounded the burgeoning middle-class youth market). It is also important to note that

Levee is eager to jettison all things redolent of the South and his youth. While jazz originated in New Orleans, it quickly became associated with the northern cities of

Chicago and New York. Levee is desperate to undergo the same sort of reorientation/reinvention as jazz had—to move far from home and start anew.

A play about the blues dialectic, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is structured around two distinct faces of the blues—represented by Ma Rainey, the rooted, world-wise matriarch of the blues (who, after many years as a blues performer,9 has achieved a fair

n Rainey had been on the road performing the blues for over twenty years when she began making records in 1923 (F. Davis 72). If she did not give birth to the blues, as her appellation indicates, she at least can be 11

amount of success, independence, and peace of mind) and Levee, the desperate, restless, destructively innovative upstart. Levee disregards the band’s power dynamic (i.e., Rainey rules) and transgresses tradition in a larger sense when he attempts to rearrange Rainey’s adamantly anachronistic “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” without her blessing—to erase

Rainey’s traditional minstrelsy-type arrangement (complete with a medicine-show-type barker introduction) in favor of an up-tempo hot-jazz arrangement. Levee fails to recognize that, at this late point in her career, Rainey is all about tradition—because she is tradition. Rainey is not concerned with the inevitably ephemeral dance craze known as the black bottom. She is, rather, concerned with the tradition of the geographical black bottom, the African-American South. When Rainey’s manager Irvin urges her to use

Levee’s arrangement of “Black Bottom” because it is “something [people] can dance to” and “makes them forget about their troubles,” Rainey roundly refuses and says, “Now, if that don’t sit right with you . . . then I can carry my black bottom on back down South to my tour, ’cause I don’t like it up here no ways” (62, 63). Rainey implicitly accuses her manager of valuing the wrong black bottom. Irvin is prizing the flash-in-the-pan dance craze over the deep, rooted blues of Ma Rainey (who playfully synecdochizes herself as a

“black bottom”) and her audience, who is located in the country’s black bottom—where

Rainey longs to be.

Levee is dissatisfied and frantically impatient with the limitations put on him as a black man and as Rainey’s accompanist. His fraught and fractured state of mind belies said to have midwifed it, spreading it from town to town and region to region—first with the all-black minstrel show F.S. Wolcott’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels, then with her own review (71-2). 12

the upbeat music and relentlessly happy lyrics that he writes in an effort to appeal to the owner of Ma Rainey’s record company (white, middle-class, mercenary Mel. Sturdyvant), who is looking to record the new jazzy sound he feels his record-buying audience is looking for. Rainey and Levee represent two complimentary, though opposed, blues ethoses, which manifest themselves as blues aesthetics (classic blues, which Rainey was instrumental in creating, and hot-jazz of the soil recorded by Jelly Roll Morton and His

Red Hot Peppers in the twenties'0).

On one side of the dialectic is the idea (represented by Levee) that the blues should ignore trouble-and downheartedness in favor of unalloyed cheer and revelry—not vanquishing blues pain with blues joy, as Murray discusses in Stomping the Blues,'but obscuring blues pain with a mask of jollity. Levee removes from the music what Toni

Morrison calls, in The Bluest Eye, funkiness—the “the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions”—which includes downheartedness as well as glee

(83). Levee strips the blues of its lowdown qualities— lowdown in the sense of both mournful and sexual Just as he represses his own lowdown blues (his trauma, caused by never being able to mourn and process his pain and loss, which is associated with sexual violence); he represses moumfulness and sexuality from the blues music he writes. The two repressions are of a piece. Levee’ s insistence on untethered modernity (on severing ties with downhome Southern blues) is an expression of his desire to keep his Southern past out of his present, to keep his trauma buried deep in the southern regions of his

1 am »ot at all saying that hot jazz is generally detached from its roots in the blues. Many hot jazz players (most notably Louis Armstrong) were blues- based musicians. unconscious. The song he pitches to Sturdyvant, in an effort to get his own band and a recording contract, is a hot-jazz number that is lyrically a whitewashing of Charley

Patton’s raggy blues song “Shake It and Break It (But Don’t Let It Fall, Mama).”11 It is disingenuously uptown, instead of lowdown. Patton’s song is a gleefully lowdown demonstration of how one can use sex to keep the blues (in the sense of “blue devils”) at bay. In Levee’s version of the song, all of Patton's funkily suggestive leers have been replaced by one-dimensional, disingenuous good cheer. Where Charley Patton’s “Shake

It and Break It” is a confrontation of lurking death (and potential dismemberment) with

Eios, Levee’s “Shake It and Break It” is a bowdlerized blues in which nothing is at stake.

Levee’s repression of his past is made manifest in the song—a Mississippi blues stripped of its essential character, of its frank confrontation with life.

Jelly roll, in Patton’s “Shake It and Break It,” as in Bessie Smith’s “Nobody in

This Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine,” signifies genitalia—specifically, coital genitalia (jelly having signified sexual effluence as far back as the seventeenth century; when John Donne used the term “excrementall jelly” in a sermon linking the fluids of sexual generation and sepulchral putrefaction) (Calt 135, Targoff 166-67).

Charley Patton sings, “You can shake it, you can break it, you can hang it on the wall /

Throw it out the window, catch it ’fore it falls / My jelly, my roll—sweet mama, don’t you let it fall.” Patton, tapping a rich poetic tradition that goes all the way back to

Elizabethan times, is asking his lover lor help in delaying the spilling (or falling) of seed;

1' Patton’s music is considered by many to be the best representation on record of an ur-biues—the sort of rural roots blues that wandering musicians had been playing since the turn of the century (F. Davis 97- 8). 14

and, on a more resonant level, he is asking her to help him stave off death. He aims to stay sexually potent, to stave off la petit mori, all night long. Utilizing Donne’s rhetorical move, which converts the dust to dust trope into the more personal jelly to jelly trope, we can say that the reason Patton is so insistent that his lover not cause his jelly to fall is that he metonymically associates the jelly of life with the jelly of death.

Patton sings to his lover that she can do anything with his phallus but please it to fruition—which would cause it to lie down, as in a. grave. In a fit of satumalian abandon, he has placed himself entirely in her hands. His member is hers. One cannot help but notice the litany of abuses of his manhood that Patton joyfully licenses in the song (“You can shake you, you can break it, you can hang it on the wall / Throw it out the window, catch it ’fore it falls”) and to note that emasculation would be necessary to realize them.

Emasculation was, of course, frequently an element of the lynching spectacle (which was a Damoclean presence in Patton’s life, living, as he did, in Mississippi in the early twentieth century); and the dismembered member was often kept as a souvenir—a sort of dehumanizing anti-totem.

Adam Gussow makes an argument about Bo Carter’s double-entendre blues “All

Around Man” that is quite germane to discussion of Patton’s “Shake It and Break It” as a song in which one’s Eros successfully overwhelms one’s death anxieties. An exemplar)' couplet from “All Around Man” is “Now I ain’t no miller, no miller’s son, / 1 can do your grindin’ till the miller-man comes” (qtd. in Gussow, Seems Like Murder 43). Gussow asserts, “The sadistic, souvenir-claiming pleasure taken by the lynchers . . . is 15

reconstituted in Carter’s song as a playful gift of pleasure (‘your grinding,’ ‘your screwing’) to the woman he is addressing. Blues song reconfigures torture as an all-points sexual healing proffered by a virtuosic lover” (44), Patton’s “Shake It and Break It” similarly converts the darkly sacrificial ceremony of death that is lynching into a sexual ceremony of life. The lynching spectacle, with its associated hysteria concerning black men raping white women, placed the disembodied black phallus at center stage. In

Patton’s “Shake It and Break It,” the figure of the disembodied phallus signifies man as embodied phallus—as pure, death-defeating sexual energy. The stakes, then, in Patton’s

“Shake It and Break It” are very high. The song is about life and death and methods of coping with the profound weight of each. The same cannot be said about Levee’s version of “Shake It and Break It,” which has been denuded of Patton’s rich sexual implications.

Levee likely , because of the fact that the series of traumatic events that led to his father’s death began with a sexual attack, unconsciously perceives sexual energy to be death- delivering rather than death-defeating.

Levee’s “Shake It and Break It” is modeled on Patton’s, but it fails to look life squarely in the face (as Levee has been unable to look his life squarely in the face) and convey its complexity as Patton’s song does. Levee’s take on the previously quoted verse is “You can shake it, you can break it / You can dance at any hall / You can slide across the floor / You’ll never have to stall / My jelly, my roll, / Sweet mama don't you let it fall”

(80). Despite keeping Patton’s bookend lines (“You can shake it, you can break it” and

“Catch it ’fore it falls”), more or less, Levee entirely changes the song’s valence. While 16

the bookend lines are, in Patton’s version of the song, invitations to love the singer so strongly that it outshines the daily hate he must confront, in Levee’s version the bookend lines serve simply to remind one that Levee is working in the blues tradition (despite his declarations that he wants nothing to do with the old-time blues). Levee’s song fails to

Signify. It does not talk back to the tradition, which is to say it has nothing to say to Ma

Rainey’s largely black, Southern audience (and nothing to say to a white audience that that audience does not already know).

Levee provides us with an explanation for his failure to voice real blues concerns in a blues-based song: The song has been crafted to appeal to the white, bourgeois record company owner—a man who has no concern or feel for the music or situation of African

Americans. After Levee has been singing the song’s lyrics to himself, while hanging out in the band room waiting to record, the first thing he says is “Wait till Sturdyvant hear me play that!” (80). He doesn’t care what his bandmates think of the song; he never asks them for their opinion of it. And he doesn’t express an eagerness to connect his music to audiences. His overriding concern is to win a recording contract from a man whom, at the beginning of the play, says to Irvin (expressing his feeling that records—and the people who make them—are just so many widgets), “Two more years and I’m gonna get out,.. get into something respectable. Textiles. That’s a respectable business” (19). Levee has correctly sized up Sturdyvant. He pitches Sturdyvant a song that will appeal to his desire for something jazzy that is “respectable” enough to have cross-over appeal. This accounts for how out of touch the song’s sentiment is with the situation of black people, who were 17

not being treated respectfully in America in the 1920s. There is one line in particular that seems so out of touch as to be insulting—“You can dance at any hall.” African

Americans could certainly not dance in any hall, because of segregation—even in northern Great-Migration destination cities like Chicago and New York. Levee’s song is entirely respectable. Stripped of the sexual depth of Patton’s song, it is a pop song the superficial sentiment of which can be summed up in a mere phrase—while one could write pages and pages explicating Patton’s rich song.

Larry Neal and Angela Y. Davis argue, respectively, that a strength of blues songs, part of what makes them life-affirming, is that they depict sexuality in its fullness. Early twentieth-century blues songs did not censor feelings of carnal love, or dress them up in circuitous metaphor, the way mainstream white pop music did. Neal asserts, “The blues

are not concerned with middle-class morality, black or white. That is because the

audience that they address is forced to confront the world of the flesh: the body is real,

the source of much joy and pain. There is very little attempt the euphemize the realities of

male-female relationships. . . . Tin Pan Alley popular songs sing of ‘making whoopee' or

‘making love.’ The blues singer exclaims, ‘My man, he rocks me with one steady roll’”

(117). Addressing female blues particularly but aiso blues in general, Davis argues “[The

blues’] representations of sexual relationships are not constructed in accordance with the

sentimentality of the American popular song tradition. Romantic love is seldom

romanticized in the blues. No authentic blues woman could, in good faith, sing with

conviction about a dashing prince whisking her into the 'happily-cver-after” (23). And 18

yet this sort of fairy-tale dreaming is just the sort of thinking that informs Levee’s version of “Shake It and Break It.” He has removed the bluesy sexuality and replaced it with a declaration (“You can dance at any hall”) that is either targeted at white audiences or, if it is not, is the sort of fantasy that is so incongruous with reality that it can only lead to deep disappointment.

The simplicity of Levee’s position, his failure to see the secularly spiritual, therapeutic quality of the blues, is its fault and is ultimately Levee’s Achilles heel—the iiamartia that will bring on his act of suicidal murder at the play’s close. Levee cannot connect with his bandmates in the blues communion (and, indeed, feels antipathy with his bandmates and with Rainey) because he fails to see the blues as more than good-time music and a good way to make money and a reputation. Levee’s repeated attacking of the other members of Rainey’s band, who are all about twenty years older than he is (which means they were getting their start as musicians when the blues itself was getting its start, in the 1890s—a fact which in itself should demand a lot of respect), is an attack on the tradition he is a part of (F. Davis 24). When Levee says to his bandmates, telling them 5' ' ... ' . y;j >. . •• . ->-v .. .. how he wants them to play “Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,” “[W]e ain’t gonna countrify it.

This ain’t no barn dance,” he is attacking their identities as musicians and as men (38).

Cutler, Slow Drag, and Toledo are country blues musicians. Slow Drag earned his name years before because of a particularly skillful, sensuous slow drag he danced with another man’s woman at a barn dance (an exceedingly culturally rural function) in Bolingbroke,

Georgia. WThen Levee says to his bandmates, “I knows how to play real music . . . not this 19

old jug-band shit,” he is not just attacking their musical style (26). Their musical style is

inextricable from their lifestyle and their Weltanschauung. Because all of their glories and their legacies are wrapped up in their music, Levee is more than insulting. He is an existential threat. If jug band music and country blues are over, then they are as well. As

Slow Drag’s very name issues from the country blues tradition (the slow drag is a dance traditionally danced to slow-paced country blues songs), Levee is attempting to wipe away Slow Drag’s very name and existence. Levee’s failure to see the blues for all it is

(and his fellow musicians for all that they are) means that he dismisses a whole type of blues out of hand, merely because it is an historical style that does not conform with modern trends. He is in too much of a rush (possibly because he is afraid that, as a black man, and having experienced what he has already experienced, his life will be cut short by death or jail) to notice the continuity between past and present blues trends

Levee wants to immediately have all the success that Rainey worked for over twenty years to achieve, building a relationship with her audience on the road. He may speak of Rainey and her musical style disdainfully, but he very much wants to be a figure like her—though he is hoping that his “Rainey-ness” will be conferred upon him immediately by the white power structure in the entertainment industry (that, as in a

Faustian bargain, he will not have to pay his dues for his power and accolades as Rainey did). Levee says to his bandmates, “As soon as I gei my band together and make them records like Mr. Sturdyvant done told me I can make, I’m gonna be like Ma and tell the white man just what he can do.... Make the white man respect me!” (94). Cutler 20

responds, “The white man don’t care nothing about Ma. The colored folks made Ma a star. White folks don’t care nothing about who she is . . . what kind of music she make”

(95). As Cutler asserts, Levee is mistaken thinking that he can create a career with

Sturdyvant’s record company from the top down. And he is doubly mistaken thinking that he would be able to “tell the white man just what he can do” if his career were entirely owed to a white record company owner. As in a Faustian bargain, the white record company owner would then own him. This dramatic irony is pointed to in the play when, shooting the bull with his fellow musicians in the band room, Levee explicitly expresses a desire to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for success. Levee says,

“That’s the only thing I ask about the devil... to see him coming so I can sell this [soul]

1 got. ’Cause if there’s a [G]od up there, he done went to sleep” (43). Levee has given up on the God who he holds responsible for his mother’s rape and his father’s murder.

However, he has not given up entirely on figures with God-like power and authority.

Now that his father and the God he was raised to believe in are dead, he has put his faith in sinister father figures like Sturdyvant and the devil. He; figures that if the world is evil, he might as well align himself with evil and get ahead.

Sturdyvant isn’t looking for talent. He isn’t looking for art. He’s looking for bankability. Sturdyvant is attracted to Levee’s modern, upbeat sound for no other reason than that he sees it as a money-maker. Sturdyvant is a classic bourgeois businessman of the type that Marx rails against in the Communist Manifesto—-a coldly unsentimental man who is only interested in culture as a vehicle for making money. He says to Irvin, at the 21

beginning of the play, as the two of them are setting up the recording studio for the session, “Irv, that horn player . . . the one who gave me those songs . . . is he gonna be here today? Good. I want to hear more of that sound. Times are changing.... We’ve got to jazz it up” (19). He certainly wants Levee’s songs. But, as an unsympathetic businessman, he sees no advantage in recording Levee (who does not have an established name) playing the material. So Sturdyvant manipulates Levee into writing him some songs (which we imagine he plans to have someone more established record) by promising him a nonexistent recording deal for the band Levee is dreaming of putting together. Levee has made a deal with the devil, figuratively speaking—as he professed a desire to do literally. His mistake is that he believed that the devil would be true to his word, showering the soul-seller with earthly gifts as promised—as he is in the Faust myths (such as the Eliza Cotter story told by Slow Drag in the play). Levee is shocked to discover that real-world devils can be far more immediately unscrupulous than the mythical one, who has all the time in the world to exploit you.

In contradistinction to Levee’s ethos stands the idea (advocated for in the play by

Ma Rainey) that the blues is not something you “sing to feel better” but “a way of understanding life”—as Rainey says to Cutler, her bandleader (82). That is to say, singing the blues is not a quick-fix, opiatic cure for a troubled mind but a long-term regimen for psychic health through a sort of self-psychoanalysis (for, in order to “understand life,” first one needs to understand oneself—and blues songs are adamantly self-oriented). For

Rainey, singing the blues is testifying in public—baring your soul for all, including yourself, to see. It is important to note that the historical Rainey had a good deal of involvement with the church during her life. Despite being identified primarily with the blues, which many churchgoing African Americans called “Devil’s music,” she spent both her youth and retirement (the periods in her life when she was not on the road) as a wholly dedicated member of a black Baptist congregation (Lieb 3, Albertson 784).

Rainey’s main songwriting collaborator, who was also her bandleader on the road, was the very religious Thomas A. Dorsey (composer of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”), who came to be known (for songwriting work he had already begun when in Rainey’s band) as the “Father of Gospel Music” (Price 303-4). The original appellation for

Dorsey’s religious music, “gospel blues,” is descriptive of the overlapping testifying and witnessing roles of the blues and spirituals/gospel music (303). In fact, Angela Y. Davis contends that the reason many African Americans with a stake in religion stigmatized the blues as the devil’s music is that Christianity and the blues were essentially offering the same thing. The blues provides the same sort of ecstatic, cathartic release that spirituals provide, she argues. The blues w'as vilified as the devil’s music, while other secular black music was not, because the blues constituted a threat to the centrality of the spirituals, and, therefore, of religion in the lives of African Americans. The blues spiritualizes, sanctifies, memorializes, and makes transcendent black experience in the here-and-now rather than in the sweet by-and-by. But both forms function by distilling the thwarted desires and bittersweet joys of the community into sentiment that can be experienced very personally (A. Davis 8-9). 23

Rainey was very aware of the testifying function of the blues, of its overlap with spirituals and gospel music—the element of Murray’s ecstatic blues ritual that Levee ignores. Sterling Brown’s description of Rainey in his poem “Ma Rainey” makes this clear. Speaking about Rainey addressing the “blue devils” aspect of the blues, Brown apostrophizes Rainey thus: “O Ma Rainey, /' Li’l and low; / Sing us ’bout de hard luck /

Roun’ our do’; / Sing us ’bout de lonesome road / We mus’ go” (33-8). For Rainey, singing the blues is a secular analogue to testifying and getting a witness—a process of identification that allows one to learn about one’s community and oneself—to diagnose its ills and celebrate its strengths. When Rainey sings “Backwater Blues” (a Bessie Smith song commonly thought to be about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927), which she is described as doing in Brown’s “Ma Rainey,” she is inciting an Aristotelian cathartic ritual. She is bringing to the fore for her audience fear and pity that leads to identification with the suffering of the character portrayed in the song and a better understanding of oneself. Doubtless, many African Americans in Rainey’s audience, who are described in the poem as coming from all over the South to see her, had not directly experienced the flood. Nonetheless, they could identify with lines like “Thundered and lightnened an’ the storm begin to roll / Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go” (44-5). African

Americans’ freedom of movement was always constricted, by redlining in the North and segregation in the South—both backed by the threat of violence. They were surrounded with a force nearly as inhospitable and threatening as a flooded river every day of their lives. 24

Levee’s “flooded river” is a physical reality (he is hemmed in by segregation and redlining) and a psychic reality (he is hemmed in by PTSD). The cause of this psychic reality (and the fact that this psychic reality has much to do with a physical reality) is indicted by his name. Levee is named for a common topographical feature in the South along the Mississippi River—the river levee, which, when functioning properly, keeps the river in its course. Levee’s parents, who were Mississippians, expressed identification with their Southern home, intermingling Levee's place of birth with his person, when they named him. By naming Levee after one of their region’s defining protective features, they were expressing their confidence that the region, like a member of their family, would protect them from harm. This identification with place made it that much more destructive for the family when the place turned out to be hateful and hostile. Levee’s psychic levee broke when his family was attacked by his family’s white Southern neighbors. Considering the confusion and radical change of emotion, though, it was not a

“clean break.” The brokenness of Levee’s psychic levee is very complex. Because of his

PTSD, Levee’s psychic levee is both too effective and not effective enough (i.e., it withholds memories that need to be worked through and regularly lets slip through the shock associated with those memories).

Levee’s disparagement of Rainey’s brand of rootsy blues as “old jug-band shit” is symptomatic of his fear of facing his past—a past rooted in the traumas he experienced in

Jackson County, Mississippi (where he is from), an area thoroughly steeped in country blues and the African-American poverty that necessitated the bricolage instrumentation 25

of the jug bands.12 Attempting to jettison the frequently-melancholy country blues and embrace modern, urban jazzed-up music with good-time lyrics (because of ambition and neurosis that are so intermingled that they are really the same entity), Levee fails to see that without the blues template (what Baker calls the blues “matrix”13), there would be no hot jazz, Levee says to Mel Sturdy vant, the owner of the record label Rainey records for

(trying to convince him to let him record some of his compositions with his own band),

“The people’s tired of jug-band music, Mr. Sturdyvant. They wants something that’s gonna excite them! They wants something with fire!” (108), What was called the “race music” scene was evolving at a rapid clip in the late 1920s. Levee is right about that. But the jazz that was developing in places like New York and Chicago was as indebted to the

Blues Queens (Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, et al.) as could be. They were some of the very first musicians (along Joe “King” Oliver, Louis Armstrong, W.C. Handy, et al.) to add some polish and sophistication to the blues. Rainey’s music was certainly not wholly countrified jug-band blues. She added the mannered approaches of vaude ville and black minstrelsy to the blues to create a wholly new music—what has come to be called

Classic Blues (Lieb xii, xvi). Ma Rainey is not, strictly speaking, the “Mother of the

Blues,” which she was billed as, but rather the mother of pop blues (a fusion of the down- home twelve-bar blues, with its casual, frequently improvisatory approach to lyrics, and

12 Jug Bands, such as Cannon’s Jug Stampers and the Memphis Jug Band, used common objects (such as wine jugs, washtubs, washboards, and tissue-covered combs) as instruments, along with guitars, banjos, fiddles, etc. ' ’ Another meaning for Baker’s radically Signifyin(g) blues “matrix” is “a womb, a network, a fossil- bearing rock, a rocky trace of a gemstone’s removal, a principal metal in an alloy, a mat or plate for reproducing print or phonograph records" (3). 26

Vaudeville and minstrelsy song, with its more composed lyrics and song arrangements).

Musicians like Louis Armstrong (who played on a few of Rainey’s recordings in the mid­ twenties) and Duke Ellington built upon the work of people like Rainey and her bandleader Thomas Dorsey. It is not for nothing that early Louis Armstrong compositions have names like “Gut Bucket Blues," “Lonesome B l u e s and “Wild Man B lu e s’’’’ (italics mine). Armstrong’s high-flying solos were frequently grounded by Southern country blues structures. Indeed, without Southern country blues, there would be no Northern jazz.

The intimate connection between the ragged Southern blues troubadours (like

Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson) and the jazzy music that Levee is dying to make is made explicit by Levee’s choice of lyrics for the song he pitches to Sturdyvant.

Trying to write a hot new, jazzy song, Levee borrows lyrics from Charley Patton, a musician known to adapt songs that had been around since the nineteenth century. The dramatic irony that is resultant from his failure to acknowledge the rural roots of his music (which are “written” all over his lyrics) is representative of Levee’s failure to confront the roots of his psychic pain. Levee’s failure to confront his blues, to talk to the blues tradition, is evident when we compare his dance song, based on “Shake It and

Break It,” with Ma Rainey’s ostensible dance song, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

It is immediately apparent that “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is not really a dance- craze song. There are no directions for executing the dance in the song. There was actually a dance-craze black-bottom song, with directions for doing the required steps— 27

Perry Bradford’s and Gus Horsley’s “The Original Black Bottom Dance”14 (so popular

Bradford and Horsley recorded it twice—once for the Harmony label in October of 1926, as the Georgia Strutters, and again for the Okeh label in December of the same year, as

Perry Bradford and His Gang), which sparked the fad for the dance among fashionable flappers when it was given top billing in George White’s Scandals of 1926 (Calt 22).

What one notices immediately when one compares Bradford’s and Horsley’s song with

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is that Bradford’s and Horsley’s song is a great deal faster than Rainey’s song. That is to say, Bradford’s and Horsley’s black-bottom song is much more appropriate for black bottoming than Rainey’s molasses-paced (or, indeed, black- bottom-mud paced) black-bottom song The black bottom is a sprightly dance—light years away from being a slow drag. For evidence of the black bottom’s alacrity, consult a short film from 1926 called “Let’s Do the Black Bottom,” which gives directions for executing the dance and features footage of Ruby Keeler (who would go on to be a movie star in the thirties) black bottoming.15 Because Rainey’s song is called “Ma Rainey’s

Black Bottom,” and you cannot do the black bottom to it, it is reasonable to conclude that * %/ .♦ . • ’ ’ •** •• ’* ’ * \*< • the song is commentary on the dance craze and the dance-craze song. It is made evident in the song’s spoken introduction (spoken by a male minstrel-show barker type) diat “Ma

Rainey’s Black Bottom” is in reaction to “The Original Black Bottom Dance” and other black-bottom dance-craze songs (such as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp”).

14 Some of the directions are “Now you hop in front, doodle back / Mooch to the left, mooch to the right / Do the mess around / Break a leg until you’re near the ground’’ (qtd. in Calt 22). 15 “Let’s Do the Black Bottom” can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch7v-gsukq62fMA4. 28

The “barker” says, “Now, you done heard the rest. Ah, boys, I’m gonna show you the best. Ma Rainey’s gonna show you her black bottom!” (qtd. in A. Davis 231). Rainey seems to be using the phrase black bottom to synecdochically refer to herself and herself to synecdochically refer to black people as a whole—as Wilson has her do in his play.

As with the blues, the dance called the black bottom had been in existence in the black community long before it burst onto the national scene in the 1920s. Bradford’s and

Horsley’s “Original Black Bottom Dance” was actually a retooling of a song called the

“Jacksonville Rounders Dance” Bradford had written in 1907 about black country people black bottoming in Jacksonville, Florida, nearly twenty years before (Oliver 35). The song “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is the reaction of a rooted blues artist to a small portion of her tradition being blown up out of proportion as a fad in mainstream culture.

Rainey would have been familiar with the dance for many years. And now people from outside of the blues community had taken the dance up as if it were brand new and wholly theirs. Rainey's “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” then, is an assertion of the centrality of blues people in the blues tradition. She is saying that it is not some dance step that contains the tradition. It is the blues people, for whom the blues is therapy, revelry, and life itself in aesthetic form, that are the tradition. These rooted blues people serve as a sort of chorus in the song, voicing Rainey’s position. The song starts with a description of a friend of Rainey’s, “dancin* Sammy.” He is described as being “crazy about all the latest dancin’ / Black bottom stomps and new baby prancin’”—a reference to Morion’s “Black Bottom Stomp” (qtd. in A. Davis 231). Sammy is a follower of 29

fashion—one for whom an old step like the black bottom is erroneously seen as “the latest dancin’.” In the next verse, people who are deeply connected to the blues tradition

(the “chorus”) are introduced. Rainey sings, “The other night at a swell affair / Soon as the boys found out that I was there / They said, ‘Come on, Ma, let’s go to the cabaret’”

(231). The “swell affair” is likely an upper-crust party at which the trendy black bottom would have been danced. “The boys” (i.e., Rainey’s “chorus”) want to get out of that sort of party, though, and head to a real blues party. At the blues party, the boys say, “[We] want to see that dance you call the black bottom / 1 wanna learn that dance / Want to see the dance you call your big black bottom / They put you in a trance. / All the boys in the neighborhood / They say your black bottom is really good / Come on and show me your black bottom / 1 want to learn that dance” (231). Obviously, the dance they are talking about is not the black bottom the flappers are doing. They would have already known that dance, as it had been in the African-American community virtually since time immemorial—so they would not have expressed a desire to see it and learn it. This dance is Ma Rainey herself, her danse vital)6 This song, recorded in 1927, late in Rainey’s career, cautions her fellow blues people (people like Levee) not to lose touch with their roots in search of the superficial pleasures of embracing a trend—which is just what

Levee is doing.

When Levee attempts to rearrange “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (which is a move as existentially threatening for Rainey as is tel ling the older members of her band that jug

16 This is another nonce phrase I am coining. It stands in contradistinction to the dame macabre. 30

band music is dead), he quickens the song’s tempo considerably, making it into the sort of song that people would black bottom to—removing much of the depth from the song when he does so, as he had with Patton’s “Shake It and Break It.” Levee says, “Now' we gonna dance it... but we ain’t gonna countrify it” (38). Ma Rainey’s version of the song

(which is arranged by Cutler in the play) is purposefully anachronistic, purposefully countrified. It is suitable for slow dragging at bam dances. It thumbs its nose at trend and affirms African-American tradition. That is to say, the song “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and the play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom are doing the same thing. Both Ma Rainey and

August Wilson, in their works of the same name, are affirming the legitimacy of African-

American tradition by sticking to an unfashionable but enduring form of music. Rainey will not play hot jazz, a music she seems to have little connection to, in order to conform to the whims of the popularly fashionable. Likewise, Wilson does not jazz up his literary works with contemporary pop music or pep culture. Both figures remain aloof from the whims of the popularly fashionable and connected to the root element of black culture

(the black bottom that undergirds the rest of it), the blues. 31

The Blues as Work Songs in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

There has to be a [new] mode to do what the [blues] did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization. .. . The music kept us alive, but it’s not enough anymore. —Toni Morrison, Interview with Thomas LeClair

The Bluest Eye is a blues-revival work. Toni Morrison felt, when she was writing the novel (between the years 1965-69), that the blues needed reviving because it had lost a good deal of its therapeutic potential for African Americans (Rice 168-69; Morrison,

“Afterword” 212). What we might call the “Morrisonian blues revival” is not the same as what is commonly called the “blues revival” of the mid-to-late 1960s—a commercial revival that came on the heels of the “folk revival” and the success of the blues- influenced British Invasion bands of the period. In fact, Morrison’s literary blues revival was something of a reaction to the musical one. While the audience for the “blues revival” was largely white and middle-class, Morrison’s literary blues project was an effort to preserve the edifying force of the blues in the lives of African Americans, which was fading, thought Morrison, along with its relevance and connection to the community

(Wald 236-7). Morrison was certainly not alone in feeling, after the far-reaching shifts in culture and consciousness of the 1960s, that the relationship of the blues to African

Americans had changed in ways both radical and subtle.

There was wide-ranging debate about the value and meaning of the blues among

black intellectuals during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras—a debate that did 32

justice to the blues’ long-running importance to African Americans as keeper of both cultural memory and habits of mind for psychological well-being. A contingent of critics involved in the Black Power and Black Arts Movements argued at the time that, because of the psychological and social changes brought about by the Civil Rights and Black

Power Movements, the blues, once valued (and vilified) for its transgressiveness, now seemed, because of the abiding fatalism of its lyrics in the face of the period’s mood of progressivism, as conservative as the staid Protestant hymns it was once defined against

(Scheiber 473). The most radical, vocal, and, notorious of these critics, Ron Karenga, argues, in the essay “Black Art: A Rhythmic Reality of Revolution,” that “the blues are invalid; for they teach resignation, in a word acceptance of reality—and we have come to change reality. We will not submit to the resignation of our fathers who lost their money, their women, and their lives and sat around wondering ‘what did they do to be so black and blue’” (9).17 Karenga’s argument in this 1968 essay that the blues is irrelevant, or even harmful, to the struggle for civil rights and empowerment is weakened significantly by his employment of the poetry of Amiri Baraka (the lines of Baraka’s that Karenga quotes do not address the blues) in the service of his polemic—this because Baraka makes an argument in his seminal 1963 text Blues People that stands in stark

17 Karenga, by pejoratively appropriating a line from Andy Razaf s and Fats Waller’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” indirectly takes a swipe at Louis Armstrong, the musician most closely associated with the song (long unfairly considered to be an “Uncle Tom”), and Ralph Ellison, who frames his novel Invisible Man as a meditation on the question that the song poses (which is to say, his hero sits around “wondering ‘what did [I] do to be so black and blue?’”— discovering himself and America in the process). 33

contradistinction to that which Karenga makes in “Black Art.” Baraka contends, in Blues

People, that the blues is a source of communal ingenuity and improvisation, and, therefore, a vital force in the ongoing struggle for African-American freedom. While Karenga advocates repressing the

“rhythmic reality” and psychological reality of the blues (he sees the diverse body of blues song as worthy of suppression because of an absence of explicit lyrical uplift; he looks only at what the songs are saying on the surface, missing both the wealth of implicity in blues song and the larger psychological/communal effect for singer and audience) and unfairly denigrates previous generations of African Americans as

1 O cowards, Baraka feels that the spirit of the blues and of the ancestors must be carried

forward in order for African Americans to realize freedom and the self-respect of cultural continuity. That is not to say, though, that Baraka felt that contemporary blues music (the music of Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, et al.) was ideal for this task in the

1960s. He argues that a truer, more essentially bluesy kind of freedom song is to be found

elsewhere.

While Baraka contends that the blues is in effect the root of African-American

subjectivity (of a freedom to feel personal emotions communally, through vocalization

and musicalization), and of continuing importance as such, he argues, in Blues People,

18 Karenga fails to take into consideration, when he disparages “the resignation of our fathers,” that from the days of the Underground Railroad through the creation of the NAACP, the era of the “New Negro,” A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement of the early 1940s, and the push to integrate the South and enfranchise Southern blacks, which began in earnest in the 1950s, there were black Americans willing to risk their freedom and their lives to work towards realization of the rights promised in the country’s founding documents. 34

that “free jazz,” as played by Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, is the true liberatory music (even the “true blues”) for the Civil Rights era and beyond (Scheiber 475; Baraka

226-7). Rejecting the “westernization” of the blues and jazz—though he is not specific about exactly when these American (i.e., Westem)-bom musical forms became

“westernized”—Baraka praises free jazz, asserting, “[The] music [of Coleman and

Taylor] does not depend on constantly stated chords for its direction and shape. Nor does it pretend to accept the formal considerations of the bar or measure, line. In a sense, the music depends for its form on the same references as primitive blues forms” (226).

Putting aside Baraka’s failure to acknowledge the reliance of free jazz on all jazz forms that came before for its deceptively formless-seeming form (one surely needs to know the rules intimately before self-consciously bending and breaking them), his praise of

“primitive blues forms” as superior to more sophisticated musical forms is indicative of a certain condescending romanticism on his part—a romanticism characterized by a longing for a prelapsarian time before American music was tainted by America (not wholly unrelated to that longing which motivated John Lomax in his search of Southern prisons for the hermetically preserved “pure” songs—untainted by contact with the larger

America and by freedom—of the “nobly savage” folk). Despite disagreeing with Karenga about the blues’ continued cultural relevance, Baraka agrees with him that African

Americans should distance themselves from things Western and embrace cultural expressions redolent of Africa (which he claims “primitive blues” and free jazz are— because of their emphasis on rhythm and improvisation over harmony)—this despite 35

African-Americans’ centrality in the creation of a thoroughly synthetic Western culture in

America. As Ralph Ellison asserts, European- and African-American culture have been reciprocally influential since their first contact in colonial America (making it wrongheaded to think one can prize one away from the other), “and white Americans have been walking Negro walks, talking Negro-flavored talk . . . dancing Negro dances, and singing Negro melodies for far too long to talk of a ‘mainstream’ American culture to which they’re alien” (“Blues People” 286). Ellison, who took issue with Baraka’s

Afrocentrism as racially reductive and restrictive (preferring the immediate cultural riches of African-American culture to the historically remote riches of an ancestral, idealized Africa), famously criticized Baraka’s Blues People for analyzing the blues with a sociological rather than a poetic lens, asserting that such aggregate, abstract analysis obscures the humanity and innate existential freedom of its subjects—the “continuity [of self] in the face of adversity” that blues song so frequently expresses (Murray, The Blue

Devils 14).19 Baraka, ultimately, in attempting to align African Americans with a culture other than that of America, denies the continuity of the African-American experience with the American experience—imposing a cultural segregation that is pure fiction.

While Baraka and Ellison are in agreement that the blues and jazz (which has been variously referred to as the blues’ nephew and its son) are the most American of musical expressions (which is to say, the most self-made and synthetic), Baraka sees the

19 Ellison’s essay in response to Baraka’s Blues People first appeared in the February 6, 1964 edition of The New York Review of Books as “The Blues” and was included in his essay collection Shadow and Act as “Blues People.” 36

blues first as a coping mechanism for dealing with an essentially bad deal (that is to say,

as protective distance for black Americans from a hostile America), and Ellison sees it as freedom and Americanness itself expressed in a uniquely African-American way—the

most fully realized expression of the margin of freedom available to all, even the most

marginal. Ellison contends that black Americans, as the most contingent, improvisatory

people in the United States—which is the most contingent, improvisatory country in the

world—created a music that most closely expresses the country’s forward-looking, play-

it-by-ear spirit (“Blues People” 285). While Karenga and Baraka offer arguments that

limit what African-American culture is (Karenga to a far greater degree than Baraka),

Ellison’s vision of black culture and the blues is expansive. Like his protagonist in

Invisible Man, and his heroes Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Ellison feels that all

modes of expression are valid in the creation of the blues—as it is “an art form and thus a

transcendence of those conditions created within the Negro community by the denial of

social justice” (“Blues People” 287). Just because the music is not overtly political or

culturally essentialist does not mean that it does not empower and celebrate African

Americans. It accomplishes these things by making an historically oppressive situation

bearable (which is not to say acceptable) and singing forth a distinctively emotional,

African-American subjectivity. Karenga, Baraka, and Ellison represent the broad

spectrum of thinking in the African-American community concerning the blues during

the Civil Rights and Black Power years—from a conservative cultural nationalism that is

variously antagonistic and ambivalent about the Americanism of an essentially American 37

art form through a liberal pluralism that views the blues as the height of Western synthetic art.

This fruitfully contentious, though very male, cultural landscape was the environment for Morrison’s attempt to revive the blues in literary form. Her approach is to strike a balance between Baraka and Ellison—between an effort to protect the blues

(which is also an effort to protect blues people) and an effort to give it to the world

(which also, of course, lets the world in)—while exploring feminine aspects of the blues overlooked by its male critics. Agreeing with Baraka and Ellison that the blues ethos is of permanent importance for all other forms of black artistic expression (because the blues licensed African Americans of all classes to feel in an expressive way) and troubled that

African Americans were losing touch with the music (it had declined in popularity markedly among black people in the sixties) and that the blues was increasingly being associated with neophyte white blues aficionado-musicians like Eric Clapton, Led

Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones (who had effectively reified the blues by focusing on its

Chicago variant, convincing their numerous fans that the blues of Muddy Waters,

Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Dixon—a very male blues indeed—was the blues),20 she determined to preserve, sustain, and renew the blues (particularly the largely overlooked female blues). Morrison’s project in The Bluest Eye was to preserve the blues ethos and

20 This was a situation rather like Portuguese Fado or Spanish Flamenco— i.e., music with deep folk roots—all of a sudden being associated more with young British enthusiasts than with the musicians who grew up in and helped sustain and create the tradition. This is not to say that these musicians did not have anything to offer the tradition—only that the attention heaped on them as master blues musicians was not commensurate with their role in blues culture. 38

blues feeling (for so long of such psychological and cultural importance to African

Americans) independent of the blues qua music, for all those who would never encounter bluesiness in its original musical context. While soul music, as well as funk, hip hop, and R&B, are all of psychic benefit in their own way (and are all descended from the blues in their own way), none of them address trauma with the clear-eyed wisdom, with the frankness and subtlety, that the blues does. This is because blues wisdom is collective, historical wisdom—as the blues was long steeped in the oral tradition before it was commercialized (F. Davis 23-4).

Morrison argues about the state of the blues in the sixties, “There was a time when black people needed the music. Now that it belongs to everybody, black people need something else which is theirs. That’s what novels can do, what writing can do”

(qtd. in Rice 168-69). In The Bluest Eye, Morrison works against the standardization of the blues that had taken place in the sixties when the music was adopted by popular rock-

’n’-roll acts and absorbed by popular culture. She also works against the masculinization of blues history that was the result of blues critics and historians, such as Amiri Baraka, treating female Classic Blues as a lesser (even a whiter) blues form because it had been influenced by popular song (an influence that was quite mutual). Madhu Dubey makes a compelling argument for the androcentrism of Baraka’s “revolutionary” argument that elevates free jazz and denigrates Classic Blues. She asserts that valorizing “a masculine urban vernacular . . . entail[s] a selective erasure of existing traditions identified with the rural South” and with women, traditions that Morrison and others work to reclaim by 39

“map[ing] out a new, distinctively feminine cultural territory” which taps into the “folk zone” of deeply-rooted Southern culture (292, 293). The link between Claudia MacTeer and her mother in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (which is also a link between Claudia and black Southern culture—even thought she is a Northerner), expressed through rituals of cooking, singing, and gossiping (which Claudia takes in with the awed love of an understudy) is an ideal example of this “distinctively feminine cultural territory.” It is this territory, this loving domestic aspect of the blues—as well as its perverse inversion, the relationship of Pecola Breedlove to her family and community, which is the true focus of the novel—that Morrison explores in The Bluest Eye.

The Bluest Eye is only the beginning of this blues work of Morrison’s. It is not the whole of her efforts to reclaim the blues in literature, and it should not be taken as a comprehensive statement by Morrison on what the blues is. The blues is worlds broader than the lament that is The Bluest Eye. Morrison would go on to explore other, more positive aspects of the blues in woks like Sula, Song o f Solomon, and Jazz. But in The

Bluest Eye, Morrison explores blues pain—straight, no chaser. The novel is an experiment, an attempt to communicate the blues of an utterly voiceless girl—one whose blues had never been communicated in song or literature before. Morrison, in The Bluest

Eye, asks a difficult question: What sort of blues does one sing if one has never known any love to bemoan the loss of? Her conclusion is troubling indeed—in more ways than one. Morrison has allowed that she finds the tragic outcome she arrives at in the novel

(the little girl, Pecola Breedlove, remains silent) deeply disturbing on both an emotional 40

and a formal level (“Afterword” 215). The little girl is not present in the story. She is not only voiceless; she is not there at all—save as an anonymous figure who is acted upon cruelly. Morrison writes, in an afterword she wrote for the novel twenty-three years after initially publishing it, that Pecola’s voicelessness “should have had a shape—like the emptiness left by a boom or a cry” in order for the little girl, the novel’s central character, to have a presence (215). But Pecola has no shape, no center. She is so blue that, not only can she not sing her own blues (the constitutive task of the blues (wo)man), her blues cannot even be fathomed by either of the novel’s narrators who are telling her story.

Thus, The Bluest Eye can be called a broken, or a troubled, blues—for a blues demands, first and foremost, communication of the subjectivity of its central character. The effect of this “brokenness,” or oddness, of the novel’s blues resonances is to make the reader do work.

Blues songs have always been medicine for those who need it. But the medicine, in order to be effective, cannot be purely anodyne; it must also be cathartic. That is to say, one must do some work in order to get any true, lasting benefit, any true psychological salubrity, from the blues. Arguing that an essential quality of the blues is that engaging with it requires some work, some exertion on the listener’s part, Ralph

Ellison asserts that “[t]he blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (“Richard Wright’s Blues” 103). The Bluest Eye is a novel 41

thoroughly in the blues grain, a novel meant to do what songs like W.C. Handy’s “St.

Louis Blues” and Casey Bill Weldon’s “Blues Everywhere” (two blues songs characters sing in The Bluest Eye) once did—bolster African-American identity. The novel’s work is to give African Americans (and, in particular, African-American women) something

“which is theirs,” something that they already have but may not know they have: themselves. It accomplishes this by reintroducing work to the blues, by reintroducing the blues to its roots in “work songs”—i.e., songs that do work and demand that those who 91 engage with them do work. Well-known (and well-worn) blues narratives, tropes, and memes are troubled in The Bluest Eye (i.e., the familiar is made “new” by being defamiliarized), in order that they may do new work. The most glaring troubling in the novel is the absent presence (Pecola Breedlove) at its center. The central warrant of every blues song is the presence, the subjectivity, of the singer. Muddy Waters makes this warrant explicit in “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” singing, “’Cause you know I’m here / Everybody knows I’m here”—making the claim true through the act of vocalizing it, showing the power of the blues to unite language and action (qtd. in Sackheim 432).

Pecola, though, cannot sing her own blues. This act is left to Claudia MacTeer, a peer of hers who was raised lovingly in the blues tradition—a fact which both emphasizes the communality of the blues and troubles it narrativistically. By troubling blues narrative tradition, as well as blues tropes like the sexual double entendre and blues memes like the

21 My rhetoric here is figurative but, of course, the blues literally is descended from African-American work songs, which were sung in both the antebellum and postbellum periods—also from spirituals and field hollers (F. Davis 23-4). 42

locative monikers of blues musicians22 (utilizing the move Russian Formalist Viktor

Shklovsky calls ostranenie—i.e., “defamiliarization” or “making strange”), the novel sings the blues of voiceless members of Lorain, Ohio’s, African-American community

(namely, the Breedloves and the three prostitutes who live above them) (Macey 284-5).

To express the blues of figures who had never been given a blues treatment before,

Morrison employs blues strategy quite obliquely and frequently quite disturbingly. The novel works to trouble simplistic popular-culture notions of what the blues is and what black American culture is. Old-chestnut tools of the blues that had become dulled by repeated use are repurposed to disconcerting effect in order that the blues may do new work on a new day.

The novel begins with the repurposing, as a deadly serious trope, of a trope that the reader, if he is a blues listener, has become accustomed to in a playful light. The common hokum blues (i.e., jestful, generally “blue” blues) trope of the sportive genitalia double entendre, in which an object stands both for itself and for the male or female genitalia23 in a first-person tale of satisfaction of desire or of unsatisfied desire,24 takes on disturbing poignancy when it is used by Claudia (The Bluest Eye's first-person narrator,

22 An example of what I am calling a “locative moniker” is Mississippi Fred McDowell. 23 Lil Johnson’s “Meat Balls,” in which meatballs stand in for male genitalia, and Memphis Minnie’s “Blues Everywhere,” in which various vessels stand in for female genitalia, are good examples of hokum blues songs that employ the sexual-organ double entendre. Memphis Minnie sings, in “Blues Everywhere,” “Well, there’s blues in my mailbox ’cause 1 can’t get no mail / There’s blues in my breadbox ’cause my bread’s got stale.” Mail, standing alone or in the compound word “mailbox,” can be spelled “m-a-i-I” or “m-a-l-e,” and both the mailbox and the breadbox can be read as metaphors for the singer’s genitalia. 24 Tampa Red’s and Georgia Tom Dorsey’s archetypal hokum blues song “Tight Like That” has verses that exemplify the former (“Now the gal I love, she’s long and slim / When she whip it, it’s too bad, Jim”) and the latter (“If you see my gal, tell her to hurry home / 1 ain’t had no bread since she’s been gone”). 43

who is looking back on events that took place when she was nine years old) in narration to refer to the genitalia of an eleven-year-old girl who has been raped by her own father.

She says, in the novel’s introduction, referring both to planting marigold seeds with her sister, Frieda, and to Cholly Breedlove raping his daughter, Pecola, “We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt” (5-6). Sending horrifying information through an avenue thought by the reader to be exclusively for friendly communication and connection,

Claudia shocks the reader in a manner resonant with the rape she is describing.

Communicating the information to the reader in an unexpected way (a perversely playful way, rather than the pathos-eliciting way the reader has grown accustomed to) forces the reader to truly engage with the material, to see it anew, in order to assimilate it to his consciousness. The use of a homey, familiar technique to refer to horror emphasizes the fact that this horror was perpetrated in the home, where one is supposed to be safe, by family, with whom one is supposed to be safe.

Another instance of a troubled blues trope (in this case a musical trope, which is created by the juxtaposition of downhearted lyrics and jaunty, playful, at times

25 Claudia’s and Frieda’s motivation for planting the marigold seeds was magical thinking. They were convinced that if the seeds sprouted, it would be a sign that Pecola’s baby (whom no one seemed to care about except them) had not died (as the community seemed to wish it would). The way that Claudia employs this trope contrasts the very elevated impulse she and her sister had with the very debased impulse Pecola’s father succumbed to. Claudia means to convey that Pecola’s father treated Pecola like dirt and that part of his motivation for doing so was internalized racism (she is “black dirt” to him— the two terms tragically inextricable). 44

mocking, 9 fi music, • which • has the effect of ironizing • • the lyrics—not in a way that dismisses their sentiment, but rather in a way that broadens the emotional palette and

appeal of the sentiment) is presented by the interaction of the novel’s central narrative

with its framing device—the leitmotif of a passage from a book from the “Dick and Jane”

basal-reader series, which was widely-used in the United States during much of the twentieth century to teach children to read. They are books of very simple narratives

illustrated with pictures of two young white children and their white friends and family,

who are relentlessly described as “very happy.” It is a disconcerting fantasy of

uniformity, as regards race and mood,27 in which all the females have blond hair and all

the males have brown hair. This framing text (which in its entirety constitutes the novel’s

introduction and excerpts of which form epigraphs for the chapters that are narrated by

the third-person narrator) is clearly drawing attention to the institutionalized racism

encountered by African Americans (in school and elsewhere). Reading the word and

“reading the world” are interconnected, as Paolo Freire contends; we structure our

realities semiotically with words as very rich and compelling symbols (Freire and

Macedo xiii-xiv). Children who are taught to read the word with racist texts will likely

“read,” or “frame,” the world in a racist way. The unremitting whiteness, sameness, and

undemonstratively expressed happiness of the basal-reader stories communicates to the

26 The mocking of the troubles articulated in the lyrics is, of course, also an acknowledgement of the troubles. 27 The “Dick and Jane” series is very unbluesy in that it does not acknowledge the full range of human emotions—a failure that children’s book authors like Tomie dePaola and Maurice Sendak had in mind when they wrote their “dark” children’s books in the sixties and seventies. 45

children implicitly that the stories (and subjectivities28) of white people are more valid than those of black people and that segregation is socially acceptable (even the genders

are segregated by hair color!).

The very first story in the text comes out of a “Dick and Jane” book. Importantly,

the “Dick and Jane” story precedes what the reader considers the actual story of the

novel. Its primacy in the novel is indicative of the reality-distorting primacy of such

stories in the minds of black children—who are creatures of narrative, as everyone is. Just

as the “Dick and Jane” story frames the novel’s reality (its actual story), the ideology the

story signifies frames the children’s reality. The “Dick and Jane” story begins, “Here is

the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family.

Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy”

(3). The “Dick and Jane” house is not a house to live in but rather a space to be denied

from, an emptiness inside that one cannot move into. The “Dick and Jane” story exists

outside of yet deep inside of the novel—and, by extension, deep inside the children. For

black children, the story of Dick and Jane can create a feeling deep inside that one will

always be outside—that one is an outsider.

To return to the blues trope created by the interaction of downhearted lyrics and

sprightly, mocking music: It is important to keep in mind that even the most hardcore of

Delta blues musicians—Robert Johnson, Skip James, Bukka White, et al.—were playing

dance music (that is to say, good time music). Condescending romantics treasure their

28 The stories devalue a blues subjectivity, which is all about being demonstrative emotionally. 46

image of Robert Johnson as the doomed loner playing his blues all alone before a heedless world (except for them, of course). But this is a gross distortion of reality.

Johnson was a professional entertainer who played the blues, a traditional music the form of which requires emotional frankness and a focus upon troubles in a performer, in order to lighten people’s troubles and their feet.29 To borrow a highly reductive but potentially effective description from the world of comedy in order to attempt to capture the

“antagonistic cooperation” (Albert Murray’s term for the blues dialectic) of Johnson’s singing and his guitar: Johnson’s guitar was a sort of “banana man” or “funny man,” and

Johnson-the-singer was a sort of “straight man” {The Hero 35, 102).30 (I use this description because comedy is all about timing and the eliciting of an almost involuntary visceral reaction—as is blues performance.) This results in antagonism and when successful (which is often the case with Johnson) in synthesis. Thus, when Johnson sings out in terror (whether this terror is existential or immediate is not clear), in “Cross Road

Blues,” “I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees [x2] / Asked the Lord above have mercy, save poor Bob if you please,” Johnson’s guitar is playing glissando counterpoint that sounds like nothing other than an expression of a really good time

(something like the happy horn stabs of Duke Ellington’s band or a voice gleefully doing

29 This argument is borrowed from Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues and Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues. This is by no means a hard-and-fast rule but a tendency and a severe reduction for rhetorical purposes. Johnson the singer is jokey at times—as in the double-entendre song “Terraplane Blues.” And, as a master blues lyricist, he frequently mixes the tragic and the comic in a single phrase, as in “Me and the Devil Blues” when he sings, “You may bury my body down by the highway side (Baby, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone) / You may bury my body down by the highway side / So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.” 47

an onomatopoeic railroad imitation) (qtd. in Taft 323). This is blues tragicomedy in nuce—a gesture of catharsis, confrontation, and endurance. Johnson cries out in pain and his guitar cries out in joy, an instance of “antagonistic cooperation” that doubtless resulted in his audiences dancing away their own pain—reveling in his catharsis and his magical ability to make tragedy and terror bearable and, importantly, in their

laughableness, confrontable.

Morrison refers obliquely to this traditional blues emotional dialectic by

contrasting the much-too-happy, much-too-simple story of Dick and Jane with the much- too-sad, much-too-complicated story of Pecola Breedlove. As in the blues, we have a

passage that could be interpreted as mocking the main story—except in the case of The

Bluest Eye, the mocking passage is not a part of the whole. The mocking passage stands

outside of the novel’s central story. Indeed, it is segregated from it. Rather than the

playful mockery of the guitar in a Robert Johnson blues or the laughter of the wah-wah

trumpets in a Duke Ellington blues, we have the sort of utterly harsh, mean-spirited

mockery black college students had to endure from Southern whites when they sat-in at

lunch counters in the early sixties. The “Dick and Jane” leitmotif is effectively saying,

through its all-white, segregationist narrative, Don't come in here. This is not for you.

Morrison here appropriates blues form but not the tragicomedy that so frequently

characterizes the blues. But an echo of the comedy is there (if one is familiar with the

blues) because of resonances with the blues form. The form reminds one of the

accustomed joy of the blues while utterly and conspicuously failing to deliver it. 48

The blues, rich in polysemy and often expressive of apparent contradictions— joyful sadness, pride in being humbled, individualistic performance of communal feelings, frankness through evasiveness—provides a paradigm in which The Bluest Eye's narrators (Claudia, the first person narrator, who very much needs the catharsis of blues healing, and a very Claudia-like third-person narrator) testify a tale of beautiful ugliness.

The novel takes the familiar world of the blues—its formal structure, its tropes, its personalities (performers of the songs and characters in the songs)—and uses/troubles it to tell the bluest of blues tales. The third-person narrator, by no means a detached observer, is like a pure, supremely bluesy version of Claudia—a righteous voice untainted by life’s compromises. She is Claudia’s aspirational self projected onto the story of a series of events Claudia deeply regrets. Free of flaws and with a true moral compass, the third-person narrator talks inspiringly about the value of resisting repression and oppression, which she refers to as embracing the “funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions” (83). Funkiness here corresponds to bluesiness as it is discussed by Larry Neal and Angela Y. Davis.31 That is, funkiness is expressive of qualities like earthiness, honesty, and agency. While Claudia must own up to the fact that at some point in her life she caved in to social pressure and abandoned the pure, true beliefs of her youth (that she “learned . . . to worship [Shirley

Temple],” even though she felt that worshipping the little white girl was on some level the same as hating herself for being black, that she “learned to delight in cleanliness”—

31 Refer to page seventeen of the first chapter of this study for Neal’s and Davis’ respective discussions of bluesiness. 49

i.e., she became concerned with sterility and propriety at the expense of taking part in

life’s natural, earthy joys—and, worst of all, that she abandoned Pecola in her time of

need ), the third-person narrator stands above all of that (23). She is Claudia’s guide, a

projection of her best self, in this blues healing. As a narrator, if not in life, Claudia

follows the third-person narrator’s example totally.

While Claudia may not have always led a wholly “funky” life, as a narrator she is

very funky/bluesy, withholding neither emotion nor information from the reader. Claudia

asks an exemplarily funky question early in the novel about vomit she vividly recalls

having disgorged on her childhood sickbed—a question that could just as easily be asked

about the blues: “How, I wonder, can it be so neat and nasty at the same time?” (11).

Extrapolating from Claudia’s whimsical but very penetrating question, we might ask,

how can the blues (The Bluest Eye included, as it is a blues rendered in prose) be

contained by such formal regularity (i.e., neatness) and be expressive of such

uncontainably harrowing emotion?33 Formally, the vast majority of traditional blues

' songs are composed of three chords (the first, the fourth, and the fifth in a diatonic chord

sequence) that alternate regularly during a series of twelve-bar verses. The Bluest Eye's

overarching formal structure, its analogue to the blues’ reassuring (because it can be

’2 Claudia tells the reader regretfully, at the close of the novel, “We saw [Pecola] sometimes. Frieda and I—after the baby came too soon and died. After the gossip and the slow wagging of heads. She was so sad to see. Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.... We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went near” (204). 33 In this paper, I talk about blues songs as laments—because the blues songs that are a part of the fabric of The Bluest Eye's narrative are laments (as The Bluest Eye is itself a lament). It is certainly not true, though, that all blues songs are expressions of unease. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” discussed at length in the previous chapter, is an ideal example of a blues song that is a celebration rather than a lament. 50

counted on) twelve-bar, three-chord structure, is the seasonal structure of a year (fall

1940 to summer 1941). The Bluest Eye's four sections (titled “Autumn,” Winter,”

“Spring,” and “Summer”) give the work a beguiling rhythmic familiarly and make it feel safe—i.e., not unfamiliar. Blues songs tend to be in standard 4/4 time (four quarter beats to a measure), also called “straight time.” The Bluest Eye is also, superficially, in

“straight time” (the seasons being the four “beats” of a year). Beneath the surface, though, the narrative is anything but linear, with its multiple narrators, narrative styles, and flashbacks. Morrison explains in the novel’s afterword that the reason she composed the novel in this fractured fashion is to include the reader in the creation of narrative continuity—to make the reader put the pieces together himself, so that he will be “part of the population of the text” and implicated in the iniquity and pain it describes (214). That is to say, the reader is made to do work. If he has no fitting mental schema to contain the pieces of the text, he must create one—and, in giving the text form in this way, in finding a way to fit it into his Weltanschauung, he must analyze himself as much as he analyzes the text. He must make connections between his fractured ideas as much as he makes connections between the fractured pieces of the narrative in the novel.

Inside the familiar blues structure of the novel is the shattered, defamiliarized family structure of the Breedloves. The Breedlove family’s actions are inimical to the

idea of “family.” This destruction of the basic cultural and social unit is represented

ironically by the glaring inappropriateness of their surname. Breeding, the creation of

Sammy and Pecola Breedlove, does not breed love for Pauline and Cholly Breedlove. It 51

breeds contempt. When Pauline becomes pregnant with Sammy, at first it looks like

Pauline’s and Cholly’s marriage (fraying because Pauline, accustomed to a ready-made community in the South, has failed find friends in Lorain, Ohio,34 and Cholly has found dipsomaniacal ones) will get a second wind. The narrator says, “When [Pauline] told

Cholly [she was pregnant], he surprised her by being pleased. He began to drink less and come home more often. They eased back into a relationship more like the early days of their marriage, when he asked if she were tired or wanted him to bring her something from the store” (121). But, in the urban environment of Lorain, Pauline and Cholly cannot reclaim the absolute devotion to one another that they once had—exemplified by the love Cholly lavished on Pauline’s crippled foot when he was courting her down

South. In a scene resonant with the New Testament, in which foot-washing (called

Maundy or Pedilavum by the Catholic Church35) is a religious ritual that expresses devotion to God through devotion to and love for one’s intimates and associates, Cholly’s first act upon meeting Pauline in Kentucky is to wash her of her shame over her

“crooked, archless foot that flopped when she walked” by “bending down [and] tickling her broken foot and kissing her leg” (Cross and Livingstone 1059, 1247; Morrison 110,

115). Cholly’s harnessing of this resonant Christian trope instantly wins the devotion of

Pauline, who, as the narrator informs us, is looking for the sort of elemental, lodestar of a man that the song “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” which is regularly sung at her church,

34 Pauline thinks to herself, when she is still new in town, that the black women of Lorain are “[d]ictly-like” and “[n]o better than whites for meanness” (117). 15 Jesus washes his disciples’ feet in John 13:1-17, and Mary Magdalene washes Jesus’ feet in Luke 7:37-9. 52

makes her think of. Pauline, who was very much in touch with her Southern culture before she left the South, feels the bluesiness, the earthiness, below the surface of this classic gospel song (which was written by Thomas Dorsey, who had been Ma Rainey’s bandleader and Tampa Red’s partner before becoming the “father of gospel music”).

Pauline, sensing the intertwined nature of gospel music and the blues (of the sexual intimacy of Saturday night and the spiritual intimacy of Sunday morning) gives the gospel song a blues reading. She bypasses the literal ethereal savior of the song for the sensual spirituality of an imagined physical savior. The narrator tells us (in free indirect discourse that channels Pauline’s feelings) that when Ivy, a lead member of the church choir, sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” she “sang of the Stranger who knew”—i.e., she sang of Pauline’s dream man, a man who would already know Pauline and know what she needed upon meeting her (114). Thus we learn of Pauline’s desire to enter a relationship in which she is wholly dependent on her partner, in which her partner is her alpha, her omega—her lord. Pauline’s desire to relinquish all control is decidedly unfunky and unbluesy. A signal characteristic of blues songs is the singer’s declaration of agency. Pauline’s dream of putting her life entirely in the hands of one powerful man foreshadows her seduction by and near-total reliance on white bourgeois culture later in her life when she has been in Lorain, Ohio, for some time. In joining exclusively with

Cholly and coming north with him, she is severed from her roots. Her lost tooth, a

symbol of her lost self, falls out (after she had been living away from the South in Lorain

for a significant period of time) because of its “weakened roots, [which had] grown 53

accustomed to the poison” (116, emphasis mine). Pauline is as connected to Cholly as a conjoined twin, who will die from death’s toxicity if her twin dies. When Cholly’s love for her turns to poison, she cannot extricate herself. Living in the North with no connection to community, she is as helpless as her rootless tooth.

When Pauline becomes pregnant with Sammy, her first child, and decides to quit her job and stay at home, because of the positive change in Cholly’s behavior, a poison loneliness, brought on by the urban isolation of Lorain, sets in. The narrator says,

“When the winter sun hit the peeling green paint of the kitchen chairs [in their two-room apartment], when the smoked hocks were boiling in the pot, when all she could hear was the truck delivering furniture downstairs, she thought about back home, about how she had been all alone most of the time then too, but that this lonesomeness was different”

(121-2). To relieve this urban loneliness and yearning for back home, Pauline goes to the movies. It is this act—along with Cholly’s drinking—that is the deadly poison in their relationship, a poison that Pecola will imbibe in her mother’s milk, for it is this act that results in Pauline “equating physical beauty with virtue” and equating physical beauty with whiteness (122).

“Breedlove” is one of a number of unfortunate names in The Bluest Eye. Another

is “Pecola.” Pecola is named, it seems fair to surmise (because of Pauline’s obsession

with Hollywood films), for the character Peola in the film Imitation o f Life—a light­

skinned black character who rejects her mother, after being shown nothing but selfless

love by her, in order to pass as white. Going to the movies was, for Pauline, says the 54

narrator, “really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate” (123). Pauline learns to love an over-simple, corrosive white ideal presented on the screen and to hate herself. This self-hate is passed on to Pecola, of whom her mother says, reminiscing in her monologue about the time when Pecola was bom, “I ’member I said I’d love it no matter what it looked like. She looked like a black ball of hair.. . . I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly” (127, 128). The beauty ideal that Pauline gets from watching Hollywood movies (kinky hair makes you ugly—even if it is “pretty [kinky] hair”) is in opposition to the beauty ideal of the blues, which is Claudia’s beauty ideal, exemplified by the song “St. Louis Blues.”

Cat Moses contends that “St. Louis Blues,” which is one of the songs that Mrs.

MacTeer, Claudia’s mother, regularly sings around the house,36 is a song that contains lyrical nutrition for black listeners—nutrition that Claudia could not help but absorb. The later verses of “St. Louis Blues,” not sung in The Bluest Eye, but a fundamental part of the song nonetheless, present a black-is-beautiful aesthetic in total opposition to the destructive aesthetic that Pauline Breedlove gets from the movies. In the third verse, the singer declares, of her lover, who has left her for a woman in St. Louis with “store- bought hair,” that he is “[b]lacker than midnight, [with] teeth like flags of truce, /

Blackest man in the whole St. Louis / Blacker de berry, sweeter am de juice” (Handy 83,

84). The nutritional quality of the lyrics is understood intuitively by young Claudia. She perceives that the sound of the blues and the smell of her mother cooking greens are

’6 The singing of the blues connects Mrs. MacTeer’s current domestic space in the North to former Southern homes and Southern roots. 55

connected, that they are integral. She sees the singing and the cooking as a comprehensive expression of her mother’s love for her and, through her mother, her community’s love for her. She is fed by both the greens and blues. Claudia says, “Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet” (26).

This is a decidedly funky, romantic outlook. Claudia is asserting that all emotions—from the painful to the pleasurable—should be embraced and that even pain can be sweet, because it is full of life.

Mrs. MacTeer’s singing voice is not just an aural experience but also an olfactory and a visual one. It is a total, embracing experience. Mrs. MacTeer’s voice is suffused by the smell of cooking mustard greens, and it is, in the autumn, still a voice expressive of verdancy (the passage about “greens and blues” is in the “Autumn” section of the novel).

Her voice gives all things a green, hopeful tint. Mrs. MacTeer’s “blue-green” voice introduces to Claudia the notion that singing the blues can reclaim things that have been lost37 (lost locales, lost feelings, lost people38). This is the power that Ralph Ellison speaks of; his “finger[ing] [of the] jagged grain” is a reclaimative act, a psychoanalytic gesture to narrativize and process trauma—to unpack it and “un-repress” it. It is this j7 It is important to note that The Bluest Eye, a story the work of which is to sing the song of the voiceless, to reclaim people whom would otherwise be lost, begins in autumn, the season of waning-days’ gloom, and ends in summer, the season of fully waxed-days’ bloom. The novel’s seasonal trajectory tracks with the reclamation of the earth by fecundity in the summer. 38 An example of the blues reclaiming people can be found in the ur-blues song “Joe Turner.” The song reclaims the memories of people lost to the oblivion of the slavery of working on a chain gang in the South, such as that watched over by Joe Turner— legendary for his cruelty and indifference to innocence. This restorative impulse was further realized by August Wilson in his play Joe Turner's Come and Gone, in which he imaginatively unpacks the life of one falsely imprisoned and forced to work on Turner’s gang. 56

power that Claudia is attempting to harness in The Bluest Eye. She is determined to reclaim Pecola, who was abandoned by her community in 1941, by unpacking her trauma through narrative. Claudia is determined to allow the marigolds she and Frieda planted to finally sprout39—to figuratively sprout in her narrative.

Discussing the rhythmic quality of the blues, Houston Baker contends that blues

songs tend to match the rhythm of the railroad, employing a sort of aural metaphor, in order to imply a desire on the singer’s part to move on from the troubles that inspired the

song—troubles that would frequently be escaped by hopping a train and moving on to a

new town (20). This rhythmic/emotional quality, which Baker calls “training,”40 is one

that The Bluest Eye shares with the blues. The narrative, which “trains” towards a

foregone crisis and then away from it, is expressive of Claudia’s desire to finally move on

(years after the fact) from the troubles that inspired the tale. The reader is aware of the

novel’s central trauma,41 that Pecola will be raped and impregnated by her father, from its

start. Moses argues that a traditional move that blues lyrics make is to open with a

“cathartic statement of loss” and progress to an “announcement of the intent to achieve

resolution through motion”—i.e., through moving on (626) 42 Claudia does not do this

39 Frieda says to Claudia, when they are planting the seeds, “fW]hen [the flowers] come up, we’ll know everything is all right [with Pecola and her baby]” (192). 40 This is a polysemous term that signifies momentum but also education. You are training, and you are in training when you engage with the blues. 41 That which makes the novel exist, its center, is also, disconcertingly, that which makes Pecola cease to exist, that which makes her to go insane and retreat into a dark fantasy of whiteness. 421 would add that this formally therapeutic method of blues narrative is characteristic only of the more composed blues songs (i.e., not of the songs that are made up largely of floating verses plucked a la carte out of the oral tradition, with far greater care given to emotional continuity than narrative continuity)— 57

literally but figuratively. But it is the fact that she is aware that she could do it literally

(an awareness bom of the education she got listening to her mother sing blues songs) that allows her to do it figuratively—as moving on from a place and moving on from a trauma are inextricable moves in blues songs. Pecola, not getting anything like education or support or from her parents (i.e., she is not passed on the cultural heirlooms, as Claudia is), does not possess the funky/bluesy concepts of catharsis, resolution, and moving on— as Claudia does. She does not know how' to leave—literally or figuratively. As Moses contends, “The only somewhere else for Pecola to go is insane” (626). Pecola cannot move on, she can only withdraw deeper into herself. She is not privy to “the [bluesy] notion that there is always somewhere else to go when hard times hit, and a way to get there, [which] sustains Claudia” (626). It is the wisdom of the music (of songs like “St.

Louis Blues,” which W.C. Handy based on blues songs from the oral tradition) and the

love of her mother that teaches Claudia of life’s many possibilities and possible

interpretations (i.e., Claudia learns from her mother how to give an ostensibly sad song a

happy, hopeful reading) (F. Davis 24-6).

Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” a song ostensibly about a Southern black woman who

has been deserted by her man for a woman in St. Louis “wid diamond rings” and “store

bought hair,” is potentially affirmative and educational (Handy 84). Moses contends that

these lines from the second verse serve as implicit education for African-American

women: “Gypsy done told me, ‘Don’t Wear No Black.. . . / Go to St. Louis, you can win

which, for the most part during the pre-war years, were performed by female singers of what has come to be called the Classic Blues. 58

him back.’ / Help me to Cairo, make St. Louis by maself, / Git to Cairo, fin ma ole friend

Jeff. / Gwine to pin maself close to his side, / If ah flag his train, I sho’ can ride” (83-4).

These lines, she argues, served to inform young African-American women, in the period during which The Bluest Eye is set, of a method of getting from the South to the North.

During the first half of the twentieth century, as many African Americans worked for the railroad, there was a distinct possibility that many black Southerners knew someone (or knew someone who knew someone) working for the railroad who may be able to arrange for free or inexpensive passage from the South to the North.43 On one level, “St. Louis

Blues” is not about a woman being left by her man for a woman who lives in St. Louis at all. It is about black people leaving the South for the North. It tells the story of the Great

Migration, which was largely accomplished through train travel (Kornweibel 169). The

song gives young black women, implicitly, directions for leaving the South. The lyrics

instruct them to try to get a free ride on a train from an old friend or relative now working

on the railroad. It is important to note that there is in the lyrics the implication that sexual

favors will be exchanged for a fareless train trip (“Gwine to pin maself close to his side, /

If ah flag his train, I sho’ can ride”). Blues listeners are conditioned to see “ride” as a

double entendre because of the common blues epithets “easy rider” and “special rider,”

which refer, respectively, to a woman or man who has many sexual partners and one’s

steady sexual partner—as in the traditional song “Easy Rider” (also known as “See See

43 During the early-to-mid twentieth century, “[everywhere [in the United States], [African Americans] dominated the“[railroad] service sector as porters, dining car attendants, and station red caps, and in many regions they dominated freight handling, track laying, and maintenance-of-way crews as well” (Amesen 2). 59

Rider” and “C.C. Rider”) and Skip James’ “Special Rider Blues” (Calt 83, 197). The sexual double-entendre is an essential part of the blues language. In serving a psychoanalytic function, the blues does not only release repressed trauma but also repressed sexual desire. This “hokum,” though, can be separated from the practical directions in the song. The song is not instructing women to sleep their way to the North.

The double entendre is in the song for entertainment, cultural signification, and psychological unburdening—not for explicit instruction. As with many great works of art, the song is at once playful and serious. The lyrics release into African-American culture, in the form of a blues story that is entertaining (which doubtless was more effective than didactic, prosaic advice) the useful idea of getting a train ride north from kith or kin—in order that the strategy may become part of the culture’s folkways, that it may become second nature.

Another reading consistent with the Great-Migration reading but more in keeping

with what “St. Louis Blues’” lyrics explicitly say is that the song is about a Southern

black woman whose man has already left the South for the North.44 He has not sent for

her yet, and he may never send for her. The woman with “store-bought hair,” then, in this

reading, can be the city of St. Louis itself (because the singer only has in mind a vague,

superficial idea of the St. Louis woman as a creature of her environment). The St. Louis

woman “wid her diamond rings” is the flashy northern city with its promise, for black

men, of steady industrial work. The song’s singer has not really been left for a woman

44 Many men hopped freight trains for travel in this period, something that women were not nearly as likely to do. 60

(though her man may have gotten another woman by now); she has been left (and the old life, the loss of which Pauline mourns in The Bluest Eye, has been left) for employment in the North. Pauline and Cholly Breedlove come to the North for employment in Lorain’s steel mills. And, while Cholly does not leave Pauline behind, he leaves his thick rural love behind. His love, in the South, was buttressed by community. In the South, Cholly did not have to love Pauline alone. There was a whole community to love and support her along with him. In the North, Pauline has no one but Cholly. She gets to live out her storybook dream of complete dependence, and it turns out to be quite a nightmare. The third-person narrator says, “In [Pauline’s] loneliness, she turned to her husband for reassurance, entertainment, for things to fill the vacant places.. . . He had no problem finding other people and other things to occupy him—men were always climbing the stairs asking for him, and he was happy to accompany them, leaving her alone” (117,

118). Up north, Cholly’s love becomes attenuated by alcohol, and Pauline’s becomes attenuated by loneliness. She comes to feel that she was betrayed by one who she thought was her “precious lord.” Feeling forsaken and somewhat martyred, she takes refuge in a conservative black Christian church—“a church where shouting was frowned upon,” which she probably would have called “dicty” during her early days living in the North

(126).

In The Bluest Eye, Claudia’s mother (or one of Claudia’s mother’s forbears, as it is not said in The Bluest Eye whether Mrs. MacTeer is a first-generation Northerner or not) brings the blues north with her as sustenance, and Pauline Breedlove does not. The 61

difference in consciousness between Mrs. MacTeer and Pauline Breedlove is represented well by the difference between the song “St. Louis Blues,” recorded by Bessie Smith, and a film Smith stars in called St. Louis Blues. Angela Y. Davis describes the film thus: “In this film, which incorporates an overabundance of racist and sexist stereotypes, the character [Bessie] is abused and exploited by a handsome, light-skinned, disloyal, crapshooting man who has obviously attached himself to her for the sole purpose of taking her money” (60). The movie effectively asserts the opposite of everything the song asserts. In the film, Bessie is limply reliant on her man, Jimmy. He rejects her, and she despondently commences drinking her blues away and does so until Jimmy returns to steal her money from her, which he does while she is blissfully dancing with him, thinking he has returned to her (dancing with a man who, in the last scene, was physically abusive to her). The song is about asserting oneself despite troubles, about “mak[ing]

[one’s] gitaway” and moving on. The film, on the other hand, is about unconditional, self-abnegating, self-destructive love. The Bessie Smith who sings the song has a consciousness like that of Mrs. MacTeer and Claudia. The Bessie character in the film has a consciousness like that of Pauline Breedlove. Pauline Breedlove’s funkiness, her rootedness, was destroyed by Hollywood in the same way that the sentiment in Handy’s song was destroyed by Hollywood.

Pauline’s naming of Pecola involves a violation of the novel’s overarching, calming “straight time”—another telling crack in its edifice. Pecola is, during the period that is the novel’s focus (fall 1940 to summer 1941) eleven years old. That means that 62

Pecola was bom in 1929 or 1930. The film Imitation o f Life (the inspiration for Pecola’s name), though, was not released until 1934; and the novel of the same name, which it is based on, was not published until 1933. This anachronistic hitch is matched by another:

Pauline claims, during her monologue, that she was pregnant with Sammy, her first child, who is fourteen during the period when the novel’s action takes place, when she lost her tooth while watching a movie co-starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. The first movie in which these two actors got equal billing was Red Dust, which was released in 1932. As

Sammy is fourteen between 1940^11, he must have been bom between 1926-27—years before Harlow and Gable co-starred in films together. The novelistic analogue to standard

4/4-blues-time is, thus, here severely troubled by Pauline’s movie-centric consciousness.

Movies have, ever since D.W. Griffith introduced the time-collapsing film cut, messed with time all the time. That is their modus operandi. In order to capture and reify time, movies manipulate it. This seems to be what Pauline has done in her memories as well.

Her psyche is so infected by the filmic that she has cut out giant swaths of time and synced the birth of her children up with the release dates of films she cares for. Her mind

(her chronotopic sense of herself) has quite literally been warped by films. Her outsized love of the movies (and later of conservative religion) blinds her to the fact that she is not showing her children any love. As Pauline’s consciousness is, at points in the narrative, the novel’s consciousness, the narrative just accepts that Pecola was named for Imitation o f Life's Peola when this is not possible in a world of non-collapsible, non-stretchable time. The one explicit mention of Imitation o f Life in The Bluest Eye collapses the 63

difference between the names Pecola and Peola: Maureen Peal (who, in an extra bit of intertextuality, is herself a light-skinned, coddled black child) says to Pecola, about the character Peola from Imitation o f Life, “[H]er name was Pecola too. She was so pretty”— implying, of course, that Pecola is not (68). Maureen’s surname is a possible pun here— as Maureen is alerting the reader to the significance of Pecola’s name with the brazenness of a bell peal. It is as if Maureen is saying to Pecola, Your mother wanted you to be me, but instead you ’re you. Her comments make it clear that Pecola is being defined in opposition to Peola—an opposition set up by Pauline Breedlove that Maureen just exposes.45

The names of the three prostitutes (Poland, China, and the Maginot Line—though no one ever calls her that to her face) tag them as blues figures. They have locative monikers, as a number of historically important blues singers do (e.g., Mississippi Fred

McDowell, Georgia Tom, Tampa Red, and Memphis Minnie), but unlike these voiced blues singers, whose monikers identify them with a down-home Southern tradition and with home (a large portion of the audience for blues records either lived in the South or had migrated to the North from the South), these voiceless blues singers’ names identify them with foreignness. The prostitutes’ names, because of World War II, identify them with vulnerable otherness. Poland was, in 1941, when the novel takes place, occupied by

Nazi Germany, a significant portion of China was occupied by Japan, and the French

45 This opposition shows a disturbing masochism in Pauline. It seems that she was unconsciously hoping that her child would end up identifying with the oppressor class and spitefully spuming her family and community. 64

Maginot Line had been breached by the Nazis during their attack and takeover of France.

The three prostitutes are viewed by the residents of Lorain, Ohio, like land that has been conquered and occupied, its booty carelessly taken. They, of course, do not see themselves this way. And the genius of the novel is not sympathetic with this view.

While the community sees the prostitutes as conquered and occupied, Claudia and the third-person narrator encourage the reader to see the inherent polysemy in the concept of occupation (a polysemy that today’s Occupy movement has drawn attention to by adopting the militaristic term “occupation” to describe a citizenly presence on the civic commons and in civic politics). While the people of Lorain’s black community (all of whom, excepting Pecola, call Miss Marie “the Maginot Line”) may see the three women as compromised and occupied, the reader is encouraged to see the three women as occupy ing their own lives (i.e., taking control of their lives—a political act for members of an oppressed class46), as doing exactly what they want to do despite public opprobrium.

The selves of African Americans generally had, likewise, been ostensibly occupied—during slavery. The assigning of misnomers to Poland, China, and the

Maginot Line is representative of African Americans bearing the “foreign” surnames of their ancestors’ owners. A way for African Americans to reclaim themselves from the ownership of their forbears signified by their surnames is to sing the blues—a music and a culture that has a tradition of renaming things (or, more precisely, of changing the

46 The three prostitutes are a repressed class (“fallen women”) within a repressed class (Northern African Americans). 65

definitions of names—of making “bad” signify “goodness,” for example).47 Poland, when

Pecola is visiting the three prostitutes, sings the song “Blues Everywhere,” written by

Casey Bill Weldon and recorded by Memphis Minnie: “I got blues in my mealbarrel /

Blues up on the sh e lf... / Blues in my bedroom / ’Cause I’m sleepin’ by myself’ (51).

Moses argues that Poland “renames” and transforms her poverty (emotional and financial) with her blues. Moses asserts, “Like Mrs. MacTeer singing the ‘St. Louis

Blues’ and Pauline reconstructing the rural South in blues prose,48 Poland transforms lack into poetry” when she sings “Blues Everywhere” (629). Moses argues, additionally, “The transformation of lack, loss, and grief into poetic catharsis is the constitutive task of the blues singer, and it is the labor that Claudia accomplishes in narrating The Bluest Eye.

Central to the transmogrification of lack into poetry in Poland’s ‘Mealbarrel Blues’ is an assertion of subjectivity: In singing to affirm not having (blues, not meal, fill the mealbarrel), Poland establishes a desiring self. In desiring, she exists” (629). In desiring,

Poland “occupies” herself. That is to say, she asserts her agency, her sovereignty.

The last line of “Blues Everywhere” (“’Cause I’m sleepin’ by myself’) is highly ironic and bitter because of Poland’s trade and her position in Lorain’s African-American community. She is paid to engage in sexual intercourse—often euphemistically called

47 D. Quentin Miller points out that in a blues context (in this case, in the blues song “Stagger Lee”), evaluative, one-dimensional names, like “bad” are redefined and made polysemous, Miller argues, “‘Bad’ can mean lawless, feared, or respected in this context. ‘Bad’ can mean all three at the same time, and in the ultimate resistance to fixed meaning in language, what Henry Louis Gates would call ‘Signifyin’ (46), it can even mean 'good'” (121). 48 This is a reference to Pauline’s monologue (when she tells her life story directly to the reader), which shows that, notwithstanding her actions that make it seems otherwise, she still has within her a spark (or an echo, in any event) of funk. 66

“sleeping with” someone. Poland, though, does not sleep with her customers. Their transaction is for money and for cheap thrills, not for bonding. As frequently as Poland euphemistically sleeps with customers, she does not actually sleep with anyone. She has all the company she can take but no romantic companionship. Her companion is her blues—typically figured as negative but transformed into a positive by Poland (and that positive, that presence, is herself). Poland, then, “sleeps with” herself.

“Sleeping with” oneself—independence, self-sufficiency—is not a concept that exists in Pauline Breedlove’s world. She is never enough for herself. She has always felt a lack. First, she attempts to fill the “lack” with a man. Her second solution is to fill it with movies, with a life lived vicariously, and the poisonous standards of physical beauty that the movies communicate. And her ultimate solution is to fill the “lack” with religion

(conservative, non-funky religion) and love of a family not her own (the Fishers, a white family she serves as a maid). Pauline is questing for a miraculous cure to her persistent loneliness and low self-worth—a silver bullet that will eliminate doubt, once and for all, behind its shield of surety. It is no wonder she eventually turns to religion. All of her solutions involve her absolute trust in and unskeptical acquiescence to a plan not her own.

The work The Bluest Eye does is to show the disastrous effects that giving up one’s self, one’s sovereignty, can have. As many blues works do, the novel extols the virtues of freedom and finds suspect anything with the slightest whiff of slavery—that includes giving over control of one’s life to a romantic partner and giving over control of s

67

one’s life to a religious institution. Those who have secure selves and secure connections to their people and their past thrive. Claudia and Mrs. MacTeer reject absolute reliance upon any one person or upon the dominant culture. They certainly do not rely absolutely on Mr. MacTeer. He is hardly mentioned in the text at all. The reader does not even hear from Claudia that she has a father until page sixteen and then only in passing. The novel tells African Americans, and, in particular, African-American women, for so long told otherwise, that they own themselves outright. The Bluest Eye extols the virtues of self- possession, of self-“occupation,” though not at the expense of connection to one’s culture, one’s people. One cannot, after all, be secure in oneself without the context and buttress of community. 68

The Blues as a Comedic Tonic in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

“The blues speak to us simultaneously o f the tragic and comic aspects o f the human condition, and they express a profound sense o f life shared by many Negro Americans precisely because their lives have combined these modes. This has been the heritage o f a people who for hundreds o f years could not celebrate birth or dignify death, and whose need to live despite the dehumanizing pressures o f slavery developed an endless capacity for laughing at their painful experiences. ” —Ralph Ellison, “Blues People”

Upon its publication in 1952, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man became a bestseller and was greeted by literary critics as a work of great cultural and artistic importance

(Johns 254). Possessing a garrulous personality and a creative, penetratingly analytic mind, Ellison was asked to sit for a number of interviews (a pattern that would persist for the rest of his life). During an uncharacteristically hostile interview for The Paris

Review,49 Ellison’s interlocutors, Alfred Chester and Vilma Howard, derided his epic story of the coming-of-age of a black man as much too “provincial”—which is to say, not evocative of the whole human experience or (to further unpack Chester’s and Howard’s euphemistic putdown) of a whole human. Ellison, likely not a little annoyed at having the humanity of his protagonist (and, by extension, all African Americans) questioned, shot back at Chester and Howard, “Look, didn’t you find the book at all fu n n y ? ’’’’ (“The Art”

180; emphasis original). As with most successful rhetorical barbs, Ellison’s riposte says

49 Ellison’s Paris Review interview, conducted in the summer of 1954, was printed in the spring 1955 issue of the magazine and reprinted in Ellison’s 1964 essay collection Shadow and Act—under the title “The Art of Fiction: An Interview.” 69

quite a bit more implicitly than it does explicitly. By calling into question Chester’s and

Howard’s senses of humor (calling them insensitive to wit—a sophisticated way of calling them dimwits), Ellison implicitly accuses them of missing the whole point of his novel, of failing to understand the key transformation of its hero—from one who is passive and humorless (a rigid Booker T. Washington acolyte who blinkers himself to the realities of racial inequity in order to unquestioningly embrace Washingtonian bootstrap- ism) into one whose sense of humor is his primary tool for coming to terms with and arriving at meaningful insights about his troubled, iniquitously racialized life. In order to cope with being mercilessly buffeted and stymied by a society violently obsessed with racial stratification, the Invisible Man becomes, in Ellison’s words, “a blues-toned laugher at wounds”—which is to say, one who salves his wounded psyche with humor of the sort employed in blues songs (Introd., Invisible xviii). He comes to understand that an effective method of confronting, accepting, and purging psychological pain is, in the words of the classic blues song “You Don’t Know My Mind,” to “laugh . . . to keep from crying” (Liston).50

By liberally employing blues humor and confronting his troubles with laughter

(thereby mitigating their ability to cause psychological trauma),51 the first-person narrator

501 am not asserting that one accepts the justness of the psychological wounds resultant from racist abuse when one looks at the world through a blues-humor frame of reference but, rather, that one, merely and significantly, accepts the existence of the psychological wounds—a move that is necessary for one to be able to escape the feedback loop of repressed trauma and get on with one’s life. jl Clinical research conducted by Dr. Ramon Mora-Ripoll and reported in the Spanish-Ianguage medical journal Medicina Clinica has demonstrated that humor and laughter have the potential to diffuse the sort of psychological and physiological tension that can lead to long-lasting trauma if unaddressed (Muller, par. 4). 70

of Invisible Man is able to shape his account of a life shadowed by racism and tragedy

(the two very much associated) into a work, expressive of endurance and optimism.

Where August Wilson and Toni Morrison frame the tragic stories they relate in Ma

Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Bluest Eye (the texts discussed in the first and second chapters of this study, respectively) as obliterative defeats for their focal characters,

Ellison frames the tragic story he relates in Invisible Man as an ongoing quest for personal identity and social justice for his focal character. Unlike Levee Green and

Pecola Breedlove, the characters who are destroyed by racist institutions in Black Bottom and Bluest Eye, respectively, the Invisible Man resists the effects of institutional racism— which he collectively terms “invisibility.” For the Invisible Man, a black American is rendered “invisible” when the people that he interacts with do not see him but see, rather, a race-based stereotype—one that has little to do with his personality and quite a lot to do with their own desires and/or fears. While invisibility is inflicted on the novel’s protagonist, and African Americans generally, in a diversity of ways (which is to say,

Ellison’s concept of invisibility has a diversity of meanings),52 I will be focusing exclusively, in this examination of Invisible Man, on invisibility as the outcome of belief, on the part of white Americans, in the inferiority of African Americans.

The Invisible Man’s resistance to invisibility as debasing stereotype is very much in evidence when, early in the novel, he demands, apostrophizing those who cast the

52 Diverse people inflict invisibility in a diversity of ways. As David Denby asserts, “Ellison’s hero is ‘invisible’ because no one has much interest in seeing him as he is in all his ornery individuality. Virtually everyone—black and white alike—wants to use him, to make him over in their own image” (par. 7). 71

racializing gaze at him (i.e., those who project invisibility onto him), “[T]o whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?”—asserting that he (as an African American who is dehumanized by the systemic racism of white Americans and is given every reason to be apprehensive of them) cannot be expected to act towards white Americans in a way expressive of familial love and responsibility (14). The narrator very much wishes to take on responsibility for the well-being of all Americans as his people (certainly his earnestly undertaken work for equity, equality, and justice in the

Brotherhood bears this out53), but he cannot be responsible for the well-being of a nation that refuses to be responsible for him and is, in fact, openly hostile to him. The IM’s54 eponymous memoir (which is the entirety of the novel Invisible Man) is a plea for the reciprocal responsibility, the true brotherhood, he finds lacking in the United States—the realization of which, he asserts, “rests upon [his] recognition” by his text’s implied reader

(whom, considering the IM’s apostrophic rhetorical question discussed above, is, it seems reasonable to assume, a racist reader—a reader who believes, as Gillian Johns argues, in

5 ’ The Invisible Man asserts that “despite Brother Jack and all that sad, lost period of the Brotherhood, I believe in nothing if not action” in the service of the egalitarian creed the Brotherhood disingenuously claims to be motivated by (13). 541 will be referring to the Invisible Man as “the IM” throughout this chapter—after Albert Murray, who asserts, in a letter to Ellison, that the use of the abbreviation “IM” for Invisible Man can signify the novel’s protagonist’s determination to be recognized fully as a man whose existence is just as important as that of any man or woman—explaining that “Invisible Man equals IM equals I’M equals I AM” (Trading Twelves 32). This basic existential declaration, which Murray sees as essential to the IM’s character and story, would be echoed during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s when striking African-American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, carried signs declaring, “I AM A MAN,” to protest the fact that, as an invisible class, their lives were given insufficient regard (Bowerman, par. 11). The novel’s hero is, in fact, not asserting, “I am an invisible man”—which is the first line of the novel (3). By stating that he is aware of others’ efforts to make him invisible, he is rejecting that status. This very personal book, in which the reader spends much time in the life and mind of the “Invisible Man,” is not an assertign of invisibility but of humanity.

) 72

the “inferiority of black cultural values, knowledge, and authority”) (Ellison, Invisible 14;

Johns 231). Composing the memoir is the IM’s initial step towards improving America by pushing back against the deep-seated notions of racial and cultural superiority/inferiority that are, asserts Ellison, “basic to the underlying drama of

American society” (“Change the Joke” 102). The IM is making an effort to engage and improve racist Americans in his memoir by making them recognize him, an African-

American man with ties to traditional African-American culture, as a nuanced individual with agency and intellectual authority.55

The narrator opens his investigation of his fraught, unfair life with a question that emphasizes his humanity; it is a question from Andy Razaf s and Fats Waller’s song

“What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,”56 articulated in purposefully truncated form:

“But what did I do to be so blue?” (14; emphasis original). By italicizing the first-person pronoun in the question and omitting the words “black and,” the IM personalizes racism, which can seem impersonal, abstract, or even nonexistent to those who do not suffer because of it. He makes the seemingly self-evident but nonetheless necessary point, targeted at those who tolerate racism in the abstract, that there are actual individuals carrying the intense burden of race discrimination. This is why he emphasizes the personal (the I) and deemphasizes the general and abstractable (blackness) in this novel-

55 In the 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, Ellison explains that one of his main motivations for composing the text as he did was to “defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience” (xxii). 56 While the standard way to write the title of this song is “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” Ellison omits the parentheses. I will be writing the title of the song as Ellison does. 73

framing question. He is not at all distancing himself from his blackness. Rather, he is emphasizing his particular experience of blackness in order to communicate to his white

American readers, raised in an explicitly racist society, an extrapolatable, empathically understandable experience of blackness. Ellison was attacked, beginning in the sixties, for being insufficiently concerned with empowering African Americans—for emphasizing the personal and aesthetic over the political and programmatic in his work.57

While one could argue that the omission of the words “black and” from the phrase “What did I do to be so black and blue?” is emblematic of Ellison’s abandonment of the political for the purely personal, that argument is based on a shallow reading of Invisible Man and on a flawed view of literature generally as a vehicle for explicit ideology and specific social solutions (a view that confuses the role of literature with that of the sociological study or the political treatise). It is an argument, additionally, that disregards the fact that the personal becomes political, if not programmatic, when the personal becomes public.

It is a mistake to argue that the composition of Invisible Man (a novel that asks readers, many of whom the IM takes for granted have racist tendencies, to see life through the eyes of a disenfranchised black man with an expansive intellect and personality—a move

57 Ellison was publicly criticized for a lack of commitment to racial uplift in his art by the socialist literary critic Irving Howe in the 1963 essay “Black Boys and Native Sons” and by Black Arts Movement writers Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal in the afterword to their 1968 literature anthology Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (Rampersad 401-2,452). These professional attacks had a definite effect on how Ellison was perceived popularly and contributed to the perception of him as an “Uncle Tom” in some circles (440). 74

that “implicitly moves ‘lower’ African American subjectivity toward the public sphere housing cultural authority”) is not an act with political ramifications58 (Johns 238).

It is also a mistake to argue, as some (but by no means all) Black Arts theorists have, that the blues strategy of confronting tragedy with comedy, of “laughing to keep from crying,” is a shirking of one’s social responsibility as a black American—that it encourages acquiescence to oppression and numbness to racial inequity.59 The purpose of blues laughter is not to numb oneself to the feelings of sadness, anger, and desperation that may result from consistent undeserved ill-treatment and can be a spur to reformative action but to avoid violently crying out in terror—which can lead to the psychologically crippling hopelessness and disorientation of trauma.60 Albert Murray asserts, in Stomping the Blues, that the main role of blues music among black Americans is to drive away blues feelings (i.e., sadness and despair—which he calls “the blues as such”), protecting

58 Ellison believed literature should be political (in the sense that it promotes the public good—the good of the polis) but not programmatically so. He asserts that, “[A]t its most serious, just as is true of politics at its best, [fiction] is a thrust toward a human ideal” (Introd., Invisible xx). His own “thrust toward a human ideal,” Invisible Man, is, he contends, “fashioned as a raft of hope [—] perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we try . . . to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal” (xx-xxi). Ellison felt strongly that a writer of serious, honest fiction in the Western tradition definitionally strives to promote a state of mind and an ethos conducive to democracy and justice; but he felt, w ith equal intensity, that this civic aspect of the serious writer’s work does not involve dictating a program for achieving democracy and justice—that it is, in fact, counterproductive to tell one’s reader how to live. Rather, one should show one’s reader life in an idealized—which is to say, an aesthetically/philosophically arranged—way (“The Art” 169). 59 While Ron Karenga, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez argue that the blues is an anachronistic music of resignation and regression, other prominent Black Arts thinkers, such as Kalamu ya Salaam, Larry Neal, Tom Dent, and Nikki Giovanni, insist on the continuing relevance of the blues as a source of both solace and empowerment for African Americans (Gussow, “If Bessie Smith” 231-2). 60 Monnica Williams, director of the University of Louisville’s Center for Mental Health Disparities, argues that the American Psychiatric Association should recognize PTSD caused by racism as a psychological disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Wortham, par. 4). She and her colleagues are in the process of conducting the extensive research it will take to have “race-based traumatic stress injury” recognized by the APA (par. 23). 75

one against the enervation of depression and/or the violence of neurosis/psychosis, and that it achieves this largely though comedic “mockery [and] mimicry” of blues feelings

(9).61 By mocking and/or mimicking blues feelings lyrically and/or musically (making fun of misery and its cause), the blues performer and audience “express . . . contempt and even disdain” for the crippling sort of sadness that is “the blues as such” (10).

There is psychological and social utility in driving away blues feelings because, as both Murray and Freud discuss (in Stomping the Blues and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, respectively), blues feelings can lead one to have socially unacceptable urges (such as that to do violence to oneself or to another). Indeed, the IM briefly gives in to just such an urge when he attacks the “tall blond man,” who “call[s] [him] an insulting name” in the street (4). The IM beats him bloody and nearly slits his throat, because the blonde man did not “see” him—only seeing a vessel for his fear, not a man, and presumably insulting the IM with a racial epithet. After pulling back from slitting the man’s throat, the IM, realizing that he has been sucked into the man’s dark, paranoiac fantasy and deprived of agency and identity (an occurrence that is representative of the pattern of his life up to this point), feels “both disgusted and ashamed” (5). But then he sees the absurd humor in the ostensibly bleak and bloody situation and, claiming his

61 Not incidentally, Murray and Ellison were very close friends and intellectual/aesthetic confidants. Their aesthetic/philosophical approaches dovetail quite well, which one readily sees in their published works (particularly their essays) and their private correspondence with one another (which was plentiful enough to be collected in the volume Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray). They both, for instance (in the tradition of the existentialist author Andre Malraux, whom they both cite as a key influence) see art as an effort to create form from chaos—an heroic effort to build something useful and beautiful from the randomness, absurdity, and amorality of the universe. The thesis of Murray’s Stomping the Blues is that the blues is such an existential art form—because it staves off the entropy and chaos that is the blues as such. In Invisible Man, Ellison’s hero puts the blues to work for just this purpose. 76

agency and identity for the first time in his life, bursts out laughing. Explaining the humor he is able to find in the situation, the IM writes, “Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life” (5). The blonde man’s projected one-dimensional identity for all black men had assaulted him; the blonde man was, to a significant extent, thinks the IM, attacking himself—which is funny, because it is ridiculous.62 But the deeper laughter of this situation comes from the fact that the IM is attacking the blonde man in prose. Thomas Hobbes theorized that “laughter is nothing else but the sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others” (qtd. in Bevis 80).63 That is to say, one laughs when others appear foolish—out of satisfaction at knowing that one appears superior by comparison. That is what happens in this scene. The IM realizes that the blonde man is morally and intellectually his inferior and laughs at him. Not only is the blonde man immoral for casting underserved scorn at the IM, but he is intellectually small (dangerously so in this situation) for failing to be in touch with his environment and recognize that black Americans are as complex and deserving of respect as all other

Americans.

62 The reason for the ridiculousness of attacking oneself is that it is incongruous with the biological imperative of survival itself. The argument that incongruity is essential to comedy, an idea central to humor theory, is discussed in footnote sixty-three. 63 Hobbes’ theory is one of the two canonical theories explaining the workings of humor. The other is the “incongruity theory,” which the Scottish-Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson advanced—asserting, in Matthew Bevis’ paraphrase, that “a perceived ‘incongruity in a person, object, or situation (rather than our sense of superiority to it) [is] the source of many kinds of laughter”—to counter Hobbes’ more cynical theory (Bevis 80; emphasis original). The two theories, while being on their faces oppositional, are by no means mutually exclusive. Indeed, the two motivations for levity work hand-in-hand in blues humor. 77

The scene in which the IM attacks the “tall blond man” is perhaps the most pivotal in the novel—because it is in this scene that he realizes his “invisibility” and arrives, by necessity, at the coping strategy of laughing darkly at his plight (the turning point to which he alludes when he writes, “I myself, after existing for some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility”—to which we might add and learned to laugh at its cause) (7).64 It is interesting to note that, despite this scene being very likely the novel’s fulcrum (the scene that contains, in nuce, the transformation that

Chester and Howard of The Paris Review miss—spurring Ellison’s jibe about their dull senses of humor), the narrator does not frame it as such; he spends only a page discussing his altercation with the blonde man—putatively only as an illustration of what can happen when an invisible man is “bumped against by those of poor vision” one too many times (4). It is likely that the reason the IM does not draw attention to this moment as the narrative’s main watershed is that he does not feel that his transformation is over. He is still very much a work in progress, and drawing attention to a Saul-to-Paul moment of revelation would imply that the IM had arrived at his great achievement—that the quest is over. But his quest is not over at the memoir’s close; the IM plans to emerge from his basement hideout and re-engage mid-twentieth-century America. He will attempt to hold

^ Though the narrator does not tell the reader when the encounter between the IM and the blonde man takes place, it is reasonable to assume that it is contemporaneous with the period towards the end of the novel when the IM is becoming disillusioned with Jack and the Brotherhood—when he is beginning to realize that those in positions of leadership in the Brotherhood are oppressive racists (whether they know it or not-—their brotherly rhetoric notwithstanding). This chronology makes sense because the IM is, in the scene in which he encounters the blonde man, still walking around aboveground, but he has achieved the disillusioned state of consciousness that characterizes him at the end of his tenure with the Brotherhood (towards the end of the novel) and will make “hibernation” underground seem appealing and appropriate. 78

the United States to its egalitarian promises—a task he feels his grandfather commanded

him to carry out when he delivered his cryptic deathbed speech, urging his immediate progeny (both the IM and his father were in the room where the IM’s grandfather lay dying) to “overcome [oppressive racists] with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction” (16). The IM does not arrive at an understanding of this speech until he has lived and observed much life; he does not reveal his interpretation

of his grandfather’s last words until the very end of his memoir. He ultimately interprets the speech to mean, in broad philosophical terms, that one should “affirm the principle on

which the country was built and not the men”—which is to say that he feels his mission is

to work for freedom and equality for those to whom freedom and equality have thus far

been denied (574).

Discussion of the scene in which the IM attacks the blonde man (when he both

realizes his invisibility and learns to cope with it) affords us a useful opportunity to draw

attention to a specific example of the IM’s bluesy humor. He writes, joking darkly about

the altercation with the blonde man, “I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps

because of the near darkness he saw me” (5). This joke riffs on the novel’s invisibility

trope. The blonde man “sees” the IM (or becomes aware of him through fear) because he

is “blind” to him—which is to say, because he does not see a nuanced man but a threat

(he sees a boogeyman, which has far more to do with the psychology of the blonde man

than the personality of the IM)—the darkness of night making the man especially

vulnerable to fears of imaginary danger. The IM, then, is ridiculing this man in his 79

memoir as one who does not see at all (the opposite of a blind seer—one who appears to see but does not—a ridiculous, laughable figure). The unreasonableness of the statement

“perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me” mirrors the unreasonableness of systemic racism and is productive of the sort of derisive laugh that can supplant anger and violence.

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud argues that the desire to relieve oneself of aggressive, socially unacceptable urges is the key motivator of what he calls “tendentious” humor—-jokes with messages, the taboo meanings of which are frequently disguised, as meanings are in dreams (205). These jokes tend to be aggressive

(frequently taking the form of mockery and mimicry), he argues, and tend to involve a butt, who operates as a scapegoat for the socially unacceptable aggression of the teller of the joke and its audience (122). In many blues songs, blues feelings, frequently in anthropomorphized form, are this butt. Blues feelings are purged through aggressive humor in order that aggressive action can be avoided (the strategy that the IM arrives at during his aforementioned altercation with the blonde man in the street). The IM wants very much to be a responsible, productive, healthy member of society. Indeed, that is all he has ever wanted. With the aim of achieving this end, he sublimates the urge to do violence to others into aggressive, tendentious, personally salubrious humor. Instead of continuing to thrash the blonde man physically (causing the blonde man to be wounded), he thrashes him figuratively by making him ridiculous (exposing the blonde man as a 80

laughable, morally inferior figure)—laughing at and healing his own psychological wounds, which caused him to attack in the first place.

An example of blues lyrics that express aggression towards blues feelings as both mockery and mimicry, lyrics that are very apt for a discussion of the role of comedy in

Ellison’s Invisible Man, because they anthropomorphize the blues and deride it as morally deficient, come from a recording of the song “Good Morning Blues” by Count

Basie (with vocals by Jimmy Rushing).65 Directly addressing the blues, in anthropomorphic form, and vocalizing the blues’ answer to his salutation, Rushing sings,

“Good morning, Blues. Blues, how do you do? [x2] / ‘Babe, I feel alright, but I come to worry you.’” 66 The incongruity of the exchange gives it what Dana F. Sutton asserts, in

The Catharsis o f Comedy, is the requisite ridiculousness of comedy. Rushing is as pleasant and polite as possible; the Blues seemingly answers his pleasantness and politeness with the same (saying, “Babe, I feel alright”) but then declares, incongruously changing affect one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, that he is set on utterly terrorizing

Rushing. The incongruity is the source of the laugh the lines tend to elicit, but the real work is done by the joke’s tendentiousness—its intent (which is to associate blues

65 Another reason for the appropriateness of citing Rushing’s and Basie’s work here is that Rushing and Basie were favorites and friends of both Ellison and Murray. More than the rural Mississippi Delta blues of Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson or the electrified Delta blues (i.e., the Chicago blues) of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Little Walter, the blues for Ellison and Murray is the big-band blues music of Basie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ell ington; and Ellison extols the virtues of this brand of blues (calling “Good Morning Blues” one of its “classic[s]”)—asserting that it boasts both the sophistication of jazz and the rootedness of downhome blues— in his essay on Rushing, “Remembering Jimmy” (244). 661 will capitalize “Blues” during discussion of the song “Good Morning Blues,” as if Blues were a character’s name, in order to emphasize the blues’ anthropomorphic character in the song. 81

feelings with ridicule—in order to “inoculate” oneself against “the blues as such” in the future).

Sutton contends that comedy, with its attendant humor, is psychologically salubrious on two levels: it has both “inoculative” and “cathartic” qualities. He argues

(expanding upon the ideas of Aristotle and Freud) that there is a catharsis associated with the physical act of laughing that purges feelings like fear, anxiety, and hostility67—which, because they prompt one to do socially unacceptable things (discussed by Murray and

Freud), make one feel ill at ease (i.e., give us “the blues as such”). In this cathartic/inoculative process, a small dose of the bad feelings is administered and mocked—“impairing the target’s ability to inspire similar feelings in the future,” because the ridiculousness inspired by ridiculing the target becomes permanently associated with it (56). Thus, in “Good Morning Blues,” the Blues is ridiculed, indirectly but surely

(through its portrayal as a sort of cruel bully who picks on one without any cause), so that it will become permanently associated with the disdainful laughter owed this sort of abusive sap on society. Adam Gussow argues that when, in blues lyrics, an anthropomorphized blues figure menaces the song’s narrator (as in “Good Morning Blues” and countless other blues songs), the menacing figure signifies oppressive, abusive whites and the terror they inspire—a menace that was very real in the lives of blues

67 Freud asserts, in the essay “Humor,” that joking and laughter counteract anxiety because they operate as a signal from the superego to the ego that the self is safe—since one would not be joking about a world that presented one with imminent peril (565-6). 82

musicians and blues people generally68 (a sort of tonal metonymy that surely qualifies as an instance of the radical figuration Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls Signifyin(g)) (Seems

Like Murder 24). Adopting Gussow’s argument, we can say that Blues in “Good Morning

Blues” is a figurative racist bully for whom Invisible Man’s blonde man is an exceedingly apt objective correlative. The Blues/blonde man, then, “feel[s] alright”; “he” has absolutely no grudge or bone to pick with the person he is intent on harming. “Good

Morning Blues” and Invisible Man are asserting, comedically, that the problem is not the sufferer’s. The problem belongs to the Blues/blonde man himself—which is to say that the blues subject should not feel any guilt because of the limitations and insults heaped upon him by cruel racists. He must bear them, the ethos of blues culture says, but they are not his. The effect of the song is educative; it imparts a valuable life lesson through heavily implicative lyrics—much as the song “St. Louis Blues” does.69 The lesson of

“Good Morning Blues” is that while one should beware of the Blues/racists, one should not view them as serious people—though they are people capable to doing one serious harm. The Blues/blonde man is shown to be the lesser person—sadistic and hateful with no cause—one who is worthy of derisive, dismissive mirth.

68 If we want to assign these “blue devils” (Murray’s term) human correlatives, abusive whites would seem to be the most obvious choice. In the songs Gussow discusses to illustrate his point (Little Brother Montgomery’s “The First Time I Met You,” Blind Willie McTell’s “Mama, ’Tain’t Long fo' Day,” and Robert Johnson’s “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” among them) Blues, or Mr. Blues, impulsively inflicts all manner of psychological and phy sical harm on the singers—bringing to mind (or to the viscera), Southern whites whom, possessed by perverse deep-seated caste codes, and perhaps sadism, attacked African Americans with that mix of regularity and randomness that creates pure terror in those at risk of being victimized. 69 The educative qualities of “St. Louis Blues” are discussed at length in the second chapter of this study. 83

While the IM has spent most of his life in and among blues cultures (his hometown is Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region that produced

Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and countless other blues greats—some of whom would have been around when the IM was growing up during the first half of the twentieth century70—and he moves to Harlem, which was the home base of Count Basie and his band, the most skillful orchestrators of and improvisers on the blues), it takes time for blues-based messages to assume meaning for him. Blues messages are based in real-life experience, and the IM must live life and take some hard knocks before the blues messages that were there all along sink in. There are three bluesy characters the IM interacts with during the course of the memoir who serve as guides into the psychologically salubrious world of the blues ethos and blues humor for him—Louis Armstrong, Jim Trueblood, and Peter Wheatstraw (all three of whom impart blues humor messages that push the IM towards adopting the coping strategy of

“laughing to keep from crying”).

70 Invisible Man's chronology is vague. The narrative is not anchored by specific years or historical events, and anachronism is used to disorienting effect—as when, during the surreally narrated riot in Harlem (which could be the riot of 1935 or the riot of 1943—the two significant Harlem riots of the period), a fat woman sitting on a milk wagon sings, “If it hadn’t been for the referee / Joe Louis woulda killed / Jim Jefferie” (544). The boxer Jim Jeffries actually fought Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight champion of the world, in 1910—four years before Louis was born. While this scene does contribute to the rather unnerving feeling of chronological uncertainty, it also, interestingly, supplies us with evidence we can use to argue for some chronological certainty. We can argue that the IM was born in either 1915 or 1923 and retreated underground in either 1935 or 1943. My tripartite evidence to back up this assertion is: First, the riot portrayed is either the riot of 1935 or of 1943. Second, the IM informs the reader that he “discovered [his] invisibility”— a revelation that takes place during his altercation with the blonde man—“after existing twenty years” (7). Third, the IM’s altercation with the blonde man takes place shortly before he retreats underground—a retreat that takes place as the riot rages. So to arrive at the year of the IM’s birth, we need only to subtract twenty years from the year when the riot takes place. 84

The novel’s hero does not actually meet Louis Armstrong—though he feels such a strong affinity with Armstrong’s music and ethos that Armstrong has as much of an effect on the narrative as any character the IM does meet. In the novel’s prologue, after describing (in science-fiction terms that mock pseudoscientific justifications for racism71) the system of oppression that has driven him into exile, the IM rhapsodizes about

Armstrong—whose playing, he asserts, makes “poetry out of being invisible” (8). He speculates that Armstrong is able to do this “because he’s unaware that he is invisible”

(8). Of course, Armstrong was aware that he suffered because of the societal habit of rendering black Americans invisible. One aspect of Armstrong’s invisibility that he was surely aware of (one not commonly drawn attention to as such) is highlighted by the fact that many spectators (black and white) read Armstrong’s jubilant stage act as neo­ minstrelsy—seeing the actions of a black man as lowest-common-denominator base spectacle rather than attempting to take in the full breadth of his approach to life. But try as his public might to bind him with invisibility’s limitations, Armstrong’s very free

71 In his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, Ellison asserts that his inspiration for employing the science- fiction trope of the invisible man (a canonical one, out of H.G. Wells) to tell his story and make his point was the “pseudoscientific sociological concept which held that most Afro-American difficulties sprang from our ‘high visibility’” (xv). This eminently dubious mid-century sociological theory makes the very un-American assertion that difference is dangerous (and, worse, that it is a fault)—that the nature of American societal structure dictates that anyone of a minority ethnic or racial group will have a difficult life because of superficial differences between his ethnic or racial group and the majority group. Ellison counters that, beyond the theory being ridiculously reductive and counter to the American creed, its assertion that African Americans are highly visible is incorrect—because, for African Americans, ‘“ high visibility' actually render[s] one ^-visible” (xv). The reason for this counterintuitive situation obtaining, contends Ellison, is that the idea of black Americans “glow[s] . . . within the American conscience with such intensity that most whites feign ... moral blindness towards [the] predicament [of black Americans]” (xv). Ellison is asserting (making a point that he made in his essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” twenty-three years earlier) that their guilt over having mistreated African Americans is so great that white Americans repress it (which leads to a repression of African Americans as reminders of that guilt). 85

public conduct sidestepped them. Ellison asserts, in his essay “Change the Joke and Slip

the Yoke,” that “Armstrong’s clownish license and intoxicating powers are almost

Elizabethan; he takes liberties with kings, queens, and presidents” (107). Indeed,

Armstrong famously addressed King George V and Queen Elizabeth II of England as

“Rex” and “Queenie,” respectively—demanding (in contravention of the explicit rule

against performers referring directly to the royals) that his aura of informality take

precedence over their aura of formality (Clifford 35; Schuman 72; Chilton, par. 3).

Armstrong transcended invisibility by mocking caste systems (upon which invisibility is

dependent)—such as the American caste system placing the African American at the

bottom and the British caste system placing the monarch at the top.72 Armstrong’s

sustaining, mirthful, genuine joie de vivre and sense of humor in the face of a system

designed to beat him down and isolate him within a handicapping racial caste is a useful

example for the IM of how to remain psychologically whole in a society designed to

break African Americans into servility.

The Armstrong recording that the narrator refers to—“What Did I Do to Be So

Black and Blue?” (writing, rhapsodically, “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis

Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’—all at the

72 An illustration of Armstrong’s subversion of the strictures of the American and British caste systems is his dedication of the song ‘i ’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” to King George V of England and the entirety of the Memphis. Tennessee, Police Department—at different performances (Brothers 82). His disregard of his “place” while on stage surely resonated beyond the performance hall. Armstrong’s ability to effectively step outside of society when onstage, leaving caste expectations behind, inspires the IM to step outside of society (retreating underground to escape invisibility, achieve peace of mind, and begin working for a more American America). 86

same time”)—presents us with an ideal example of Armstrong laughing performatively, through music, at troubles resultant from the realities of the American racial caste system

(8). Armstrong’s solo-based approach to jazz, an approach that he popularized, relies on his widely-touted sense of “swing”—-his acute feeling for the dynamics of pieces of music and their players, which gave him the ability to syncopate notes in the right spots ahead of or behind the beat, his position vis-a-vis the beat always shifting (that is to say, swinging, and swinging in a pleasant, loping way, giving an overall effect of smoothness, coolness, and grace—a musical manifestation of his good-humored, imperturbable public persona). His unpredictable but affectively satisfying method of note-placement sounds, especially when placed in front of a relatively steady musical backdrop, rather like laughter—which, likewise, comes in staccato waves. Armstrong’s solo, in “What Did I

Do to Be So Black and Blue” (which comes at the beginning of the song, before he sings), can strike one as musical preemptive laughter. It is “laughter” that is alloyed with melancholy and is meant to gird both singer and listener before the singing of an essentially sad song—a song in which the singer, with one darkly comic detour,73 details in unrelentingly harsh terms the difficulty of being black in America. The IM’s prologue, in which Armstrong plays a significant role, operates in Invisible Man similarly to the way Armstrong’s solo operates in “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue.” The events of both halves of the novel could certainly have crushed the spirit of the IM—for

73 Armstrong sings, “Even the mouse ran from my house” (which is a dark joke that plays on the incongruity of such an event) but then immediately sings, “They laugh at you and scorn you, too,” which serves to return the song to its previously solemn cast. 87

different reasons. The first half of the novel (until the IM is taken in by Mary Rambo, the motherly woman who nurses him back to health after he is hospitalized and subjected to shock therapy) is the story of one bleak occurrence after another, while the second half of the novel is the story of illusory success and, ultimately, of retreat. The laughter and joie de vivre that the IM expresses in the prologue, then, sustain and fortify him, giving him the energy to be funny and optimistic, during the telling of a story that could easily have been framed to give as bleak an impression as Black Bottom or Bluest Eye. For

Armstrong, swinging the blues was a way of expressing both pain and joy—of telling of sadness and resisting its oppression with humor and grace.74 Just as the IM does in his memoir with his life story, Armstrong takes the bleak content of the blues and blues- based pop songs like “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” and “St. Louis Blues” and riffs on their content with humor and honesty in order to confront and purge the pain for himself and his audience.

The next exemplar of blues humor that we encounter in the text, Jim Trueblood, is a figure who is not as obviously comical as Louis Armstrong. Trueblood, the father in an impoverished sharecropping family living near the state college for Negros that the IM briefly attends, tells the IM and the wealthy white benefactor of the college he has taken for a drive (Mr. Norton) a story about having unintentionally copulated with and impregnated his daughter while in a dream (which he says caused his wife to attempt to kill him retributively by hitting him in the face with an axe). While Trueblood employs a

74 Dizzy Gillespie said of Armstrong, “A lot of people underestimate Louis’s musical sense of humor. Many times, listening, 1 used to laugh right in the middle of his solos” (qtd. in Hentoff 74). 88

different kind of blues humor than that already discussed, it is one with the same cathartic,

inoculative aim. Gillian Johns argues that the story Trueblood tells the IM and Mr.

Norton is in fact a tall tale—an aggressive joke that makes the gullible listener (in this

case, Norton) its butt and serves as an empowering—potentially cathartic and

inoculative—experience for its teller.

Before I read Johns’ essay, I took Trueblood at his word, believing that he had

raped and impregnated his own daughter, and, as a result, I did not know what to make of

his episode in the novel. It made me uncomfortable that a story of incestuous rape and

attempted matrimonial murder was framed comedically—narrated, by Trueblood, with

little to no commentary from the narrator, as an amusing, entertaining misadventure. I felt

that this scene did not fit with the rest of the novel, and, not knowing what to make of it, I

did not want to discuss it in this study. However, Dr. Lois Lyles insisted that I must

discuss the Trueblood episode—that any analysis of Invisible Man that fails to consider

the Trueblood episode is incomplete. It was not until I read Gillian Johns’ essay that I

saw how the scene could be reconciled with my conception of the novel as a work that

receives its energy to be told, its lifeblood, from the psychological salubrity of humor.

Because treating Trueblood’s story as true renders his scene perversely, not salubriously,

humorous, this reading is entirely incongruous with my conception of the novel. After

reading Johns’ essay, I saw that it is a question of whom we are laughing at. If we are

laughing at Trueblood, we are laughing at tragedy, and thus we become complicit in 89

tragedy. But our laughter need not be directed at Trueblood; we can direct our laughter at

Norton. If we are laughing at Norton, we are laughing at yet another self-important figure who renders African Americans invisible by seeing only his own desires and fears when he looks at them.

A true Trueblood story is out of step with the novel as a whole, which is a comic bildungsroman—a novel of formation and education.75 What would the educative purpose of a true Trueblood story be? How would laughing at a black family’s debasement help the IM arrive at his ultimate conclusion—that, despite the United States being fraught with violent hate, its foundational democratic principles offer hope for political and social equality? As a great novel, with all its parts working together, the

Trueblood scene surely should jibe with the rest of the novel’s parts, and the reader should not be encouraged to laugh at something (an affective response that, makes even the most horrific acts more palatable) that is actually morally reprehensible—a rape/attempted murder scenario. Wayne Booth asserts, in A Rhetoric o f Irony, that, “other things being equal, we should always accept the reading that contributes most to the quality of the work” if we can be “reasonably sure of the generic grooves in which we travel” (qtd. in Johns 247). As Invisible Man is a comic bildungsroman in which the

75 Many scholarly critics, including Earl H. Rovit (“Ralph Ellison and the American Comic Tradition”), Sharon Rosenbaum Weinstein (“Comedy and the Absurd in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man”), and James R. Andreas (“Invisible Man and the Comic Tradition”), have argued that Invisible Man is a comic novel. And Kenneth Burke argues compellingly that Invisible Man is a bildungsroman—because the IM moves through all of the bildungsroman’s characteristic stages of education (which Burke—taking Goethe’s novels of education as his model—delineates as childhood, apprenticeship, journeymanship, and mastery) (66-7). Sharon Rosenbaum Weinstein puts the two contentions together, arguing that “[t]he entire novel can be viewed as the protagonist’s education in laughter”—arriving at my contention that Invisible Man is a comic bildungsroman (12). 90

protagonist learns how to use humor to cope with injustice and maintain the strength to work for justice, the Trueblood scene as a tragedy warped into comedy has no place in it.

The Trueblood scene, then, is not one in which Trueblood willingly debases himself and his family before the reader. Rather, the scene is one in which he challenges

Norton’s status as hegemon and moral exemplar (the two very much entangled), by enthralling and exciting him with his sensational, taboo-rich tall tale. The fact that

Trueblood’s fictitious sexual transgression excites and awes Norton (after Norton has already rhapsodized so sensually about his deceased daughter, to the IM, as to be suspect) shifts the balance of power and moral authority in the scene from Norton to Trueblood.

Norton, upon meeting Trueblood, having already been told of Trueblood’s supposed offense, exclaims, with apparent envy, “You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed!” then asks him, agitatedly, “You feel no inner turmoil, no need to cast out the offending eye?”—sounding like a man who knows intimately what it is like to feel precisely the sort of “inner turmoil” and “need to cast out the offending eye” he assumes

Trueblood feels (51).76 The IM does not make the connection between Norton’s immodest paean to his dead daughter (Norton says, “She was a being more rare, more

76 We can gain insight into Norton’s veiled feelings of guilt by looking at the word “eye,” in Norton’s phrase “offending eye,” as both a pun and a metaphor. If Norton is using “eye” as a pun, he is referring to himself (“eye” = “I”) covertly, and perhaps unconsciously, as an offender who needs to be “cast out” for incestuous acts or desires of his own—concerning his daughter. If we look for the metaphorical possibilities of Norton’s use of “eye,” we recall that there is literary precedence for using the word to refer metaphorically to a sexual orifice— in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” in which the anus, which a character kisses sexually, is referred to as the “nether eye” (which, as well as meaning lower eye can mean infernal eye, or infernal I—a demonic version of oneseif) (141). Norton seems to be both taking and dodging blame for his transgression (making an effort to feel clean without actually coming clean)—by employing, with his metaphorical use of the phrase “offending eye,” a Cartesian dualism that blames the body (the infernal, corporeal “nether eye”) for transgressing while holding the mind/soul (the ocular eyes) above the fray. 91

beautiful, purer, more perfect, and more delicate than the wildest dreams of a poet....

Her beauty was a well-spring of purest water-of-life, and to look upon her was to drink and drink and drink again”) and his awe and arousal at hearing of Trueblood’s transgression with his daughter, because his narration seeks to capture his state-of-mind at the time when the events described take place; but the narrator does not have to make the connection between Norton’s words and actions for the reader to understand that

Trueblood “gambles successfully on . . . repressed white male sexual desires,” which are habitually projected onto African Americans (contributing to their invisibility), when he tells his tall tale to Norton (Ellison, Invisible 42; Johns 245).

Trueblood could not have known the extent of repressed sexual desire festering in

Norton (as he hadn’t heard Norton talking about his deceased daughter, he could not have suspected that Norton’s angel-in-the-house obsession with purity and chastity was in fact quite unchaste), but he surely knew (or felt, in any event) that white males project their own repressed sexual desire onto black men and women.77 As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues in The Signifying Monkey, in an atmosphere characterized by explicit murderous oppression of African Americans and suppression of their communication, the meaning, the signification, in African-American speech sought indirect, underground routes

7/ Ellison asserts, in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” that racism in America is largely the result of the interaction, in the minds of white Americans, of the repression of guilt over having treated African Americans so poorly for so long and a “Manichean fascination with the symbolism of blackness and whiteness”—which has the effect of catching African Americans “associatively in the negative side of this basic dualism of the white folk mind ... shackl[ing] [African Americans] to almost everything it would repress from consciousness” (102). Repressed base desires, Ellison contends, are projected onto African Americans by white Americans in order that they may be able to psychologically “kill two birds with one stone”—that is, in order to repress their own socially unacceptable desires and to justify, by dehumanizing African Americans, not feeling guilt for having historically mistreated them. 92

(resulting in methods of communication, which Gates calls Signifyin(g), that could be byzantine in their indirection). Thus, in order to assert that black over-sexuality is a myth projected by whites, Trueblood Signifies, telling a story of rampant black sexuality the aim of which is actually to expose Norton as riddled with repressed sexuality—by putting him in a position where he becomes violently aroused by a story of taboo sexual behavior, exposing the fact that the propriety that he uses to justify his elevated status is a fiction.

Trueblood plays out Norton’s projections to the hilt—showing the IM the strategy his grandfather recommended in action. Trueblood “overcom[es]” Norton “with yeses”— which is to say that he unqualifiedly says yes to Norton’s id—giving him a surfeit of his own base projections and exposing him as their source (showing Norton to be one entirely undeserving of the sort of posture of superiority he claims).

Trueblood’s tall tale accomplishes much the same thing that the song “Good

Morning Blues” and the scene in which the IM ridicules the blonde man accomplish.

Norton is ridiculed—which has the effect of “inoculating” Trueblood and the IM against

Norton’s brand of dehumanization (though it will take some time for this “inoculation” to take effect for the IM). The IM misses the meaning of Trueblood’s tall tale upon first hearing it, but the meaning sinks in after he becomes self-aware—after he realizes that he is an invisible man and begins to resist his invisibility. As with other kinds of blues humor, one has to be in the know to get Trueblood’s “tall humor.” In blues songs, one needs to be aware of the fact that much of the humor is not in what is said but in its mocking musical obbligato. Analogously, the key to Trueblood’s humor (or, rather, to 93

Trueblood’s intention to be funny), asserts Johns, is in his covert body language

(specifically, an implied smile). The IM writes that, after it has become obvious that

Norton is absolutely entranced and smitten by Trueblood’s story, he suggests to Norton that they get going. Norton, he writes, “d[oesn’t] even look at [him]” then testily says,

“Please” and “wav[es] his hand in annoyance” (61). The IM then signals to the reader the fact that Trueblood is willfully manipulating Norton, writing that “Trueblood seemed to smile at me behind his eyes as he looked from the white man to me and continued” (61).

Trueblood sees now that he has full control of the situation, and he signals to the IM that he knows he is in control.

While Trueblood must signal his mastery to the IM covertly, the next blues- humor exemplar that we meet, Peter Wheatstraw (a street-smart Southern migrant the IM meets in Harlem, whose name references an actual blues singer and pianist, Peetie

Wheatstraw, who was very popular in the 1930s), can report his mastery quite overtly and boldly, which he does by making boasts straight out of African-American Southern vernacular culture—such as, “I’maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyes andraisedonblackcatboneshighjohntheconquerorandgreasygreens” (176). But his language and cultural signifiers are not exclusively Southern and rural. He also uses the hipster language of the urban North. Immediately after expounding his list of Southern signifiers of good fortune, Wheatstraw says, in hipster language of the sort spoken by

Northern jazz musicians, “You dig me, daddy?” (176). Wheatstraw is a bridge between 94

the South and the North, whom the IM encounters when he is newly arrived in the North and is still quite unsure of his identity.

As well as being a bridge between two African-American cultures the IM is connected to, Wheatstraw is a sort of guardian and dispenser of coded warning for the IM.

He warns him, through another type of joke (a riddle, which one must be conversant in

African-American Vernacular English—AAVE—to understand) that his lack of rootedness (his lack of interest in either of the cultures he is affiliated with—both of which put a premium on “mother wit,” which Wheatstraw extols the virtues of) can cause him to be vulnerable to exploitation (176). Wheatstraw asks the IM, “[I]s you got the dogT (173). The IM does not have the tools to unpack this question, so loaded is it with meaning, and answers in a manner that is much too literal-minded, saying, “Dog? What dog?” and behaves in a manner that betrays the fact that Wheatstraw makes him nervous

(173). Wheatstraw is aware that the IM is made uncomfortable by this reminder of his origins, and he says, chidingly, “[W]ho got the damn dog? Now I know you from down home, how come you trying to act like you never heard that before! Hell, ain’t nobody out here this morning but us colored— Why you trying to deny me?” (173). Wheatstraw can see that the IM is denying who he is, both because he is afraid (of being ostracized— which he already is, though he does not know it yet) and because he is ambitious. When

Wheatstraw says, “Why you trying to deny me?” he is actually saying, Don't deny yourself; don’t deny where you come from . Ellison picked the name Peter Wheatstraw to signify rootedness in Southern and Northern African-American culture. While Peetie 95

Wheatstraw the popular blues musician was a figure rooted in Southern tradition (as anyone who plays the blues is), he was also a very modem, Northern figure. He played urban St. Louis blues (a piano-based blues music that was an elaboration of the traditional guitar-based Southern folk blues) and talked fast in a hipster argot. Ellison aims to communicate much with just his use of the name “Peter Wheatstraw”—knowing as he does that names in oral-based African-American culture have outsized significance.

Ellison asserts, “[Y]ou get so many [African-American] guys who nickname themselves

Jack the Bear or Peter Wheatstraw” that you come to understand that the names represent

“experience which has been projected . . . which has been refined by being defined by generations of people who have told what it seemed to be” (qtd. in Tracy 54). When an aspect of a people’s experience becomes abstracted in a name (such as Long John or John

Henry—names that just need to be spoken to conjure a wealth of stories and associations), that name has become a signifier—or even a Gatesean (S)ignifier. “Peter Wheatstraw” is one such (S)ignifier. “Dog,” as used in the question Wheatstraw asks the IM, is another.

“Dog” is one of the most Signifyin(g) of blues words—right up there with the word “bad” and the word “blues” itself. The documented meanings of the word dog in the

AAVE of the period in which Invisible Man is set include the verb “to dog,” meaning “to mistreat”; the exclamation “dog,” which expresses letdown;78 the noun “dog,” meaning

“an abusive or offensive man” (Major 141); the noun “dog,” meaning “a person who has been utterly humiliated by an attraction to a mean or unfaithful partner” (DeSalvo 61);

78 The modern variant of this use of “dog,” with which we are more familiar, is “dag” (Major 141). 96

the noun “dog,” meaning “[a]ny extraordinary person, thing, or event” (Fisher 299); the noun “Dog,” the nickname for the Yazoo and Mississippi Railroad line (F. Davis 25); and the noun “dogs,” meaning feet (Calt 74). Because Wheatstraw has chosen to use such a richly signifying AAVE word, he is essentially asking the IM if he has maintained his connection to the root of the word’s richness. He is also making fun of him—making him the butt of a tendentious, bluesy joke in an effort to wake him up. He is effectively asking the IM if he is what Amiri Baraka calls a “blues person”—one with an intimate connection to vernacular African-American culture. The IM’s failure to connect with the question demonstrates his lack of connection to his roots at the moment in the novel when he encounters Peter Wheatstraw.

The IM’s lack of rootedness when he encounters Wheatstraw is diametrically opposed to the rootedness of the voice who is narrating the memoir. The IM, after many experiences of struggle and strife, looks back to the wisdom of the blues to sustain him, and finds in the blues a voice that Ellison describes as “an ironic, downhome voice . . . as

irreverent as a honky-tonk trumpet blasting through a performance, say, of Britten’s War

Requiem” (Introd., Invisible xv). The blues has no time for the high-minded abstraction that characterizes much of art music. The blues is concerned with real life discussed in

real, if at times indirect, terms. And humor is necessary to blunt the blow of so much

harsh reality. As Ellison asserts about his great novel, the use of humor by the IM as an

analgesic/prophylactic (i.e., a cathartic/inoculative) when confronting the harrowing

details of his life allows him to make “a thrust toward a human ideal”—by which he 97

means the Socratie ideal of intimate self-knowledge (xx, xxi). The IM would not have been able to take on the stark realities of his life so directly, to “snatch the victory of conscious perception from the forces that overwhelmed [him]” if not for the blues strategy of “laughing to keep from crying.” 98

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